There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to it. You've damn well heard and seen most of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Conflating "you", as in the individual you are replying to, with "you", as in some loud or prevailing opinion out of a loosely defined group, is what leads to your angst.

The guy you replied to likely has a consistent opinion on this. I bet the loud voices that said this was bad for the US to do are also saying its bad for China to do. You're inventing an issue and displaying, once again, how ironic your name is. At least the mods see it for what it is (-1 right now).

EXACTLY THIS! The US forced Nvidia to offer a modified (compromised?) version of their hardware for the market in China. It's blatantly and plainly a modified version that was modified to ensure the US maintains an edge over them. Why wouldn't they do this? The US already did that, and more, to their products (Huawei, as you mentioned). Who is surprised by this?!?! (besides the orange tariff king, of course)

FWIW, output is non-deterministic on purpose. Also, some models can be fed a seed that will then ensure the result is the (mostly the) same on repeated runs:
https://cookbook.openai.com/ex...

I wonder if there are some especially good seeds that often produce "better" results, somewhat like how Minecraft uses seeds and some of those produce some spectacular results, while most produce average results and some are awful.

How much LESS often did your hands go from face to public surface and vice-versa? How often do you even sneeze in public (I go for dog walks multiple times every day, in the city, through parks, and that's probably weekly to bi-weekly for me)? FYI, when I sneezed during masking, I simply held in my sneeze if outside of my home. If/when I could not do so, I would certainly keep the mask on, and also cover my face with my arm. Did you not!?!?

100% agree. It's not at all like MS Recall; They're doing this the right way.

I think this rsilvergun guy might disagree with you - "couldn't think of anything stupider than letting another company (like those cloud backup companies) handle encrypted data like that" :-P

Seriously though... how do you propose we "just do the encryption yourself" in this case? The IOS app doesn't even have an option to export chat history. On the desktop, one can use sqlite to dump the chat DB, but are we really going to recommend that normal users implement an encrypted backup that way?

I'd move that line in the sand. This backup is excellent for most people, business and personal, under most circumstances.
If you fear rubber hose cryptanalysis, this solution may not be for you.

Given your concerns, I don't think Signal is the right solution for your scandalous activities. It's not anonymous; The content is end to end encrypted. This backup seems to add a little anonymity compared to Signal messages (which are tied to account identifiers), so I would say if Signal is good enough for you then this backup is likely good enough as well.

How does this backup service change this situation? Currently, one can run Signal desktop and all the messages are stored in an encrypted sqlite DB, and they can give anyone access to that. You then suggest the user do the encryption and backup themselves, which is far more likely to leak info than their solution.

Sharing a similar anecdote... a former employer went from company provided email and a variety of whatever chat apps we were using (from IRC, SILC, AOL IM, Mumble, and Hangouts), to requiring everyone use MS Linc, which turned into Skype for Business, and eventually to MS Teams. Email went from an inhouse open source solution, to MS Exchange on prem, to Office365, and then to restricting client access to only MS Outlook (no third party email clients). More and more beholden to MS, fewer and fewer features and less flexibility, less usability (try finding files that were shared or browsing old chat history - which they purge and only keep server side), and way more screen real estate (why did most chat apps go from AOL IM / ICQ size vertical rectangle that fits nicely on wide monitors to browser window scale things like Teams!?!?).

For the longest time, anyone could use one of the multi-protocol clients (ex. Pidgin) that fit their needs best. Why did we "upgrade" to something that removes that feature and forces a heavyweight UI with worse features? (rhetorical: control, eyeballs, lock-in?)

Dunno if that's the ticket (those are different, though similar, licenses), but I love the idea of coding LLM's trained only a targeted codebase. For example, train one only on Linux Kernel source for use in working with Linux Kernel code... I imagine the code style and such would be a better fit, and that codebase is big enough to learn a lot from it.

As a counter-example, if a coding assistant was trained with a lot of obfuscated C, I wouldn't want the results going into my production codebase.

100% this!

And then they add, "This may cause you to be subject to fines and penalties under the GDPR and other laws."?!?!!? Is the hacker really threatening with ambiguous laws, while being the actual culprit violating bunches of laws? HA!

ROBOT JOX! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I swear, that dystopian future, as batshit crazy as it is, seems more and more likely every day. Companies are already competing for best rockets to get to space; autonomous drones are fighting each other and humans; the big countries with nukes can't resist war but the people don't want to be directly involved... let them fight it out in a wasteland with giant robots and make it entertainment!?!

Anyway... great movie if you haven't seen it :-)

So we've come full circle now. Are they doing business in France (or the EU)? I'll clarify this time... I mean financial transactions that France can actually block because the involve entities are within France (or the EU), as opposed to GP's view[^1]. If they have no such financial situation, and if this behavior is not against the law in the AU, then what's France got to do with it?

[^1] GP's view seems to be that advertisers paying a company in Australia that serves content that winds up being viewed by someone in the EU means said company is doing business in the EU.

OK... so neither of us have that answer. You have a guess. You have mentioned nothing about where their servers are, where their people are, where their business is declared, registered marks, etc etc.. nothing indicating anything about their business at all, except a wild ass guess that they may profit from advertising in some form.

We're right back to where we started; Your comment of, "If they're doing business in Europe... (or if they're not) ..." I see no point to progressing this discussion without setting that fact straight first.

Pay-per-view TV is a form of directly profiting from the viewership - The viewer directly pays for the content.
Advertising supported content sites (and please note, I did not make that assumption about their business) are one of the most pure definitions of INDIRECT profiting. They do not get their money directly from those they appear to serve; They get money indirectly via associated advertisers.

If they're not profiting directly from anyone in France, and the money doesn't flow to France, does that change your opinion? You even stated, "If they don't want to follow them they can choose to just not do business there." So if they're not doing business there, then they don't have to follow that law, right?

OH! You're just off your rocker crazy wrong. Got it.
Look, even if you can reason this out, that position is untenable. It's not how things work today, and it would introduce enormous complexities.

On the plus side, at least this is a well defined position; Clearly wrong, but well defined :-P

That seems to be part of the problem - that all they have to do is refund the money for that purchase. I don't know how many titles they have pulled, but it can't have been that many (The book 1984 is the only thing that comes to mind, but I know there are others). Point is, it's worth the cost to them to keep the interface simple. You just "buy" it, and if "it" ever goes away AND enough people get upset/sue, then they'll just issue some refunds.

Amazon may even be able to recoup that cost from whomever licensed it to them in the first place. What motivation do they have to change the "buy" button into something else? What change could one make that would make it clear that there is "Rent" and "More-or-less buy it, but it may go away someday without much notice"? And would said change decrease purchases by more than the penalties from stuff like this?

Honest question: Are they doing business in Europe? Or is their content simply accessible from Europe and/or accepts posts from Europe? IMO, that makes a world of difference.