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So we're just going to hand the world over to everyone who

1) is not competent (were not educated, and generally can't predict the outcome of their actions)

2) were not driven enough at least gain basic competency (so in other words: you ask them to do something and the odds of them still thinking about that 5 minutes later are pretty bad)

3) have no intention to change that

What do you think will happen? What is going to make these people brilliant hires?

Docters, lawyers, accountants ... are at their best when they have to work adversarially, which is something LLM models really, really suck at. I think instead we'll see the same as we've seen in IT. Destruction of entry-level jobs, but "seniors" will command bigger and bigger premiums because of two big reasons:

a) LLMs amplify their abilities greatly. 1 competent accountant can now do taxes of 100 people well with LLM help. But 10 incompetent accountants (either because they're actually bad, but more likely because some CEO decided to "just do it himself" with LLM help) still only deliver a single product: catastrophe.

b) If a competent person, with or without LLM help, has to adversarially deal with an incompetent person (extreme example: in court), the senior person will always come out way ahead.

Doctors are adversarial versus health problems (disease, symptoms, government ...) and a little bit versus patients. Lawyers are of course adversarial. Accountants have to make intelligent and consistent choices with particular goals where the choice of how to classify things isn't clear, sometimes literally adversarially (e.g. keeping TWO government tax departments happy at the same time about the same transactions). And so on and so forth.

Over time, what will happen is that AIs will simply get captured by governments. They will make the game impossible, while only giving their own LLMs the required information not to screw up company taxes etc. This is really the way society worked for millenia now.


Just to clarify, the person staring out the window would be competent, just bored. They see the schoolwork as relatively pointless. The adversarial work/tasks you described can be largely done today. Throw a complex scenario at GPT 5.3 with Extending thinking and you will see my point. The problem now isn’t the models capability, it’s the context. Getting the AI the info it needs. So, where I think we differ, is I am saying AI today (or near future) can reason against these complex scenarios (edge cases/outliers) you mention. The agents just don’t have all the context it needs in these complex scenarios. There will be some scenarios where the AI will fail, but this will be very small, and you can have human in the loop.

Well, I was a person like that. Voraciously reading/practicing when I could, then being bored in class most of the time, some of it spent dreaming. But ... this was not exactly common, to put it mildly.

The problem solar will create is that solar doesn't work for highrises. It works for suburbs. Electricity companies will be forced (more and more) to tax suburbs for nothing (for the sun, Louis XVI-style) to keep reasonable energy prices in cities.

Unless of course, cities think ahead for once and city hall gets large solar collectors (at least the physical area) along power lines NOW.


This seems quite strange to claim. Basically every city in the developed world already has power plants on the outside and a lot of wires to get the electricity in

Coal fired power stations work for high rises and for the suburbs.

Battery backed wind and solar farms work for high rises and for the suburbs (see, for example: South Australia).


It's not like Pakistan doesn't have these regulations, or doesn't try to tax solar power. It's just that the Chinese-Pakistan border is open and nobody's paying import taxes or listening to government regulations.

So the problem in Western Europe is simply that government is actually effective. This generates surprising differences with Pakistan. The government is effective at forcing employers to actually pay their employees. The government is effective at giving women their rights. The government is effective at taxing solar power.

All 3 differences are the same effect, really.


You misunderstand. Nobody should be getting short changed (who doesn't deserve it).

It's just that the difference between the cost of something that's safe and effective and one that is ensured to be safe and effective by the govt should be no more than 10-20%.

Instead it costs 3x as much, and comes with mandatory government monitoring, and the sword of Damocles over your head that things are liable to change in the near future on the governments whim' instead of you owning the solar plant you have bought.

All the subsidies the government hands out are calculated for it to cover the cost of a self-install, and then maybe a bit. So tax money (which is YOUR money) gets used by the system to support itself rather than you, even when its supporting you.


... and if Iran keeps raising it will eventually become the only choice available, at which point we'll do it (and can I just say the truly horrible part: ... which was going to happen at some point anyway with the islamists in power)

How did you read the previous comment and decide that "insanity is the only option"?

The sane option would be to back down.

And no, not every adversarial regime can be taken down. The Soviet Union had to fall, nobody was going to invade it.


Exactly. The deal of all these platforms is that there is a fuckton of up-front costs. Hard drives. Networks. Peering. Transit. Operators. Payment. Lawyers. SREs. And so on and so forth.

The solution to this used to be that governments provide the platform. You would think this wouldn't be hard to do, since people have now shown that this can work and so it's a guaranteed money maker, or as close as you're going to get.

Yet I can't find a single initiative.

So any such rules will just make all internet platforms disappear ... and nothing.


Govt already backs DNS, registration, and regulation of backbone transit along with a bunch of other services.

Beyond that, there really isn't much that a small shop couldn't manage unless you are trying to be the next FAANG (and lotsa luck with that).


... again?

They are conservatives. In Germany they also try every time to enact Mass Data Retention ("for catching Criminals"), then the courts decide it's not compatible with the constitution, and after a few years they try again.

I highly doubt they have given up here too


I see the exact opposite. Let's classify parties:

EPP (Christian-democrats, ie. centrist to somewhat conservative parties): >95% voted against. These mattered more than any others

Patriots for Europe (far-right, even racist): 2/3 voted against.

"Green"/progressive parties: ~90% voted in favour

Socialists from anywhere on the spectrum (from just-barely-left-of-centre to communists): >95% voted in favour

Laissez-faire parties (meaning rightist, but not racist): largely voted in favour.

https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/189574

Leftists and Green parties desperately seem to want ChatControl (not just this vote), against literally everyone else, but especially against centrist parties.


What about all the non-western colonists?

What about Iran? Iran was conquered by muslims. So should we conquer it and kick muslims out because it wasn't ok to take that land? What about every muslim country? Muslims stole mecca from the Jews, as is extensively detailed in muslim history books. Should it be conquered and returned?

What about China? The kingdoms did most of the conquering of course, then "unification" took their land and then communists did ethnic cleansing until Han Chinese were in most places all that's left. Hell, a number of the people they cleansed aren't even gone yet. There are still Tibetans. There are plenty of original Hong Kong'ers still alive.

What about Russia? What about North Africa? What about ...


The guidelines also say that if the border agents of China or Russia ask you point blank, to give them access. It is not worth risking your personal safety for your device. That includes your PIN and password, and in China and Russia's case, whether or not that's actually allowed by law.

Secrecy of correspondence only applies to sealed physical letters, so it has zero applicability to this law and provides zero protection against scanning of private messages.

Also it isn't respected in most types of criminal trials. If a sealed physical letter is opened and proves fraud, for example ...


Secrecy of correspondence doesn't necessarily only apply to physical letters as far as Constitutions go. In Finnish constitution it is defined as "The secrecy of correspondence, telephony and other confidential communications is inviolable" meaning it also applies to any internet message.

Unfortunately large majority of parties in Finnish Parliament do not really care about that provision and have passed multiple laws which create exceptions to it. They do it via the proper protocol (which is essentially the same as modifying the Constitution itself) so it's technically legal.


Secrecy of correspondence still has exceptions. That's what is always lost in these discussions -- every right of every person is not absolute. Just because you have a right to personal property, doesn't mean you don't have to pay taxes or store nuclear material in your basement. That's the hard part.

But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute. It's a new thing and the balancers can't balance it against other rights of other people, so this happens.


> But end to end encryption with forward secrecy at no cost to user makes your right to private communication absolute

As it should be. Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around. Not click a button and have the lives of everyone in the entire world revealed to them.


>Governments should have to suck it up. If they want to know things about someone, they should have to actually assign police to follow them around.

What you describe is clearly not the only possible policy choice.

The opposite doom scenario isn't either.

Based on the past experience, government gonna do their government stuff


The ends still have the decryption keys, so the result is the same as with a physical letter: you have to acquire the physical object holding the key material.

The result is not the same as a physical letter, as you can intercept those covertly (which is resource constrained)

But don't worry, exceptions for ALL officials are built in. And I do mean ALL officials. In this bill, for example, pedophile gym teachers are perfectly safe from getting scanned.

Gym teachers are also the largest group of people convicted for pedophilia. So you can be sure they are keeping their priorities straight. States, and the monopoly telco's are also protected from paying even the tiniest amount of money for companies to do these scans, all costs are entirely offloaded to app developers.

So the priorities are clear:

1) protecting the state from even the tiniest amount of responsibility, even at the cost of children getting abused

2) keeping some 50 foreign states from the same

3) keeping a whole list of organizations safe from inspections

4) keeping the state safe from actually spending any amount of money on these scans

...

n) protecting children


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