Same, migrated away from GMail about 5 years ago, had the same account since around 2004 when it was still invite-only. I got scared after a friend's experience getting their Google account locked after setting up AdSense for a side project.
Chose Fastmail over Proton just due to the convenience of search, I appreciate that Proton is more privacy conscious with the full encryption but I can only manage my emails if I can search them, I'm not well organised but can remember the right keywords to find anything in the tens of thousands emails I have from all these years.
Proton's full encryption is only if you email to another Proton user. Other email providers would not be able to decrypt the message for the user to read. While readers of this board might not need the distinction to be made, the vast majority of the population definitely does though. I have had multiple conversations with people that did not consider their Proton mail sent to a Gmail user wasn't fully encrypted.
Encryption is hard to get right on multiple levels. The biggest hurdle however will always be end users.
It's not even a slow boil which is the craziest aspect of it. They're speedrunning into Corporations Lebensraum, the American twist is to call it "national security" (such a great bit of propaganda, umbrella term for stamping out anything internal or external since 9/11).
Watching Stephen Miller talk is fucking scary, I cannot comprehend what happened to American society to allow this to happen, I understand social media brainrotting many, I don't understand the sane ones simply sitting on the sidelines, and wailing on the internet...
> But I don’t know if I should be denied access because of those people.
That's the majority of people though, if you really think that I assume you wouldn't have a problem with needing to be licenced to have this kind of access, right?
Depends. If you're talking about a free online test I can take to prove I have basic critical thinking skills, maybe, but that's still a slippery slope. As a legal adult with the right to consent to all sorts of things, I shouldn't have to prove my competence to someone else's satisfaction before I'm allowed autonomy to make my own personal decisions.
If what you're suggesting is a license that would cost money and/or a non-trivial amount of time to obtain, it's a nonstarter. That's how you create an unregulated black market and cause more harm than leaving the situation alone would have. See: the wars on drugs, prostitutes, and alcohol.
People are very good at ignoring warnings, I see it all the time.
There's no way to design it to minimise misinformation, the "ground truth" problem of LLM alignment is still unsolved.
The only system we currently have to allow people to verify they know what they are doing is through licencing: you go to training, you are tested that you understand the training, and you are allowed to do the dangerous thing. Are you ok with needing this to be able to access a potentially dangerous tool for the untrained?
There is no way to stop this at this point. Local and/or open models are capable enough that there is just a short window before attempts at restricting this kind of thing will just lead to a proliferation of services outside the reach of whichever jurisdiction decides to regulate this.
If you want working regulation for this, it will need to focus on warnings and damage mitigation, not denying access.
The few cases I know of people who retired in their early 30s they really didn't want to even be "recreationally employed", they diverted their efforts to causes they believe are bigger than usual work. They help communities, they started projects in their free time that enhances others' lives in direct and meaningful ways which had nothing to do with their past day job.
I believe I'd do the same, forget about coding yet another little project/library, and go into the real world dedicate part of my time to causes that can't pay much but have meaning to others.
This is entirely within the scope of "recreationally employed". There is no implication that what you spend your time on has anything to do with your former career.
In most cases I know of recreational employment has little to do with their former employment. They often put in a lot of hours and it is still "work" in the ordinary sense but it is entirely self-directed.
I believe it's a misuse of "employment" then, I do not understand employment as something you do without payment, to me it is necessarily related to paid labour.
If you obligate yourself to significant and consistent labor when no such thing is necessitated by your life then you are effectively "employed". You have to show up. Absent external motivation, like feeding your family or staying out of prison, it is purely a lifestyle choice. It is the opposite of playing video games all day or sitting at the beach.
The FIRE types are not working to survive by definition, allowing them to work at non-profits for a pittance, run a farm with no meaningful market, do thankless maintenance on FOSS, or travel around the world saving the whales. The lack of a meaningful paycheck doesn't make these things not "jobs" for all practical purposes.
> and we are instead stuck talking only about stopping abuse that is ultimately still bringing skilled workers to the US.
In my opinion this is even more general: there's a culture of focusing on punishment in the USA that creates more issues than the abuse it tries to punish.
It's one of the reasons of much of the bureaucratic mess in many systems, like healthcare and social welfare, an eternal game of whack-a-mole to stamp out abuse/fraud that creates Kafka-esque results. The focus is to find, and punish as much abuse as possible through increased requirements, increased bureaucratic burden, so on and so forth, instead of iterating the design in more clever ways to diminish the downsides.
I don't think there should be resignation to fraud and abuse, at the same time it doesn't matter how much more complicated the process gets it will always suffer from fraud/abuse, this extreme focus on trying to stamp it all out, punish, etc. instead of searching for a good balance where it's the most net-positive without creating additional issues, becomes very counter-productive after a certain level. Punishment of all waste, abuse, fraud is an impossible goal but it's always a political need given how American society needs to feel it's possible and will be done.
This is by design by replubicans so that they can claim government doesn't work, or so that they ca kneecap programs before becoming successful and permanent.
Look at their plan to 'starve the beast'. They claim they are for fiscal responsibility as their number one priority, but they would rather bankrupt the country in order to get their political way than be fiscally responsible. They have zero morals. It's hard to have a working government when half the people in charge don't want a working government.
It's simpler to regulate the source of it than the users. The scale that genAI can do stuff is much, much different than photocopying + Photoshop, scale and degree matter.
So, back in the 90s and 2000s, you could get The Gimp image editor, and you could use the equivalent of Word Art to take a word or phase and make it look cool, with effects like lava or glowing stone, or whatever. The Gimp used ImageMagick to do this, and it legit looked cool at the time.
If you weren't good at The Gimp, which required a lot of knowledge, you could generate a cool website logo by going to a web server that someone built, giving them a word or phrase, and then selecting the pre-built options that did the same thing - you were somewhat limited in customization, but on the backend, it was using ImageMagick just like The Gimp was.
If someone used The Gimp or ImageMagick to make copyrighted material, nobody would blame the authors of The Gimp, right? The software were very nonspecific tools created for broad purposes, that of making images. Just because some bozo used them to create a protected image of Mickey Mouse doesn't mean that the software authors should be held accountable.
But if someone made the equivalent of one of those websites, and the website said, "click here to generate a random picture of Mickey Mouse", then it feels like the person running the website should at least be held partially responsible, right? Here is a thing that was created for the specific purpose of breaking the law upon request. But what is the culpability of the person initiating the request?
Anyway, the scale of AI is staggering, and I agree with you, and I think that common decency dictates that the actions of the product should be limited when possible to fall within the ethics of the organization providing the service, but the responsibility for making this tool do heinous things should be borne by the person giving the order.
Caelan Conrad has also been doing some excellent reporting based on their own interactions with AI[0] and real life cases of someone taking a life at the behest of AI[1]. Some of these stories are truly heartbreaking, especially when I can see a more vulnerable version of myself falling into the same hole.
> Katie Miller, the former administration official-turned-podcaster and wife of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted an image on her X account on Saturday showing a map of Greenland colored by the American flag with a one-word caption: “SOON.” [0]
Great, the USA collectively decided to elect not only stupid arrogants, it selected the violent ones.
What's the goalpost now to call this administration fascist?
Would ASML be able to produce these machines without parts from the US? My guess is no, because they represent the culmination of decades of research across the entire developed world.
You can imagine anything from the US trying to steal any valuable materials or information related to lithography that it can, to actively destroying what it can't usefully steal, right? It's not like both sides would just sit there and declare foreign strategically-important companies off-limits.
It seems naive to assume Canada isn't on Trump's shopping list given he has said the exact opposite in the past, though I'm also not sure I understand what you mean/what that had to do with my comment.
That's exactly what I'm talking about too. Some combination of intelligence/military operations would almost certainly target companies like ASML during war, no? Why would you assume its assets would stay intact and remain on the Europe side?
Chose Fastmail over Proton just due to the convenience of search, I appreciate that Proton is more privacy conscious with the full encryption but I can only manage my emails if I can search them, I'm not well organised but can remember the right keywords to find anything in the tens of thousands emails I have from all these years.
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