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I think that's a bit too optimistic, but I still think the direction is right-ish. It feels hard to give a timeline though. Robotics is hard.

People catch the spooks and their exploits all the time though.

It is possible to defend against them. Maybe not on your phone though.


Agreed. I just mentioned that for the spooks who don't like I am suggesting moving sensitive conversations elsewhere using basic opsec. I assume the farm recruits on HN are probably just as concerned about AI taking their jobs. Surely someone has bought AI a coffee unprompted by now, maybe even flirted with the AI.

I don't quite understand your comment. I also disagree with some implications of the final bit of your first comment: encryption is obviously basic privacy, but the interesting bit is who you're talking to.

So having a signal for switching mediums is something that I feel indicates thinking in the wrong direction.


So having a signal for switching mediums is something that I feel indicates thinking in the wrong direction.

It's not for everyone. I grew up with code phrases. My mom knew that if I said "I love you" to send in the cavalry. We had similar processes in the military. If I answered the phone a particular way they knew the remote site was under siege.


That's an okay use, but in that use you're not attempting to achieving privacy.

Everyone knows you talk to your parents, but code phrases are not a way to get privacy.


It's not for privacy in the way you may be thinking. This was long before cell phones or the internet existed and the conversation would have been over the rotary phone and it is assumed someone is in the house with me that should not be. Goal being police have authorization to kick down the door and assist the person or people that are nutritionally deficient in lead.

Here in Sweden the thing that makes something a contract is that you can't change it-- that it has definite provisions that have been agreed and that both parties actually expect the other to hold up their part.

The US breaking its contract law to treat non-contracts as contracts is one of the most insane things I've seen a legal system do to itself.


I do not think this is true for Sweden.

The key difference, is that the US is many jurisdictions (Federal + 50 states + a lot of others, from counties to cities to territories to MANY others), and the variance amongst those is high.

The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet.

In the US, these things have huge variability. There are well regulated states, and well, the others.


>The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet.

Yes, but Swedish contract law actually is like this. A contract is a specific agreement, it can never be "Oh well, you can add provisions as you like if you send them to me" or "I will pay whatever".


The workaround is that each change is a new contract. If you don’t accept the changes the existing contract ends and that’s it. But the power is mostly with the provider, you need it more than it needs you, so you will want the new contract. You can also ask and negotiate terms and the provider has the same choice. If there’s healthy competition you have some power, otherwise you are out of luck.

But that would supposed need to have some explicit text stating the expiration of that contract. An existing contract can't just end when provider feels like it, I suppose?

I would guess it can end the moment either party wants, unless a length was established. At the end of the month or year you’ve paid for, perhaps with a minimum notice, would make sense. Otherwise the provider can refuse to let you stop paying, citing the contract.

Every contract has that, either party can exit the contract under normal conditions. You can cancel your Netflix subscription with a short notice period. They can do the same. They use the notice period as grace period for you to accept the new conditions. You accept a new contract with new conditions.

I negotiated my mobile phone or internet contracts again and again, to get better deals. I threaten to leave, they throw a bone. Because they know I have options. Providers who know you don’t will squeeze you however they please.


Yes, you have to enter into a new contract with the person you want a new contract with and he has to actually agree, as in any contract negotiation.

Yeah, “implicit agreement” isn’t a real agreement.

Which is still loads preferable to what's happening in TFA.

Do you think it's likely that these kinds of things come about because there's varity in the myriad of jurisdictions in America or that there are monied interests who stand to benefit from it?

Like to put it another way how much of this is 'We must do it this way because Americans are simply built different and we're just special' vs 'this makes a handful of people a bunch of money and they have teams of lobbyists, marketers, and lawyers to normalize this kind of stuff in society over time'?


It's probably a bit of both from what I've seen of how Americans tend to react to their government doing things (online anyways).

The US's quagmire of incoherent laws and many jurisdictions seems to be a bad combination of:

* Apathetic voters that are raised on a media diet of "big government bad", which impedes any regulations on a federal level. (Note that this is irrespective on if the voters actually want a small government, it's what they're led to believe.)

* Politicians that don't like to give up power; there's an unusual desire for local/state US officials to claim responsibility and get very pissy when the federal government steps in with a standardized solution. This is very unusual compared to other countries; punting responsibilities to local officials in other countries is generally seen as a way for politicians to abdicate responsibility by letting it die in micromanagement and overworked administrative workers and isn't popular to do anymore these days. (This is also a two way street, where federal US lawmakers can abdicate making any legislation that isn't extremely popular by just punting it down to the states, even if they have legal majorities.)

* The US has a court system that overly favors case law rather than actual law. Laws in the US are permitted to be painfully underdefined since there's an assumption that the courts will work out all the finer details. It's an old system more designed around the days of bad infrastructure across large distances (like well, the British Empire, which it's copied from). It's meant to empower the judicial branch to be able to make the snap decision even if there's not directly a law on the books (yet) or if a law hasn't actually reached the judiciary in question. The result is that you end up with a bunch of different judiciaries, each with their own slightly different rules. It also encourages other bad behavior like jurisdiction shopping where people will try to find the judiciary most favorable to them, crafting "the perfect case" to get a case law on the books the way you want it to get judges to override similar cases and so on and so forth - in other countries, what the supreme court judges doesn't have nearly the same lasting impact that a decision in the US has.

* And finally, the entire system is effectively kept stuck in place because lobbyists like it this way; if they want to kill regulation, they just get some states to pass on it and then hem and haw at the notion of a federal regulation. Politicians keep it in place on their own, lobbyists provide them the grease/excuse to keep doing it. (And those lobbyists these days also have increasing amounts of ownership over the US media, so the rethoric about voters not liking big government regulations is reinforced by them as well.)

It didn't end up this way on purpose; the historical reasons for this are mostly untied from lobby interests (which is mostly just "the US is the size of a continent in width", "states didn't actually work together that much at first" and "the US copied shit from the British Empire"), but they're kept this way by lobby interests.


This is not true. It is 100% possible to write a contract in Sweden where one of the paragraphs says that you can change it in this and that way. And if we're talking about business to business contracts, it will probably in almost all cases be enforceable, even if you're writing that one party can just announce changes. In fact, I think most business to business contracts have some kind of clause specifying that it is possible to raise prices or change certain things.

That absolutely isn't true. You can enter into agreements about how to form a contract, but a contract is definite, completely specific, with no changing provisions. That's what makes it a contract.

If you have an agreement that says one party can announce changes, you don't have a contract, because those changes were not agreed to.


I am not sure that is correct. At the least it sounds to be a violation of EU laws if this were possible in Sweden; but, even aside from it, I do not think a contract can be changed willy-nilly without offering termination of the service in due time.

That's not what's happening as far as I can tell.

These users have agreed to a monthly contract or, if there is no money paid, a contract with no finite end date but with provisions to change terms, essentially terminating and restarting. So the service provider has decided to amend the contract at the end of the current (one month) contract in the first case, or on some date arbitrary date in the second (unpaid). The users are free not to accept the new contracts.

So nobody is just changing a contract mid stream. Use of a service month-to-month implicitly agrees to this: your ability to stop using and paying them on the 1st of the next month is their ability to change the terms on which the service is offered next month.

And btw, everyone on here hates this, but I don't know how else it could work. The idea that if I sell a customer one month of a paid saas on a monthly plan I'm somehow obligated to never change my terms or price forever as long as he or she keeps paying is beyond absurd. If people want stable terms, they need to find software that will sell them annual or multiyear contracts.


I think the way it would normally work is that you present them with the price offer and ask whether they accept, and if they do you render the service.

This is exactly the same. The company has changed the terms under which they will offer the service starting next contract renewal.

Presumable in Sweeden you can agree to new contract that supercedes the current one? That's all that's (argueable) happening here.

To me the insane part is that contracts don't have to be registered with the courts (or some qualified third party) ahead of time.

Like each party could show up with their own piece of paper (or not be able to provide it). Which is largely the issue here in that one party is showing up with a 2021 document and the other a 2023 document.


>Presumable in Sweeden you can agree to new contract that supercedes the current one? That's all that's (argueable) happening here.

Yes, of course.

We don't have any rules about contracts needing to be written down or registered or anything of that sort. Even verbal agreement are valid, and you are entering into simple contracts even when you buy something in a store.



I actually don't think this looks that bad. I think it might even be good for them. If young people are eschewing helmets, I can see making a helmet law, but even if they take over a lane of traffic, they seem to be going in such large groups, that if they'd been in cars or other vehicles, moving in the most orderly manner imaginable, they'd be blocking the intersection just as effectively.

Consequently I think this is mostly fine. The big problems are the helmet issue and I also think they might need knee protection. 60 km/h is a bit high if they're made for 25 km/h, but most of this stuff is achievable with ordinary bicycles.


> If young people are eschewing helmets, I can see making a helmet law

Australia already has mandatory helmet laws for cycling; the person quoted is pointing out that they’re breaking the law.


I have seen them fall off their bikes in the middle of intersections on more than one occasion, hit people riding on the footpath, more than a few try to bully me off the road, doing dumbarse stunts in the process. One I saw got taken to hospital.

The issue is not so much the bikes or where they are riding, it is the brain dead groupthink mentality of a bunch of antisocial little rich boys who haven't been taught basic self preservation.. or what is feels like to be punched in the face on account of doing 50ks on a crowded footpath.


I'm not sure goals are totally aligned though. The current models are created by enormous expense. We know that many stages are done incorrectly. I am confident that they can be replicated without any unique US knowledge.

At the moment my impression is instead that the issue is computational resources. It's important to stay near the frontier though, and to build up ones capacity to train large models.

Consequently I don't think we need Anthropic. It wouldn't be terrible if they came. Especially if they picked a nice location. Barcelona would be very nice, for example.


The strange part from my point of view is that it's so obviously heretical from inside the system.

They have Amos, which reasons out the problems of wishing for the Day of the Lord, and I don't understand how they can ignore it. Internalizing this idea should rather lead to a profound dislike for destabilizing the world, push the Day of the Lord as far into the future as it can be, to save all the people who can be born. I can understand how one can be a madman for a while, when one is full of grief. That's fine, but when one returns to normality one should realise that not destabilizing things is a moral duty.


The way they ignore everything else that doesn't validate their own sinning?


While it may be legal for an individual to film something, it is certainly not permissible to process video data of this sort at scale.

I don't agree that responsibility to comply with Swedish law is on the wearer. This should motivate prosecutors to immediately order raids to secure any data relating to the processing of the data.

I also think the Swedish camera surveillance law is also applicable and there's a deceptive element since the cameras are disguised as glasses.


I think it is, seeing as she says 'While the Republic of Cyprus was not the target'

>While the Republic of Cyprus was not the target, let me be clear: we stand collectively, firmly and unequivocally with our Member States in the face of any threat.


They're civilians, for one.


Are they? In most countries the head of the state is also army's commander-in-chief.


Yes, but these are traditionally not treated as actual soldiers, but civilians commanders-in-chief-in-name-only.


Only because of professional courtesy between powerful assholes. I have far more sympathy for an infantry grunt from literally any country in the world than any head of state.


It's pretty obvious that these dictators etc. are legally civilians and that this kind of thing is against the laws of war.

Traditionally even people like the US president, who is technically commander in chief, kings etc. with formal military ranks but who are not real battlefield decision makers etc., have been regarded as civilians.


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