If your ideology involves hurting people, to a point, you should be left alone by the government. but by that same principle, others should be left alone too when they show similar levels of hostility or worse.
You shouldn't lose your fundamental human rights, up to a point, that point is when you start believing and spreading a belief that other people should lose their fundamental human rights.
If only it were that simple. People seem to have to constantly argue about what human rights actually are. They use free speech to argue for all kinds of censorship for example. Censoring and harassing people who think differently will rarely do more than make them angry. Philosophers even centuries ago figured out that free speech is a most essential freedom and must be nearly unlimited in a free society, but it's a constant struggle to maintain this ideal in the face of the fearful and easily offended.
a better approach is to convert them to jpeg/png. Then convert that to raw BMP, and then share or print that.
A more modern approach for text documents would be to have an LLM read and rephrase, and restructure everything without preserving punctuation and spacing, using a simple encoding like utf-8, and then use the technique above or just take analog pictures of the monitor. The analog (film) part protects against deepfakes and serves as proof if you need it (for the source and final product alike).
There various solutions out there after the leaks that keep happening where documents and confidential information is served/staged in a way that will reveal the person with who it is shared. Even if you copy paste the text into notepad and save it in ascii format, it will reveal you. Off-the-shelf printers are of course a big no-no.
If all else fails, that analog picture technique works best for exfil, but the final thing you share will still track back to you. I bet spies are back to using microfilms these days.
I only say all of that purely out of a fascination into the subject and for the sake of discussion (think like a thief if you want to catch one and all). Ultimately, you shouldn't share private information with unauthorized parties, period. Personal or otherwise. If you, like snowden, feel that all lawful means are exhausted and that is your only option to address some grievance, then don't assume any technique or planning will protect you, if it isn't worth the risk of imprisonment, then you shouldn't be doing it anyways. Assume you will be imprisoned or worse.
does he not understand that countries are...countries? "quasi-judicial" is so childish of a thing to say, of all people by a CEO.
I don't even care about the details of the law, what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government as a foreigner and accusing them of "censorship". Makes wish they'd fine him just for that tweet alone. You do what a country tells you to do as a foreigner, or you leave.
These people want immigrants in their own country who obey their own laws to be treated like animals and deported to countries they've never even heard of before, yet they don't think they're obliged to follow the laws of other countries.
> You do what a country tells you to do as a foreigner, or you leave.
I suppose you're right. You're still allowed to criticize the government's decisions though! This is certainly true in Italy, which has quite reasonable laws with regards to freedom of speech.
> what is he aiming to achieve here by disrespecting their government
Western government instituitions are hardly sacred. Again, people are allowed to criticize them, or disrespect them event if they so desire. What he's trying to achieve is a more just and reasonable application of the law, as it's quite clear if you'll care to carefully read the tweet instead of raging at his supposed disrespect for the Italian government.
The people in italy are allowed to do whatever they want with their own government. Even foreigners in other countries, who cares. But if you're a guest, you don't disrespect your host, certainly not about the rules they have.
Imagine if I were to complain about HN rules and how the moderators are tyrants. That's what @eastdakota is doing. It's one thing to say that when you're posting else where, but not here. he's not having to following italian laws because he's an italian, he's having to do so, so that he can be afforded the privileges of doing business there.
Part of democracy is that the people of that country get to criticize their own government. It is anti-democratic for a wealthy and powerful individual of a foreign country to undermine a democratically instituted governmental organization. Italians get to have a voice in the governance of Italy and criticize their own government, that's democracy. We just had our democracy destroyed by another billionaire, quite frankly people like Musk are the biggest dangers to democracy right now, powerful individuals wielding unequal influence over democracies, where they use that influence to use democracy as a proxy for their oligarchy.
There is already a captcha when you create accounts.
There is no high-volume spam (ai or otherwise) on HN, so captcha won't help, low volume captcha can be farmed out. Humans are the best defense against low-volume spam. So flag these posts!
Renting should be viewed is a negative in society. Imagine if car dealerships moved to a rental model instead of ownership..oh wait, they sort of already are, they just call it "financing", they make no money from cash buys because of that economic perversion.
Rent income is not wages, that's the critical part you're mistaken. Income and wages are not the same thing. Rent income is as much wages as Elon Musk selling stocks is to him, or a bank making income on interest payments. Renting is a business, it's income is business revenue, not wages.
There is this terrible view that landlords are "just like you and me, hard working regular people" - not that it's false, but so are the people that own mom & pops shops, or a local subway franchise, they're all business owners making business profits, not wages.
Business practices that harm the public should be regulated and curtailed. With taxis for example, the medallion system was used to limit the number of Taxis in operation. Similarly, not only should an individual be limited to (directly or via an ownership/shareholder interest in a company -- even with them or their family) a reasonable number of properties, but the number of rental properties in an area should itself be limited. Property owners can either sell houses, or sell condos and make income via condo (regulated) condo fees.
Food, shelter, health-care/medicine should be heavily regulated, if private parties take part as intermediaries between individuals and their food, shelter, health-care, they should expect lots of red-tape and limits. Ideally, the government itself would be driving these markets directly by building and selling properties, hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, etc.. that's not socialism or communism. That's just common-sense capitalism, everyone, especially the richest make more money this way. not only that their money will spend better this way.
The kind of capitalism we have now is a short-sighted parasitical money-grab. The kind where if fully realized, you'll build your own mansions and sky scrapers but you'd be complaining about the slums and crime nearby, how you can't get good help, skilled labor, and spend a ton of money on bribes instead of paying a fraction of that in taxes.
In theory, reaganism and trickle-down economics could have worked. A rising tide does indeed lift all boats. But in reality, it's more of the "scorpion and the frog" story. In this case, landlords can own a reasonable number of decent homes and make decent income, and then diversify the money in other markets. But currently, it's a race to become the biggest slumlord or until the markets collapse again.
> they make no money from cash buys because of that economic perversion.
This is completely false. This might be surprising to learn, but for normal car dealerships (not buy-here, pay-here or used car dealerships) a huge amount of their compensation rides on receiving holdback payments from manufacturers, as well as per-unit bonuses that often have cliffs.
Cash buyers paying invoice price are welcomed (if they aren't too big of a headache) because they push a dealership over or at least closer to the next sales-volume bonus cliff.
Holdback alone is worth more than any realistic origination fee.
What I heard is that they make no profit. I'm sure they'll make revenue, but if they simply sold all cars at the cash price, they will be losing money, especially dealerships. But if you're certain they do make profit, not just revenue, then you sound like you know more about the industry than myself, so I'll concede that point.
The dealership customarily earns 2-3%+ in quarterly holdback payments from the manufacturer. They sell you a $100k car at invoice, later that quarter they're getting a $3000 payment - this is pure profit, the deal was long-since done and they didn't take a loss at time of sale.
Dealerships are also earning miscellaneous per-car bonuses which are also profit, which go up based on overall volume: if they sell 50 cars, they get $200/car, if they sell 100 units this might jump to $500/car - just a random example.
If a car is in high-demand or really uncommon (in reality, not sales-speak, and a customer has no other options), they can afford to not sell a car at invoice - but this is an exceptional circumstance.
It's the nature of a capitalist society. Perverse incentives are everywhere and our primary measurement of success is wealth. We richly reward grifters and cheaters and folks with integrity often fall behind. The decades of perverse incentives have created a perverse society that no amount of "golden rule" theory taught in kindergarten can stand up against.
I commented elsewhere in more detail, but it is in my opinion caused by a lack of national pride. If I was a billionaire, how would I feel about other Americans living the way they do? Would i be apathetic or would I feel ashamed as an American? Even paying taxes used to be considered a patriotic act a few decades ago.
I was just telling someone the other day how all the talk of civil wars and unrest were overblown, Americans will never resort to that with the economy the way it is. Even in the '08 recession (and even worse scenarios), recovery was a possibility. There would be no jobs at the time, but you can reasonably expect them to be created in a few years. You could go to school and switch careers.
But I think right now there is a dreadful perfect storm of sorts.
- It's not just LLMs, the social/political environment just doesn't favor risk taking, which means less opportunities.
- The US will be alienated from all its good trade partners for a decade plus at best. They'll still do trade, but the era of relying on US companies, or relying on a stable US consumer base is over.
- The dollar will decline, by how much I don't know but it will. Less buying power for American companies.
- Education is in shambles, and skilled & educated immigrants who can leave the US are doing so in droves. Brain drain will be real, the pipeline to replace them will take a generation, and that is if it was fixed today.
- Historically, there is a natural re-balancing of powers that happens as a result of people getting upset and organizing change or some sort. But the ability of the population to organize meaningfully is curtailed because tech, moderation and surveillance capitalism.
- I won't say too much about the current admin, but things are really scary. Not as in "i'm upset about this" or "so much for democracy" but more like "i'm scared for my life" levels of scary.
- Erosion of trust is huge, you don't take risks if you don't have some trust. consumer spending, loans, business spending,etc... and the erosion of trust is fundamental and hard to repair. Trust is also heavily asymmetric, it costs a lot to obtain, but it takes little to lose it. Once lost, gaining it again is usually orders of magnitude more costly.
let me stop there for brevity, but my point was how the US has never truly been in a situation where the economy is doing bad, and the politics is untenable. You have people who are in power and well incentivized to make things even worse, you can cancel elections and deploy troops better if things are really and truly "bad". When people stop having their basic needs met (and I don't mean health care and affordable houses - but food and shelter), I'm concerned there will not be many ways left where the rule of law and peace can be sustained.
It's one of those things, like "you can't unspill the milk". If things get as bad as I fear, right now, today is as good as it will ever get in the US. What scares me is that Americans aren't terrified enough, those that know better are in catatonic state of "what can i possibly do about it?" - and I mean all Americans regardless of politics.
From what I understand, things will get bad but for 99% of the world, the rest of this century should be bearable climate-wise. There simply aren't enough fossil fuels in the ground to keep it burning longer than 2100~ish anyways. I mean, the problem is very real and millions might die, but at the same time the majority of the billions will do ok as well, so no real cause for nihilsm on that front. Especially considering the mortality rates at the same decades a century earlier would still be significantly higher.
Wars, economic crises and other turmoils however, that's a tough one. Even climate change alone will stress out too many things and exasperate those areas.
It's more like we've had it really good post-WW2 over all, and that will go away pretty soon. Even ocean currents collapsing and acidification of the ocean, as bad as it is, it won't yet be the worst or cataclysmic I'm afraid.
Widespread undesirable situations like that tend to result in humans coming up with solutions too. It took us WW2 to get nuclear energy. It took slavery and colonialism to get us the industrial age. Bad things and good things tend to come and go alike.
I can only speculate, but many are going back to their home countries. China is also ok-ish from what I hear (at least in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen). Native born americans are also trying very hard to move to Canada, UK and EU.
But your question is what is a better country for them? A year ago, I would have said none. But I'm sure you're seen the same news that I am where even when immigrate legally, work hard, obey the law,etc.. even having real-ID proof is of no use, they get jailed. the threat of imprisonment alone, just for existing is scary, I'd say just about any other country that won't throw you in prison for existing is better. They're also talking about revoking citizenship of Americans so non-nonchalantly, hardly anyone cares. I don't even if the US is safe right now just for getting your degree at an Ivy-league school.
You said "especially for americans" - they're talking about getting rid of H1Bs right now, my comment is about the brain-drain from immigrants. The majority of the time, it isn't to save money, but the talent just isn't there in the US. Even in software-dev, there is a sort of flood of compsci grads right now, but it's only so because so much of these positions are filled with immigrants. Many other fields will have strong demand, and if the supply could be bootstrapped in a few years it isn't a big deal, but while americans get degrees (which isn't happening like before! it's really really bad right now) american companies lose their competitive advantage. Look at the CEOs of Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, they 're the type of people ICE would be eager to throw in prison were it not for their wealth and connections. Go to Arxiv.org to see pre-prints on research papers from various industries, look at the names of who's publishing.
You have to understand that the current environment and government in the US is specifically to drive out immigrants. There is a reason ICE has a higher budget than the US marines right now ($50B), they're not at the border arresting illegal migrants, they're hunting legal migrants in american cities. There are many countries where there are little opportunities for work, and population and government are very hostile to migrants (russia for example, or even japan in certain cases),but you will not have to fear being thrown in jail at-random, or constantly fear for your safety, especially for those who have family hear, I can't image what it must be like.
i'm also not really sure why the budget the marines is relevant here. the DoD has a nearly trillion dollar budget. if we're going to randomly segment out expense centers why not focus it even more narrowly to something arbitrary like how much the military spends on flour for pizzas?
for ICE, total effective/enhanced funding for FY2026 is widely reported in the $28–30B from what I can tell.
not trying to be a dick but dont want to spend more time wording this more softly
They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor. They didn't have instant comms and globalized commerce either.
Only tangentially related, the Nazis started the holocaust, in part, as a way to boost their domestic economy while making invasion supply chains viable. Less people to fight over resources, they were removing demand because of supply shortages, in literally the worst way possible.
> They didn't outsource manufacturing, rely on foreign parties for critical tech, and rely on immigrants (legal or not) for both skilled and unskilled labor.
Outsourcing manufacturing is new. But you are wrong about the other two.
Why do you think fascists (and proto-fascists and the unrelated look-alikes) keep losing wars all through history?
Fascism as a term started getting used with Mussolini from what I recall. Italy back then did not depend much on foreign supply chain or immigrant labor as far as I know, am I mistaken, or are there other examples you're thinking of.
Germany did enough for it to matter¹, Spain did. Everything in Japan was imported when they started warmongering around².
Italy was in an exception situation at the beginning of WWII, where they couldn't afford external goods.
1 - Mainly because they pushed their definition of "hated foreigner" to an extreme.
2 - They made a huge movement into replacing production chains, mandated by the government at the beginning of the war. But their lack of access to tech was still crippling at the end of the war.
I think it depends on what "join" means. I see no reason why it has to be "replace a human". People used to have secretaries back in the day, we don't anymore, we all do our own thing, but in a way, LLMs are our secretaries of sorts now. Or our personal executive assitants, even if you're not an executive.
I don't know what else LLMs need to do? get on the payroll? People are using them heavily. You can't even google things easily without triggering an LLM response.
I think the current millenial and older generation is too used to the pre-LLM way of things, so the resistance will be there for a long time to come. but kids doing homeworks with LLMs will rely on them heavily once they're in the work force.
I don't know how people are not as fascinated and excited about this. I keep watching older scifi content, and LLMs are now doing for us what "futuristic computer persona" did in older scifi.
Easy example: You no longer need copywriters because of LLMs. You had spell/grammar checkers before, but they didn't "understand" context and recommend different phrasing, and check for things like continuity and rambling on.
But why? I routinely see typos and grammar errors on major news articles. LLMs catch that stuff really well, it's like the one thing they're good at. They can be as opinionated as humans on the subject. Perhaps sycophantic mainstream models might be to eager to please, but that's not an issue with the tech itself. I like to think that every publication that is using LLMs to write content has also replaced copyeditors/writers with them.
"Reasoning" in this context is just a marketing gimmick that means "run the llm in a loop". But people who don't know how they work (the people buying them for others) just take that word at face value and assume it means what it usually means in totally different contexts.
> A post-American Internet that is possible because Trump has mobilized new coalition partners to join the fight on our side.
I'm sorry, was the pre-trump era more pro-privacy or respectful of European's sovereignty? Is Snowden forgotten now? What about the State department cable leaks?
I didn't know people relied on governments being friendly for internet security so much.
> In politics, coalitions are everything.....That's where Trump came from: a coalition of billionaires, white nationalists, Christian bigots, authoritarians, conspiratorialists, imperialists, and self-described "libertarians" who've got such a scorching case of low-tax brain worms that they'd vote for Mussolini if he'd promise to lower their taxes by a nickel.
Ok, inflammatory wording aside, this isn't wrong, but the item over which a coalition is built is important. Building a coalition because of some group membership will always result in toxic cesspools in my opinion. But coalitions build around policy can be productive. quid-pro-quo coalitions of "I'll support you on X if you support me on Y" is also how political parties start and they result in terrible results for regular people.
A lot of anti-privacy law these days is also coming out of Europe (recent one: Chat control). I think current politics and trump are good recruitment tools, but they're not effective in terms of getting things done. For example, I disagree on just about everything with trumpers, but I guarantee you can build a coalition that includes many trumpers/MAGAts when it comes to stopping things like chat control. Point being, if you have a goal, stick to it. Build coalitions and policies around it. Thinking like this does more harm than good, now it is a social/cultural/national warfare. If I didn't know better, I would feel like I should oppose this person simply as a result of being an American myself.
How can you talk about coalitions and make a point about excluding people from your coalition. Your coalition in other words is built not around policy, or enacting change but around opposing groups of people. It's worded and crafted as if supporters of this cause must view it as a means to opposing other people, instead of making changes.
Even something as simple as "let's stop using Microsoft office" makes sense, we can then talk about funding something that can compete with it. But if you worded it as "let's oppose america" umm..ok, I guess people that don't really care about america either way probably don't have a place in your coalition?
That's one thing I'm disliking heavily, the nationalization of open source and privacy related things.
You shouldn't lose your fundamental human rights, up to a point, that point is when you start believing and spreading a belief that other people should lose their fundamental human rights.
reply