Hello,i don't mean to be dismissive but i think lawmaking definitely needs less AI and less pretendly-neutral summaries.
It's already a problem when researching a law proposal that dozens of news outlets will just copy-paste a bland summary of arguments from both sides, neither being explored fully.
I would recommend giving direct links to actually partisan information so people can situate the bill's intent and consequences in a broader context.
Where it helps:
- sometimes a bill's proponent is just an industry puppet whose talking points will be repeated in the media, but aren't solid enough to warrant a proper article… unlike opponents criticizing specific (for example deregulation) points
- sometimes, there are strong feelings and arguments on both sides of a bill and it makes sense to view them in their entirety; seeing one's side unhinged logic sometimes reveals more about the bill than the bill's text itself
- "same-side" opposition: sometimes a bill is perceived as "left-wing" or "right-wing" but receives opposition from the same side; for example, the democrat party is very divided on helping the rich vs taxing the rich, while the republican party is (less than 20 years ago) divided between hardcore authoritarian trumpists and libertarians defending civil liberties
All in all, i believe AI is a plight for society. We are only starting to understand the ecological and psychological costs. There are areas where machine learning can be useful (translation), but i strongly believe politics is not one of them. Please don't try to apply it to anything serious. Don't take it from me, take it from James Mickens in a talk where he explains both how ML works and how it related to the field of computer security:
That's not a fair assessment. Context: I hate Trump as much as Khomeini. A "both sides" treatment would be:
US & Israel illegally assassinate Iranian leader in bombing campaign, calling agression "necessity".
Now, if you'd like to lean to one side or the other, you can either:
- remove information about legality and the fact that they are the authors of the agression, add something about Iran being a threat to its neighbors
- or insist that any excuses provided by USA or Israel about nuclear weapons is 100% bogus as they have been claiming this for over 20 years
"We have no choice to do this horrible thing, but it may have slightly bad consequences for us" does not take the second side into consideration at all. It's very biased, and it's a very strong opinion in itself.
Of course i'm biased (though probably not like you mean), but that "both sides" depiction was fair and rather neutral. I'm personally very happy Khomenei is dead, and so are my iranian friends. But we are all very concerned that he is dead for the wrong reason, under a wrong pretext, and with very grim perspectives (see also what the US did in all the countries it bombed in the past 20 years).
I think Khomenei and Trump are two sides of the same coin: bloody authoritarianism and religious zealotry. They're both pretty bad, but one side in this conflict was clearly the aggressor, and denying that is in itself picking sides. One can both sympathize with a victim of unjust aggression, and at the same time thinking they're a profound piece of shit.
One could even point out that just a few years ago, Trump was very insistent about "no more wars", and that he regularly mockingly predicted that Obama would attack Iran to avoid talking about domestic policy. Turns out the hypocrisy level is high and he really is beyond a doubt the bad guy in this story, even if that does not make the iranian ayatollahs good guys by any measure.
Well it is very hard to believe they're guilty, at least to me. Too bad the news report does not provide any actual information about the case and the evidence (actual journalism beyond clickbaity headlines).
In environmental circles, Greenpeace is very well-known to be traitors working with big corporations to launder their image. They're opposed to sabotage and revolutionary tactics. Their activities are mostly fundraising and legal proceedings, and on the rare instance they perform so-called civil disobedience (such as deploying banners on nuclear plants), it is in very orderly fashion that doesn't provide much economic harm.
As a left-wing environmentalist, i wish such a strong voice as Greenpeace was capable to incite people to rise against the greedy corporations destroying our planet. I just don't see that happening, neither here in France nor in the USA.
Contrasting specific technological and social artifacts with a form of economic organization and legal structures without noting how different they are is a cheap and weak form of argument.
If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point. If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point. If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
> If you want to insist that only greedy corporations could have made portable hand-held network connected computing devices possible, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Doesn't matter who makes it or if they are "greedy." Physics doesn't care about human emotions.
> If you want to insist that there could be no automobile or refueling system without a system in which corporate profits primarily are directed towards capital rather than labor, then make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about accounting.
> If you find it impossible that powered flight would exist at a price where most people could afford it without specific laws controlling corporate liability and legal fiduciary responsibility, than make that point.
It burns oil and emits CO2. It doesn't matter what the price to the end user is or who liability. Physics does not care about lawyers.
> But "ah, so you use human-created technology while criticizing the organizations that make it" isn't really the winning argument that you appear to think it is.
If your criticism is about global warming, then yes it is a wining argument because the organizations are irrelevant. It burns oil and emits CO2. Physics doesn't care about human organizations.
The GP made an observation about "greedy corporations".
You sarcastically wrote
> Posted from your iphone while driving to the gas station to fill up? Where did you fly to for your last vacation?
as if using any of those technologies means that you have no standing to criticize "greedy corporations".
I've pointed out the (potential) disconnect between the technologies and the corporations, and you've now wandered off into "fossil fuels do stuff, physics matters" which of course is true but as before, has nothing to do with someone criticizing what they see as/claim are "greedy corporations".
Nice try, but I'm not stupid enough to fall for your deflection. GP did not complain about "greedy corporations." He complained about "greedy corporations destroying our planet." They aren't destroying our planet. You, GP, and I are destroying our planet. But unlike you and GP, I am an adult and I don't try to blame other people for my actions.
Well, corporations are destroying our planet, whatever our individual consumption patterns are. I could be living in the woods and that would not change. I'm not denying we have a share of personal responsibility in profiting from this ecocidal system: i'm saying individuals have no choice and no power over this, and social change is produced on a bigger level.
And so could the rest of us. If we did, there would be no CO2 emissions and, therefore, no global warming. But we don't choose to do this because we would rather live with modern convenience.
- it's technically illegal for me to do that here in France, even if i'm the legal owner of the woods
- it could be a choice to live low-tech alternative lifestyles, if there was not active attacks by the State and corporations to destroy any kind of alternative means of survival, such as the very violent processes over the past few centuries to destroy subsistance farming and non-monetary exchanges (laws & regulations, expropriations, imprisonment and murder of political opposition such as during the Paris Commune)
- it doesn't matter what we personally and individually do: this is a problem at scale that can only be addressed at scale, and pretending otherwise is a bad faith argument on either side ("recycle your plastic bottles to save the planet")
- there's a wide range of possibilities for durable/repairable goods and sustainable lifestyles in between primitivism and our current ecocidal nightmare: to frame political choices as a binary is very limited or dishonest from an intellectual perspective
The main issue here is the implication of human free will.
We're driven by our herd instinct and subconscious manipulation. The way Edward Bernays and others like him have guided us to consumption.
To break free from this woud require either the summoning of collective free will or the brainwashing to keep the eternally growing consumption to cease.
The decision to keep manipulating the masses is something the decision makers behind corporations and governments either enable or actively participate in, but for individual it is extremely unlikely to break this machine.
Once again, you're making an implicit claim about all the nice things in contemporary civilization (or least the list you gave), in this case that their mere existence is "destroying our planet". But you haven't made that case, and it is far from obvious that it is true. It could be true ... but I'm also to the imagined version of a political & economic system that had still produced portable hand-held network connected computing devices and long distance personal transportation vehicles without "destroying our planet".
What I cannot imagine, however, is an alternative that still featured "greedy corporations" without the "destroying our planet" part.
> This is precisely why there are multiple protocols out there and bridges between them.
Yes, that's great! What's not great is Bluesky attempting a hostile takeover on federated and decentralized social networks. It's been advertised from day 1 as an alternative to centralized silos and it's a lie. [0]
To be fair, projects like Blacksky try to decentralize it (except the identity server, as it's impossible??), and there's now a vibrant developer community around ATProto. That doesn't make the centralization and false marketing claims any less problematic.
Develop the protocol you want. Don't lure my friends into it by pretending it's something that it's not.
In my (arguably not very representative) circles, unlike the big Facebook->Instagram migration, which was motivated by "i don't like that it's run by a Silicon Valley tech-bro neofascist, but that's where everyone's at", the Twitter->Bluesky migration was motivated by "finally an alternative that's not centralized so it can't be bought and controlled by american neonazis".
> Can you clarify this?
Well Bluesky's number 1 selling point was always decentralization. Just looking at a few past articles from the wikipedia page's sources:
"Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announces a new research team, called Bluesky, to create a set of open and decentralized technical standards for social media platforms" (CNBC)
"Bluesky now operates as a “decentralized” social media platform, which means users can create their own servers on which they can store data and set their own rules" (Forbes)
To be fair, they did fit some of the bill which is now why we're complained that Bluesky is not 100% federated/decentralized. And they did improve compared to AP in terms of nomadic identity and letting users know everything on the platform is public (unlike Mastodon where people had a false sense of security).
I think this is an unfair take. ODF is an actual file format, while OOXML is a serialization format for Microsoft Office specifics, as debated here 6 months ago. [0]
Beyond marketing fluff, I don't think anybody at Microsoft genuinely believes they have an "open office format" or an actual "standardization". Even Apple back in the day had to reverse-engineer the Microsoft formats. [1]
Whether you'd like to denounce OnlyOffice taking part in this masquerade or not is a political issue. But giving Microsoft any form of benefit of the doubt on this matter is historically wrong and, I believe, ethically evil.
What is an “actual file format”? Every file format is a serialisation of some kind of data-model. I'm sure the OpenDocument data-model might be simpler and cleaner in some ways than the Office Open XML one. But for something with the complexity of an office document, you can't escape the fact that every file format is full of assumptions about the application interacting with it. I find the examples in the article from [0] unconvincing, it reminds me of arguments about programming language syntax.
(I do not doubt that the OOXML standard is a mess though.)
I'm sorry you were not convinced. Of course a "file format" could be anything. I personally am convinced that a standard file format (filed for ISO) should have proper semantics that precisely escape assumptions about the application's internal state and framework.
That's why administrative interop formats are standardized XML files with a schema and not a random Oracle SQL export from any given entity with their custom database layout.
Correct. I simply placed it for historical context on Microsoft being hostile to competition, interoperability and free software for much longer than OOXML has existed.
Indeed, the basic point is fine - just 2 competitors standing up for their own choice - but the use of the words "and most open format" ruins the GP's point and perhaps is the reason for the downvotes. There's no way one can argue that Microsoft believes their format is the most open.
Disclaimer: i'm rather hostile to ATProto for reinventing the wheel without bringing much value over AP/XMPP/Matrix.
I don't think that's a fair characterization. Most AP implementations famously don't have privacy features: it was by design (and therefore no surprise to us tech folks), but i remember it was quite the scandal when users found out Mastodon instance admins could read users' private messages. A later "scandal" involved participation in the EUNOMIA research project about "provenance tracking" in federated networks [1], which to be fair to conspiracy theorists does sound like an academic front for NSA-style firehose R&D.
That being said, Bluesky is much harder to selfhost and is therefore not decentralized in practice. [2] See also Blacksky development notes. However, Bluesky does bring a very interesting piece to the puzzle which AP carefully ignored despite years of research in AP-adjacent protocols (such as Hubzilla): account portability.
All in all, i'm still siding on the ActivityPub ecosystem because i think it's much more ethical and friendly in all regards, and i'm really sad so many so-called journalists, researchers and leftists jumped ship to Bluesky just because the attraction of "Twitter reborn" (with the same startup nation vibes) was too strong. At least in my circles, i did not meet a single person who mentioned the choice of Bluesky was about UX or features.
But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community. Much more so than AP. And to be fair to ATProto, it is worse than AP from a centralization standpoint, but at least it's not as bad and complex as the matrix protocol which brought 0 value over AP/XMPP but made implementations 100x more complex and resource-intensive.
> But now, i'm slowly warming up to the ATmosphere having a vibrant development community.
I build in the ATmosphere because I want to effect change. AP was hostile, Nostr is for crypto bros. The @dev community is one of the strongest pieces and attractors
One way I like to think about how the protocol is different is that they made a giant event system for the public content and then let anyone plug in anywhere they want
Even at the time Bill Clinton was already very much right-wing. When he was in power, he oversaw the destruction of public services and the introduction of neoliberalism. Is that not right-wing?
It's not just me saying this. Ask anyone who was politically active (as a leftist) in the 90s. I'm not sure what was the equivalent of the Democratic Socialists of America (center-left) at that time, but i'm sure there was an equivalent and Bill Clinton was much more right-wing. That's without mentioning actual left-wing parties (like communists, anarchists, black panthers etc).
Not a single of those three things is either left-wing or right-wing. It depends on the actual implementation.
For example, universal health-care is only left-wing if it's a public service. Taking money out of the State's pockets to finance private healthcare and pharmaceutical for-profit corporations is very much a definition of right-wing policy.
Everything depends on actual implementation. In healthcare, for example, we already had a system where state money was sent to private healthcare and pharmaceutical companies corporations. The problem was that the poorest people still had trouble getting covered. This proposal would have broadened the scope of who can afford that by providing poorer folks with direct government subsidies for coverage. Nobody is calling subsidize childcare in Scandinavian countries a "right-wing policy" because private providers exist.
Lowering military spending by aggressively shrinking active duty troop levels and eliminating weapons programs is certainly left-wing. Raising income taxes on the highest earners and raising the corporate tax rate have always been associated with left-wing policies in the US.
> de Gaulle would be considered insanely far right today
As much as it pains me to say this, because i myself consider de Gaulle to be a fascist in many regards, that's far from a majority opinion (disclaimer: i'm an anarchist).
I think de Gaulle was a classic right-wing authoritarian ruler. He had to take some social measures (which some may view as left-wing) because the workers at the end of WWII were very organized and had dozens of thousands of rifles, so such was the price of social peace.
He was right-wing because he was rather conservative, for private property/entrepreneurship and strongly anti-communist. Still, he had strong national planning for the economy, much State support for private industry (Elf, Areva, etc) and strong policing on the streets (see also, Service d'Action Civique for de Gaulle's fascist militias with long ties with historical nazism and secret services).
That being said, de Gaulle to my knowledge was not really known for racist fear-mongering or hate speech. The genocides he took part in (eg. against Algerian people) were very quiet and the official story line was that there was no story. That's in comparison with far-right people who already at the time, and still today, build an image of the ENEMY towards whom all hate and violence is necessary. See also Umberto Eco's Ur-fascism for characteristics of fascist regimes.
In that sense, and it really pains me to write this, but de Gaulle was much less far-right than today's Parti Socialiste, pretending to be left wing despite ruling with right-wing anti-social measures and inciting hatred towards french muslims and binationals.
While de Gaulle being far-right is not a majority opinion (except in some marginal circles), he would undoubtedly be considered far-right if he was governing today, which is what GP seems to have meant.
I think that, for most Western people today, far-right == bad to non-white people, independent of intention (as you demonstrated with your remark about the PS), so de Gaulle's approach to Algeria, whether he's loud about it or not, would qualify him as far-right already.
All this to say, the debate is based on differing definitions of far-right (for example you conflate fascism and far-right and use Eco, while GP and I seem to think it's about extremely authoritarian + capitalist), and has started from an ignorant comment by an idiot who considers Bush (someone who is responsible for the death of around a million Iraqis, the creation of actual torture camps, large-scale surveillance, etc.) not far-right because, I assume, he didn't say anything mean about African-Americans.
Believing in free speech is neither left nor right, it's on the freedom/authority axis which is perpendicular. Most people on the left never advocated to legalize libel, defamation, racist campaigns, although the minority that did still do today.
The "free-speechism" of the past you mention was about speaking truth to power, and this movement still exists on the left today, see for example support for Julian Assange, arrested journalists in France or Turkey, or outright murdered in Palestine.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter and promised free speech, he very soon actually banned accounts he disagreed with, especially leftists. Why free speech may be more and more perceived as right wing is because despite having outright criminal speech with criminal consequences (such as inciting violence against harmless individuals such as Mark Bray), billionaires have weaponized propaganda on a scale never seen before with their ownership of all the major media outlets and social media platforms, arguing it's a matter of free speech.
> police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.
Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.
Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.
If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.
> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop
That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.
Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.
Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.
The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.
Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.
The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in France police killing of a threatening person is the outlier. [1]
We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.
[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.
>though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation
It's easy to track because anytime it happens it's instant major news on the internet. Trust me, in the economy of social media clout, few things rank as valuable as police murder.
Pretti was frontpage of reddit within 30(!) minutes of being shot. Even without bystanders there is a whole group of creators whose whole channel is combing bodycam footage for wrong doing. These videos are worth (tens) of thousands in ad views if nothing else.
Some, maybe all, ICE agents were body cams, but I haven't seen any footage. I'm not sure what the process would looks like, this whole ICE violence thing is only a few months old, whereas most regular police have had bodycams for 5+ years now and getting the footage is well established.
Police also definitely don't turn it off when it suites them, although some have, but again, it's a Streisand effect when they do. I really cannot stress enough that police doing bad things has extremely high monetary value for the people who find it, and you also get paid for the crazy bodycam videos you find along the way. If you're a cop and you turn off your cam before breaking the law, you are almost certainly going to be the face of a 1M+ view youtube video. People, like yourself and me, gobble that up.
It doesn't matter much anyway, because there is 100x more footage of cops doing bad things with their cam on.
It's already a problem when researching a law proposal that dozens of news outlets will just copy-paste a bland summary of arguments from both sides, neither being explored fully.
I would recommend giving direct links to actually partisan information so people can situate the bill's intent and consequences in a broader context.
Where it helps:
- sometimes a bill's proponent is just an industry puppet whose talking points will be repeated in the media, but aren't solid enough to warrant a proper article… unlike opponents criticizing specific (for example deregulation) points
- sometimes, there are strong feelings and arguments on both sides of a bill and it makes sense to view them in their entirety; seeing one's side unhinged logic sometimes reveals more about the bill than the bill's text itself
- "same-side" opposition: sometimes a bill is perceived as "left-wing" or "right-wing" but receives opposition from the same side; for example, the democrat party is very divided on helping the rich vs taxing the rich, while the republican party is (less than 20 years ago) divided between hardcore authoritarian trumpists and libertarians defending civil liberties
All in all, i believe AI is a plight for society. We are only starting to understand the ecological and psychological costs. There are areas where machine learning can be useful (translation), but i strongly believe politics is not one of them. Please don't try to apply it to anything serious. Don't take it from me, take it from James Mickens in a talk where he explains both how ML works and how it related to the field of computer security:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentat...
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