streetfighter64

Let me quote you:

> there's a massive difference between transporting a private package from point A to point B vs hosting someone's speech on a privately owned platform and broadcasting that speech through a privately owned network, with wider consequences that do not come into play when dealing with private correspondences between parties.

If you think that this states what the difference and what the consequences are (in your mind), I don't know what to tell you except you have a vivid imagination. Sorry I'm not a mind reader. A tip for the future is actually stating what you mean, instead of some vague suggestion at it.

> but GDPR doesn't confer access

GDPR was given AS AN EXAMPLE. I never suggested it "confers access". That interpretation comes from your own inability to read what I have written three times now. I don't know how to be more clear with you. Perhaps you can give my comments to a LLM that can translate them into something more comprehensible for you, it seems English is neither your first nor second language.

> is irrelevant

For what? You know laws can change, don't you? Or do you just accept each and every law, in every country, as the way things should be?

I already told you: "just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today."

Sigh. Trolling, I should have known. Keep yourself safe.

Pretty good. I'm not ashamed to say that I argue because it's fun, and because I'm right (unlike you). I'm also not so desperate to have the last word that I'll post a comment entirely without substance (like you did, and probably will do again in reply to this).

> I went into great detail

> a massive difference [what difference?]

> wider consequences [which consequences?]

> certain obligations [which ones?]

Okay dude. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

> This isn't 2016

https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/come-on-its-2015-cu...

> GDPR is not an "entitlement"

Do you really want to get into the semantics of "entitlement" vs "right". Are you not entitled to a copy of "your" data according to GDPR? https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/

What's even "your data"? Are the posts you write not "your data"?

The semantics doesn't matter because GDPR is just an example of the LAW regulating YOUR USAGE of a FREE PLATFORM. It's an EXAMPLE that disproves your false statement "when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything"

> there is no question as to whether it's legal to arbitrarily ban users based on the content of their posts

I already told you: "just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today."

What's your point? Do you mean "everyone is equally bad", so reducing your resource usage is pointless? Because that's not true, clearly.

Do you mean that owning any electronics at all is morally wrong? That's a more consistent point, but what are you posting from then?

This sort of all-or-nothing mentality is really reductive and pointless. It's like saying you shouldn't go to the gym unless you plan to become the worlds strongest man.

In my opinion, it is the responsibility of each and everyone to live as frugally w.r.t. the environment as possible, while keeping in mind that each of us has a job to manage in order to feed our families.

I own a phone, but it's as old as I can have in order to still have access to banking. I own a car, but it's as old as I could find while still driving well and being reasonably fuel efficient. I drive as little as I can, while still allowing myself to travel to meet family. I eat food but I buy organic and avoid imported food as much as possible. And so on.

Another important factor is that one should strive to improve the laws. Because clearly, reducing your own impact is not enough. And the political work one does, of course needs to be calibrated to what time one has available.

I'd never judge somebody for prioritizing family over political work, or buying a second-hand iPhone in order to save time on setting up a Fairphone or similar.

I will judge somebody who buys the latest car, or latest phone, or something like that. I will not judge but gently inform someone of the facts, if they buy meat that I consider coming from an unethical animal industry. And I will listen to a vegetarian if they'd like to inform me about the realities of the industry that produces the meat I eat, even though I personally consider it "ethical enough", because perhaps they'll change my mind.

Basically "Don't live beyond our collective means" = "Die".

Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.

I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".

I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.

> then it doesn’t make finding the bug more likely for any independent researcher

See, I think the issue is that you misread my original comment, because this is an entirely wrong interpretation of it. Obviously I'm not saying that for any one given researcher who's already chosen to focus on PHP, that changes anything.

I suppose all your whining about strawmen and mental gymnastics is just you being unwilling to accept that (a) you misread my comment and (b) your reasoning in your reply was entirely illogical.

You know you can just stop replying if you want right? No need to tell me about it.

"A rumor" or a confirmation by the maintainers that the bug exists? Oh well, I guess you believe the that Fermat's statement of his Last Theorem had absolutely no effect on how quickly or slowly it got solved. After all, it was just a rumor. It probably had no effect at all on how many mathematicians chose to try to solve it or not.

> you are changing what you said and now you’re fighting a straw man.

Not really. I think the issue is just reading comprehension on your part. Go back and read my original comment again and see if you understand it better this time. You made a ridiculous argument, which I responded to, how is that a strawman?

> Go find some bugs lol

I still don't understand what your deal is? Why do you think I'd be interested in that? It seems like a pretty basic concept that a person can know of a thing being possible without being personally interested in doing it?

You don't see any difference between the maintainers of PHP telling the whole world, "try to find a bug in PHP in 24h", and one random guy on the internet telling another random guy on the internet to try to find a bug in Nginx, Apache or IIS? Surely making all interested security researchers with time on their hands focus on one thing with a specific deadline has no effect on the probability of finding a bug in that thing?

That's why I write "should" and not "does". And in the UK and the EU, corporations also have more rights than they should (according to my worldview anyway). I think you should find the UK and EU laws disturbing in the same way as the USA's. Corporations also have way less liabilities (example: imagine if you could deduct your "operating expenses" (e.g. food) from your taxes, in the same way corporations do) and face way less penalties for their misdeeds than you do, which a bigger problem.

Let me ask you this: Do you believe it's possible for a passenger to do a 3G pull up in a 737 without breaking the plane or crashing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flydubai_Flight_1073

Since you haven't seen any commenter here on HN go out and rent a 737 and personally demonstrate it to you, it should be totally impossible right?

1. It has happened before

2. Even if it hadn't, some occurrence of any given event has to be the first

3. Who claimed no other targets are vulnerable in the same way?

What a dumb "gotcha" argument.

> Me: AI models can solve open math problems

> You: Well then go do that and come back with a proof of [insert whatever conjecture]. I'll wait.

What you're saying is "I don't believe it's possible to do thing X unless you personally demonstrate it to me, despite the fact it's verifiably been done before by others".

I'm not claiming I personally will find any critical security vulnerabilities in "Nginx, Apache and IIS". But you seem to be claiming that nobody in the world ever will?

> when you are utilizing a privately owned platform for free, you are not entitled to anything.

Factually wrong. Both when paying, and when using something "for free", there's a contract in place (terms & conditions, etc.), and that contract also needs to obey local laws. I don't know if you've ever heard of GDPR, but that's one example of things you are entitled to when using a "privately owned platform for free". Even the USA has laws regarding this, though less strong than GDPR (look it up).

> refuse to ship your package based on an any legal criteria they choose

The question here is what is a "legal criteria". And just because the law is a certain way today, doesn't mean that's the way it should be. It used to be legal to kick people out of restaurants because you didn't like the color of their skin, it's not today. It used to be legal to fire people because they were members of a union or other political group, it's not today. (All depending on your country's laws of course.)

Also, the point of an analogy, is to illustrate a point through a comparable situation. Pointing out that there's a "massive difference" but never explaining what the difference is and how it affects the validity of the comparison, is just a (very common) misunderstanding of what an analogy even is.

Did you try reading my comment before replying? Because I never claimed anything close to "the only consistent viewpoints are ..." Reading what I wrote might also give you a clue as to what argument I was referring to, because it's not what you "suspect".

Releasing a statement that a critical security bug exists with no more information, does the opposite of preventing rumors. I think one of the most surefire ways of generating rumors is to say "something big will happen tomorrow, please don't speculate about it".

Anyway, GPs point is that even if nobody leaked anything, and the only thing publicly known was the existence of the bugs, people would anyway have been able to find them independently. So what is the purpose of waiting 24h before releasing the patches?

I'm not the one being confused here, though it's fun to see you're already resorting to ad hominem. It reveals a lack of actual arguments, as does your appeal to obviousness.

But yes, I'd like to see the board of Facebook and the boards of many other companies being held liable for the actions of those companies. But for some reason, it's only ever "expedient" to grant companies the rights rightfully belonging to people, and never "expedient" to impose the same sorts of liabilities on them as on people. (Not that a non-physical entity such as a company could ever practically face the same penalties as a physical person anyway, which is another ("obvious" in your parlance) reason not to grant them those rights.)

If I was interested in going down the ad-hominem route I'd claim that you simply see the status quo as "obvious" because you lack the power of imagination to consider a more sensible alternative.

In fact, I think your argument is so backwards it actually supports my case. Why do I need to "imagine" that the owners of the company are using their rights to free speech as individuals (which is obviously not what is actually happening)? Why can't they just actually use those individual rights?

You don't like a trawling boat emptying out the lake in your village? Just imagine that the boat's captain is using a fishing rod to do the same, that's clearly a comparable situation!

That's actually a pretty good illustration of my point. Because Facebook has many of the rights that people have (own property, enter contracts etc.) but very few of the liabilities (can't be imprisoned, rarely ever pays any fines in practice), Zuch can use it as a proxy to do a bunch of shady stuff, that he wouldn't do if he risked being held personally liable for it.

If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.

No, the argument is definitely "you have no expectation of free speech if you're using e.g. facebook to deliver that speech". Which is certainly an opinion to have, but in my view a silly one. You might as well say that if you chose to send mail using a "private company", it's that's company's "free speech right" to inspect your mail and throw it away if they don't agree with the contents.

Yeah but what GP is commenting on is that you can't make the argument "deplatforming is okay because free speech doesn't apply to companies" and then complain about deplatforming in this instance.

I agree with GP that the arguments one makes should reflect one's actual reasoning, e.g. "I believe it's wrong to say thing X and therefore I support deplatforming in that instace". But because "I support deplatforming in every instace" sounds stronger many people falsely claimed that to be their reasoning. And now they're forced to deal with the consequences, i.e. being called hypocrites.

> facebook's right to express their own political views

Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views".

The silly idea of treating companies like persons and giving them any "rights" at all is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Well, the point is that people shouldn't need to find replacement skills. We have robots that can grow our food, drive it to us, manufacture our clothes, etc. etc. So the only reason we're still working our asses off, is because our laws and expectations of society are wrong.

The people that lose their jobs don't need to "find replacement income streams", they need to organize in order to establish a society where we all can just work to survive and thrive, instead of enabling the richest to waste the resources of us all and destroy our environment.

So no, sorry, I'm not seeing the "other side" at all here. In my opinion the story you heard is just an attempt to (yet again) redirect the focus to machines "taking people's jobs", in order to distract from the real problem: our organization of society is completely wrong, to the benefit of certain rich people who willingly make others suffer for their gain.

People don't need or want work, they need resources. And we collectively have all the resources we need, it's just a problem of dividing fairly.

> Accelerator mass spectroscopy (AMS) radiocarbon measurements were performed on starch extracts and cellulose fibers from 50 paper samples with known production year from 1950 to 2018. For most of the paper samples, the measured 14 C concentration values in the starch extracts were highly correlated with the data of the 14 C bomb peak calibration curve. The differences between the calibrated ages and the actual harvest years of the starch-containing plants were only up to 3 years.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35195289/

Um, that's exactly my point. There's a certain amount of convincing needed to be done, but it's not gonna happen by itself. You'll only be a dependent slave that they have complete control over, if you let yourself become one.

Working at your job won't feed your family in the long run. Organizing will perhaps do so.

Western countries are supposedly democracies, so shouldn't it be possible to rewrite some laws for the benefit of the people? And even nondemocratic countries have been able to improve the conditions of the masses through organization. In any case, wanting the tech overlords to hire people to do customer service instead of using AI, seems like a very poor solution to the coming problems.

Yeah, my point is no safety net will ever be "put" in place unless people coordinate in order to put one in place themselves. Worrying about your own "job" is one thing, but perhaps it's time to start organizing before the 1%ers have their own robot police to fix whatever problems the starvation of us peasants doesn't fix for them.

It's funny all this talk of AI "stealing jobs" from humans. Shouldn't we, as in humanity, want to collectively work less? It's amazing that the top 1% has psy-opped so many people into wanting to work more in order to allow their "families to eat", while holding 30-40% of the world's resources for themselves. We have robots that can work for us, but still we prefer to spend our time doing menial customer service, rather than just convincing the 1%ers to share with normal people... (who in fact created everything they claim to own)

Seems like all of this stems from a very cavalier attitude towards making accusations from the self-proclaimed "plagiarism hunter". There seem to have been a whole bunch of alarm bells regarding the book itself, so it's surprising he didn't look further into it before publishing his allegations.

> At the library, the elderly archivist told him they didn’t carry it. After consulting her databases, she informed him that no other library in the world did, either.

> [...]

> Weber’s research turned up no other references to her groundbreaking conference.

> [...]

> When he received a pdf of the red book he was supposed to have plagiarised, he was struck by how many glaring errors it contained – and how many people had overlooked them.

> [...]

> Despite his vow, Stefan Weber has not retired from plagiarism hunting, but he has sworn to never again work with “grey literature”

Seems it's not the first time either, as Weber was convicted in 2024 of defamation due to "false and malicious allegations on Weber's blog".

Hah, only an alien species would be of the idea that infinite growth in a finite planet is a bad idea. No, surely we can keep pressing the gas pedal forever, never slowing down sounds like a sound and reasonable plan.

I think the problem you're seeing is not with LLMs per se, but with capitalism. Imagine we have a quite useful machine that's reducing the amount of work needed to accomplish stuff, and all normal people are afraid of that machine simply because they worry they'll have less work. How backwards is that!

If we didn't let people live off the work of others, as the capitalists do, then we could all rejoice in that we've found yet another way of reducing the labor required to produce stuff.

Yet, in the real world, it seems as despite the progress of technology, the labor of the everyman is constant, and only the richest get more and more shiny jets and yachts.

I see. I'm not trying to put down your love of programming. The only programming that I really can say excites me (C64 or the like) died a long time ago, before I even started I suppose.

Nothing is stopping you from enjoying the sort of programming that you like. But I think it's healthy to accept that that style will soon not be mainstream. It will be like knitting your own clothes, and that's okay.

Regarding formal verification, it's not needed, as LLMs already make on average about as many errors as the average human programmer.

For me, 90% of programming is just a tool to get the job done. It's like a machine in a factory that spits out 50 spoons a minute, and it doesn't need to be any more beautiful than that. If you enjoy woodcarving and want to spend an hour making your own spoon, do that and don't let the existence of the machine make you feel that hobby is any less worth loving.