Some of the signal messages I've seen screenshotted (granted screenshots can be altered) make it seem like the participants have access to some sort of ALPR data to track vehicles that they think are ICE. That would probably be an illegal use of that data if true.
The government falling victim to ALPR for once might actually be the push we need to get some reform. That said, they'll probably try to ban it for everybody but themselves. Never before have they had such comprehensive surveillance and I don't expect them to give it up easily.
I remember having to explain to you that the CFAA doesn't apply to German citizens in Germany committing acts against a German website, so I'll take that legal advice with a few Dead Seas worth of salt.
Given that models seem to be converging to similar capabilities and that there are plenty of open weights models out there market competition should drive prices towards the marginal cost of inference.
I saw a similar inflection point to this guy personally, in 2024 the models weren’t good enough for me to use them for coding much, but around the time of o1/o3/Gemini 2.5 was when things changed and I haven’t looked back since.
The main vulnerability of the Western world isn't technical, it's that we voluntarily surrendered our communication and social fabrics to advertising-driven businesses that will happily host and promote anything as long as it generates engagement. This makes it trivial for foreign agents to sway public opinion where as back in the day influencing media required actual capital and connections.
Unfortunately, a lot of our own people (and especially politicians) make money out of this situation so there's very little incentive to change this. Just look at the reaction every time regulations designed to curtail Big Tech ad-driven monopolies (EU DMA, GDPR, etc) are discussed. Our greed is what makes us vulnerable.
Who is the "we" that you think surrendered control here? Freedom of the press necessitates that anyone can publish freely even if what they publish is foreign propaganda.
I wasn't talking about press, I was talking about how ad-driven social media became effectively the only communication tool and we still refuse to enact/enforce effective regulation to curb its hegemony.
It became the primary communication tool because that is what people chose to use when presented with the alternatives. If you want to force people to use different channels then that is a violation of freedom of the press.
Again I am not talking about press. I am talking about communication tools.
Yes the free market has decided that these tools are the "best" option as long as the negative externalities (such as exposure to malicious actors - foreign or otherwise) are not being priced in. We need adequate regulation to price in such externalities.
For that matter, press and conventional media is subject to many regulations that don't apply to social media. Conventional media wouldn't get away with even a sliver of what social media is allowed to get away with time and time again.
I am still not sure why you keep going on about press. I did not refer to press in my comment and I make no opinion on it here.
I am referring to the fact that back in the day communication used to be mediated by domestic, neutral carriers who got paid to carry communication neutrally regardless of source or content.
Nowadays, communication is primarily mediated by a handful of foreign companies that prioritize advertising revenue at all costs and will choose which media to carry and promote based on expected ad revenue. They are effectively acting as pseudo-press without the checks & balances and oversight that actual press is subject to.
> Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.
When’s the last time you saw an obvious scam advertised in a conventional print newspaper or magazine? Now check Facebook or YouTube ads. If such an ad made it through any reputable magazine heads will be rolling and they’d expose themselves to lawsuits, but social media keeps getting a pass.
Now, let’s say you’re a foreign threat actor and want to sway public opinion. You can’t just get in touch with the NYT/etc and ask them nicely. You’d need to buy and cultivate such influence over time and do so covertly because their people would get in trouble if there’s an obvious paper/money trail.
With Facebook? Create a page, make your propaganda video “engaging”, boost it with bot farms for the initial push and then Facebook will happily keep hosting and promoting your propaganda as long as its advertising revenue outweighs the costs of hosting it. That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than buying influence with traditional media.
You have to be joking. Print magazines have always been plastered with shitty scam ads for MLM pyramid schemes, bullshit weight loss treatments, psychic readings, and every other get rich quick scheme and ripoff known to man. And, of course, there were no adblockers. Were you not alive before the internet? You think they weren't full of foreign propaganda too? I'd like to introduce you to my friend AIPAC...
According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.
These things are not an inevitable consequence of freedom of the press. Commercially-influenced legislation like the Communications Decency Act, which largely absolves platforms for the content of the material they publish, have pushed us in this direction. One could certainly imagine legislation which puts society's interests first to improve the situation.
The real problem is the almost total capture of the political process by money, which weaponizes the legislative branch against common citizens in the interests of corporate owners.
Being subject to the topic promotion and suppression technologies [1] and bizarre political whims of billionaire media owners is an unusual definition of "freedom."
All media is subject to the whims of its owners. That's freedom of the press. The only other option is that the government tells the owners what they can and can't publish.
Another option is that the government limits the power individuals can have. How many people control, say, 80% of the media? Do you need more than one hand to count them?
How do you define "control" here? Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
I’d argue that social media stopped being democratic as it introduced algorithmic content selection. But today perhaps a bigger problem is bot farms shaping public opinion.
Bots don't count as people. They're not represented demographically. They also don't have voting rights. Yet they're spreading propaganda to influence how people vote. So one could argue social media is rather anti democratoc.
Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.
One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.
But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.
In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin
Yes, Vladimir Lenin is likely one of the most appropriate people to quote on the question of freedom. Maybe only his successor Joseph Stalin is better in that regard.
I just checked on my personal desktop, which has Windows 11 installed using a local user account and is signed into my MS account for OneDrive and my account is listed as having no recovery codes in the cloud. I don’t recall editing anything in the registry to accomplish this it was the default behavior for having a local user account. I copied my recovery codes when I built the machine and pasted them into an E2EE iPhone note which should allow me to recover my machine if disaster strikes (also everything is backed up to Backblaze using their client side encryption).
Google scholar and the vagaries of copy/paste errors has mangled bibitex ever since it became a thing, a single citation with these sorts of errors may not even be AI, just “normal” mistakes.
There are people who just want to punish academics for the sake of punishing academics. Look at all the people downthread salivating over blacklisting or even criminally charging people who make errors like this with felony fraud. Its the perfect brew of anti AI and anti academia sentiment.
Also, in my field (economics), by far the biggest source of finding old papers invalid (or less valid, most papers state multiple results) is good old fashioned coding bugs. I'd like to see the software engineers on this site say with a straight face that writing bugs should lead to jail time.
And research codebases (in AI and otherwise) are usually of extremely bad quality. It's usually a bunch of extremely poorly-written scripts, with no indication which order to run them in, how inputs and outputs should flow between them, and which specific files the scripts were run on to calculate the statistics presented in the paper.
If there were real consequences, we wouldn't be forced to churn out buggy nonsense by our employers. So we'd be able to take the time to do the right thing. Bug free software is possible, the world just says its not worth it today.
Getting all possible software correct is impossible, clearly. Getting all the software you release is more possible because you can choose not to release the software that it is too hard to prove correct.
Not that the suggestion is practical or likely, but your assertion that it is impossible is incorrect.
If you want to be pedantic I’m pretty sure every single general purpose OS (and thus also the programs running under it) falls into the category of not provably correct so it’s a distinction without a difference in real life.
And I’d like a pony, but we can’t get what we want, only what we can take, and asymmetric encryption with western law enables hardware manufacturers to take control of your property away from you. I’m not holding my breath for that to change anytime soon…
So I’m not proud to admit that for my recent work (which has been 90% data science stuff in Julia) I’ve been still just using Gemini via the webpage for coding and it’s pretty effective for me, what is the most user friendly way to get started with Claude Code? Is there a nice VSCode integration out there?
Claude Code is a command line CLI. There are many like it -- Opencode, aider, Gemini CLI -- you launch the CLI in a software project directory and ask it to code interactively. It can navigate source files and create them. I prefer the approach to Cursor, however, there is a vscode extension for Claude Code as well: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code
So many google queries I have are pretty simple and the AI overview is good enough to answer them, that is honestly one of the best outcomes of the AI bubble for the masses.
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