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Last time I wrote anything remotely academic was several decades ago, but at that time, the argument was that you had to use LaTeX because Word documents had no support for simultaneous editing, version control, and editors comments. It is truly bizarre to see the same arguments repeated after so long time but completely reversed, in favor of Microsoft Word. Surely the tools haven't become worse over time, given the popularity of github, Overleaf and such?

The protocols themselves are not important anymore. It's all variants of http to Google or Amazon. What's important is control of the end user device, and Google and Apple keep a remote root connection with "their" terminals at all time. Any data that is obtained remotely will be from the presentation layer, not the network layer. This is also harder to US adversaries to access, so an argument could be made that for the majority of normal people this is a net increase in security.

If you wanted to make the corresponsing strong argument for Chat Control and its ilk, the EU just wants (the juicy part of) what the US already has. The remote root level control of most end user devices is not under EU juristiction. So they naturally want companies operating in the EU to give them one piece of access to the presentation layer, too.

This argument is what one must be prepared for, the encryption itself is less relevant..


No to belittle your find even the slightest, but it might be good to notice that tcpflow decodes tcp flows, which is exactly what Wireshark does, only the latter in a GUI and with a plethora of other protocol decoders. Just right click any tcp packet and select Follow.

Both tools even use the same filtering language, coming from tcpdump itself. Wireshark's protocol decoder is more advanced than tcpflow. It does understand fragmented packets. So given a choice, Wireshark is often the preferred tool.


There's also the fact that all parties involved benefits from overstating the story. Facebook doesn't hate the reputation that their impact is so powerful as to sway elections. Cambridge Analytica and whatever they turned into has a reference customer like any other. Those who lost the election has an explanation that doesn't involve having to change.

Zuckerberg sounds a bit entitled in that interview. Yes, it was a chore having to appear in the senate and all, but he would probably not hesitate to take that same chance again if he could. As they say, all attention is good attention, and that probably goes double if you personally control the biggest social network on the planet.


Right. Among bicycle advocacy groups it's been well known for long time that cars do not run over people, drivers do.

The fact that we talk about a car running someone over, and this is the same in many different languages and countries, contributes to lower punishments for drivers. Clearly it was just an accident. He or she was run over by a car.

Now we see that same language tricks play out again every time an LLM did something illegal.


And what if it's a self-driving car? :)

You say this flippantly, but I think this is actually another very good example!

We even do it for obviously unintelligent inanimate objects. A rollercoaster ran too fast for its tracks, killing 10 people. In that sentence, the roller coaster is the subject which took an action and caused death — obviously the roller coaster is not ethically at fault here, the people who built the rollercoaster are at fault through negligence.

Although this example and the ones around cars both demonstrate how we tolerate some degree of "accidents" from humans as no-fault, which is fair. I wonder how that fits into this analogy? I suppose its all about intent (mens rea) and judgement: did they intend for the roller coaster to harm people, and should they have reasonably predicted that the accident was likely to happen.


Right, and negligence is a broad concept and could be criminal in itself. As a car driver, glancing at your phone at exactly the wrong moment could kill someone. Clearly that is an accident, but if you know fully well that lookin at your phone while driving could kill someone, that negligence is willful and that should matter. The same can be said about doing things like strapping thousands of LLMs to systems that have the potential to disturb other poeple.

Sooner or later we will hear about an AI that broke out and phished people into sending money.

I just hope that we won't extend the same leniency to those operators as we have done now.

"I did my best to stop it, sir, but it kept convincing people to send me money against my will!" (Perhaps best read in Bender's voice.)


That would actually be kind of hilarious, and I could easily see it happening.

E.g. the agent's instruction is to finish some task on cloud infra and it has a $100 budget.

It realizes it will cost $200, and instead of surfacing this to the user (who has told the agent it has full autonomy to figure out how to complete the task, the user just wants the final result), it decides to start phishing people to acquire the remainder budget and top up its credits. Or look on the dark web for stolen credit card credentials or something.


"Tiny" speed improvement? According to the benchmarks, it's almost 10x the speed of rsync!

Really serious benchmarks never contain any information about network characteristics, options used or buffer sizes, and these are indeed very serious. The "details" button produces huge bar graphs. No disappointment there.

Absolutely looking forward to 10x my speed, perhaps even transferring gigabytes per second on my gigabit link.


> GrapheneOS cannot include GPL code if they want to remain permissive

It's hard to take this seriously when the entire kernel is GPL.


> A LAMP at this time meant a lot of manual setup, IaC wasn't a thing,

I'm sorry but this is just nonsense. LAMP is called that because it was a very standardized thing. Pop in a Debian CD and select a ready made profile for it. There were even ready made installers for Windows and Mac if you weren't on an Internet native operating system.

A lot more people got by using custom bash scripts, but cfengine exited in the 90s. It's still not honest to say things were more manual. Take a look at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today and look at the Compose or self hosted K8s stacks people set up today. That's orders of magnitude more manual work than just popping in a CD and selecting LAMP.

Yes, those are not the same thing. Yes, a self hosted stack today consists of so much more than running PHP in a web server. But for self hosters, the amount of work required has objectively gone through the roof. That's a problem if your goal is data sovereignty.


> op in a Debian CD and select a ready made profile for it.

At the time in question here tasksel wasn't a thing, I think merely a concept. It made its way in Debian installer around 20005 IIRC, right along "one-click installs" from hosting services mentioned in the other reply. The whole decade before that, indeed manual set up was needed.

> at /r/homelab or somewhere selfhosters hang out today [...] That's orders of magnitude more manual work

There is two kinds of self-hosters, those who aim at reproducibility and those who don't. The latter is more fun, the former gets quickly mandatory when you _rely_ on your homelab.


> It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.

It is trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.


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