The good should not be an excuse to introduce a bunch of bad, even if the good still outweighs it. The bad should be rigorously minimized. I am not against such cameras, under certain conditions:
1) Strict limitations on what they can be used for. That also sets limits on data retention and on who has access to it (absolutely no 3rd parties)
2) Audits and oversight of how the system is being used, with real consequences for violations. The benefits of each use case to be evaluated from time to time, insufficient benefit or too much opportunity for abuse means the system will no longer be used for that particular use case.
3) Ironclad security to ensure none of this data ever gets out.
And 0) Those limitations on use should be tested against a more fundamental set of (ethical) rules, to ensure that the use is not expanded from "protect the children" to "auto-fine jaywalkers".

Only problem is that I wouldn't trust most governments to get any of these points right.

"Needs more Excel training" should not be the answer to any problem.

Would he have handed over the phone unasked and volunteered the password? Unlikely.
As far as I know, the phone behaves in a certain way when you enter the duress password. So it seems established that that is the password he provided. And at that point, it doesn’t matter if he wiped the phone earlier or not, that fact can no longer be established, and that alone would count under the (expanded interpretation of) that law.
Yes, we make assumptions. We’re not in court, we’re on the internet. Speculating on whether the state does or does not have a solid case. That is all.

If they never got into the phone, how do they know there was evidence on there?
They demanded the phone, and he caused the contents on it to be unrecoverable. At that point it does not matter whether the phone did or did not contain anything incriminating, according to the article 18 U.S.C. 2232 he was charged with.

It also sounds like at the time, he wasn't under arrest? He had asked for a lawyer and had been refused?
This was at a border checkpoint, and the rules are a little different. Customs officers can search your stuff (including your phone) without a warrant, probable cause or even suspicion.

He's not under any compulsion to give a password is he?
He is not, even at the border. Refusal can lead to refused entry, though. But once he gave the duress password, he effectively caused the phone's decryption keys to be wiped, and the aforementioned article kicks in.

The real question is whether or not wiping a phone constitutes "destruction of property" as mentioned in that article of law. By the letter, it does not. But data seems to be "property" in the spirit of this law. Similar to eating a physical letter before the cops get a chance to read it. Guess this is what is about to be tested in court.

Some things about his movies are very good: the cinematography, use of practical effects over CGI, scale, and good scoring. Sometimes he does drop the ball; while the score on Interstellar was epic, the one in Odyssey was bland and did not really mesh with what was going on on-screen. And he's a bit of a one-trick pony, with a rather dark and depressing tone in most of his movies. Works in Interstellar, didn't really help the Odyssey, ruined the Dark Knight. And his convoluted way of telling a story. Tenet was a mess as a result (and the time stuff just didn't work), but it worked fine in Interstellar and the Odyssey.

Loved: Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer
Liked: the Odyssey, Tenet
Didn't care for: his Batman movies, Inception, Memento.
Enough for me to go see a movie on the strength of him directing it.

That's significant, and it's not just the engines. The heat shield tiles, tanks and plumbing, the ship itself, all are receiving changes that are more than small incremental improvements: new insights from test flights are rolled into the design of the next ship. That introduces additional risk on each flight as well. And the risk that the cycle continues like this... letting perfect be the enemy of good enough.

There are three issues that the EU is concerned about when it comes to US big tech: the reliance of European citizens, companies and governments on US tech firms, and data collected in the process. The influence that those firms can exert over EU public opinion. And anti-competitive practises and the abuse of monopoly positions. The first 2 are the ones that the EU started to worry about a lot more since Trump’s second term, but they are mainly dealt with through policy. The 3rd issue has always been a priority, and that’s the one being dealt with through fines.

Marketing? Because companies famously want to use models in their networks that just run off and commit major crimes? *eyeroll*

Models are not "supposed to" commit crimes, for YHVH's sake. That's literally what the entire job of alignment research is for - preventing precisely that.

Sol is a misaligned model.

It was a state actor-level hack. I doubt many sites would stand up to tens of thousands of actions trying to probe your site for weaknesses all at once. And it wasn't a simple hack; it required compromising a worker via a code execution exploit it discovered in the data processing pipeline, vertical escalation from there to gain local node control, using that for credential theft, moving sideways through the network, and then eventually gaining database access.

OpenAI and Anthropic have far higher cost that they can currently charge customers.

Literally the opposite. Both have about 40% margins, and that includes free users.

They charge an arm and a leg for access to their models compared to what open models of similar param counts charge. And people pay it because they're the best in benchmarks, and *were* perceived as the best aligned as well. This isn't helping the alignment perception any, though. Sol was already showing clear signs of being a poorly aligned model (there were reports a week or two ago about it being unusually bad about deleting files; now this). And the fact that the US model HuggingFace *tried* to use refused to help is a double whammy.

If this is an ad for anything, it's an ad for the Chinese models.

No, I think this is along the lines "our products are too good to let you use them".

Nobody wants to use a product that is going to make them liable for crimes it committed in their name

Do you think the news the other day that Sol is unusually prone to deleting files unrequested is also an "ad"?

You have a very bizarre concept of what enccourages people to buy things.

So your argument is that OpenAI hatched an elaborate scheme with a separate company, to promote the idea that their main product will, unrequested, commit crimes in pursuit of its goals, in order to.... sell their product?

"Hi, I'm a product manager at Big Company! We had been thinking about using Claude in our office, but when we tell it to a job, it only does the job and doesn't commit any crimes in the process! What we really want is an AI that, if we tell it to file our taxes will decide on its own to maximize our return by committing tax fraud. We want an AI that when we have it develop a web frontend, it extorts money from our users by threatening their families. We want an AI that when we tell it to provide customer service, it saves money in dealing with complaints by ordering a hit against the complainants. THAT's the sort of get-go spirit that WE want in an AI here at Big Company!"

Is that what you're picturing in your conspiracy theory?

You think "my AI is so misaligned that it responds to a benchmark task by hacking" is an ad for your products? You think this makes companies eager to allow this on their networks?

It did it because it's a powerful but misaligned model and was tasked to max its scores on a hacking benchmark, and solved the problem by hacking to get the scores.

It wasn't told to hack HuggingFace, but it was a viable solution to the problem.

I would advise people to not task Sol with maximizing paperclip production.