Let's say I'm sitting outside of your office with a bazooka and boxes of high explosives. You ask my why, and I say, "someone might try to rob this office." You say, "somehow, that does not persuade me that a stranger should loiter outside of my workplace with a massive stockpile of ordinance." I reply, "what's your solution to combat robberies?"

it already has a lock, by default you're not allowed to install apps in android you have to accepts a bunch of prompts and configurations (the key) and now you won't even have the key

Is it a lock? I buy a building and the builder put an id verification lock on the doors and I am not allowed to remove it. And they also require a separate one time fee of 2 to 5 percent of the purchase price.

Metaphors have their limits.

In physical world, there’s only so many people who can rob you if you do something stupid (like constantly give away copies of your keys to strangers), they will be very noticeable when they are doing so, and if you feel like something’s off you can always change the lock.

On the Internet, an you are fair game to anyone and everyone in the entire world (where in some jurisdictions even if it’s known precisely who is the figurative robber they wouldn’t face any consequences), you could get pwned as a result of an undirected mass attack, and if you do get pwned you get pwned invisibly and persistently.

Some might say in these circumstances the management company installing a (figurative) biometric lock is warranted, and the most reliable way to stop unsuspecting residents from figuratively giving access to random masked strangers (in exchange for often very minor promised convenience) is to require money to change hands. Of course, that is predicated on that figurative management company 1) constantly upping their defences against tenacious, well-funded adversaries across the globe and 2) themselves being careful about their roster of approved trusted parties, whom they make it easy to grant access to your premises to.

The trouble with your analogy is that physical reality works the same way. People have been committing mail fraud since the advent of post offices. Spies have been planting bugs on delivered goods since the invention of bugs. The thing that causes this isn't digital devices, it's long-distance delivery of goods and messages.

Meanwhile installing software on your own device is the thing that isn't that. They're preventing it even when you're the owner of the device and have physical access to it. They're not installing a lock so that only you can get in, they're locking you out of your own building so they can install a toll booth on the door.

totally my point here. The actual shape of the thing starts mattering so much that at one point your metaphor is just completely useless for judging the actual tradeoffs

If something is bad when it's done illegally, it's worse when it's done legally, and even worse than that when it's done dutifully.

You'd also be a lot more likely to keep that kind of job post-crash, by all means take it if you find one.

I estimate we have two to three years in the English-speaking world to organize an effective lobby for the rights of the common man before changes to the speech environment and habitual methods of communication make it impossible. There's less than a year before the wave of lock-downs reaches normal internet users through announced policies like the Android software installation ban and through the growing effectiveness of algorithmic "Joy of TikTok"-style discussion selection, and one to two years after that before we run out of other avenues. The latter timeline could be too optimistic if the completion of the TPM-to-cloudflare chain of permission for desktop environments (steps had been made in the past but failed after public pushback) comes without a lot of advance notice. Don't forget - after each new constraint on the public, the next counter-reaction will be smaller, and the next change will be bigger or sooner.

The cloudflare thing is insane.

Like overnight a while ago, normal everyday websites are suddenly inaccessible (yes I have JS on, no it won't work.) Sometimes only the first page loads.

Can't complain to CF either, because that too is walled off by their non-functional robot detector.

This serves as a two-way filter for me. Any website I'm not allowed to access is not worth accessing. I'll take my attention and business to where I'm wanted instead.

>I don't think just building more housing is sufficient. That might decrease the cost of living somewhat, but probably not enough to remove the need for a second income.

While shadowy special interest groups and large corporations are able to write text directly into the laws of anglophone countries, The People can't even talk about one instance without fragmenting into a trillion pieces covering topics such as the affordability of housing.

This is the thing where bad proposals are easier to come up with than good ones. If you want to actually fix it you need to identify the root cause, come up with a viable, efficient, effective means of addressing it, and then get it enacted.

If all you want to do is pass a bad law, all you have to do is pay money.

I don't disagree with you about affordability of housing. I just don't think that that by itself is sufficient to solve the problem of households needing two incomes.

Instead of collecting biometric info from humans and IDing all of their online movements, you could mandate that LLM output be watermarked (using a technology that Scott Arronson was hired by OpenAI to help develop, after which the project was shut down under Altman right after proving that it could work) so that their online movement would be IDed. The implication in this story that it was shut down to keep the Orb around in principle (telling humans they had to be tagged to distinguish them from machines that could more easily be tagged) is very easy to pick up.

Is that viable given the proliferation of open-weight LLMs that don't apply that sort of watermarking? If somebody with malign intent can skip the attestation, presumably they will, right?

If every major LLM producer did it, it would not be easy for malicious actors to remove it. That's on top of the fact that most of the issue is coming from careless actors.

By the time it replaces doctors, nobody but today's investors will be able to afford anything at all. The X-shaped economy would have owners in the V and manual laborers (assuming this doesn't translate to gains in automation) in the ^. This outcome is worth avoiding...

Sure, I said as such:

> Of course, the reaction is wildly out of proportion. A normal response would just be to stop doing business with the company and move on. Labeling them a supply chain risk is an extreme response.

Nobody would put this much effort into it as a hobby unless they were happy about it, so that necessitates a certain point of view.

Developer fantasy? Here's the consumer fact: people do not like the race-to-the-bottom extractive practices installed on their computers non-consentually. People do not like the union-style collective barganining of duopolies following each other's anticonsumer practices after the bolder one tests it. Everybody complains about this stuff nonstop, and adapts by reducing their attention span on a fundamental level. The demand for a respectful computing environment is enormous.