To be fair, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group was murdered with a 3D-printed handgun. He made $10 million in 2023, or about 100 times the median salary of a UnitedHealth employee.
This bill is performative legislature not because of pipes and nails, but because professionally manufactured guns are widespread in the US. Criminals in the US overwhelmingly choose this option.
Criminals have tons of options, including straw purchasing a CA compliant gun, straw purchasing a non-CA-compliant gun from Nevada, or just throwing a brick through the window of the nearest pickup truck with a Glock sticker on it.
I know no such thing. The number one type of gun death is by far, suicide. When a gun owner takes a gun home (or in this case, prints one) statistically speaking they are more likely to use it to end their own lives or harm themselves more than anything else.
You could make a similar case for this as was made for the banning of highly toxic coal gas in the UK in the 1960's. Most suicides are acts of distressed individuals who have quick, easy access to means of ending their own lives. The forced changeover from coal gas to natural gas is largely credited with a reduction of suicide by 40% after it was done. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC478945/
I don't think 3d printed guns have been around long enough to really provide meaningful data on whether this law will be effective, and on the whole, I'm not thrilled about it. But again, as was originally commented: this is an issue where states are, perhaps ineffectively and ineptly, attempting to solve what they see as problems, under a federal government that has shown itself incredibly resistant to common sense gun regulation that virtually everyone, including the gun owning community, thinks is a good idea.
> The forced changeover from coal gas to natural gas is largely credited with a reduction of suicide by 40% after it was done.
The mechanism of that reduction very well could be reducing the level of depression in the populace and thus suicidal ideation, rather than just making the means less handy (or of course, some combination). Coal gas, like any other gas used for combustion, doesn't burn perfectly and UK homes likely had persistent amounts of carbon monoxide roughly all the time since heat gets used not-quite-year-round.
> What historical precedent is there for infringement of Constitutionally-enumerated rights of others based on suicides?
There is no requirement that a precedent exist for limiting personal freedoms for the sake of safety. We infringe personal rights in the name of public safety all the time, not the least of which is current, existing gun regulations, all the way down to far more benign shit like speed limits, and not letting people scream "fire" in a theater. The 2nd Amendment was itself a modification to the constitution, ratified some time after the constitution itself. Hence the "amendment" part.
And as numerous gun activists have pointed out before me: The individual ownership interpretation goes only back to the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, and is not itself law, merely judicial precedent. The right for every single American to own a gun is not enshrined in any law, merely an interpretation of a law, and the law itself was written in an era of single‑shot, muzzle‑loading firearms, not modern semiautomatic rifles, and further, it was written to promote the creation of, and I quote, "well-regulated Militas," not "Ted up the street who owns the gas station."
Further, even if it was spelled out, in the 2nd Amendment, in clear words, that every single American had the innate right to buy and use an AR15, that does not make it unimpeachable or forever carved in stone: We can change that. We can amend the amendment, hell, we could reverse it entirely. The problem of gun violence is a hard nut to crack, and the culture of American gun ownership is long standing and on the whole I myself quite like guns. That said, I think they're far too easy to get right now, and I am far from alone in that opinion.
The "fire in a crowded theater" line is by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Schenck v United States.[1] During the first World War, he ruled that it was constitutional to send socialists to prison for distributing leaflets that protested the draft.
The judicial precedent set in that case was overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio.[2]
As far as I understand it, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater has not actually been legally tested. This was a non-binding analogy used in the decision of a supreme court case that found it was not a violation of the 2nd amendment to prosecute someone for speaking out against the draft (which was later overturned for obvious reasons).
The fact that the federal government is unwilling to restrict guns and other real causes of ongoing public health crises (such as massive passenger cars and trucks) even as the deaths pile up does not mean that any level of government should be piling onerous regulations onto other things that demonstrably cause essentially zero harm at the macro scale, such as 3D printers, non-commercial/non-military UAVs, and so on.
If the number of people killing themselves with 3D printed guns is not literally zero or vanishingly small at most, I would be very surprised.
No conspiracy required. There's a lot of money to be made lobbying against guns - in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year - regardless of efficacy.
"Naveen Rao, the Gen AI VP of Databricks, phrased it quite well:
all closed AI model providers will stop selling APIs in the next 2-3 years. Only open models will be available via APIs (…) Closed model providers are trying to build non-commodity capabilities and they need great UIs to deliver those. It's not just a model anymore, but an app with a UI for a purpose."
Unstoppable monopoly will be extremely hard to pull off given the number of quality open (weights) alternatives.
I only use LLMs through OpenRouter and switch somewhat randomly between frontier models; they each have some amount of personality but I wouldn't mind much if half of them disappeared overnight, as long as the other half remained available.
I think the big difference is that Google is free: everyone is using Google because it doesn’t cost anything and for a long time was the best search engine out there. I am sure that if Google would suddenly charge a few dollars per month for access, Bing market share would explode overnight, because it would become “good enough but cheaper”.
With the AI models, using a model that is “good enough but cheaper” is already an option.
There's no reason that a sizeable portion of LLM usage can't and won't end up free/ad-sponsored. Cutting edge stuff for professional use will probably be monetized via subscription or API credits for a long time to come. But running an older and less resource intensive model works just fine for tasks like summarization. These models will just become another feature in a "free" product that people pay for by watching or clicking ads.
I imagine the split will look a lot like b2b vs b2c in other technologies, b2b customers tend to be willing to pay for tech when it offers a competitive advantage, reduces their operating costs etc. b2c customers mostly just guzzle free slop.
It's actually pretty bonkers when you think about how basically every cutting edge professional you deal with is getting ads for all of their top search results for all of their work.
(Not quite "every", but outside of tech, most professional workplaces don't support ad blocking or Kagi.)
I too am old. Google search is free, hard to replicate, and while there used to be lots of search engines, Google was (and arguably still is) miles ahead of all the others in terms of quality and performance.
A model is hard to train but it doesn't need to be hyper up to date / have a new version come out every day. Inference is cheap (it seems?) and quality is comparable. So it's unclear how expensive offerings could win over free alternatives.
I could be wrong of course. I don't have a crystal ball. I just don't think this is the same as Google.
Of course I could be entirely mistaken and there could emerge a single winner
I would say Google's monopoly mainly comes from its name recognition, definitely not because its still ahead in core search as I have been using DuckDuckGo for 2 years once I noticed search results are the same or better than Google.
In the first years, I remember no other search engine was close to Google quality. We all ditched AltaVista because Google was incredibly better. It would have been awful to switch back to any other options.
We can already switch between the 3 big proprietary models without feeling too much differences, so it’s quite a different landscape.
This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes and Windows will never be a monopoly.
Software always gets monopoly simply by usage. Every time a model gets used by esoteric use cases, it gets more training data (that a decentralized open weight model doesn't get) and it starts developing its moat.
>This is saying we have hundreds of open source OSes
we don't, we have about 3 operating systems that have the decades of hardware and software compatibility that makes them widely usable. They're the most complex and complicated things we've built. LLMs are a few thousand lines of python hooked up to a power plant and graphics cards. This is the least defensible piece of software there ever has been.
They will [try to] ban open weights for ethics / security reasons: to stop spammers, to protect children, to stop fascism, to defend minorities. Take your pick; it won't matter why, it will only matter which media case can they thrust in the spotlight first.
And if the frontier continues favouring centralised solutions, they'll get it. If, on the other hand, scaling asymptotes, the competition will be running locally. Just looking at how much Claude complains about me not paying for SSO-tier subscriptions to data tools when they work perfectly fine in a browser is starting to make running a slower, less-capable model locally competitive with it in some research contexts.
Until very recently, tariffs on American cars sold in China were much higher than vice-versa. The new US tariffs were an attempt to even the playing field.
I think most people would agree that no tariffs would be good, but China is more protectionist than any other major economy, including recent changes in US policy.
Yes, but China has always been straightforward in that they believe in protectionism. It's part of their system.
In contrast, in the West (at least until a few years ago), we have been fed the discourse that free market without protectionism is the best model, and protectionist countries are sabotaging themselves. And I don't know how it was in the US, but in the EU this caused hardship to many people. Entire countries pretty much sacrificed whole industries to the free market gods, because it was more efficient to bring the merchandise from elsewhere. Opponents who were defending their livelihood were framed as reactionaries that were opposing +X% GDP gains or didn't want "free competition" (often against products with unbeatable prices due to being made in countries with totally different rules and labor standards).
Now it seems that the system that supposedly was so bad gives an unfair advantage, so if others apply it the only defense is to apply it as well... but the free market apologists won't shut up anyway, in spite of the obvious cognitive dissonance.
There has long been a strong undercurrent of people who are for protectionism. Remember Ross Perot (many reading this were not even born in 1992 when he got popular as a third party presidential candidate) and his Giant sucking sound?
there are many people in America who don't believe in protectionism, but we lost this time.
True enough but really this boils down to we are just doing what they are doing. The reason they had it higher for longer was because for longer the situation was reversed, our cars were better. Now they have surpassed us and don't really need protection. We didn't before either, so it was a moot point. Now we do, so we do the same thing.
The point however is that the United States is supposed to operate under a different model than China. The reason to bring up the ways we act the same is then to find clarity in the contradiction.
This is essentially the same tension that runs through much of modern American discourse. It's never welfare if the beneficiary is a rich CEO at a corporation, only if it's a family in poverty. It's not like Chinese cars can't employ American workers just as Japanese and other foreign automakers do.
To my mind then, I think it's less about reciprocity and more about corporate welfare. Putting aside ICE automakers, there is also a very obvious individual who turned conspicuously political as of late who owes a great deal of his fortune to the expectation that his electric car company will one day rule the world. It would be quite embarrassing for even him if demand for his vehicles suddenly got demolished on his own turf. I would think he and others would be willing to spend a small fortune to keep the political needle tipped in their favor on this issue, the average consumer be damned.
At some level there is nothing wrong with such naked self interest. I just prefer we be honest about it, as only then can we really analyze it.
> but China is more protectionist than any other major economy, including recent changes in US policy.
Not true. China let Tesla set up shop in the backyard of their domestic EV industry, WITHOUT the mandatory by law 51% Chinese ownership, precisely so Tesla would light a fire under the asses of domestic players, forcing them to compete better with what was at the time, the pinnacle EV brand.
China is no longer beating us with protectionism but with innovation and manufacturing. People better wake up.
Which was a good strategy. It's not that far from older "Detroit strategies" that led to Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, and GM all competing for "world leader" from "The Motor City" in a past century.
If anything the shame is not that the Chinese pulled this off successfully, but that Detroit is still barely trying to compete in streamlining their bloated supply chains in light of EV competition; none of the US automakers are sharing upstream suppliers on batteries and all are scrambling in different directions on even some of the basics.
>TSMC didn't become the world's supreme chipmaker by a laissez-faire aproach from Taiwan.
>Same applies to Samsung. And oh-so-many Japanese tech ventures.
You're missing a lot of context with these analogies. TSMC and Samsung started off in the 1950-1980s as cheap manufacturers of low margin electronic commodities the west was actively trying to get rid of in the name of protecting the environment(semi industry is poisonous) and increasing shareholder value via cheap(cough, slave, cough) labour, while giving western consumers who had options of better paid jobs access to cheaper imported stuff. It was a win-win-win situation, kind-of.
But fast forward to today, now that TSMC and Samsung have become masters of cutting edge high margin manufacturing, and the west finds itself exposed to lack of said cutting edge manufacturing at home, they're starting to twist their arms to get the know-how and infrastructure that they missed out on back on-shore. Had the west know the table would turn like this they probably would have acted differently.
Same with cars. German OEMs like Mercedes that were the pinnacle of auto tech especially when it came to tings like safety and self driving/crash avoidance, but got greedy and were more than happy to outsource electronics and ECU development and manufacturing to the lowest bidder in the name of shareholder value, but over time they lost vertical integration and access to inhouse critical high end technologies that made them valuable over the competition. Now China used that outsourced electronics industry to develop its own electronic auto tech and its vertical integration supply chain to beat the Germans.
The highest margin item in an ICE car was always the engine at which the Germans were the best at, and China could not catch up. Fast forward to today, in an EV, the highest margin items are the battery, self driving stack and supporting AI silicon, almost none of which come from Europe, meaning German OEMs are losing out on innovations and profits big time, becoming only system integrators of US and Chinese sourced parts on top of which they slap a badge hoping the consumers will value it more than Chinese badges because "heritage and tradition". They are super fucked.
They say history repeats itself, and this EV market shift is a repeat. A remarkable past parallel occurred with US industrial quality experts and statisticians being ignored by the US auto industry in the 1970s, then being taken seriously by the Japanese auto makers who then sling shotted themselves past US auto quality in the 80s to probably 2010ish?
In this round of history repeating, 2020s US car maker management was also actively anti-collaboration and anti-expert within it's own domain. You can see commentary by Sandy Munro on US companies ignoring design and production efficiency details - outsourcing too much of their own supply chain, and being resistant to integration improvements. And similar occurrences of Chinese auto companies hiring US auto production experts who were being ignored by the US auto industry, then going on to to improve fit, finish and quality, while building organizations unafraid of vertical integration.
> The new US tariffs were an attempt to even the playing field.
That's a guess at the White House's thinking. They've been using every form of coercion in international relations, including economic (tariffs), military, and diplomatic. That's a factual basis for divining their reasoning.
Their words are not a factual basis - they can say anything and clearly will. Everyone who does those things provides justifications - Putin was helping oppressed Russians in Ukraine and stopping fascism, for example. Taking them at face value is not a serious analysis.
Politicians don't have anything to lose from this. There is (shockingly!) nothing illegal about politicians making trades based on decisions that they know they are about to take that have a significant and easily predictable impact on the market.
By contrast, making public bets based on classified information that you are not authorized to publicize is a simple and relatively direct breach of laws regarding the handling of classified documents and state secrets.
A number of Trump's cabinet advisors have strong backgrounds in finance. At least two former hedge fund managers and one VC that I know of in prominent positions and I do not know much about American politics.
Is this confirmed by a trustworthy source? This article only reports on what president Trump stated. Given the source and the lack of any details, this isn’t verifiable which I think is a minimum requirement.
This happened to me too. I eliminated it in text responses, but eventually figured out that there's a system prompt in voice mode that says to do this (more or less) regardless of any instructions you give to the contrary. Attempting to override it will just make it increasingly awkward and obvious.
Might not be the best fix but other than disabling memory I changed the setting ‘ChatGPT personality’ to ‘Robot’ and I’ve always had straight to the point answers (so far).
I add "Terse, no commentary" to a request, which it will obey, but then immediately return to yammering in a follow-up message. However, this is in Incognito; maybe there's a setting when logged in.
You can add a custom instruction in settings. That works pretty well, applies to all chats. Memory feature I of course disabled as soon as it was released so I don't know which takes precedence.
Same. The GPT5 “Robot” persona does what no custom “be terse”, “no fluff”, etc. custom prompt ever could. It actually makes ChatGPT terse and to-the-point and eliminates (or at least greatly reduces) fluff. I love it.
First and foremost, ignore it. When you find yourself listening to it, distract yourself and immediately move on.
Secondly, add more white noise into your environment. The best approach I find is just opening a window or adding a little fan or water feature to your desk. White noise generators don’t work as well for me, but they can help in a pinch.
I believe that our modern day indoor environments are honestly just too unnaturally quiet anyway.
I’m not joking when I say that the only time I really get annoyed by my tinnitus is when the monthly “cure” for it gets posted on HN. ;-)
While "white noise" is the colloquial phrase, it's also a technical term that refers to a different noise spectrum – one that will do serious damage to your hearing if you listen to it loudly enough to do anything about tinnitus. (When played on ideal equipment, white noise has infinite energy – which is clearly not what you want to deliver to your ears.) You're probably thinking of brown noise, pink noise, or perceptually-weighted grey noise.
It’s not if Google can decide what content they want on YouTube.
The issue here is that the Biden Whitehouse was pressuring private companies to remove speech that they otherwise would host.
That's a clear violation of the first amendment. And we now know that the previous Whitehouse got people banned from all the major platforms: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.
They claim that the Biden admin pressured them to do it, except that they had been voluntarily doing it even during Trump's initial presidency.
The current administration has been openly threatening companies over anything and everything they don't like, it isn't surprising all of the tech companies are claiming they actually support the first amendment and were forced by one of the current administration's favorite scapegoats to censor things.
The political right have no principles and were actively cheering on FCC censorship when this story initially broke. Why should anyone care what they ostensibly think?
I disagree. Trump, IMO, has been a cult-like leader for the GOP since 2016. And he even called for more networks to lose their licenses over "dishonesty" after this incident[0]. Not to mention the multitude of scandals that we've seen like: law firm security clearance revocation as retribution for supporting Trump's opponents, deporting legal residents over their protest against Israel, and various lawsuits he's engaged in as President against media corporations, pollsters, etc.. who disfavour him[1].
> Many voices did not cheer it but called it for what it was
"many" is Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz? To my knowledge, they haven't called out Trump specifically for attacks on the First Amendment, only Brendan Carr. That's fine and dandy, but no one on the right seems willing to take the plunge for some reason on the huge array of issues that cropped up before this FCC threat against ABC.
I think rank and file folks are waking up a bit. Things are hard in the economy and tgey are seeing their moms, aunts, sisters, and daughters get impacted by reductions to women's healthcare.
I don't think so at all. I think some are waking up to the fact that Trump is becoming a liability and that his time is limited. They're preparing to shift to someone else who is just as bad, if not worse, such as Vance.
Nobody has any principles here my friend. There is a long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats, and now a few murders too.
But yes, apparently everyone hates Disney and wants them to go bankrupt. So finally the left and right agree on one thing.
Unfortunately for Kimmel, late night TV is irrelevant dinosaur so he better extract as much money as he can before he inevitably ends up like Colbert.
"long list of people canceled for making content that displeased the Democrats"
If we exclude the people advocating violence and discrimination against others due to their immutable characteristics, we find that its not such a "long" list after all.
Comments by government officials aren't protected free speech because government officials control policy.
There have been market panics ended by the right words at the right time. It's a different kind of speech entirely from criticism of the government by those without direct political power.
When Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr suggested Jimmy Kimmel should be suspended and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” ABC and its local affiliates were listening.
On Wednesday afternoon, Carr tapped into preexisting MAGA media anger about a Monday night Kimmel monologue and used a right-wing podcaster’s platform to blast Kimmel and pressure ABC’s parent company Disney.
Those are the actions he took as an official at the FCC.
If they'd issued an order, it wouldn't be final until it reached SCOTUS! Most regulatory interaction happens informally. A regulator tells a regulated entity to do something, and they do it. Public statements by the FCC commissioner are significant enough to make it into court cases as evidence of the Commision's intent.
That's not "goal post reconstruction". Someone said the FCC took actions. I thought I might have missed them actually _doing_ something, so I was asking about it. The response was to highlight the statements they said.
The point is the FCC Chair making public statements threatening specific regulatory actions against a regulated entity is an action. You're trying to hold the word action to a higher standard than a judge would. The Rubicon was crossed.
> You're certainly very sure of what I was thinking, but you are again wrong
Nope. You're confusing regulatory actions, broadly, with official actions. The FCC didn't take any official action. The FCC Chair absolutely conveyed a credible threat of official action in response to specific political speech; that constitutes a regulatory action.
Like, the SEC announcing they're going to launch an investigation is a regulatory action. The Fed Chair saying they believe the job market is cooling is a regulatory action.
> The decision was guided by what was in the entertainment company's best interest, rather than external pressure from station owners or the FCC, the sources said.
From today's statement: "Last Wednesday, we [Disney] made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country" [1].
We shouldn’t need to clarify this, but Tim Allen and Roseanne Bar were not threatened by high-ranking government officials, right?
These are two completely different situations. If conservatives want to vote with their dollars and boycott Disney, that’s something I wholeheartedly support. If they want to use their power as federal officials to silence voices they disagree with, that’s unacceptable.
> The political right in this country would love for Disney to be boycotted - just saying
Don't care.
We've got two groups of people in this country: those willing to sacrifice our republic for personal enrichment and those who won't bend the knee. (The former need to be heavily investigated over the coming decade, mostly so we can write statute that makes their behaviour criminal in the future.)
The issue most people have with Disney's behavior is that they didn't even attempt to fight.
It's one thing to say "We're going to comply for now, but here are the things we'll be doing to push back..."
Attempting to can Kimmel because he said something the President doesn't like and because it's politically/economically convenient for Disney, without doing anything else?
Thank you California for acting on this, our top national priority.
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