Paper and glass boxes is the best technology for voting. It's easy to spoof, but it's also easy to detect when someone is spoofing the result.

The most essential property of a voting process is that anyone can understand how it proceeds, and with digital voting you need to rely on techno priests reviewing that everything went as intended. That's not secure, no matter how complex cryptographic algorithm you create to avoid tampering.

Because laws must reflect whatever society collectively considers ethical. The monopoly is granted for an ethical reason (at least in theory), so corporations must comply and accept that, even if they like to pretend it was created only so they can extract profit and ethics was not concerned.

NRA is not the only US 2A rights organization, it's not even the most effective. GOA for example defending Pretti's "right to bear arms while protesting", as did the SAF and many others

Odd, that's not what the NRA stated, nor what any media org reported them as saying. So where do you get that so-called "quote"?

Trump was the one who said "it was a bad idea to bring a gun", and here is the NRA's actual response to trump's suggestion: “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,”.

You are correct -- under federal law, it is legal to make your own firearm for personal use (PMF), though manufacturing firearms with the intent to resell for profit requires a federal license (FFL). A few states are trying to pass their own local restrictions on firearms manufacture. Some of these proposed bills, such as in the states of Colorado and Washington, also include CNC machine tool fabrication in their bans.

This specific bill proposed in California is focused solely on 3D printing

Most commercial printers, copiers, and print engines, but not "all"

So it was solved not by a law, and not by software that looks for anything resembling currency, but rather by placing a simple, easily software-detectable, pattern into all currency, and ensuring that anti-counterfeiting tools treat any currency lacking this pattern as fake money.

Okay, so now we just need to mandate the (mostly anonymous, decentralized) designers of printable gun CAD files to embed these special patterns into their open-source STEP and other CAD files, and then convince the open source printer and slicer software developers to include the detection code ...

The currency detection pattern (The "EURion Constellation") was added to the design of banknotes and certain other documents to enable detection. Good luck getting the printable gun STEP/STL/GCODE people to embed a special small easily-detected feature into their files!

Also worth noting that currency detection isn't a law, and isn't in every printer. The few companies making high-quality color printer/copier internals caved to political pressure and "voluntarily" added detection for a very simple pattern to their firmware. Adobe also embedded this in their (closed source) photoshop software.

Reliable detection of anything that might possibly be a gun or a part of a gun, in any possible 3d rotation, is not a trivial problem, an effective solution would pretty much first depend on developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

If you believe that computers are fully deterministic, I have a PC I want to sell you...

Theoretical computers may be fully deterministic, but physical computational machines are made of electrical signals running on rare earth semiconductors, and with AI we have complex statistical chaotic interactions on top.

Any small unpredictable perturbation at any later may swing the whole system in a whole new direction. Hardly what we'd call deterministic (unless you believe the whole universe is deterministic, in which case the word loses all differentiation power).

Seems like the typical case of workers producing things of value that can actually be sold...

If the workers had produced "things of value" in the past couple of years instead of uninspired, repetitive and boring slop, the company would not have been bought by Tencent. But the didn't and now Tencent is cleaning house.

I for one think it's a good thing that incompetence has consequences. And I hope Ubisoft can find its way again, and eventually starts delivering good games again.

So, basically the weights of an AI model are a compilation of human knowledge, i.e. an encyclopedia - or its equivalent for the XXI century. They don't contain just what human authors select and have the capacity to write, but everything that they're exposed to and that is frequent enough to leave a trace in the weights.

Any content generation of an LLM which isn't guided by a human is merely a random walk through that compressed encyclopedia of everything, following the most well-connected paths more frequently (that's why long generations often get caught in loops btw). There's no real agency in those 'agents'.

None of them. They're borrowing trillions in a triangular scheme of circular lending; the computing platform company invests trillions in the AI company which invests trillions in the energy company which invests trillions in the original computing company, increasing their overall valuation until they're all Too Big To Fail before the bubble pops.

+1 Informative, you

If a new development is going to leave large numbers of people unemployed, it would make sense for the government to seize it so that the wealth created by it can be invested in supporting those who lost their jobs because of it.

However, for some reason I suspect Anthropic's CEO may be hoping for the opposite result, having the government subsidizing the private company with whatever excuse.

It's a lot easier to remember that your asterisks will be converted.

For neurotypical people not trained in programming languages, it actually is easier to use 'symbols' for *emphasis*, because they work as augmenters of the written text (i.e. they take the same role as punctuation, parentheses, question marks and exclamation signs), instead of changing the reading processing mode into a totally different mental context (i.e. as code tags instead of natural text with markings). Markdown was a clever hack to get that natural reading experience to digital text formatting.

For the untrained eye, <i> and <b> look more like alien ships from an Invaders videogame that somehow got stuck in the middle of one paragraph, not as helpful commands to change the behaviour of the computer; you need to have a quite thorough understanding of how a computer processes digital text in order to understand those tags, which is simply not needed to use markdown.

We need to organize. All of us who are not billionaires, it's in our best interest to ensure that they don't get that much power; this time there won't be enough marquisates, counties, and baronies to fight over among ourselves for the crumbs they're willing to give us to keep us in line.

This time, socialism won't do; we're not proletarians doing work on a production line. We need to be able to create our work projects without being able to sabotage us or buy from one of these great feudal platforms.

For once we have the necessary tools and knowledge to make it viable. It is true that platforms centralize power, but we have enough free software and open computers to create an alternative that does not depend on that central power. We only lack awareness that it is necessary to achieve it, and the organization to carry it out.