For practical purposes this is accurate. Ostensibly, however, the US government is supposed to exist only for the purposes of securing our rights. If logical or moral consistency were relevant, as soon as they claim to be "outside the bounds" of the constitution, there is no longer any justification for them to exercise power at all.

Which leads to the real life outcome that if they can get away with it, then they can get away with it.

Where's the boat?

Not sure if it's an age thing or what, but you're not supposed to take it as a given that the police can set up a sting based on automated output from an unaccountable machine; even if the police themselves were perfectly professional about it.

The issue is not whether the cops acted professionally. The issue is that, even if the surface level outcomes seem similar, there is a huge difference in your actual level of freedom in a world where a someone has to convince a judge that your behavior is suspicious verses one in which a bunch of automated and bureaucratic systems can flag you as a problem with no means for you to make them account for their reasoning.

Yeah. This seems like the real objection.

Could we solve satisfactorily the engineering risks? Sure. But when someone says "it's still too risky," the underlying issue is not engineering. It's that the risk of takeover-by-idiot remains in place for the lifetime of any given plant.

"We're wasting too much time on paperwork, so let's find a way to do paperwork more quickly" sounds sensible on the surface, but when you recognize that time is just one resource, that translates "We're wasting too many resources on paperwork on resources, so let's spend more resources into spending resources on paperwork more quickly."

Assuming you live in a functioning democracy, and can get enough political clout to move the needle on the issue at all, the opening bid should be "our society does not owe you a living, therefore, the day you stop supporting a piece of software is the day copyright expires."

If your leadership is, like mine, so corrupt that there's nothing you can do, then I'm sorry, that's no fun. But it makes absolutely no sense to have video game companies dictating what peoples' rights are or what counts as property.

Discounting the Wilhoit observation, the entire left-right model is silly, and describing the OP as a "left wing extremist" obsuscates the truth of what was said without doing anything at all to address it. It's also the entire purpose served by the left/right model in the first place; you can't think about the underlying dynamic if you're trying to police everyone into playing a "moderate" voice along an imaginary left-right spectrum.

In the USA, the Epstien class (aka billionaires) have spent decades stoking anti-humanist, authoritarian fantasies of MAGA style conservatives in order to prevent the rest of us from building anything even remotely like equal representation or equal protection under the law. Nothing about that can possibly get better unless the Epstien class and their cronies are held to account. There is also no mechanism by which they can be held to account without severely reducing their political and economic power over the rest of us.

Plainly - we can have a representative government or we can have the billionaires, but we cannot have both. That's largely by their design. It's not a "left-wing extremist" thing. It's a straightforward observation about our current reality.

You go to the documentation site and somewhere is a "contribute" button that asks for a donation. Sometimes people realize that they appreciate the project and donate money. AI does no such thing.

Accurate, though I'm really confused why this debate is happening at all.

Human traffickers in Myanmar aren't going to be the slightest bit curious about what US law says about the death penalty. They probably would care to know whether or not a country with an army might decide shut them down. Kind of weird to wake up in a world where the US is focused on attacking it's own citizens while China is getting into the business of stopping human traffickers.

... and why not? They clearly enjoyed how it tasted in the paint.

... also, now that you mention it, getting rid of that particular windbag would be in the best interests of our national security.

I was thinking "target practice."

Maybe. But the law says otherwise, and thus far, every time we've caved to "I shouldn't have to obey the law because it messes with my profits," things have tended to get worse.

Somehow you managed to completely invert the meaning of my argument, and then attempt to approximately repackage it as a counterargument to itself.

If someone rm -rf s their own root, that should be on them. Everything about that program and the platforms that support it says "this is meant for people who know what they are doing, so make sure you know what you are doing."

The slashdot crowd tends to be in the know, so it tracks that people have the same general attitude that AI users ought to be informed as well. But those tools are generally being marketed as skill / knowledge base equalizers intended to allow people to do things where they have zero or near zero skill.

At some point if the box has really big letters that read "safety scissors," we ought to point out that it's not really the purchaser's fault if they didn't notice that the small print on the back says "warning, may explode," and it should be on the manufacturer to be more responsible with their marketing.