it's not speculation, they specifically tell people that they're using facial recognition. They threaten protestors that they're entering them into a domestic terrorist database using facial recognition. They're arresting people and detaining them for long periods of time without due process, even while having proof of citizenship (real id, passports) on them, because of a facial recognition hit.
Who knows, but ICE agents are terrorizing people with the threat. It’s fascinating that the Ministry of Information is trying to redefine terrorist to mean something other than the people who try to induce mass terror for political gain:
I think this is just millenials discovering nostalgia. For me all kinds of things sucked (even though I am a millenial).
I really love lots of things about the world today. I love delivery apps, remote working, so much entertainment. I feel much safer in some ways (not in others -- but that's a 2026 development). I hated walkmans and cd players, they skip, wearout,etc... I hated having to rent movies, sometimes all the copies have been rented out, and you had to deal with fees for not rewinding. and the media quality sucked.
Even when there was internet (if you're lucky, and you afforded the very costly computers back then), you had to share time with landline usage. You had to remember landline numbers too.
I hated writing all the time, pens, pencils, sharpening pencils, pens leaking in your pocket. There were no cameras anywhere back then, so people were free to be really bad to each other with little consequence. You didn't go viral for berating a waiter back then. Everything terrible cops are accused of doing today, it was 10x worse in the 90s too.
So many thing were inaccessible unless you were in the right neighborhood and with the right amount of family income.
In news and politics, petty things were made to be a big deal, like Clinton's affair for example. People today fall for the deception of nostalgia and think it's because things were by relation not so bad back then, but it's just that they were kids and their parents sheltered them. All the stuff in epstein's list, all the #metoo revelations, all the gang warfare and war on drugs chaos in cities, that happened in the 90s too. matter of fact, a lot of the terrible things happening today are only coming into the light now that we have smartphones, internet and things are getting exposed.
In my opinion, the US peaked in 2022-23 in many ways.But post-covid trauma and the current administration nullified much of that.
What was great in the 90s was that the US had a healthy amount of national pride and love of country. Russia/Putin has been trying to undermine that, split the us apart from within since the fall of the USSR. Which by the way, all the 90's nostalgia is fueled by the whole "we won the cold war" euphoria in part, and mostly younger people being fooled by the whole "that means we're the good guys" nonsense. Until Iraq of course.
But anyways, social divisions and strife has widened dramatically, but the people who call themselves "MAGA" were "tea party" prior to that and all sorts of other names historically. All the chaos with the current admin is caused by "the heritage foundation" which has been sowing sees of divisions and chaos since before the 90s (thank them for project 2025). My point is the divisions and chaos are not new. but a lot of people that were doing badly in the 90's are doing much better now (oh..and did I mention how terrifying aids was then? even covid in 2020 was nowhere near as scary).
We're terrible at appreciating what we have right now in the present,today. We're losing so much of our rights and privileges because of this nonsense, so I hope you all don't propagate it. The 90's were nice in some ways, but they were mostly horrible, and the more disadvantaged you were the worse they were. There was more injustice, more misery, more suffering, more discomforts. We have the best technology, the best health care, the most powerful military, an economy which by all means should be crashing but is somehow surviving, a government which is being attacked by cartoon-level villains at all sides and somehow it too hasn't collapsed yet. Even our allies which are turning to other countries, even they haven't forsaken the US completely yet.
This mindset of "we used to have it great but it's over now" is defeatist. it is actually the same mindset MAGA is using for their lunacy.
The problem I think is our generation and gen-z are finally grown ups now, but instead of fighting to keep what we have and improving it, we're in this defeatist mindset looking back into the past and thinking it used to be better. Not appreciating the progress achieved by the sacrifices and struggles of so many. What you don't fight to keep is taken away from you.
Oh and by the way, remember the ozone crisis, it was more scary than climate change now, and we fixed it more or less now (although objectively, climate change in the future will be worse if it isn't fixed).
I really really hated school so much!! now for all the problems I had, there has been so much research into them. educators are more aware and more willing to provide individualized plans to students. I wish I had wikipedia back then, heck I wish I had chatgpt back then, I was the student that asked 1000 questions and annoyed everyone, I could annoy chatgpt instead if i were a student today.
Taxis, how horrible and scammy they were! it was such a hopeless, boring and miserable time. I could go on all day.
The key thing everyone should keep in mind is that nostalgia is by its nature deceptive. This is why eyewitness testimony is also unreliable. We selectively recall things from the past, not only that, our minds alter how we felt back then in the recall process.
I try to keep up with this stuff, but I wish to a layperson like me, the benefits of this was communicated more clearly. Even something like the JWT, I'm still not seeing the benefit. It's really awesome, don't deny that at all!
But I'd rather see more investment put into developing space-faring capabilities. Being able to transport lots of goods and people into space, and start manufacturing in space.
I've heard it said that research into this stuff will inevitably benefit all manners of other sciences, but hoping for a byproduct isn't the same as direct investment.
I'm just asking in earnest if priorities are aligned properly. I'm sure many of these experiments and projects would be more useful if they were actually built in space! Even for space agencies, it's all sorely disappointing. Their focus is on research and experimentation, which wouldn't be a problem if there were plans that were getting executed with some vision or goal of actual progress in capabilities. Their planning is also too long-term.
Why did artemis take 3 years? is it just to boast about being able to go back to the moon? By now this should have taken 3 months after over half a century. My point is not to be dismissive of the complexities, but to say that the state of things is being accepted as-is from what I'm seeing. Is there any actual solid plan to reduce at least launch times that factor?
It would be amazing if humans launched enough infrastructure into space, that there were would be foundries and factories entirely in space, reducing the dependence on transporting heavy things from earth into space.Spacecraft and space station components could largely be manufactured by mining raw materials and manufacturing with them without depending on earth's resources directly. That's probably not realistic, but what I'm decrying is not so much lack of action, but lack of vision (outside of scifi), planning, and focus.
That said, I'm just hijacking this to bring up that point of discuss. This is private cash, and I'm glad someone is donating to CERN for this research. I wish all the stuff I said could be funded with tax dollars. lay people need to see a vision, a plan, even if it can't be achieved in our lifetime, political will comes afterwards.
I suppose the question of how to prioritize scientific funding is itself a scientific problem, so we would first need to decide how much to allocate to the scientific funding sub-discipline so that all of scientific funding is as efficient as possible!
In all seriousness, I don't know how science policy works but I expect it is more goal-oriented than objective-oriented. Science rarely starts with, "What are the biggest problems faced by humanity", and then tries to take them up. Rather what it's saying is, "I know this and this about something. Given this, I think I can figure out what is that", and then tries to figure out "that". There is no greater objective to figuring out "that", other than it is there to be found. You could perhaps say the ultimate objective of science is simply to know, and so you take whatever steps are in front of you that will help you know more.
It might seem kinda wasteful on the outset, but 400 years back nobody would have dreamed that studying why these dots in the night sky move will help understand tides on earth, which in turn leads to understanding tidal currents, which in turn leads to understanding climate at a given place. 200 years back no one would have imagined that the key to health and diseases lie in finding invisible things moving around in the air. A mere 100 years back it would've been impossible to conceive studying why tiny flecks of dust jiggle about when floating on a drop of water, would lead to unlocking immense reserves of energy for civilization. Everything we are today, everything we can do, all the scientific and technological progress we have achieved is a result of this very process. It happened simply because many thousands of curious minds tried to take the next step in front of them. If some of them didn't because they were told it wasn't a worthwhile investment of resources, where would we be today?
This is science for science sake. To advance knowledge. You argue for direct investment for building space faring capabilities, rather than for advancing knowledge, but then you should state why you want these space faring capabilities.
Because they are cool? I think that's essentially the reasoning behind putting people on the Moon. If you believe there are valifld economic reasons for space, why do we need tax dollars? And also: I don't see it. Space is so hostile an environment to humans, that it's hard to understand why we should invest in capability to be there personally. People aren't even investing to harvest Greenland's resources, and they are infinitely more accessible.
For starts for science itself. If transporting things to space wasn't so costly, so much more experimentation would better be done in space.
Yes it's cool, but that isn't why. It's because of resources and human progress.
I want mirrors in space that direct/magnify sun light to destinations on earth for example.
So many of human problems today have to do with resource scarcity. The "old" world had this, and the discovery of the "new" world in the west solved lots of problems.
Every tech we have to day, every advancement in medicine, industry,etc.. from steam engines to the internet and AI is a result of the discovery of the americas. the center of trade and commerce shifted to western europe, and western europeans used lots of means including conquest of the americas by force , enslaving africans,etc.. to get gold and riches from the americas back to europe. The improvement in the quality of life for western europeans meant they could focus less on subsistence and survival, and focus on science, industry and reformations.
Space is extremely hostile to humans. You're not wrong about that, but it isn't beyond humans' capability to conquer it. Solving the obstacles in the way of space expansion requires solving things that have the ability to improve humans' lives greatly. It means we could also conquer the polar zones and tundras much more easily, and be more resilient to climate change. Like how western europe benefited from the Americas, and how they pillaged gold from the americans, so is there gold and riches in space to be pillaged and improve the lives of the world on earth. Back in the 1800s, the west was a hostile (no comparison to space of course) place people with no options went to, space could be that for a while.
Humanity can't survive in a stagnant way. We will always need more space and more energy.
This is such a repetitious issue that I wonder why there has been no class action suits so far?
I think documenting these cases somewhere, and targeting not just Alphabet but all the other "we're too big to support little people like you" companies would be a good idea. I don't think the pay out would be significant, but the punitive impact might change things.
OP is not clear , but it looks like GCP suspension not Google one (I.e email android etc)
All clouds reject a lot of businesses for their services for variety of reasons and there are alternatives in the market unlike say a Google account suspension .
I don’t think class action is feasible for cloud computing suspension (unless of course they are discriminating against a protected class etc)
i was thinking more in terms of tort law or contract law. They probably have a disclaimer and Tos that addresses all that, but given enough plaintiffs and their market dominance, it might amount to possible deliberate/calculated financial harm. It might be enough to not get thrown out of court at least. They can reject business for any reason, but once someone relies on their services for their business, there is always a certain expectation of continued service, and in the event of service termination, they may not need to explain themselves, but they must accommodate reasonable requests to transfer data, customers,etc.. elsewhere. Otherwise it sounds like tortiuous interference.
> Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm.
In this case, people who use GCP have customers and other contractual relationships. Google's termination of service interfered with that. Google also doing this as a matter of standard business practice indicates that they are aware that their action will interfere with people's contractual obligations (well common sense should tell them that anyways).
You can't force someone to sign a contract with you that says "if I interfere with your future contracts with arbitrary third parties on purpose, you can't sue me". The deliberate part is crucial from what I understand. If their decision making couldn't have accounted for the interference, and the interference wasn't calculated as an acceptable risk, there is no issue. But the plaintiffs can claim that repeated social media posts and acknowledgements of said interference by Google over the years means it's enough grounds for a suit. and a suit will mean discovery, google will have go hand over internal documents, depose employees,etc...
In the end, this might be more costly to companies like Google than just giving customers a grace period to move elsewhere before termination.
Obligatory: IANAL, I'm just a guy using big words I barely understand.
Call me cynical but I have little to no hope that even class actions would solve anything. These companies have become so big that they can take one class action after another for years to come without making a dent in their financials and without bringing any change to their operating procedures.
I'm just expecting them to change their calculus. Right now it costs them nothing to randomly shut down accounts. If it had some cost, perhaps some minor notice, accommodation,etc.. however automated might be worth just the man hours spent on lawsuits.
Of all the posts like this I’ve seen the customers are always 1) extremely scant on details about what they were using GCP for or why they were suspended, and more importantly 2) never actually paying for support.
Having worked with a fair few academics, I’m guessing they lost track of their service account keys and the account got suspended for crypto mining.
There have been plenty of posts where the reason was apparent. One i recall was caused by a guy having malware on his phone, and he happened to use a work email on his phone, so the entire GWS organization was banned, shutting down the company's operations.
Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations like that.
Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.
My only gripe is that these newer wm's require hardware acceleration. It's hard to try them out in a VM, and committing to a hardware install is a big ask for anyone that's been using something else for a while.
You can often install packages in a live system ("try" option of installation medium). The backing storage for that is a RAM disk overlay. Did you not know or is that too short-lived for you for a proper trial?
then you'll have to stop using your existing system. and yes, it's too short-lived, I'd want like a week of usage normally. I can see the videos and screenshot to know what it looks like, I want to see how buggy it is, and how hard it is to manage things with it.
> . Yes, it’s expanding the surveillance state, and yes, it’s destroying the education system, and yes, it’s being trained on copyrighted work without permission, and yes, it’s being used to create lethal autonomous weapons systems that can identify, target, and kill without human input, but… I forget my point, but ultimately, I think you should embrace it.
What's your answer to this? How did it turn out for nuclear energy? If it wasn't for this sort of thinking we'd have nuclear power all over the world and climate issues would not have been as bad.
You should embrace it, because other countries will and yours will be left behind if you don't. That doesn't mean put up with "slop", but that also doesn't mean be hostile to anything labeled "AI" either. The tech is real, it is extremely valuable (I applaud your mental gymnastics if you think otherwise), but not as valuable as these CEOs want it to be or in the way they want to be.
On one hand you have clueless executives and randos trying to slap "AI" on everything and creating a mess. On the other extreme you have people who reject things just because it has auto-complete (LLMs :) ) as one of it's features. You're both wrong.
What Jensen Huang and other CEOs like Satya Nadella are saying about this mindless bandwagonning of "oh no, AI slop!!!" b.s. is true, but I think even they are too caught up in tech circles? Regular people don't to the most part feel this way, they only care about what the tool can do, not how it's doing it to the most part. But..people in tech largely influence how regular people are educated, informed,etc...
Look at the internet, how many "slop" sites were there early on? how much did it get dismissed because "all the internet is good for is <slop>"?
Forget everything else, just having an actual program.. that I can use for free/cheap.. on my computer.. that can do natural language processing well!!! that's insane!! Even in some of the sci-fi I've been rewatching in recent years, the "AI/Computer" in spaceships or whatever is nowhere near as good as chatgpt is today in terms of understanding what humans are saying.
I'm just calling for a bit of a perspective on things? Some are too close to things and looking under the hood too much, others are too far and looking at it from a distance. The AI stock valuation is of course ridiculous, as is the overhyped investments in this area, and the datacenter buildout madness. And like I said, there are tons of terrible attempts at using this tech (including windows copilot), but the extremes of hostility against AI I'm seeing is also concerning, and not because I care about this awesome tech (which I do), but you know.. the job market is rough and everything is already crappy.. I don't want to go through an AI market crash or whatever on top of other things, so I would really appreciate it on a personal level if the cause of any AI crash is meritocratic instead of hype and bandwagonning, that's all.
I wasn’t around at the time to argue against nuclear energy.
I wasn’t old enough to argue against the internet. Plus to be fair to the ones who were, there was no prior tech that was anything like it to even make realistic guesses into what it would turn out to.
I wasn’t old enough to argue against social media and the surveillance it brought.
Now AI comes along. And I am old enough. And I am experienced enough in a similar space. And I have seen what similar technology have done and brought. And I have taken all that and my conscience and instinct tells me that AI is not a net good.
Previous generations have failed us. But we make do with the world we find ourselves born into.
I find it absurd that experienced engineers today look at AI and believe it will make their children’s lives better, when very recent history, history they themselves lived through, tells a very different story.
All so they can open 20 PRs per day for their employers.
Whether you were around or not is irrelevant, I wasn't around for some of that either. I brought it up so we can learn from the past instead of repeat those mistakes.
> , there was no prior tech that was anything like it to even make realistic guesses into what it would turn out to.
Same with LLMs.
> AI is not a net good.
You're falling into the same trap as previous generations when you do that. You won't actually end up fixing or improving the negative impacts of AI and your country/society will lose out big time in all sorts of ways.
Tech doesn't make things bad, people do to the most part. Where AI is abused, it needs legislation, not resistance and you should know it is a LOT more nuanced than that. How is an LLM language translator for tourists being loped in the same bucket as LLMs being used to target people for assasination? Your lack of nuance is laziness, no political or ideological stand can justify that laziness.
Nuclear energy had a lot of negatives, and people made the same types of arguments and outright banned it, next time you complain about climate change consider that your way of thinking might be part of the problem. Right now datacenter build outs are contributing to water scarcity for example, so instead of doing the hard and nuanced work of actually regulating and fixing that you oppose AI entirely. You do the easy thing, in the end we live in the real world and supply/demand economics rules, so your resistance is only performative at best, or catastrophic to the economy at worst. The latter part isn't for billionaries, and it isn't just for job markets, when the economy goes, all the climate change talk goes with it, all the EVs, green energy initiatives,etc... go, wars and crises increase, disease outbreaks increase. Doing the easy thing leads to this is my point, not that you need AI to prevent those.
> I find it absurd that experienced engineers today look at AI and believe it will make their children’s lives better, when very recent history, history they themselves lived through, tells a very different story.
100x it would! although whose children depends on who regulates it first. My bet is China and the EU will regulate the crap out of it and extract the most value for themselves and future generations. AI is just solution, a tool, it isn't magic as you very well know. Companies have being using ML for surveillance for a long time. The US gov was using life of pattern analysis ML ten years ago to pick out assassination targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. You have a fundamental lack of laws and a broken system of governance, don't take that out on tech.
The big disadvantage is wages, and how everything is so...formal and bureaucratic, for lack of better terms.
For example, I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree. Work hours and wages too, less pay given the tradeoffs makes sense, but getting paid more than others for the same role is a big problem, even if you have more skill/talent/experience. Or simply working long hours on salaried jobs, with the understanding that when the spring or whatever hacking cycle is over, you can take it easier, that's hard because of the formalities, laws,etc...
Perhaps the term I'm looking for is "inflexible"?
On the other hand, the reason all of that is not a problem here in the US is "bottom-line oriented" thinking, and that ultimately leads to everything getting enshittified.
It feels like the UK and EU think they're happy with where their society is at, and they mostly want to keep things afloat? The type of thinking that goes with startups involves risk taking and experimentation outside of zones of comfort, or even outright laws sometimes.
Would all these AI companies get away with scraping the internet if they were based in the UK or EU? I'm not saying they should, I'm saying look at the big picture results vs near-term stability and comforts.
If I were British or European, I would want local and/or regional wages to be high, trade surpluses to make sense, foreign dependency to be minimal, military to be strong, so that social welfare subsidies, and all the nice pro-human laws won't require so much sacrifice. The US had been (no longer) in that position, but our deep political divisions and prevalent sub-cultures of cruelty prevented us from going that extra step and having the best of both worlds for everyone.
Do you have an experience working in Europe or the UK?
> I couldn't even hope to get employment in tech in the UK or Europe without a degree
Maybe this is how it looks from the outside, but it's not how it works in reality.
My evidence is I've been working in 'tech' for 25 years and having hired people across the UK, Europe and North America. Tech is one of the most accessible career paths, particularly for areas that are novel and expanding rapidly - consequently direct experience of an area is the important currency.
Often roles will advertise a 'degree' or equivalent industry experience. The only roles I can think of where this could be an issue is trying to join a large corporate organisation in their 'graduate' programme (e.g. a major bank), but that's the same situation in the USA as well.
I have no experience working in the UK, my impression is entirely based on what people there have told me. I've also looked at job postings there. In the US you'll see "or equivalent experience" tacked on, but not in UK, Canada, EU job posts I've seen so far. But I'm very glad to hear you say it's different.
I've had a similar career, and the only time I've ever been asked about my education was towards the end of the hiring process with a major US-based tech company back in the early 2010s.
No UK employer has ever asked about it, to my knowledge.
Keep in mind that with secure messaging, if the other side gets compromised, your chats with them are compromised. This seems obvious, but with signal groups of a large size, they're effectively public groups. Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.
Don't use Signal for organizing anything of this sort, I promise you'll regret it. I've heard people having better luck with Briar, but there might be others too. I only know that Signal and Whatsapp are what you want to avoid. Unless your concern is strictly cryptographic attacks of your chat's network-traffic and nothing more.
> Signal insists on using your phone number too, refusing user ids or anything that will make analysis hard.
That is no longer true, you can use user IDs now.
For the other problem, you can enable self-deleting messages in group chats, limiting the damage when a chat does become compromised. Of course, this doesn't stop any persistent threat, such as law enforcement (is that even the right term anymore?) getting access to an unlocked phone.
It doesn't mean much if it isn't the default, even then people who got it prior to that use phone numbers, you can protect yourself maybe, but not other people in the group. But it's good they're doing this now.
Not traitor, but compromised user. Given enough targets, one of them will have their device compromised. Of course the FBI has access to things more powerful than pegasus I'm sure (Just guessing).
Apparently, one member of the group uploaded a personal photo as an avatar.
I've also heard of side-channel attacks on Signal that could allow for profiling a user's location, which with the FBI's resources could presumably eventually result in identification.
Bitmessage is/was awesome, but it fundamentally doesn't scale.
Every user has to attempt decryption of every message sent by any sender. Later they cobbled on some kind of hokey sharding mechanism to try to work around this, but it was theoretically unmotivated and an implementation minefield (very easy for implementation mistakes in the sharding mechanism to leak communication patterns to an observer).
Bitmessage would be great if we had something like Schnorr signatures (sum of (messages signed with different keys) = (sum of messages) signed with (sum of keys)) that could tell you if any of the sum of a bunch of messages was encrypted to your secret key. Then you could bisection-search the mempool.
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