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The licenses in question here are only relevant to the airwaves. An FCC license isn't required to send you news over cable or the Internet.

The FCC has a number of extraordinary powers over the broadcast spectrum, but they do not include viewpoint discrimination, which has always been seen as uniquely odious and different than indecency restrictions. As held in Shurtleff v. Boston, even the much more limited medium of a government-owned flagpole in front of a government building cannot be subject to viewpoint discrimination. If the public is allowed to speak freely in a particular medium, the government may not rescind that permission based on whether their message is true or fair or in the public interest.

I think "odious" really undersells it. A free press is an important part of a functioning democracy. What's the use in being able to vote against people doing wrong, if no-one's allowed to tell you about the wrong?

It's important not to concede the premise that First Amendment protections are subordinate to the public interest at all. Carr argues in his statement, after all, that the FCC has to take action because the public is losing faith and confidence in the media altogether. But even if the FCC can produce a detailed, convincing explanation of how American democracy will suffer if they're not allowed to block certain viewpoints from the airwaves, they still can't do it.

They do. Certifications make technical expertise legible to non-technical decisionmakers, and I've encountered people on both sides of that dynamic who affirmatively like it when companies set up programs like this. Obviously you and I would rather have someone who understands Claude make decisions about whether and how to use it, but in a lot of industries that's not realistic.

I'd endorse that principle. It's true, of course, that societies without an abundance of easy and high-paying jobs may struggle to satisfy it except by banning sex work.

It did! We saw with the opioid crisis just how much devastation can be caused by a single drug wiggling its way into legality.

What was that single drug?

It makes a difference if his compatriots knew he was going to do it, and took material steps to help him do it or help him get away with doing it. They argued, I believe, that they didn't know and only intended to have a peaceful protest, but the jury decided that's not true.


That’s a lot of words for you don’t know what actually happened. /if


I don't know why you would phrase this so confrontationally. All I know is what the source article says, and it doesn't include much beyond the jury verdict that would let anyone guess what happened. If you have a link to the specific evidence that was presented at trial, or other detailed information, I'd love to see it!


At 11 this morning, I wanted to both debug an issue and take a meeting before lunch. Before AI, I would have had to just start debugging after lunch, there wouldn't have been enough time to do both. But now I had Claude debug the issue concurrently with the meeting. Its answer didn't actually make sense (I still do think I'm smarter than Claude, although the gap is narrowing!), but it showed enough of its work that I could make a good guess about what was really going on, and when I asked it to check my hypothesis I got back from lunch with some debug logs that confirmed I'd found the bug.

I can easily believe that, I agree Claude has applications.

I am disputing the idea that this is enough of a game changer to make us mourn our now lost craft. Also, I’m mentioning that we’ve discovered a world of footguns dressed as shortcuts, which we’re not taking proper care of.

First, your experience was required for that story to have a happy ending. Second, we both know someone else could probably have gone with Claude’s senseless hypothesis, asked for a fix and sent it for review. This last part is becoming pretty universal.


It's beyond credulous to give the benefit of the doubt to a spokesperson who responds to questions about a whistleblower report by complaining that the reporter is “desperate for clicks and eager to publish fake news to scare seniors." They're obviously lying, trustworthy sources do not talk this way.

In my experience, Claude and the juniors piloting it are usually receptive to quick feedback along the lines of "This is unreasonably hard to understand, please try refactoring it this way and let me know when it's cleaner".

Can I interest you in a bunch of emoji-laden comments?

I don't think you can infer consumer positions on IP law from positions on who ought to get paid or how much they should be paid. Many of those same consumers, and indeed many of the artists, feel that fan art of your favorite characters should be legal and unrestricted so long as nobody's making too much money off of it.

You're right. It's wrong to think that all of those people are busy writing to congress demanding new laws be enacted. The problem is, the vast majority of people (while possessing a vague sense of right and wrong) do not understand how IP law works, and what the tradeoffs vis-a-vis the public good are. I'm sure many among the supposed consumers in this survey think something akin to "there ought to be a law" -- a sentiment somtimes echoed by readers of this very forum.

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