> Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.

I don't get what's difficult to understand or believe here. Grok causes a big issue in practice right now, a larger issue than photoshop, and it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't, so the state intervenes.

> maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?

You're basically asking "why do a surgical strike when you can do carpet bombing"? A surgical strike is used to target the actual problem. With carpet bombing you mostly cause collateral damage.

> it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't

Yes they do regulate it. But then people find exploits just like the competition.

I don't think that's a candid description of how X handled this.

I don’t think saying other people aren’t candid is polite or advances the conversation.

Just calling out the false equivalence (Grok self-regulation: dragging their feet and doing the absolute minimum too late after deflecting all blame on the users, while the competition proactively tries to harden the models against such use)

Grok's always proactively had limits on adult content frm the day it was first released public. There's equivalence, you're stating that it's false but I haven't seen any reason to think that. I'm calling out the hypocrisy.

> Anyone skilled at photoshop

So let's say there are two ways to do something illegal. The first requires skills from the perpetrator, is tricky to regulate, and is generally speaking not a widespread issue in practice. The second way is a no brainer even for young children to use, is easy to regulate, and is becoming a huge issue in practice. Then it makes sense to regulate only the second.

> People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?

Tricky question, but a more accurate comparison would be with a company that runs a service to 3D print guns (= generating the image) and shoot with them in the street (= publishing on X) automatically for you and keeps accepting illegal requests while the competitors have no issue blocking them.

> Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things?

That's also a tricky question, but generally you don't really need to know precisely where to draw the line. It suffices to know that something is definitely on the wrong side of the line, like X here.

Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?

I think systemd is the one to learn now if you want to learn Linux. Maybe someone can make a Unix from Scratch for people more interested in the Unix philosophy than Linux per se.

SysVInit on Linux isn’t true Unix though as the way it abuses runlevels to start daemons was never intended by the original designers of init.

Yeah, people forget the degree to which sysvinit was hated at the time - "why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?!?".

If the intention is to create a system that users can reason about, then sysvinit offers the worst of all possible worlds.

> why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?

Run levels. That's it, sysvinit is about run levels. Each run level starts or kills off its own specific list of runnable things like applications, daemons, capabilities, etc.

Run levels were a desirable feature back in the day amongst System V Unix vendors, so each run level required its own kill and start scripts for each item. Run levels, for example, could take a running system from single user (root admin) mode to multi-user, multi-login, NFS sharing, full X11 mode in one command immediately as the scripts ran. This allowed rapid reconfiguration of a system, such as from a GIS workstation to a headless file server, etc. etc. as needed. Each system could be configured to boot to a specific run level. Rather than duplicate some or all such scripts across some or all run levels, symlinks were the solution.

For example, Solaris had run levels 0 through 6. Zero was a blunt force system halt; 1 was single root user admin mode; 2 was multi-user headless mode with NFS; 3 was multi-user X11 windows mode with NFS; 4 was unspecified and therefore kept for purely local configuration as desired; 5 was a planned, orderly system shutdown; and 6 was a planned, orderly system reboot. The root user could implement their choice of run level directly with the init command.

Each run level had its own run control directory (rc.d) under /etc/rc.d for its appropriate kill and start scripts, which were run in order of their K or S number, so dependencies had to be kept in mind when numbering, and curing a dependency failure was as simple as changing a script's number to rearrange the list. So, why copy S04blahblah from rc2.d to rc3.d when a symlink is far better?

Its not hard to understand when you get the big picture, and it wasn't hard to administer if you had the proper overview of it all. Admittedly, admins coming in cold would have to sort through it all, which is partly why it gained a reputation for murkiness when not properly documented by/for local admins. Keep in mind it was the era of administering sendmail macros and NIS tables by hand and you get the picture.

NOTE: edited for clarity

systemd is most certainly the most pragmatic service to learn, but if you're doing LFS to "learn" how a Linux system gets brought up, something lower-level may be a better idea to pick up.

All this stuff is versioned anyway so if the point is learning youe can still read an old version of the book and use old versions of the repos.

Would that help in any way with the increasing concentration of wealth? It doesn't seem to be particularly tied to land.

Some variants also tax contrived monopolies like IP.

> The term "capital" is an abstraction that's not helpful here

It was not so abstract when Musk came up with 44 billion to buy Twitter... The details are complicated but in the end it's still wealth.

> Bezos owns 9% of Amazon stock. That's why he's "rich." What should happen to that stock? What happens to his voting control over Amazon?

Presumably he would sell the stock to pay the wealth tax (or whatever mechanism is there to limit wealth)?

As for the voting control: when you're down to 9% this ship has sailed hasn't it? Anyway I don't think society has a moral obligation to allow individuals personal control of a trillion dollar company because they founded it (and if society disagrees with me, super-voting shares can be used as Alphabet does).

Isn't there also an effect like the second billion dollar being easier to get than the first? I mean all your points are good but the fact that the system allows you to leverage your wealth to increase it is probably the most important factor to get to $250B.

Absolutely, the more money you have the more risk you can take. That's fractions-of-a-martingale level money so you can probably chalk up a win before you lose it all. Musk uses the same playbook. Losing is for small fry.

Proverb from my granny to contemplate: the devil always craps on the larger heap.

Right, and the risk aspect is only a second order effect. The main effect applies even when you restrict yourself to low-risk investments: it's simply that the more you have, the more you can invest so the more you make on average. But yeah, higher risk tolerance means you can also aim for higher returns.

Why are you assuming that “fairness” requires a linear distribution between ability and wealth? A winner-take-all system may be undesirable in many respects, but it’s not necessarily unfair.

Yeah there's no reason it should be a linear function, but it's a moot point anyway until we define what it would mean to have "X times more abilities".

My point is that having tycoons with 1,000,000 times the wealth of the median person is not a fair distribution, no matter which reasonable function you choose.

If you think superficially of "fair" like in a game, then yes a winner-take-all system can be fair. But when talking about socioeconomics, I think fairness goes a bit deeper. For example I would say a society with a lottery that picks one winner and tortures all others is not fair to those who lose (even though it's game-fair).

Do you think "fair" is about procedures or outcomes?

Isn't it of course both? What do you think?

I think you have the right idea, if poorly worded. The economy is not a zero sum game, but the idea works when you apply it not on wealth but on wealth increase. That's more or less the famous r > g formula of Piketty: when the rate of return of capital is larger than the growth rate of the economy, wealth gets more concentrated. Its application has been disputed but the basic principle certainly applies in many situations.

> inability to express "just shut the fucking system down, you won't have power in 5 minutes" for servers connected to UPS.

What about "systemctl --force --force poweroff" ?

With two “--force” options, that is essentially equivalent to “echo o > /proc/sysrq-trigger”, isn’t it? I would think that one “--force” would have the actually desired effect.

Yes you're right.