Viewing profile — advael

It seems pretty silly to answer a question about military intervention by insisting that the major instance of military intervention by a world power that's happened in the last ye…

I treat all proprietary software as malware, though of course the risk surface varies

Apologies, the prior commenter in the thread mentioned it, and I think the overall claim that someone's being disingenuous is frustrating when the contradiction claimed is hypothet…

The reason the term "singularity" was used when that term was coined was in analogy to a black hole, which has a point on its radius called the event horizon where the gravitationa…

I stand corrected that all these contracts are no-bid, though some functions still are. I remain skeptical that paired contracts do much to help competition or efficiency in a mark…

I not only haven't mentioned Musk a single time, but have thought this for my entire adult life. Utilities should be public goods. Hell, this isn't even that unpopular an opinion. …

All I'll say is that this is the place on the internet I have seen the largest percentage of people who have an opinion on OOP at all also have that opinion be positive Coincidence…

I would rather things like internet not be provided by entities that are incentivised by profits, controlled by one or a few individuals, none of whom are publicly accountable. I a…

Private here is meant to refer to the "private sector", as in using a company, not the existence of the contract being classified or something. I suppose SpaceX is publicly traded …

Yea, and medical costs - including those paid for by medicare, often for people who aged into the program with worse health, which in turn is partially attributable to a tendency t…

Can't speak to the world as a whole but the US has we spent 50 years gutting most government functions that aren't part of the police/military/surveillance apparatus (and many of t…

The disdainful pile of stereotypes you've generated merely based on seeing the word "weed" in an example game is not throwing off my impression that you're engaging in culture war …

As a side note, writing comments that sound like some pearl-clutching culture warrior on a post about someone's open source software isn't really a good look. As the saying goes "b…

What do we consider trivial? What are we measuring effort by? Yes, people have different skills from each other, and different resources they might have differential access to, but…

First mover effects, network effects, brand recognition, corruption, rent-seeking over the assets created by the aforementioned Like, yes the main point of leverage obviously isn't…

I still have the same question about this that I have every time someone proposes it: If there is some hurdle that AI solves that means someone can create a highly profitable busin…

I mean, I do this all the time via sshfs. I don't think these tools or ideas are bad, they just mostly aren't new, the innovation is maybe a particular ux or a particular bundle of…

On PCs, the best you could really do is restrict access to certain websites on certain boxes with TPMs the users can't disable. Remote attestation can lock people out of your stuff…

Kinda, yea. I've never been able to afford to fully prioritize values-alignment in my work, but it is something I care about, and building anything proprietary and US-controlled fe…

It's crazy how all these tech CEOs develop the same sense of ethics that seeks to make the foundation of open research and development that made their efforts possible and may thre…

Yea, I mean, I think the reason people balk at corporate personhood are to do with both the iniquities committed by corporate actors and the fact that personhood is a really confus…

I get that there's a lot of loud nonsense flying around about AI, both positive and negative, and I echo the sentiment that people should have some damn perspective when talking to…

I'm confused about why you believe this contrasts with what the above poster said. You've described a bunch of practical reasons why this is legally expedient and also at least one…

Citizens United did a lot to effectively legalize foreign influence as well, since the mechanism is opaque transfer of money But regardless, most people's threat models should disc…

AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gatheri…