This comment is probably going to be unpopular. But these questions need to be asked. Why did anybody think that Americans were NOT going to be targeted? While the regime claimed that they were going to round up and deport only 'the worst of the worst', they were also arresting illegal immigrants who had clean records otherwise, asylum seekers, legal immigrants and those who were made illegal by retroactive repeal of their residency permits, from the beginning itself. Why didn't enough people object at the time?
The opposition to ICE and CBP saw a massive upswing after the executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I respect and grieve for them, because they were brave human beings who stood up and died for the less privileged people who were in danger. But they were hardly the first casualties of this regime. Nearly 40 had died by that time, in ICE's concentration camps (aka detention facilities), including at the El Salvadoran CECOT. And nearly a hundred men were blown up at sea, based on the unsubstantiated accusation of trafficking drugs. We will never know if they were actual drug traffickers, because they were never tried.
But the protests were relatively feeble until Good and Pretti were killed. There are two differences I see in them, from the other victims. They were white, and their death were caught on camera. (The assassination of the Venezuelan boaters were caught on camera, but it wasn't as clear.) If those prior extra-judicial executions generated as much outrage as the Good and Pretti murders, perhaps the latter two would still be alive.
Here is the problem with that line of thinking. Once a regime starts to violate constitutional and other laws, it's only a matter of time before they expand it to all demographics. Contrary to what they claim, they absolutely won't observe any boundaries. Why would they? They're the ones in power. This is the basis of the age old adage beginning "First they came for the Communists ...". It isn't a fancy poem. This is how autocrats behave. They're using your prejudices to silence you. It should have been taken for granted at that point that the American citizens were going to be in the cross hairs soon.
This is why such atrocities must never be downplayed or normalized. This is why prejudices must not be allowed to override justice. Where did all this go wrong? And why are you still making the distinction between Americans and non-Americans? Isn't it clear yet that everybody gets justice, or no one does?
Part of the problem is that many Americans don't hear about these things or get a manipulated version that switches the good and bad. It's only going to get worse as Trump and his friends consolidate the media spaces.
I'm going to say this again. You aren't giving people credit where it's due. Those who live in democracies don't hold that privilege by not caring about anything. It's something that they constantly fight for.
The only specialty that we possess over others is a deeper knowledge about technology and the politics behind it. But it DOESN'T have to be exclusive to us. We're not the only ones fed up with this amount of BS from the gilded class. People do listen and act if we're willing to inform them. Even if everyone doesn't respond, there will still be enough to make a difference. Just dismissing their will like this is uncharitable at best.
> It also destroyed climate data claiming the ledgers were old fashioned, but they were the only copies.
I don't know how long ago the library of Alexandria was burned down. But what I do know is that we never learn the lesson. It's rather stupid to store public research data (i.e, excluding classified info) at a single location. There are any number of unpredictable future scenarios that can lead to this same unfortunate outcome.
Scientists and politicians should work together and agree to store and host such research data in multiple countries, including with rival nations. That should make it a lot more resilient against such eventualities. It won't cause any security risk. After all, you were going to publish it anyway. Why waste the information worth a lot of money and effort?
But instead of that, many governments and greedy corporations go after independent groups who do exactly that - scihub and internet archive, for example. We as a species possess the stupidity of stubbornly avoiding the obvious right path.
> Comparing a government intervening on data they challenged with one of their own agencies to the 'burning of Alexandria' is beyond delusion. holy cow.
I'm talking about precious data being destroyed by anti-intellectuals because their predecessors didn't foresee that possibility. There are no delusions here. You're just being unimaginative, hyperbolic and histrionic.
> For gosh sake, the internet is public, nothing is being truly erased, published papers will be there for literally all of time. The publishing industry may control some distribution for a very short period of time but it's not relvant in the grand scheme
Is that what you see happening here? Didn't the Internet Archive race to save the data from the websites of US research institutions before they were deleted by the current regime? They could have done it with ease if they had started as soon as the election results were out. This is not to say that IA is inefficient. It's to point out that while the Internet has a great preservation ability, it's not perfect and hardly always the case. There are a lot of data that aren't sufficiently protected.
Instead of trying to even understand that possibility, you go on a shallow and low-effort dismissal with excess drama. Is that the quality of discussion now?
> The is 'delusional' - or pick a more specifically appropriate term.
If drawing parallels from history is being delusional, the entire world is. Comparisons may not match in scale but the intent is the key. And the intent is absolutely clear here. That's why I said that you are 'histrionic' and 'hyperbolic'. You're being dramatic in your over exaggerated outrage at normal things people do.
> If nobody of 7 billion earth want to spend a few pennies to save something, then it's obviously not valuable in any way to anyone.
'Nobody cares' doesn't equate to 'not worth it'. That's false equivalence. Climate data especially. Who knows what's backed up and what's not? That's why I said it has to be collaboratively backed up and hosted. Instead you create this fanciful scenario that doesn't exist, in order to reach incoherent conclusions that you use to perform your over-the-top drama.
Thank you for this tedious discourse with your haughty dismissals based on arbitrary fallacies. I'm afraid I have to decline any further exchanges you offer with this histrionic and smug disposition.
I'm aware of the political landscape in the US right now. But I must ask. What exactly are the policy makers thinking? Do they hold some sort of delusions about the intellectual superiority of their race? Or do they believe that they don't need scientific talent, research and knowledge to be a great nation and civilization? Or do they believe that these deficiencies can be resolved with money alone?
I'm puzzled by autocrats beyond a certain limit. Their actions don't really seem to fit any logic, if their intention is to be become unchallengeable and unassailable. This seems like ceding the advantage to any future rivals.
Wait! Are you talking about the history or the future aspiration? I thought that the IP laws were initially like what you described here, until the greedy class stuffed the politicians' mouths with cash (aka lobbying).
This is what I want copyright and patents to be. I could see a case for the initial patent period to go up to 10 years, but more or less operate identically.
Make it apply retroactively. Clean, simple, no exceptions, grandfathered special interests, or variations for special industries.
This nukes all the exploitative actors in the industry, like the textbook publishing industry, patent trolls, IP hoarders like Sony, Disney, etc. It turbocharges culture - gives everyone an even playing field, right when we need it most.
It makes AI use cases clean, but might be worth formalizing - $150 or %15 of revenue relative to the total percentage of a creator's fair-use content in the training data, whichever is greater, and the per item minimum gets decided each year by the office of the copyright, adjusted for inflation, etc.
No more technical gotcha game bullshit making lawyers and giant corporations insanely rich, just in time for the AI revolution, and best of all, it makes vast swathes of data legal for open source and small businesses, with no barrier to entry.
Groups like Anna's Archive and SciHub can come to understandings with publishers, transitioning from pirates to first-class archivists on the internet, letting them engage in legitimate commercial activities without threat of legal peril.
No more soccer moms getting slapped with nonsense million dollar fines by MAFIAA lawyers.
The entire industry of rent seeking copyright grifters gets nuked from orbit, and nobody gets hurt. The old paradigm of middlemen and studios and platforms justifying all the apparatus and exploitation through providing "legal services" and exposure and access to IP goes kaput.
The only disadvantage I see might be the increase in use of trade secrets if patents no longer look sufficiently attractive. The quid pro quo basically used to be 'tell us your secret sauce and in return you'll get monopoly use for a period. There's a bit of a balancing act. Of course that original concept has been corrupted
Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied, and if existing patents don't cover it, they can file a patent on the copy, and then you're paying royalties to the ones that copied your tech, etc. We're almost at the point that you can take a video, give it to an AI, and have it produce CAD drawings, circuit schematics, and detailed process documents to rebuild something. We're going to need responsive, flexible, and clear laws around things. The current system is also designed around a court system and process that regularly drags out for 3+ years, and results in lawyers being paid obscene amounts of money. Having a clear claim and no legal technicalities means authors don't have to invest years of their lives and lots of money to fight big companies who don't care about losing a few hundred grand just on principle, and so forth.
A whole lot of the pacing and timing around copyright laws originate with conventions from pre-electricity times, and only get perpetuated because grifty people want their legalized scams to continue.
> Yeah, but the advantage in the modern world is reverse engineering things is easy; if your tech isn't patented, it can be copied
That's true for products that are freely distributed, less so for inventions that are more closely held.
If you're doing something like cutting-edge physics, aerospace, semiconductors, biotech, etc -- trade secrets have always been pretty compelling by default, and patents were seen as a way to encourage more sharing.
It's a balance, and I think we should be mindful that we don't get too caught up in worrying about mass-produced widgets of little importance "taking advantage" of patents so much that we eliminate out the incentive to share the real cutting edge advancements.
In an alternative software world, "Attention is all you need" could have been a trade secret instead of a public paper.
How easy reverse engineering something is varies a lot. Something where the production process is the secret can be almost impossible to reverse engineer, for example.
Stop legally protecting trade secrets then. Why would we have a system that simultaneously grants a limited benefit for sharing information while granting unlimited protection for not sharing? This obviously creates an incentive to only patent things you expect others will soon figure out anyway, which means the patent only harms society.
Make the incentive "if I don't share my information in exchange for a patent, any of my engineers could leave for a competitor and share all of my information tomorrow anyway." You take the offer society gives, or you get nothing.
Microslop? Hmm... Never heard that before! Meanwhile, I just randomly remembered that I haven't opened a couple of dozen social media accounts in ages. BRB!
There was a concept named Web 3.0 a while ago, aka the 'Semantic Web'. It wasn't the crypto/blockchain scam that we call Web3 today. The idea was to create a web of machine readable data based on shared ontologies. That would have effectively turned the web into a giant database of sorts, that the 'agents' could browse autonomously and derive conclusions from. This is sort of like how we browse the web to do research on any topic.
Since the data was already in a structured form in Web 3.0 instead of natural language, the agent would have been nowhere near the energy hogs that LLMs are today. Even the final conversion of conclusions into natural language would have been much more energy-efficient than the LLMs, since the conclusions were also structured. Combine that with the sorts of technology we have today, even a mediocre AI (by today's standards) would have performed splendidly.
Opponents called it impractical. But there already were smaller systems around from various scientific fields, operating on the same principle. And the proponents had already made a lot of headway. It was going to revolutionize information sharing. But what I think ultimately doomed it is the same reason you mentioned. The powers that be, didn't want smarter people. They wanted people who earned them money. That means those who spend their attention on dead scrolling feeds, trash ads and slop.
> but it's a shame that so many companies who built their empires on the shoulders of those visionaries think the only valid way to browse is with a human-eyeball-to-server chain of trust.
Yes, this! But only when your eyeball and attention earns them profit. Otherwise they are perfectly content with operating behind your backs and locking you out of decisions about how you want to operate the devices you paid for in full. This is why we can't have good things. No matter which way you look, the ruins of all the dreams lead to the same culprit - the insatiable greed of a minority. That makes me question exactly how much wealth one needs to live comfortably or even lavishly till their death.
> ... because the discoverability is lower than GUIs.
The UI paradigm created by the emacs transient package [1] can improve the discoverability of CLI commands significantly. It's one of the components of magit, the famous git frontend, that makes it so awesome. It's discoverability is very close to that of GUIs and somehow even more pleasing to use than GUIs. I wonder if someone is trying this on terminals.
The opposition to ICE and CBP saw a massive upswing after the executions of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I respect and grieve for them, because they were brave human beings who stood up and died for the less privileged people who were in danger. But they were hardly the first casualties of this regime. Nearly 40 had died by that time, in ICE's concentration camps (aka detention facilities), including at the El Salvadoran CECOT. And nearly a hundred men were blown up at sea, based on the unsubstantiated accusation of trafficking drugs. We will never know if they were actual drug traffickers, because they were never tried.
But the protests were relatively feeble until Good and Pretti were killed. There are two differences I see in them, from the other victims. They were white, and their death were caught on camera. (The assassination of the Venezuelan boaters were caught on camera, but it wasn't as clear.) If those prior extra-judicial executions generated as much outrage as the Good and Pretti murders, perhaps the latter two would still be alive.
Here is the problem with that line of thinking. Once a regime starts to violate constitutional and other laws, it's only a matter of time before they expand it to all demographics. Contrary to what they claim, they absolutely won't observe any boundaries. Why would they? They're the ones in power. This is the basis of the age old adage beginning "First they came for the Communists ...". It isn't a fancy poem. This is how autocrats behave. They're using your prejudices to silence you. It should have been taken for granted at that point that the American citizens were going to be in the cross hairs soon.
This is why such atrocities must never be downplayed or normalized. This is why prejudices must not be allowed to override justice. Where did all this go wrong? And why are you still making the distinction between Americans and non-Americans? Isn't it clear yet that everybody gets justice, or no one does?
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