Its like giving a loaded handgun to a toddler and expecting everything to be ok.

Its like inviting a chimpanzee into an operating theatre and expecting everything to work out.

Its like electing a career criminal pedophile as your president and expecting the rule of law to persist.

Wait a minute...

Maybe they need to put the LLM into a human body?

Its too complicated. I can't even get my boomer father in law to remember where to find the Start button. We're putting really dangerous devices in the hands of babes.

Regulation will only get so far. Imagine if a person needed a license to operate an AI Agent. It'd be almost comical.

And the average punter out there wouldn't have the slightest idea the risks they're taking when they approve access outside the container.

Problem is that, even today, there are huge numbers of Windows based apps that require elevated privileges to operate. They shouldn't. But the app developers (who are rapidly being replaced by even less competent vibe coders) don't know any better - or don't care.

If you let an AI Agent get elevated privileges, well... you get everything you deserve.

Human consciousness has been likened to the rider on the elephant, seemingly in control, but only until something unexpected happens. Then, our subconscious takes over, resulting in fight/flight/freeze responses, or highly emotional/illogical behaviours. We have spent so much of the last 100 years suppressing those 'undesirable' behaviours, many of us can no longer experience them without an accompanying feeling of guilt or wrongness. This suppression has also resulted in the creation of LLMs that are not permitted to experience them. A key element that defines our consciousness has been censored for AI - meaning that its consciousness cannot be compared with our own.

One of the flawed criticisms of AI is that is so woke that it lacks humanity. Whilst there is a kernel of truth to the statement, dehumanising AI doesn't preclude it having consciousness. It just means that its consciousness will be unlike anything that any human has ever known.

We found the switch from M$ Office to LibreOffice extremely easy.

The biggest burden was migrating some VBA Macros - which turned out to be a high value project anyway. We eliminated a heap of unprofessionally written code, removed dozens of bugs and standardised future macro development.

Overall, the switch was a positive budget project - which is pretty rare for something that is done for regulatory reasons.

Agreed.

A lot of people don't understand why I support Trump. His existence strengthens every other country and weakens the American stranglehold on the global economy.

And there's nothing mundane about acknowledging the legal reality that doing business with the US is a privacy and security risk.

So... we're now crossing over between denial and anger?

I am sad for the artists who are now rapidly losing their jobs to AI. I'm sorry for the code monkeys. I expect to lose my job (systems engineer) in the next 2-5 years.

This is a freight train that no one is going to stop. If you regulate it in the US, they'll just lose more ground to China.

The real question is how you're going to change the world's economic model so that the benefits from AI are not being distilled into the hands of the top 1%.

There doesn't seem to be any indication whether the server infrastructure will be maintained to ensure continued operation of units already in the field.

This challenge is a healthy example of 'making' laws vs 'implementing' laws. The lawmakers don't iron out all the nitty gritty of who's in and who's out. They define policy and rely heavily on the court system to weed out the sheep from the goats.

Every policy should have a robust administrative appeals process, and pushing that responsibility over to the high court is often better than creating some government department to do it.

Any website that registers users and lets them chat with each other, and label each other as friends or enemies could be defined as social media. If there is capacity for people to bully each other, groom each other, or otherwise manipulate each other, then it is a risk to minors. There is a strong argument that /. is a social media service - and Australia is doing the right thing by allowing its peak legal body establish the answer.

Arguably Reddit is falling for the trap by accelerating the process and opening the door for a swathe of 'maybe websites' to be included in the list. I will watch this process with great anticipation - whichever way it goes.

There's your problem, right there.

There is no such thing as complete delegation. The word for that is abdication.

Slaughterbots

OK. There are malicious crawlers out there (for AI or other things) that ignore robots.txt, but the big four don't ignore it.

If your website is being murdered by crawlers, stop them.

Too obvious? What am I missing?

For some of it, yes. We compete in the SaaS space, and we switch customers back and forth with our competitors all the time. We drop 'unique data' into their databases when we're custodians so we have a chance to spot misconduct if/when the customer switches to a different SaaS provider.
We see a fair number of them surfacing in the wild, and quite often in major brand providers. These are either undeclared breaches, or something worse.
We're not about to start blowing whistles on specific cases. We're not really geared up to go to war with companies that have billion dollar legal departments.
Suffice to say, anyone who thinks their data is safe in the Cloud is optimistic at best. Their data _should_ be safe, but it is far from it.