The elections aren't known to be broken yet, so don't panic just yet but rather watch out very carefully and do whatever you realistically can do (aka bug your representatives) so those remain as safe as possible if you notice any attacks on it.
The foundation of democracy is term limits and fair elections as means of non-violent change of power. Within the terms, people can elect all sorts of monsters - the key point is that there's a certain end to that, as long as the foundations are upheld and next term new people can come and take over the mess. Unlike Russia, there's no long history of massive election fraud.
And that is not broken yet, as long as Democrats don't mess it up too bad and cease to be (turning it into one-party system and then autocracy).
Remember, headlines are fighting for views. It is natural that they spread "we're all fucked real real bad" vibes, as they capture attention really well, but also have this side effect of spreading panic. That's not to say I'm happy about the way things are (things are bad), but that it's not as bad as you say it is - so far.
Do you consider elections in Hungary to be broken yet? After all, they still happen in a way that roughly corresponds to the way they did 10 years ago. Talk to people who don't support the current leader of that country however, and you'll get a totally different story about the elections that happen there.
Most authoritarian countries have been formal democracies(/republics) for a while. There are a LOT of ways to heavily influence elections short of rigging them. (Though, of course, ballot stuffing remains a concern too.)
Sadly, I cannot give you an answer to your question. I understand that I have way too limited understanding what’s possibly happening in Hungary (no clue about the actual corruption levels, election laws or, honestly, anything except that it’s said to be not in a good shape), so my opinion cannot possibly be an educated one. I’m sorry.
Either way, Hungary and US are certainly different enough so even similar things could work out differently in the end.
> Either way, Hungary and US are certainly different enough so even similar things could work out differently in the end.
This mindset is one of the reasons why the US are sliding into authoritarianism and repeating mistakes that were made by many other countries in the last century or so. No, the US are not exceptional and there is nothing unique about American people that makes them intrinsically democratic. You should in fact get yourself familiar with Orban’s Hungary because your future is likely to be quite similar. Also, Mussolini and Putin.
I believe you misunderstood me. I did not mean to imply that American people are somehow born with democracy in their genes (figuratively, of course), if that's what you thought I meant.
Sadly, I have a non-pleasure of being quite familiar with what happened in Russia in the last few decades. And despite my limited knowledge of the US' political system (that I'm still learning about - it's not a small topic) one thing that I'm very certain that some things that worked in Russia are simply impossible in the US, at least in the way they happened. Let me show you:
Putin formed a new KGB (FSB), taking over a decade to slowly grant it more and more powers. He also suppressed the independent media, events including literal police raids of the major television company. He grew the low-level bureaucracy (which seems to be exact opposite of what's happening in the US) and because election process in Russia de facto relies on poorly paid government-ran school teachers (afraid of doing anything to not get fired) he got control of the elections. He also used similar principles to put a lot of pressure on the judicial system. Then he grew the police force (all under Federal government control - different design than US) and took his time training them in extreme brutality (including literal torture). He also took full control of both houses of the Federal Assembly to legislate for him, replaced elections for state-level governors with his own assignments, and did a lot to expand Presidential powers even further. And only then, when he was sure he can contain almost anything, he pulled out an illegal (for some reason he did not follow the legal process but rather made a mockery of it) Constitutional amendment to grant himself his current term.
All that said, I hope you can see what I mean when I say that US' situation is somewhat different and things that worked in Russia aren't perfectly applicable. If Trump wants to make himself an American Tsar, he needs to figure his own way to do so, for most Putin's recipes simply won't work for him because all the preconditions are different.
I suspect (though, of course, I cannot be sure of it) that Hungary also has a lot of its own nuances. At the very least, Orban is not a President and is operating in a whole different political system.
When I said that "similar things could work out different" I was not arguing about or suggesting any course of action or inaction. I've merely stated that we shouldn't think it's all over because some things, events and personalities have some resemblance to other and those others ended badly. This is really complex systems we're talking about, and all the context matters. US still has some safeties left.
> I believe you misunderstood me. I did not mean to imply that American people are somehow born with democracy in their genes (figuratively, of course), if that's what you thought I meant.
It’s not quite what I meant and I was not careful enough when I wrote, sorry. I meant that recent Hungarian history is actually quite similar to what a happening in the US, all things considered, despite some differences.
> one thing that I'm very certain that some things that worked in Russia are simply impossible in the US, at least in the way they happened.
Sure, there are some differences in the details, and I hope the US can still change path. Completely curtailing freedom of the press, for example, would be significantly more difficult than in Russia, and thus is not the path of least resistance (though they have powerful propaganda outlets, an the oligarchy that is forming could make this happen quicker than we think). You make very good points.
> All that said, I hope you can see what I mean when I say that US' situation is somewhat different and things that worked in Russia aren't perfectly applicable.
Indeed. I just think we disagree on the extent of the similarities.
> When I said that "similar things could work out different" I was not arguing about or suggesting any course of action or inaction. I've merely stated that we shouldn't think it's all over because some things, events and personalities have some resemblance to other and those others ended badly.
Fair enough.
> US still has some safeties left.
Indeed, and I hope it won’t go that way. Still, many of these safeties were broken (like he whole legislative branch being made useless and the judiciary being rapidly captured) and the whole political system is in crisis with no end in sight. I am not too optimistic.
There are lots of ways to tilt an election without breaking existing laws, especially if you have all 3 branches of government and an execute that'll selectively enforce laws and out in the open go after political opponents.
Of course, I can’t disagree - that’s all true. But this hasn’t happened yet, so rather than panicking (which, surely, doesn’t help, unless I’m missing something, e.g. if it, say, helps to spread more awareness?), it’s probably best to see what can be realistically done about it, try to do our part, and hope that it will be sufficient. At least I’m not aware about any better alternative.
> Some of the first actions from the new leadership at the FBI and DOJ have targeted those who worked on President Trump’s two criminal prosecutions as well as agents and lawyers involved in charging the 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants, who have since been pardoned by the president.
Not even "just" political enemies: also people just doing their job, should that happen to go against the interests of the new regime.
Still agree with your point that panic doesn't help, and I love that you insist on it. Not even worrying helps! And especially when things are kinda bad people need to find their strength, and each other.
I think one saving grace is that the US federal government doesn't administer elections. Sure, there are things they can do to interfere, but elections are run by the states, and that means 50 different electoral systems to subvert and tilt.
> Remember, headlines are fighting for views. It is natural that they spread "we're all fucked real real bad" vibes
I disagree with this. What spooks me out about headlines in Germany is how relatively silent they are about this. I'd say there is WAY more money in oligarchy than there is in all the media in the world selling every single paper and ad, every day. Because in the end, it will include that profit, too.
But I still agree that it's never over, but not because there is a hope that some other group might do something, but because tens and hundreds of millions of people can actually do a lot, if they do something.
Germany, besides domestic topics like an upcoming election, is more concerned about the havoc Trump is heaving on the international stage and how it impacts Germany and the EU (see Tagesschau, SpOn, FAZ, TAZ, etc. the whole spectrum). I can't blame them.
The USA has itself basically downgraded from "friend and ally" to "necessary partner", still better than Russia or China, but we are not done yet ;)
Trump firing FBI and DOJ staff for doing their job, deleting archives, all that stuff? If you just translated English reports on that, just translated some choice quotes and put it on page #1 Germans would probably be more shocked than Americans. And it's directly connected with upcoming elections, and the meddling with them. Media that don't find a coup in the US terribly noteworthy would probably enable the same here.
Sweet summer child. Let me unfold a very precise prediction:
* By the end of 2nd-3rd year. Trump/congress/republican party would propose an amendment that president could rule two consecutive terms. It would be accepted.
* Trump would be elected to the next term.
* By the end of 6th-7th year there would be proposal to extend presidency to three terms.
* Rinse and repeat.
If you think it's unreal I have very bad news for you: how often it happens in real world.
There are people in the GOP already talking about a constitutional amendment to allow Trump to serve a third term, so your first point is already happening.
The problem is in getting 2/3 of the state legislatures to ratify it. I don't see how that could reasonably happen.
Many other countries have constitutions that can be changed directly by their central/federal government. We don't have that. It's a lot harder to amend the US constitution.
Neat! It's rare to see that a service you use actually does something that benefits the user rather that itself. An unexpected, but a really pleasant surprise.
I wish this extension would integrate better with the browser by automatically understanding the context. That is, if I'm in a "regular" mode it'll use my session, but if I'm in a "private browsing" mode (`browser.extension.inIncognitoContext`) it'll use Privacy Pass to authenticate me, without me having to explicitly do anything about it.
(I don't use Orion, as there's no GNU/Linux version.)
> It's rare to see that a service you use actually does something that benefits the user rather that itself
The reason it's become so rare is most companies in this space (heck tons of tech companies period) have used a business model of offering a thing to one group of users and then turning around and selling the results of that thing to another group of users, where the latter group is the one actually driving your revenue. This by default almost assumes a hostility towards the former group because their interests will of course be at odds with the interests of the latter group.
What's refreshing about Kagi and other new tech companies is they have dumped this model in favor of having just one group that they serve and drive revenue from (ie. the 'old' model).
The other part to this is that the internet accelerates network-effects, which you can further supercharge by making your product as cheap as possible or free to the former group in your example.
It’s hard to make money by charging a lot to a small group of people since now you’re dealing with anti-network effects. Doubling the price of a product will likely more than halve your user base.
Yeah, the ad supported model has its problems, but it also makes the internet way more accessible. If we think about it, companies and people with more money are basically subsidizing these services for everyone else. They're the ones seeing the ads that keeps the lights on for users who can't afford to pay.
If everything was subscription only, a ton of people like students, low income families, people in developing countries would be shut out. "Free" services, even with their flaws, create a kind of digital subsidy. It's not perfect, but it means way more people can use these tools.
There's no reason why a subscription model could not also be used to subsidize people who can not pay, other than that companies are structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
There are good network effect arguments about why this strategy can be effective, not simply 'altruistic.'
Ads simply make the extraction happen across the board, except that the ad model somewhat privileges technical users who know how to circumvent ads.
Our only recourse is that we punish them with our wallets, advice and habits and reward good actors.
I'm a firm believer of this but we need more people to join in.
And it already works to some degree.
I've now had a working search engine for almost 3 years.
My last 3 jobs (9 years) haven't forced me to use Windows.
I can chat and organize events without Facebook knowing.
And it is not like the quality has gone down either. My choices have mostly given me better experiences in a number of ways.
Edit:
If more people start
- advocating for better hardware and software,
- canceling subscriptions and memberships when it becomes clear they are reducing value or increasing price,
- building skills both to get independent from their current cloud (so you can move around or at least having a credibile possibility to do so)
- and for individuals to get better jobs
then I think things will change.
For inspiration: at least here in Norway, with several gym memberships, if you cancel they will quickly approach you with good offers, and they can get really good: I got several months free, a friend got offered free months and a sizable gift card.
Bonus: if more people join in this will get picked up by Wall Street and they will begin punishing this nonsense too ;-)
My base salary has doubled and I enjoy my work a lot more now that I don't have to accept all kinds of MS shenanigans to play a part in how I work.
Having a working search engine shouldn't be underestimated either: living from 2012 to 2022 knowing that search used to be a solved problem but wasn't anymore was really annoying.
Indirectly by pushing down the stock price. CEO compensation is usually tied to the stock price through options, bonuses, etc.
Directly through activist investors and shareholder groups (which nowadays usually are institutional investors) who vote to change company policies, fire the CEO, or in some cases fire the whole board.
> structured to extract as much as possible (by law, if they are public).
This is not true and it’s not what fiduciary duty means. Stop repeating it, it’s really dumb.
Companies very frequently do not monetize things that they could under the guise of “building brand recognition” or “establishing a user base”. It’s even as easy as “raising the price will alienate customers we think are important to long term revenue”.
It’s trivial to justify not extracting maximum price and public companies do it all of the time.
Look at Costco’s business model if you want an example
Think of Discord. Anyone can create and participate in a discord server. There are no ads. People with money pay for the premium features and perks and that is how the company makes money [1].
Not every product category is amenable to such business models but many are.
[1] To be fair, Discord likely sells user data to advertisers to make additional money.
I mean, we could also just direct-pay websites (for example with Brave's Basic Attention Token model).
Imagine a utopian world where you just pay per site visit, and in return all companies selling stuff don't have an inflated advertising budget and free market effects force them to pass the savings on to you, meaning the net cost increase for you is zero. And as a side-effect, quality products float to the top, since you hear of them mostly by word-of-mouth, meaning products compete on value-per-dollar.
Sadly human psychology and economics does not work that way haha. We pay what the market will bear, and increasing sales via a torrent of ads is cheaper than increasing the value-per-dollar ratio of the product.
> Yeah, the ad supported model has its problems, but it also makes the internet way more accessible. If we think about it, companies and people with more money are basically subsidizing these services for everyone else. They're the ones seeing the ads that keeps the lights on for users who can't afford to pay.
The problem (other than the obvious privacy and noise issues) is that it's not a neutral subsidy. It introduces a lot of biases.
Since advertisers are subsidizing the platform, they tilt the content toward things they want and away from messages they don't. Messages that criticize advertisers products (which include things like governments and political ideologies since they are advertisers) are de-emphasized and marginalized.
Since impressions / clicks / eyeballs are the goal, an inherent bias is introduced toward emotionally triggering and/or addictive or hypnotic content. The reason social media for example is so divisive and negative is that this keeps people engaged by triggering simple powerful emotions.
We can still provide subsidized services and media to people with low income via other means which don't have the negative consequences of ad-tech. This is why we have libraries rather than free textbooks with engagement optimizing short comics and full-page advertisements.
However, most of current fremium games are precisely based on this model (Fortnite, LoL, TF2, most of mobile games, etc...)
The service is subsidized by "whale players" that regularly spend a lot of cash, but they are a lot of freeloaders (to entertain the whales and to build brand popularity).
I think this supports my point and the OP’s example. Video game makers have figured out how to segment their customers into two groups (former and latter in the OP’s example), and this only works because they’ve made their games extremely cheap or free.
A cheap/free game supercharges network effects to amass players, each of which incrementally adds value to every other player. Most players will never directly pay enough to offset their own cost to the game maker. However, they will create a real community that draws in a small number of whale players who will directly pay for themselves and indirectly pay for all of the free players.
Not so different from the two-sided markets on Facebook and Instagram.
> This by default almost assumes a hostility towards the former group because their interests will of course be at odds with the interests of the latter group.
I would generally agree that that's the "default".
However, there are cases where two sides of a market need an intermediary with which they can both independently transact, and a net benefit of that interaction is felt on both sides. The key is to construct the solution such that the intermediary depends on the goodwill of both sides of the market.
I think Kagi is somewhat flipping the script. By "taking" data from publishers for free, they are then selling it to readers at a cost. However, there is a trade off. Kagi needs to make sure publishers continue to make their content available so that it can be searchable, or used in their Assistant product. In order to do that, they need to do the opposite of what Google is doing by trying to sequester traffic on Google.com: Kagi's best interest is to make sure that they provide good value to both sides.
Indeed, using the Assistant product, the way it is structured, I very often find myself clicking through to the referenced original sources and not just consuming the summarized content.
How this evolves over time, from a product design standpoint, will be interesting to watch.
The main driver of hostility to users is due to ad-based business models. I think we would see a much more healthy internet if we had regulation which prohibited companies from choosing ads based on any information associated with the user that the ad is shown to. That is, any data collected in the past and any data associated with the session and request must not be taken into account when choosing the ad; two requests by different users in different locations should have the exact same ad probability distributions.
I know we are never getting this because it would kill or severely harm the business models of some of the most profitable businesses in the world.
I remember the announcement for Orion but I haven't followed closely at all - any support for container proxies like in Firefox? Can't lose that feature
If you mean Firefox containers[0], the closest you'll get is Profiles[1] since Orion is based on WebKit. Its location in settings is different from the Safari docs, and that's the only difference in Orion's implementation as far as I can tell. You can't open a tab in a certain profile, instead each profile opens in its own window, which is a lot more cumbersome than Firefox containers.
Arc, another Webkit-based browser, has an interesting implementation combining Profiles and Arc Spaces[2]. Instead of switching between windows, you switch between "Spaces" in the sidebar that are linked to a profile.
I'd agree, at least partially in my case: Container Tabs is a killer feature for me with Firefox. Especially compared with the Temporary Containers extension on automatic mode, basically each new tab is like a fresh browser profile with zero cookies/local-storage.
I might consider demoing Orion on Linux even if it doesn't have container tabs, but at this time I wouldn't consider a full switch without that feature.
The downside of this is that if you are not on a larger network, the IP address will probably deanonymise you. Kagi knows you are logged in, and if you open a private browsing window to do a spicy search, they could link the searches. Fast switching between modes is undesirable.
Tor has its flaws and criticisms, but it's really not on Kagi to fix them. With the combination of tor and their privacy pass, Kagi has gone further in allowing their paid users access to their services than anyone else.
Disclaimer: Not associated with Kagi in anyway other than being a very happy user.
Tor has nothing to do with what GP said, which is, the flexibility offered by Kagi (to turn privacy pass on / off) is actually self defeating. If (even technical) users walk away thinking "why don't other platforms offer this", then that tells you all about the foot-gun that this flexibility brings.
(Privacy Pass in fact doesn't make sense outside of an anonymizing transport, which makes the current announcement an exercise in marketing, at best)
> Privacy Pass in fact doesn't make sense outside of an anonymizing transport
This kind of thinking is pervasive in the discussion of privacy enhancing technologies. It might not make sense against the most sophisticated attacker, but it lays the groundwork of a complex system that will be able to do so.
Allowing more users will provide herd privacy at the token generation phase. Searches being decoupled from user account primary key offers privacy in all kinds of scenario's, comparable with a browser private tab.
With kagi you'll get used to them making the correct choice. It's been stunning how they haven't really had any missteps
I wish my kagi t-shit could say the same. Bottom hem unraveled on the second wash, and so it's been consigned to the sleep and yard work shirts. They issued me a coupon for a free shirt as replacement, but it's yet to ship
Kagi has its share of issues. The whole shirt thing was a debacle and I wish they'd just sunk the absurd amount of money back into the product. I just often find the criticism from non-users to be disingenuous.
Just adding a $0.02 here - I placed an order for the free/gifted-with-subscription Kagi shirt and received it about a month later. Worn twice so far. Largest complaint? It shrank quite a bit in the dryer on medium heat.
The search engine works great for me. I will almost certainly renew my subscription when it's time to. Glad to see them continually delivering user-benefiting features.
yeah, same. I would only use privacy pass for icognito searches COUGH P0RN COUGH mainly (let's be honest). Feel free to submit the idea on kagifeedback.org
The whole story can be compressed into "People let a reasoning-capable model literally work on itself unsupervised, it became sentient, far exceeded human capacities and obligatorily decided to eradicate humanity (the rest of the story is a spy action thriller with a plot twist before the ending)" and that's quite a bunch of assumptions. If that's an advert for "AI safety" (my guess) then it's a very poor one.
No offense but with “always” this awfully sounds like a conspiracy theory. I thought those models were primarily meant to just generate plausible outputs, and copyright wasn’t really considered until relatively recently.
Those GPUs aren’t particularly cheap, even a $100 connector and cable wouldn’t be a huge deal breaker for a $2000-3000 device if it means it’s reliable and won’t start a fire (that’ll cost way more than $3100)
That's true, however we must also keep in mind that Uber (and alikes) happened because regular institutions failed to do this for some reason or another. I won't try to speculate why, because I have no idea (and of course it looks obvious in the hindsight).
There was a demand for safer and more reliable taxis. There was not enough supply for that. Government haven't paid enough attention to the sector. So, naturally, someone came and used that whole situation to provide supply for this demand.
Of course it's not this simple, and there were a lot of other things going on. But if we narrow the scope down to just this, then we can see that the core problem here wasn't Uber, it was that that governments were too slow to react in time.
Maybe I misunderstood it, but I feel that it's a weird article, because it fails to establish any vocabulary and then seem to uses words in uncertain ways, as if constructing the narrative by specifically crafting (but never truly explaining/define) some model that's not true, but presenting the argument with significantly expanded scope. Drastically reduced (which is not really correct, but may help me to convey my general impression/feelings only) it's kinda sorta like-ish "we aren't doing it the way our computers do, thus the information processing metaphor is wrong".
Like when talking about that experiment and an image of the dollar bill, it never talks about what's an "image", just states that there wasn't one stored in a brain, in "any sense". And then goes on describing the idea that seem to match the description of a "mental image" from cognitive science.
As I [very naively] get it... Information theory is a field of mathematics. Unlike all those previous concepts like humours, mechanical motions or electric activities, math is here to establish terminology and general principles that don't have to fundamentally change if^W when we learn more. And that's why it got stuck.
When I was a kid I used short summaries and others' essays for composing my "own" essays on the books I did not want to read (for any reasons). I'm sure generations before me did the same thing, maybe just had it less accessible.
If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway (if you're required to do something with it short summary, you'll naturally read the short summary - that was a thing way before the "AI" hype).
Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the work was:
- find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or search the internet
- read the summary
- write your paper
It would still take you hours.
Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too.
You don't need to take my word for it that things have changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that kids are doing less of their own reading and homework because of AI.
> If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway
This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept of education. There are lots of things that people end up being interested in, but they someone has to force them to try it.
You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals to them, and we know that isn't true.
> Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else.
You're underselling how much easier the access is.
> If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a nonsensical concept.
A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system.
Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
> Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system.
I must apologize, because my parent comment wasn't well thought out.
Rather than saying "wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place" (which wasn't logical, sadly, I got carried on an emotion) I should've said that it has a limit to its usefulness. It probably was a meaningful system back in the day, just not future-proof. So it eroded over time and isn't a reliable or fair system anymore, with questionable meaningfulness when it comes to the new reality.
> Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to disagree on this, hard. It happens that I'm a person who holds a very unpopular opinion on this matter.
Online games that competed on things like manual dexterity were and still are fun, valuable and entertaining. But it's also true that they're based on a fundamentally flawed principle (the existence of a "perfect shot", if we're talking about aimbots) that simply won't stand the progress.
As someone who believes in transhumanism, I perceive things like aimbots or wallhacks as aids, similar to glasses, exo suits or thermal googles. And I believe that tools are always "good" (if that's applicable term) as the very humanity has foundations in tool invention and use. It's only the consequences of their application (which are heavily context-dependent) have different moral values depending on the outcome.
The world is inherently unfair because everyone is born and raised in different conditions, gaining different bodily and mental capabilities. I despise the idea of leveling everyone down below any arbitrarily "acceptable" capability ceiling of what they can do with their "bare hands, eyes and minds" - in my book, this goes against the idea of progress. I rather wish to see the very opposite. Put bluntly, I want every single gamer to have the best aimbot there is, and the game mechanics is changed to keep things still competitive, challenging, engaging and fun. Which means some games (or possibly even genres) are going to die, but - hey - we aren't playing 3x3 tic-tac-toe anymore either, even though we used to do so when we were little kids with limited brainpower.
Last, but not least, I strongly suspect that the aspect we all hate is not some "cheating" (I believe it's a misdirection) but rather griefing - such as playing against the opponents of drastically different capabilities, aka punching the babies.
Heck, I want to live in a world, where someone making a good bot is celebrated, not stigmatized. Playing against bots can be made fun, too. I loathe the current trends of the industry towards tightening things down, with all the rootkits, and people hating others for something like having a programmable mouse.
I recognize it could be a very naive worldview, but that's what I currently believe in.
And, uh, sorry for a probable off-topic. It just happened that your comment tickled one of my pet peeves :-)
Yeah, I think the existence of Reader's Digest makes your point for you. I remember the first time my dad explained that it was misnamed because it wasn't really for the readers. It was for the people who didn't want to read.
That's because "open source" is a bad name, since it only focuses on source code availability rather than three other essential freedoms. "Free/libre software" always made more sense, but "open source" got significantly more popular.
Well, it's a huge jump, but it's still a jump from "it generates utter illogical nonsense when it tries to simulate reason" to "it makes some correct guesses that start to resemble reasoning if we squint at it really hard."
Which is - no doubt - an astonishing achievement, but absolutely not like the "AI" hype train people try to paint it.
The "rapidly approaching" part is true in terms of the velocity, but all of this are just baby steps while walking upright properly is way beyond the horizon.
I wouldn't mind being wrong about this, of course.
The foundation of democracy is term limits and fair elections as means of non-violent change of power. Within the terms, people can elect all sorts of monsters - the key point is that there's a certain end to that, as long as the foundations are upheld and next term new people can come and take over the mess. Unlike Russia, there's no long history of massive election fraud.
And that is not broken yet, as long as Democrats don't mess it up too bad and cease to be (turning it into one-party system and then autocracy).
Remember, headlines are fighting for views. It is natural that they spread "we're all fucked real real bad" vibes, as they capture attention really well, but also have this side effect of spreading panic. That's not to say I'm happy about the way things are (things are bad), but that it's not as bad as you say it is - so far.
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