But the good kinds that actually work and help people are

I like to think of myself as a pretty tech competent person but I do tend to buy pretty high end hardware when I do replace a computer every 8+ years or so. I feel like it will likely last me longer and I won’t have to change computers again as soon.

That’s a good point, and I feel that way about things like weapons manufacture or intelligence, and yeah, probably working for Google or Palantir. There is a limit to the abrogation of our responsibility because we need to make a living. But I still somewhat disagree with some of your point, on practical grounds, which is basically that “AI” doesn’t really work.

I agree with the first part, but scientists and engineers are not that much more complicit than literally everyone with a job. Those businesses couldn’t have done that without marketing, hr, janitors, tradespeople, lawyers etc etc etc either. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism and there is no ethical job.

We do not have the death penalty, it is banned in the charter on human rights and abolishing it was a requirement for joining for those countries which still had it on the books, although it was more or less phased out in all European countries by the time that happened.

Yeah, indeed. Fwiw I hope you’re right. Although I don’t think this process is going to take just a few days, even at the rate things have been going the last few years that’s too fast.

No we aren’t lol Europe is going to capitulate to keep NATO intact

The only people who are lying are people who upload stuff which is against their terms of service lmao

As we saw in this story from a few months ago, yes, absolutely, manufacturers will stoop to the level of disabling devices which are prevented from exfiltrating your data. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of TVs doing the same with the network modules but I’m too lazy to search for it now.

Where in their comment does it say “exactly zero users”? Oh right, it doesn’t

I get all that, I just mean you can’t just ignore the social reality. Like you said elsewhere in this thread, Linux is barely cracking 3% of the desktop market. Can you run an LLM locally? Of course. Do people do it? No, except a couple of hardcore enthusiasts. That is an issue which can’t just be cleanly separated from the technology itself and has to be taken into account when discussing it.

Also, weapons are tools.

A hammer can be used for good or bad but a shrapnel bomb can only kill and maim; not all tools are multivalent like that, some are realistically only used for evil. Additionally, divorcing discussion of a tool from the social context like this is blinding to the real consequences. We don’t have small scale LLMs running on personal machines (even if we could, that’s not how it is now), we have them at industrial scale controlled by a few billionaires. It’s purely fantastical thinking to say that just because you could imagine a world where they’d be used for good, that actually means anything.

You clearly haven’t read it, since he lays out clearly the exact steps that would be required.

Many online banks and money services can do this. I have an account with one whose main purpose is transferring money to my home country to pay my student loans and for money while traveling, but they also offer these digital visa cards. Wouldn’t consider it “private” in any serious way but it’s probably less bad than paypal.

There’s a fair argument for a longer sentence for such a horrible crime, but for Germany this is pretty long, prison sentences are not as inflated there as in the USA.

Hahaha, you got me in the first half

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of wonderful things about it, but living there is much worse than visiting. It is very normal to have mould all through your house and have to wear your coat indoors in the winter because you can’t afford to heat and the house has no insulation, we have staggeringly high levels of poverty for a “developed” country. Yes, people are friendly, the nature is some of the best in the world, and the lifestyle is relaxed. But the disparity between incomes and cost of living means most normal people are really quite struggling to make ends meet, the health system is a shell of its former self, and things are just overall getting worse quite rapidly. I know that’s not unique, most of the Anglosphere has basically the same issues, but we already started at the lower-income end of that group.

I promise you you wouldn’t like living there as much as you think. I agree our immigration laws are really shitty though, and you should be allowed to come find out for yourself what a crappy country we are.

Because they just don’t write emails like this, it’s way more likely that some scammer fooled your friend.

its from my friend so thats all I need personally

You think it’s literally impossible that your friend would be fooled into thinking the email was from Microsoft when it wasn’t?