It seems like the purpose is to have the law and all the paperwork set up as a precaution for the future. Sure, right now it’s all voluntary and just rubber stamping, but if in the future they need to do something like Ukraine and lock down travel for military aged men, it’s much easier to flip a switch and start denying travel permits rather than having to set up and fund an entirely new system for requiring travel permits.
If it were to get closer to war (i.e., Spannungsfall, let alone the Verteidigungsfall) a set of laws would unlock that allow control of various areas of life and the economy anyway.
Yes, iPads (at least at my university) are incredibly common. I would guess they’re at least on-par with paper. So many people swear by Goodnotes because you get all the benefits of handwriting your notes without giving up the niceties of search-ability, auto correct, etc.
I don’t know anyone who uses any other tablet besides an iPad, they’ve basically conquered the market.
This is a great point. For example, near where I live there’s a massive Google cloud warehouse out in the middle of a field next to the highway. Inside of that warehouse there’s a separate section for servers belonging to the US government that can benefit from all the electricity contracts Google has negotiated, the physical security and fences that Google has set up, and the fiber optic cables they’ve laid.
It’s the best of both worlds, they get the decades of research Google has put into systems engineering and fault tolerance while retaining the security of having their own servers.
It’s incredible how much time and political maneuvering it took Sam Altman to get to this point. He took on the entire board and research scientists for every major department and somehow came out the winner. This reads more like an announcement of victory than anything else. It means Sam won. He’s going to do away with the non-profit charade and accept the billions in investment to abandon the vision of AGI for everyone and become a commercial AI company.
This is the mini existential crisis I have randomly. The attack area for a modern IT computer is mind bogglingly massive. Computers are pulling and executing code from a vast array of “trusted” sources without a sandbox. If any one of those “trusted” sources are compromised (package managers, cdns, OS updates, security software updates, just app updates in general, even specific utilities like xz) then you’re absolutely screwed.
It’s hard not to be a little nihilistic about security.
The more important thing would seem to be what actually led to the immigration in the first place. In Cuba’s case it seems like widespread corruption and wholesale mismanagement by the government. This particular case doesn’t seem like an inevitable result of globalization but the natural reaction to a terrible government.
The tools used, as you’re undoubtedly aware, go far beyond small arms. Family members in the Army have talked about training to clear houses where they want to avoid going through a heavily defended doorway so they put an explosive against a wall, duck around the corner, light it off, pick themselves up, and run through the newly created entryway.
I have this exact same experience about every other time I walk into a grocery store as well. It's hard not to be in awe of the amount of time and effort that went into every single one of those thousands of products. Multiple people studied for years to learn the skills required to create a small part of just one of those products.
> I’ve some to see it as some kind of “spiritual awakening”, although I think those are really loaded words. But in essence a cultivation of a broader awareness of the inherent complexity and interconnectedness of everything we interact with.
Imagining the hordes of humans and machinery behind the simplest of products is truly awe inspiring.
But nuclear power starts to look even better when you look up the death tolls and realize that as long as you are halfway competent (i.e. not Chernobyl) even the worst disasters have led to vanishingly few deaths. What is more dangerous is the irrational fear of nuclear power that led to the dangerous evacuation of Fukushima.
