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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#201

Post by decimalenough »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #150
decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are: Extreme Threats Severe Threats AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts) Public Safety Messages State and Local Tests

There are more granular controls, but the details are OS/phone specific and the selected threat level is ultimately at the discretion of the government bureaucrat pressing the SPAM button.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#202

Post by matheusmoreira »

xpct wrote: post #110
laughing_man wrote: post #69

It's really difficult to see what technologies will be enablers of state power. IMO, the techs ushering in 1984-levels of control are wifi, cheap cameras, and LLMs. The three technologies on their own are beneficial, but taken together they're going to make Big Brother seem impotent.

I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.

I asked Claude to analyze and datamine all of my eleven thousand HN comments, plus my reddit comments, lobsters comments, mailing list emails, stackexchange content, etc. With this database it managed to create an entire dossier about me. It could psychologically profile me, and it had a better and more complete view of me than my literal psychologist. We identified things like weaknesses, social engineering susceptibility, likely scenarios. It got to the point it started digging into open source projects I made when I was a teenager and started making eerily accurate inferences about my childhood.

I can't even imagine what the NSAs and CIAs of the world are capable of with their limitless black budgets. Anthropic only balked at domestic surveillance, it had zero objections towards allowing the US government to surveil foreign persons like me.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#203

Post by fragmede »

protocolture wrote: post #158
fragmede wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some sort of chain... of blocks, that would require distributed consensus before the message would go out? Hmm...

Yep. I had a go at trying to sketch out a protocol for this years ago, that was low enough level to be actually mildly censorship resistant and also pay out for middle men successfully routing traffic and there was something like 10-100 times more protocol traffic on network than actual packets. It was a mess.

But did it work?

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#205

Post by GJim »

red_admiral wrote: post #198

The UK system has "severe alerts", which is what the wildfire alert was, and "extreme alerts" which is a higher category. Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me. Both levels can be deactivated on Android (no idea about iOS but I presume it's the same), there's no unblockable presidential alert level.

> Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me

It most certainly was NOT OK.

By your own statement, both trigger the siren sound by default (including to those driving).

By all means do this if a wildfire is heading my way and I need to evacuate, not to tell me I shouldn't be lighting a bloody barbeque! An ordinary text message would have sufficed.

The net result of this is, like most people I know, ALL such alerts are now switched off on my phone. Thus, if Putin does decide to push the button, I'll probably find out about it a little later then you.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#206

Post by roenxi »

blooalien wrote: post #108
roenxi wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a "good person" exactly? There are many wildly different definitions. People do generally want to be good people but it is a fairly basic don't-upset-the-neighbours form of good. You can't rely on them to consider any specific act as being good or bad.

> What's a "good person" exactly? I was taught that a "good person" tries to actually care about their fellow humans and other lifeforms on this planet enough to try to live a life that contributes toward a positive future that we'll all benefit from, while choosing not to support the hatred, greed, and ignorance of those people who would work toward the opposite of that. Problem with that sorta fantasy is that it do…

Most people do try to live a life that contributes toward a positive future that we'll all benefit from, while choosing not to support the opposite of that. There aren't exactly large groups of people organising around the principle that they want everyone to be worse off. It'd be pointless and they'd get crushed; militarily if needed. Only very fringe groups organise around negativity. People aren't very good at bettering themselves & others but that is clearly the direction they're trying to go.

As for "care", that is one of those unreasonable expectations. You can't tell who cares by looking at them and it doesn't do anyone much good for someone to be caring but incompetent. We get a lot more out of hyper-competent people who don't care but nonetheless do a very good job of making the world better.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#207

Post by [deleted] »

WalterBright wrote: post #193
vkou wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well do free markets resolve basic problems of resource distribution? Like, say, the tragedy of the commons?

Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have commons. For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.

[deleted]

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#208

Post by [deleted] »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #31

I agree that there's no difference in principle between the government of the land you live on ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to everyone about wildfire danger; and ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country. This is simply what it means for a national government…

[deleted]

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#209

Post by lins1909 »

solatic wrote: post #197

> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't. This is the wrong prism through which to confront the problem. Technology is neither good nor evil nor neutral - it is a tool lacking agency, to be manipulated by people. You might as well ask if it's possible to design a gun that can only be used in self-defense, or a knife that can only be used for cutting vegetables…

Can't believe it's 2026 and people still believe this nonsense about technology being neutral.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#210

Post by boomlinde »

decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

I've seen it during my career as a software developer, too. Heaps of alert spam that remained unread because 99% of them were useless and not indicative of a problem on our end. It's important to be careful about alerts so you know when real problems occur.

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