A1kmm @ A1kmm @lemmy.amxl.com

Posts

8

Comments

214

Joined

2 yr. ago

The quote from the article has it right: "They are human beings. They have bad leaders, like us. We can throw away the leaders on both sides and make peace in a matter of minutes".

Hamas and Likud are the instigators of this, and they actually both want to entirely destroy the other side rather than a peaceful resolution. To quote Hamas' 2017 charter: "Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea" (noting that means the complete destruction of Israel). To quote Netanyahu: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian State has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring of money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy".

Deliberately killing civilians is never okay (which both sides are doing - see the article, and Hamas are safe in their tunnels and it has become a trope that after killing many civilians Likud people just automatically claim it was Hamas HQ, with no credibility), and neither side has a right to target civilians.

The hostages are likely with Hamas in the tunnels under Gaza. The bombings by the Israeli military under the orders of Netanyahu's Likud are not likely to kill either Hamas or the hostages, but rather they kill civilians and destroy civilian property on the surface. They are deliberate massacres of ordinary Palestinian citizens.

Likud (and its collaborators) and Hamas are the evil forces here - both sides are murdering many civilians for each Hamas / Likud / IDF death.

I always thought of Raspberry Pi as a not-for-profit and supported it on that basis. If the model was supposed to be like Mozilla where they have a not-for-profit and a corporation that is wholly owned by the not-for-profit, then it seems like selling out the corporation to for-profit investors runs contrary to the goals of the not-for-profit. Does anyone know why they are allowing the corporation to be sold off?

The reason they can get away with it is because too many people use Chrome / Edge / Brave (Chromium based browsers). The free web will survive if companies lose half their customers by not supporting it. It won't survive if they would only lose 0.1% of their customers.

So the key will be to push non-Chromium browsers - get that installed base up. Encourage everyone you know to use a non-Chromium browser. Install a decent browser for your elderly relatives, and spread the word.

And now one of them is reportedly under investigation for allegedly performing a Nazi salute after that court appearance: https://www.9news.com.au/national/victoria-news-first-person-to-be-charged-in-for-performing-nazi-salute-under-new-laws/accddf5a-d263-4a49-813c-3117adb674d1 (a law prohibiting Nazi salutes, displaying swastikas, etc... came into force in Victoria on the 21st October, 3 days prior to the court appearance).

I read the article expecting some kind of hateful comment, and it turns out she was on the side of civilians over Likud and Hamas - which I think is a refreshingly well thought out position. I'd question whether she is really losing fans overall, or if this is just clickbait. Haters are always going to hate, but just because a few people criticise someone doesn't mean there is a net trend against them.

Israel should take in the refugees they created, and offer them citizenship, if they are serious about this not being a genocide and only being about Hamas. It is, after all, their ancestral land.

I suspect the far-right parties like Netanyahu's Likud would never let this happen though. Netanyahu is probably quite happy Hamas committed their atrocities to give him cover for more of his own atrocities.

Going back to Hardin, the fundamental thesis of the tragedy of commons is that as society scales past a certain point, regulation is the only way to deal with the over-exploitation of things that are beneficial to one person but carry an externality borne by others.

In tribes / small societies (and presumably your workplace!), that regulation might come from ostracisation of people who over-exploit by their neighbours. In a large society, it could come from a government (and could come in many forms - subsidies, taxes, laws prohibiting or rationing activities, laws requiring counterbalancing good).

Now consider the climate crisis. It has the externality (if I burn fossil fuels, I cause emissions that warms the planet for everyone, and leads to rising sea levels, lots of people losing land, losses of biodiversity and the benefits that provides, and extreme weather events). Most of the impact of my own emissions would not be felt by me - in fact, most would be felt by future generations - making it an externality. At least until society transitions fully to non-fossil energy sources, in the absence of any regulation stopping me, burning fossil fuels is likely more convenient. So it meets all the requirements to be a tragedy of the commons.

As a result, that analysis tells us that, if we accept Hardin's thesis, some kind of government intervention is needed to control emissions. Sadly, due to regulatory capture, in many countries there is not enough of that happening, hence why this has become such a crisis.

I wonder about how the end-to-end efficiency of this compares to going back to older processes from before synthetic nitrogen fixing.

Reading between the lines, they are fixing nitrogen by converting it to ammonium nitrate using the Haber and Ostwald processes, with energy the run the process provided by solar panels, and then scattering the ammonium nitrate on the soil where they grow their crops.

The classic way to fix nitrogen is to grow nitrogen fixing crops sometimes (members of the Fabaceae / pea family), such as peas, clover etc..., which fix nitrogen, and rotate the crops growing in each plot of soil over different growing seasons between crops that deplete nitrogen and crops that fix nitrogen. It's entirely possible that this is more efficient in terms of land use (area * years) than using some of your land for solar panels and then growing the crop you want continuously in the other part of the land. It also means lower embodied costs in terms of resources to manufacture the solar panels.

So it would be good to see some actual numbers around this.

This would be very hard to protect against; if the attacker controls Linode and Hetzner, it is likely they also have access to the disks and memory for the virtual services, and not just the network. So extracting the private key for the real certificate is probably also on the table as an option for the attacker, and would be much harder to detect.

As they say in the article, end-to-end encryption such as OTR is probably important to avoid getting caught in dragnets like this.

Data being public (and privacy in general) shouldn't be 'all or none'. The problem is people joining the dots between individual bits of data to build a profile, not necessarily the individual bits of data.

If you go out in public, someone might see you and recognise you, and that isn't considered a privacy violation by most people. They might even take a photo or video which captures in the background, and that, in isolation isn't considered a problem either (no expectation of privacy in a public place). But if someone sets out to do similar things at a mass scale (e.g. by scraping, or networking cameras, or whatever) and piece together a profile of all the places you go in public, then that is a terrible privacy violation.

Now you could similarly say that people who want privacy should never leave home, and otherwise people are careless and get what they deserve if someone tracks their every move in public spaces. But that is not a sustainable option for the majority of the world's population.

So ultimately, the problem is the gathering and collating of publicly available personally identifiable information (including photos) in ways people would not expect and don't consent to, not the existence of such photos in the first place.

Note that "Reclaim The Net" is very shady and unlikely to be a legitimate civil rights organisation.

Firstly, they display bias; they only ever say positive things about Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Ron DeSantis, and spin most things in whatever way helps the far-right in the US. They are silent on any Internet related civil rights issues that reflect poorly on the US far-right, or reflect well on central or left parties. Contrast this to more authentic organisations, which criticise things from all over the political spectrum.

Secondly, they prioritise collecting your personally identifiable information over advocating for civil liberties. Some of their articles are behind a registration wall where you have to give at least an email address to see the content.

Thirdly, however, they don't tell you who they are, and go to lengths to hide it. Whois privacy, author names are likely pseudonyms, only contact is an email, no information about governance structures. There are legitimate reasons to be pseudonymous, although given how keen they are to collect data on visitors, it is a bit hypocritical!

I believe there is a network of single-interest sites the far-right use as hooks to try to gather people with a range of different reasons for being dissatisfied, where the next step is to try to radicalise them and line them up behind Trump.

If the Likud-controlled military were serious about this being a humanitarian concession, they'd let civilians enter Israel and become citizens there as refugees.

Many of them are already refugees (or descendants of refugees) forced out of modern-day Israel, and want to return - so if this is really just about Hamas for Netanyahu, letting them through the border as refugees would be a win-win for everyone except Hamas.

Not all Israelis are Likud, and not all Palestinians are Hamas. The problem is not the 'sides' being 'mean' to each other (quotes used because I think your choice of language trivialises the atrocities being committed by both sides), it is the civilians who are not part of Likud or Hamas being dragged into it.

The entire situation in Israel / Palestine is primarily a tale of escalatory tit-for-tat, and politicisation of hate, all starting from a relatively small initial grievance. Netanyahu showed himself when he deliberately provoked conflict in 2021, causing harm to civilians on both sides - in that example, it was blatant how willing he was to cause this much suffering for such a selfish reason, but that boldness only comes because Likud has been doing the same thing only slightly more subtly for years. So when Hamas commits war crimes, it was predictable that Likud would treat it as an opportunity to commit a bigger war crime and try to genocide the Palestinians in Gaza.

Neither Likud or Hamas want an enduring peace - their entire political relevance is through escalation. But the way to get peace is not by further escalation of violence / war crimes. The best way out of this is for the people of Israel and Palestine to say no to Likud and Hamas respectively, and pick leaders who want and know how to de-escalate.

If AI generated art is a close derivative of another work, then copyright already applies.

But when it comes to vague abstractions over multiple works that isn't like any one of them, copyright is probably not the right fix for what is fundamentally a more general problem. Copyright has never covered that sort of thing, so you would be asking for an unprecedented expansion to copyright, and that would have immense negative consequences that would do more harm than good.

There are two ways I could see in which copyright could be extended (both of which are a bad idea, as I'd explain).

Option 1 would be to take a 'colour of bits' approach (borrowing the terminology from https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23). The analogy of 'bits' having a colour and not just being a 0 or 1 has been used to explain how to be conservative about ensuring something couldn't possibly be a copyright violation - if a bit that is coloured with copyright is used to compute another bit in any way (even through combination with another untainted bit), then that bit is itself coloured with copyright. The colour of bits is not currently how copyright law works, but it is a heuristic that is overly conservative right now of how to avoid copyright violation. Theoretically the laws around copyright and computing could change to make the colour of bits approach the law. This approach, taken strictly, would mean that virtually all the commercial LLMs and Stable Diffusion models are coloured with the copyrights of all inputs that went into them, and any output from the models would be similarly coloured (and hence in practice be impossible to use legally).

There are two major problems with this: firstly, AI models are essentially a rudimentary simulation of human thinking (neural networks are in fact inspired by animal neurons). Applying the same rule to humans would mean that if you've ever read a copyrighted book, everything you ever say, write, draw or otherwise create after that is copyright to the author of that book. Applying a different rule to computers than to humans would mean essentially ruling out ever automating many things that humans can do - it seems like an anti-tech agenda. Limiting technology solely for the benefit some people now seems short sighted. Remember, once people made their livelihoods in the industry of cutting ice from the arctic and distributing it on ships for people to keep their food cold. Their made their livelihoods lighting gas lamps around cities at dawn and extinguishing them at dusk. Society could have banned compressors in refrigerators and electric lighting to preserve those livelihoods, but instead, society advanced, everyone's lives got better, and people found new livelihoods. So a colour of bits approach either applies to humans, and becomes an unworkable mess of every author you've ever read basically owns all your work, or it amounts to banning automation in cases where humans can legally do something.

The second problem with the colour of bits approach is that it would undermine a lot of things that we have already been doing for decades. Classifiers, for example, are often trained on copyrighted inputs, and make decisions about what category something is in. For example, most email clients let you flag a message as spam, and use that to decide if a future message is spam. A colour of bits approach would mean the model that decides whether or not a message is spam is copyright to whoever wrote the spam - and even the Yes/No decision is also copyright to them, and you'd need their permission to rely on it. Similarly for models that detect abuse or child pornography or terrorist material on many sites that accept user-generated content. Many more models that are incredibly important to day-to-day life would likely be impacted in the same way - so it would be incredibly disruptive to tech and life as we know it.

Another approach to extending copyright, also ill-advised, would be to extend copyright to protect more general elements like 'style', so that styles can be copyrighted even if another image doesn't look the same. If this was broadened a long way, it would probably just lead to constant battles between artists (or more likely, studios trying to shut down artists), and it is quite likely that no artist could ever publish anything without a high risk of being sued.

So copyright is probably not a viable solution here, so what is? As we move to a 'post-scarcity' economy, with things automated to the extent that we don't need that many humans working to produce an adequate quality of life for everyone, the best solution is a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Everyone who is making something in the future and generating profits is almost certainly using work from me, you, and nearly every person alive today (or their ancestors) to do so. But rather than some insanely complex computation about who contributed the most that becomes unworkable, just tax all profit to cover it, and pay a basic income to everyone. Then artists (and everyone else) can focus on meaning and not profit, knowing they will still get paid the UBI no matter what, and contribute back to the commons, and copyright as a concept can be essentially retired.

which absolutely drowns out the ability to find information about the negative health effects of a typical vape user buying name-brand products from reputable suppliers

It is true that the 2019 EVALI outbreak linked to tocopheryl acetate contamination got a lot of media attention, but there is evidence of other vaping-related harm.

The review article summarises some of the more recent evidence from across a lot of different studies: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/19/6808.

Programming is the most automated career in history. Punch cards, Assembler, Compilers, Linkers, Keyboards, Garbage Collection, Type Checkers, Subroutines and Functions, Classes, Macros, Libraries (of increasingly higher-level abstractions), Build Scripts, CI/CD - those are all automation concepts that do things that theoretically a programmer could have done manually. To build all the software we build now would theoretically be possible without any automation - but it would probably require far more programmers than there are people on earth. However, because better tech leads to people doing more with the same, in practice the number of programmers has grown with time as we've just built more complex software.

Having to have a trustworthy notary interactively as part of the protocol during the TLS request seems like it shuts out a lot of applications.

I wonder if it could be done with zk-STARKs, with the session transcript and ephemeral keys as secret inputs, and a CA certificate as a public input, to produce a proof of the property without the need for the notary. That would then mean the only roles are TLS server, prover, and verifier, with no interactive dependency between the prover and verifier (i.e. the prover could generate the proof first, that can non-interactively verified at any time later by any number of verifiers).

Phones have a unique equipment identifier number (IMEI) that they share with towers. Changing SIM changes the subscriber ID (IMSI) but not the IMEI (manufacturers don't make it easy to change the IMEI). So thieves (and anyone else) with the phone could be tracked by the IMEI anyway even if they do that, while leaving the phone on.

In practice, the bigger reason they don't get caught every time if they have inadequate opsec practices is that in places where phone thefts are common, solving them is probably not a big priority for local police. Discarding the SIM probably doesn't make much difference to whether they get caught.

Probably just easy to catch.