How is any kind of antivirus or threat detection software supposed to operate on this standard?
Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.
And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.
I think that is the idea. They shouldn't exist without a prompt mitigation path.
In other words, if you can't deal with the false positives in a timely manner. You SHOULD be liable for the damages.
I can't build a budget car put together in an unsafe manner. Then complain I can't compete due to all the peoples cars crashing and blowing up and suing me.
You document your claims with concrete evidence of fraud. That will be your libel defense. No evidence means you bear the full responsibility of a fuckup.
At internet scale, this would roughly be equivalent to not doing any warning or detection at all.
Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.
There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.
Then that heuristic is your evidence in court. If it's a good heuristic, you win the case. If it's a bad heuristic, you lose the case.
"Your Honor, we banned this person's website because his web page contained the word 'bitcoin' more than 5 times" will not hold up.
"Your Honor, we banned this person's website because it contains a bitcoin miner script. See, here is the script, and it matches the hash value found in these other attacks" hopefully holds up.
It seems that many people lean into the "community" aspect of open source. In real communities there are webs of mutual responsibility. If you use open source to fill the role of community in your life, it makes sense psychologically that you would project moral stakes or obligation onto the maintainers. But this is really not fair to the maintainers who don't view their work that way.
I'm not sure if it's true that the leader is less powerful.
In many countries, it seems that the leader has near total control over candidate selection, and dissent is punished ruthlessly.
In the US, it's easier for a member of Congress to openly dissent against the President's agenda. This was a major thorn in the side for e.g. Joe Biden.
Some Republicans today fear dissenting (though of course, most are enthusiastically on board), but I'm not sure that it would be any different in a place like Canada or the UK.
People should be able to get cash transfers to buy goods on the general market. There shouldn't be food stamps.
The success of SNAP comes despite its inherent inefficiency, friction, and the indignity of its limitations. We structure the program the way we do in order to mollify voters who twitch at the idea of the poor ever enjoying anything.
Inequality isn't just about healthcare costs, biological metrics, etc. It is also deeply corrosive socially and psychologically, and this side of things is systemically underappreciated in policy circles.
To be sure, our food and diets are bad. Americans broadly should eat healthier. But are society's interests really better served by insisting that a poor child not be allowed to have a cake and blow out the candles on his birthday, the way all of his friends do?
In California you can use food stamps for fast food.
I haven't been there in a while so it might be different now.
Let's think about it.
Your homeless or in an unstable living situation. You don't have access to a kitchen, where are you going to make a home cooked meal.
How are you going to prepare raw chicken without a stove. Some homeless encampments do have people trying to cook, which sounds neat until a fire starts.
Let someone down on there luck buy a sandwich with SNAP. Maybe a shake too. Keeps the fastfood franchise in business, keeps people employed there.
The money is going to flow right into the local economy. I'd rather my tax dollars stay here than funding military bases all over planet earth.
I agree with you though. Just give people money. I feel like a UBI is the way to go. A single Flat tax rate for everyone. Everyone gets 1000$ a month( just off the top of my head, could be higher or lower).
The bizzaro welfare cliff...
If you and your partner have kids it can be smart to not get married and have the kids live with whoever makes less.
They get free healthcare with the less affluent parent and you just hope you don't get sick.
It seems unnecessarily reductive to insist that we must choose between endlessly subsidizing Mountain Dew and Twinkies or that poor children should never be allowed to have cake.
Mountain Dew and Twinkies are bad for your health regardless of your income level. We should tackle unhealthy eating by going after the supply, not by going after a class-segmented group of consumers.
Like many Americans, I grew up in a town where unhealthy eating was a major part of the social rhythms of life: a bag of buttery popcorn at the movie theater, an ice cream at the zoo, things like that. Not having the means to participate in these simple pleasures is a kind of social deprivation. I view redistributive programs as a tool to lessen the gap between families. Food regulators can handle the junk food problem.
I don't think we have an obligation to legislate everyone's health, but I do think it's a higher ask when we're talking about explicitly subsidizing bad choices for people most vulnerable to making them. I don't think we should subsidize cigarettes for poor people, either, even if that means they are still accessible to rich people in a way that's perceived as unfair.
And besides: people of high incomes already disproportionately avoid these highly processed foods, so it's not like we're hoarding the wealthy pleasures of Mountain Dew and Twinkies just for them.
I agree that we should not provide targeted subsidies for Twinkies, Mountain Dew, or cigarettes. The whole premise of food stamps is flawed. We should provide cash instead.
If there is an objection that giving cash is equivalent to subsidizing Twinkies, I would push back. Child tax credits are in many ways economically equivalent to cash transfers, but we don't usually see arguments that this is a subsidy for Mountain Dew.
Honestly when it comes to SNAP there's no good answer that achieves all of the reasonable policy goals ('make sure the kids have something to eat', and 'avoid wasting benefit money on crap')
You can replace it with cash aid, and there's a good chance a good chunk of recipients will spend most of it on drugs, lottery tickets, or alcohol while the kids go hungry.
On the other hand, you can have the way it is now, where the same kind of person who would do the above, sells $200 worth of SNAP benefits to whatever corrupt bodega owner in exchange for $100 to spend on drugs, lottery tickets, or alcohol while the kids go hungry.
In both situations the government is spending $200 to buy the poor harmful vices. We're just choosing between fraudster shop owners getting a cut, or the addict being able to buy twice as much malt liquor.
And in case it isn't clear, I don't think the majority of SNAP recipients sell their benefits or don't feed their kids. But the responsible group, well, it makes little difference to them whether they have EBT or cash aid as they're going to buy food anyway.
> We're just choosing between fraudster shop owners getting a cut, or the addict being able to buy twice as much malt liquor.
I don't agree with these zero friction in a vacuum takes. Difficulty in access does shape choices, a lot in fact.
If you make it easier for people to use handouts to gamble or do drugs or whatever then more people will do it and ones doing it will do more of it. This isn't even a take its the null hypothesis.
The null hypothesis could just as easily be if they get a 1:1 dollar exchange rate versus a 1:2 rate on their food stamps, they can afford to buy drugs AND food instead of just drugs. Guess which one they buy if they can only buy one? Guess what they are incentivized to do if they have less cash than they need on hand to do both? I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with teal.
> I am a firm believer that the very notion of IP ownership needs to die a horrible death, something that AI may very well make happen in short order, yay.
The leading AI labs are not killing IP. They are taking IP and reshaping/combining it to produce their own highly lucrative proprietary IP package which they sell to you.
The mirror image of IP defenders are AI boosters who argue against IP when it comes to slurping up media but squirm when you say "ok, then publish all of the inputs that go into making your frontier models, and publish the model weights too."
ChatGPT dominates the consumer market (though Nano Banana is singlehandedly breathing some life into consumer Gemini).
A small anecdote: when ChatGPT went down a few months ago, a lot of young people (especially students) just waited for it to come back up. They didn't even think about using an alternative.
When ChatGPT starts injecting ads or forcing payment or doing anything else that annoys its userbase then the young people won't have a problem looking for alternatives
That is different because all of the players I mentioned have credible, near-leading products in the AI model market, whereas nobody other than Google has search results worth a damn. I wouldn't recommend anyone squander their time by checking Kagi or DDG or Bing more than once.
I don't use google. Believe it or not, I get better results via Bing (usually via DDG, which is a frontend for Bing). But I asked the rhetorical question expecting the answer you gave. These people use ChatGPT only for the same reason you exclusively use Google.
Right, that's consistent with what I said if you re-read it. Search isn't changing. If you are happy with your search you would be wasting your time to shop around.
ffmpeg doesn't have a cargo-cult of self-proclaimed "privacy experts" that tell activists and whistleblowers to use their thing instead of other tools cryptographers actually recommend.
Yeah, instead they have a cargo-cult of self-proclaimed OSS contribution experts who harass anyone that critiques or challenges ffmpeg's twitter account.
I think people are confusing the bubble popping with AI being over. When the dot-com bubble popped, it's not like internet infrastructure immediately became useless and worthless.
that's actually not all that true... a lot of fiber that had been laid went dark, or was never lit, and was hoarded by telecoms in an intentional supply constrained market in order to drive up the usage cost of what was lit.
If it was hoarded by anyone, then by definition not useless OR worthless. Also, you are currently on the internet if you're reading this, so the point kinda stands.
Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.
And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.
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