We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
But we want to support privatization at all cost, even when privatization these days has significant influence on our daily lives, akin to the concerns we had when we placed restrictions on government. Seems like we need to start regulating private actions a bit more, especially when private entities accumulate enough wealth they can act like multi state governments in levels of influence. That’s my opinion, at least.
> We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.
Thats basically the foundational idealogy of the united states. Thats not the issue.
The real issue is your next sentence. The government can just loophole around their intentional limitations by paying private companies to work on their behalf.
I'm aware it's intentional on the government's end. My point is it is not intentional by the original intentions, and should be a priority for people to advocate to fix.
The only private companies with this power are monopolies. Effective competition would destroy this behavior. So the real problem is the government _intentionally_ and _illegally_ allows monopolies to form so they can get access to this workaround.
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allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
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Somehow this reminds me about Blackwater / Xe Technologies? :-/
(Im betting 100 USD that soon we will find out that ICE also deployed "private financed forces" to "support state actions"?)
>We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.
It really isn't, given that the government literally has a monopoly on violence, and therefore it makes sense to have more guardrails for it. That's not to say private entities should have free reign to do whatever it wants, but the argument of "private entities can do [thing] that governments can't, so we should ban private entities too!" is at best incomplete.
>Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
Again, this is at best an incomplete argument. The government can't extract a confession out of you (5th amendment). It can however, interview your drinking buddies that you blabbed your latest criminal escapades to. Is that the government "bypassing" the 5th amendment? Arguably. Is that something bad and we should ban? Hardly.
Your cell phone provider does not constitute "drinking buddy". The fact that, in essence, everyone is being surveilled location wise all the time by these providers is reason enough to restrict the activity.
> The poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. DRINKING BUDDY IS WATCHING YOU.
> 'Does Drinking Buddy exist?'
'Of course he exists. The Party exists. Drinking Buddy is the embodiment of the Party.'
'Does he exist like you or me?'
'You do not exist', said O'Brien.
> Oceanic society rests ultimately on the belief that Drinking Buddy is omnipotent and that the Party is infallible. But since in reality Drinking Buddy is not omnipotent and the party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts.
>Your cell phone provider does not constitute "drinking buddy".
You're right, it should be even more scandalous for the government to get information out of my drinking buddy, because the information I told him was in confidence, and he promised he wouldn't tell anyone. My cell phone provider, on the other hand, clearly says in their ToS who they'll share data with and in what circumstances.
A non-exhaustive list that has, time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time again, to downplay the grossly cavalier approach they take to the "privacy" of your location data.
They value it alright. At several dollars per person.
And what many are saying is that the phone provider should not be allowed to be so free with your data in the ToS. In the same way that your landlord can’t add a slavery clause to your lease.
This is why I advocate for making selling location/identifying data illegal. If nobody is allowed to sell it then the government cannot legally buy it.
Government is supposed to follow the law as much as everybody else. Whatever they do has to hold up as legal in court when contested. If they acquire information illegally they will be losing trials.
I agree completely with your first paragraph, but I'm not sure what privatization has to do with it. Also, I agree that more regulation of private parties is needed. Or even better, break up the private companies that are like multi-state governments in terms of power.
Why not vote for some law limiting the government’s buying of this data? After all, I expect a say in how the government is run, so that seems like the appropriate path. I don’t see why I should expect a say in how AT&T is run. AT&T can’t raise an army, or enter my house, or shoot me.
How exactly do I vote for such a law? We do not have a direct democracy, and I'm not aware of any viable political candidates that have this sort of thing as a part of their platform.
I think you’re missing the main limiting resource: money.
Some of these projects could occupy entire regions of cloud compute in some cases for awhile, some even more depending on the problem. But running that for even a short time or decades needed would cost more money than anyone has to do.
Academic HPCs existed long before cloud compute options and for certain problem spaces could also be used even in non-distributed memory cases to handle this stuff. But you still needed allocation time and sometimes even funding to use them, competing against other cases like drug design, cancer research, nuclear testing… whatever. So searching for ET could be crowdsourced and the cost distributed which is something that made it alluring and tractable.
I used to run a small academic cluster that was underutilized but essentially fully paid for. I’d often put some of these projects running as background throttled processes outside scheduler space so the 90% of the time no one was using them, the hardware would at least be doing some useful scientific research since it’s after-all funded largely from federal scientific research funding. There was of course some bias introduced by which projects I chose to support whereas someone else may have made a more equitable choice.
Complain to our representatives who will do absolutely nothing because the system is ripe for abuse and we’ve put people who actively want to abuse and exploit it into office.
I keep telling everyone and have been for a year, it’s not just our problem, due to global US positioning it’s now a world problem. Just ask Venezuela. Regardless of what you think about the end result the ends did not justify the means.
I for one will be collecting my (completely legal) hunting rifles and weapons I’ve had in storage since I was a kid, have them professionally serviced and grab some ammunition, on the terrible case I need to defend myself which I thought I’d never ever have to consider and I’d just sell them some day. But alas we have a lot of really really stupid as well as downright toxic voters in this country.
In my opinion it’s to some degree an artifact of immature and/or rapidly changing technology. Basically not many know what the best approach is, all the use cases aren’t well understood, and things are changing so rapidly they’re basically just creating interfaces around everything so you can change flow in and out of LLMs any way you may desire.
Some paths are emerging popular, but in a lot of cases we’re still not sure even these are the long term paths that will remain. It doesn’t help that there’s not a good taxonomy (that I’m aware of) to define and organize the different approaches out there. “Agent” for example is a highly overloaded term that means a lot of things and even in this space, agents mean different things to different groups.
I liken the discovery/invention of LLMs to the discovery/invention of the electric motor - it's easy to take things like cars, drills, fans, pumps etc. for granted now, and all of the ergonomics and standards around them seem obvious in this era, but it took quite a while to go from "we can put power in this thing and it spins" to the state we're in today.
For LLMs, we're just about at the stage where we've realized we can jam a sharp thing in the spinny part and use it to cut things. The race is on not only to improve the motors (models) themselves, but to invent ways of holding and manipulating and taking advantage of this fundamental thing that feel so natural that they seem obvious in hindsight.
Eh, I like an interesting spin on a classic. I’ve seen/heard the Frankenstein plot and small variations on it many times, taking a different direction is a good way to keep in a general universe but develop something new. If you’re not going to come up with new interesting content, at least don’t rehash the exact story I’ve heard many times. But that’s just my preference—I really enjoyed it and have become a fan of Guillermo del Toro works recently (due to exposure on Netflix). I’m not huge critic really so I won’t speak to artistic merit but I can at least say I really enjoyed it.
I would argue not good enough but better. A home cinema depending on viewing distance can have superb visual qualify. Comfort is going to be impossible to beat to being at home. A lot of theater projectors top out at 4k just like home TVs and they’re not as bright. Also information density is lower (it’s 4k spread over a huge wall).
The only shortcoming now really is if you want to view with several people and socialize after, it may be difficult for someone to accommodate a large party with good viewing in their home without a theater setup. And of course audio, audio is where theaters can still stand out. It’s a pain in the ass for most homes to setup a good sound system, you really often do want a dedicated theater area which most aren’t going to have. A soundbar helps. You can Jerry rig some surround speakers into any space but it’s often a pain. So that’s really the last barrier: cheap low latency sound that can beat a theater.
For me comfort trumps the slightly degraded sound. Plus some baby crying or random person chatting during the movie can break that as well.
Businesses are great at optimizing in profit and left to their own accord, that’s ultimately what they’ll do. In many cases that means risking safety, externalizing costs to others, creating anticompetitive unions like cartels, and so on.
Regulation exists to guide that optimization process so it’s forced to factor in other things like safety, environment, competitiveness for consumers and so on. The point being that if you can optimize in a way for profit AND for society at large then we have a reasonable balance to justify your existence. If you can’t, well then we probably shouldn’t be doing what you’re tying to do because the costs you would otherwise opaquely externalize on society are too high for your profit motive.
That isn’t to say things can’t go awry. Over regulation can occur where constraints are added that become crippling and the constraints are too risk averse or just poorly constructed that they do more to break the process than actually protect society. But whenever someone cries at over regulation, they need to point out the specific regulation(s) and why they’re nonsensical.
I’ve worked in highly regulated environments and you’re often very aware of what regulations you need to conform to. Part of that process is often asking why it exists because it can be frustrating having a roadblock presented before you with no rationale. Most the time I can think of good reasons something exists and it’s easy to consider and honor that. Meanwhile there are some regulations I scratch my head and can’t find what they justify, so there should be a channel back to lawmakers or regulators where people can inquire and work can be done to see if those regulation are actually effective or not at achieving their goal, or if they’re just constraints that makes things more expensive.
It's a double edged sword. It creates a floor but also lowers the ceiling so a company can't lock out competitors through brute force. it's best to introduce such regulation before we have to worry about monopolies, though.
Yes, and a distinct feature are pressure groups funded by corporations drumming up fake issues in order to get regulations passed that remove the competitors to those corporations.
The sidelining of tort law also didn't help one bit.
So we're going to ignore the pressure groups who are deregulating in real time to tear down regulations that also remove competitors to those corporations? Or is it okay to be anti-competitive when it helps you get paid?
Well in contrast to the enterprises which can survive free competition, those which rely on regulations to survive receive rents for which no corresponding benefit to consumers can be recovered. This is what rentseeking is.
There is a very big difference between succeeding against competition because you're able to deliver a cheaper or better product, as in free competition, and succeeding because a government decree happens to exclude your product from certain liabilities that your competitors aren't excluded from.
This is the Schoolhouse Rock version that ignores the real phenomenon of regulatory capture, formalized by Stigler way back in 1971.
“We propose the general hypothesis: every industry or occupation that has enough political power to utilize the state will seek to control entry. In addition, the regulatory policy will often be so fashioned as to retard the rate of growth of new firms.”
You’re never gonna get these people to understand basic economics if they don’t already. It’s mindblowing people do not understand that more regulation = more red tape = less competition as the only companies that can afford to do business in that environment are the ones already in power with resources. Taxation and regulation genuinely only further embed those in power. Ironically, most leftists that advocate for more taxation and regulation in an effort to help the poor and working classes seem to have no grasp of economic realities at all.
Having just visited South Korea last year, one thing that sort of caught me off guard was the lack of Google Maps or other major direction system. I wasn’t aware but turns out anything considered “detailed mapping” infrastructure has to be ran stored and on South Korean soil, probably lots of other requirements. So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad.
There may be a point in time it made sense but high resolution detailed satellite imagery is plenty accessible and someone could put a road and basically planning structure atop it, especially a foreign nation wishing to invade or whatever they’re protecting against.
Some argument may be made that it would be a heavy lift for North Korea but I don’t buy it, incredibly inconvenient for tourists for no obvious reason.
Several other countries have similar requirements with regards to storing and serving maps locally.
If you take a moment to think about it, what's weird is that so many countries have simply resorted to relying on Google Maps for everyday mapping and navigation needs. This has become such a necessity nowadays that relying on a foreign private corporation for it sounds like a liability.
OSM is competitive with google maps in most places. Even if a person uses google maps, its inaccurate to say they "rely" on it when they could fail over to osm if google maps went down.
Local mapping efforts and allowing Google Maps to operate aren't mutually exclusive though. I don't see how it's weird that people can choose which map app they use.
Agreed, I would expect a government to provide their own mapping system, independent of any private entity. It’s so critical for a governments operation and general security needs.
What’s odd (to me) is trying to regulate other groups from generating maps of your nation when you have no jurisdiction over them. That’s akin to the US telling all South Korean governments they can’t create maps of the US unless they operate under heavy supervision or something of that nature.
It’s impractical, largely unenforceable, and any nation probably has independent mapping of foreign nations, especially their adversaries, should they need them for conflicts, regardless of what some nation wants to oppose over them in terms of restrictions. I guarantee the US government has highly detailed maps of Korea.
So who exactly are these regulations protecting? In this case they’re just protecting private mapping groups that reside in their country against competition.
Why didn't you use Kakao Maps or Naver Maps? They're not shotty and work just fine, even if you don't read Korean, you can quickly guess the UI based on the icons.
I tried both and the lack of an English UI made a lot of it non-unintuitive, especially when it came to search and finding local businesses walking around. There were some other annoyances, like when I travel for leisure I enjoy researching an area ahead of time bookmarking places to overlay on a map, and being able to organically explore the area as I move around. I found that very difficult on Naver (I don’t recall the details but I know being able to search for types of businesses in English was part of the issue).
I believe performance wise it was also pretty sluggish from what I remember. I’m by no means saying it was unusable, it got me through somewhat functionally but with a lot of extra effort on my behalf. I also had an international data plan and wasn’t able to see if I could precache the map set vs streaming it as needed over wireless.
I often like to look at restaurants, menus, prices, reviews as well to scope out a place quickly before going there. That process was also tedious (to be fair it could be that I’m not familiar with the UI).
The question is why did I have to use Naver or Kakao in the first place. I’d rather just use the system I already enjoy and am quite proficient with using it, not be forced to play with some new app that I need useful information from for some unclear reason.
Agree, Naver maps for navigating public transit in Seoul is excellent. Easier to figure out than public transit in any American city I've been to and I don't read or speak Korean. iirc it even tells the fastest routes/best carriage to be on to optimize transferring between lines.
I was there few months ago and I found them to be quite good too, both in coverage (shops, bus/metro networks) and accuracy.
Obviously, not the apps I'm used to so & the language but otherwise, it was okay.
I heard similar complaints from friends that came to visit. But they were using the English version of the apps, which, when I tested, were indeed harder to use, but never a miss for me when I helped them. OTOH, I always find my destinations within the first three options when I search in Korean. So maybe it's subpar internationlization.
> They lack a lot of polish. [...] some interactions are janky
I see. I guess I wouldn't know. It's not janky for me, and I think that I am so used to it that when I need to use Google Maps, or any other, I feel a bit frustrated by the unfamiliar interface that I start wishing I could be using Kakao or Naver Maps instead.
I used both English and Hangul to search. Searching for general things like food was good, but if I was trying to find a specific address it was very difficult. Sometimes it would just return completely wrong garbage. One time I was trying to meet up with someone and only realized halfway that the destination was wrong because Naver decided to take me somewhere else despite me copying the exact address in Hangul.
Maybe more about my unfamiliarity with the Korean address format than anything else tbh.
Some things about Naver I kind of miss from Apple/Google maps, but international software in general feels much more user friendly and better UX than Korean software.
The original sin was writing a signed confession of their crimes and packaging it up with a video of them commiting said crimes.
You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.
But we want to support privatization at all cost, even when privatization these days has significant influence on our daily lives, akin to the concerns we had when we placed restrictions on government. Seems like we need to start regulating private actions a bit more, especially when private entities accumulate enough wealth they can act like multi state governments in levels of influence. That’s my opinion, at least.
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