I don't want to be uncharitable but the Mt. Everest analogy is not that far away from directly justifying not adding accessibility features in order to satisfy the ego of specific gamers.
I agree with you that in some sense it undermines the achievement, but tending to the ego of players that feel undermined by the existence of accessibility features is not high in my hierarchy of values personally.
And why not? Law enforcement does not represent supreme justice and good. There are higher moral principles out there. Respect for law enforcement in the absence of justice is a disaster for society. All it does is give cover for bad actors.
There's plenty of high moral principles, but "let's build technology that explicitly protects criminals - especially child and women traffickers - against investigation" ain't one of them for majority of people living in democracies.
How does it protect trafficers especially? Does it have some extra trafficking features? Does it unlock additional capabilities if you're a criminal?
Or maybe it just protects everyone?
Your assumption that "criminals" are doing something morally wrong is fundamentally flawed. Civil rights activists were criminals, as were suffragettes, and the people who protected Jews in Nazi Germany, and gay or trans people just existing in countries where that isn't allowed. All criminals. Law enforcement isn't even always carrying out the law, as we've seen with ICE arresting, assaulting, searching, deporting people on no other basis than their skin color.
Democracy dies when people can't protest. When they are under constant surveillance, afraid of being singled out by the government intelligence gathering mechanisms. Unable to speak out about injustice, organise and engage in healthy counter culture.
Look at Russia, look at China. Don't imagine that giving your own government and law enforcement the same tools of surveillance and oppression will have a different outcome.
You do realize there's another side to it, right? There are morally good examples where privacy is needed, and morally bad examples where not being able to access data is harmful.
I personally agree with you, but for most people it's not black or white. They want privacy when it suits them, but would take yours away in a heartbeat.
I agree that privacy is not always a force for good. I think that when we remove privacy we normally lose much more than we gain.
People easily focus on negative consequences of privacy (dangerous people being able to communicate secretly) and don't notice the benefits they enjoy because of privacy.
Yes, exactly, but if you actually follow all of those groups, none of them changed things by building bunkers into which police couldn't ever enter and any crime could happen there.
As someone who grew up on the other side of the iron curtain, I find this idea that you'll make your own government an enemy and shield criminals against it utterly naive, since that's not what actually changes society. It's a form of techno-cowardice, where people hide behind technology to avoid doing the hard stuff.
It's not cowardice. It's a standard defence against tyranny. Governments can change quickly so even if you think your present government is democratic and healthy it still pays to keep the tools to defend against it if it changes.
If your government is seeking to remove those tools from you then that is a warning sign.
Not in my part of the world, which is both safer and more democratic than the US approach you're defending.
There were also other groups hiding away and doing interesting things - killing, maiming murdering. It took access to private communication and files to take those down - you may have have heard of some [0].
You forgot terrorists on your usual list of reasons e2e is bad. Technology will always be used for bad and good, but there are far more people using it for good than bad.
In the era before the advent of mass digital surveillance, it was well understood that there are many different ways to fight crime. Now every time I see this conversation being had, it's treated as if keeping any amount of privacy beyond what you personally find acceptable is tantamount to endorsing the existence of human traffickers. Warrantless spread-shot digital surveillance is now often treated as essential.
I have a question for you. Why don't you advocate for more surveillance? The more active and widespread the surveillance, the more criminals can be caught. If you think it's not entirely practical, just embark on a thought experiment with me -- assume it would be practical. Would you do it? Would you have everyone be under perfect surveillance 24/7 in order to catch every criminal? Let's call this stance surveillance maximalism.
If you agree with surveillance maximalism, then we're just very different people and I don't think we can find common ground. I hope we can live peacefully in different countries with different laws that suit our preferences.
If you disagree with surveillance maximalism, then why is your arbitrary tradeoff so good? It's not obvious why it's better. You are assuming the moral high ground, but you're also doing the same thing you're accusing me of -- you're accepting some amount of traffickers existing by not being a surveillance maximalist.
By adopting this moral high ground, the discourse is kept at a shallow level. We talk less about which surveillance measures are actually effective or not, what has happened to crime rates over time, what is the context in which crime occurs, what are the negative consequences of undermining privacy, what are the negative consequences of mass surveillance etc. Instead we waste our time and energy on cheap moral opprobrium.
> In the era before the advent of mass digital surveillance, it was well understood that there are many different ways to fight crime. Now every time I see this conversation being had, it's treated as if keeping any amount of privacy beyond what you personally find acceptable is tantamount to endorsing the existence of human traffickers. Warrantless spread-shot digital surveillance is now often treated as essential.
That's not what anyone writes, especially not me.
> I have a question for you. Why don't you advocate for more surveillance? The more active and widespread the surveillance, the more criminals can be caught. If you think it's not entirely practical, just embark on a thought experiment with me -- assume it would be practical. Would you do it? Would you have everyone be under perfect surveillance 24/7 in order to catch every criminal? Let's call this stance surveillance maximalism.
Because it's a bad tradeoff between free society and safe society. There's a reason why we put checks and balances on enforcement agencies and why it's so important to keep them up to date.
> If you agree with surveillance maximalism, then we're just very different people and I don't think we can find common ground. I hope we can live peacefully in different countries with different laws that suit our preferences.
I do not agree with surveillance maximalism.
> By adopting this moral high ground, the discourse is kept at a shallow level. We talk less about which surveillance measures are actually effective or not, what has happened to crime rates over time, what is the context in which crime occurs, what are the negative consequences of undermining privacy, what are the negative consequences of mass surveillance etc. Instead we waste our time and energy on cheap moral opprobrium.
I agree, so perhaps losing your mind and going into mindless screaming every time anyone opens a debate about tradeoff between access, surveillance and privacy isn't the best way forward. Which is what's happening here way too many times.
Just because I acknowledge an issue which gave us things like surveillance warrants and existence of police forces doesn't mean you can just strawman me into whatever position you hate. Perhaps think on the reason why every single stable prosperous society has concepts of police and police warrants which grant access to private spheres when deemed necessary.
Do you believe window curtains should be legal? Should it be legal for a TV to not include a microphone and require an internet connection (as recent LG TVs do)?
I feel the opposite. It is one of the genuinely competent languages out there, if you're the kind of person that isn't upset about it being a "kitchen sink". Instead, I feel like the ecosystem, community and reputation hold it back. There are nowhere as many useful and popular packages to reach for as Python for example. Unity3D always lags behind in runtime and language version and had amazingly bad package management -- this further hamstrung C#, because the language is never used in a vacuum.
This kind of opacity is unacceptably user hostile. It's not okay to treat some amount of developers as acceptable casualties, without them even knowing, in order to help enforce a restriction that only serves Anthropic's interests. And if you want to tell me this is for managing the x-risk factor, I'm frankly unimpressed.
Because the poor will suffer tremendously if they are ill equipped for the job market. If we want to have education have a strong humanistic focus then we should start by changing society in other places. Or we'll get unemployed and suffering well rounded human beings.
Regardless, at the moment education does not seem to be doing great on either the humanistic or "pragmatic" axis.
Unfortunately, framing the problem as this kind of dichotomy is something people are inclined to do because then the problem can be reduced to the unwillingness of the opposing side to face reality.
Sometimes the dichotomy is correct, but the bias exists.
What about setting environments for normies that mitigate this problem? I don't know that you can do it on Windows, but Linux offers various tools for isolation where you can give full rights to an LLM and still be safe from certain classes of disaster.
Maybe this kind of isolation neuters the benefit you're thinking of, but I do believe some sort of solution could be reached.
I recall having a conversation with a friend that was angry at this kind of thing sometimes being called "Tail Call Optimization". It's a guarantee that your program won't literally crash by stack overflow if you recurse too much using tail calls; the fact that it might have performance benefits is secondary in importance. So the name can be a bit misleading.
Back then Rust's tail call story looked bad. The problem slipped my mind for years and now I'm suddenly made aware of this become keyword, and it seems like a great idea -- to make the developer's intent more explicit. Getting better target support for this is doing god's work.
As an aside, I would slightly argue against the idea that it's useful only for a narrow set of libraries. It's useful for the developer as a user of the language to be able to express things in either iterative or recursive style without worrying as much whether the latter is going to panic. Maybe if I had to deal with all the work of making such features functional in a language, I would value expressiveness a bit less!
Trump's second term has had dire consequences for the US that are simply not on the same level as Obama, and it could have been avoided. The democrats are also terrible, but it's a matter of harm reduction. In this case, I would strongly argue that the difference was greater than 99 and 100.
You should vote to do harm reduction. Elections happen regardless of what you do. Whether 30% or 100% of Americans vote, the winners of elections still get access to the same amount of state power. The system does not require our political participation to continue to exert control our lives. Abstaining from voting is not an effective tactic in reducing the legitimacy of the system. That tactic might work in other situations, but not in this one.
I hope you will keep your distaste for both parties, but still vote for the lesser evil, even if it's distasteful. Because I think we should help that one person not get stabbed. And if indeed you have voted for the lesser evil and my post has a tone that assumes otherwise, I apologize.
The fact that the police won't use surveillance data in a way you would consider good and effective does not mean you don't live in a surveillance state.
One of the key aspects of police and surveillance states is that the incentives are structured so that the policing and surveillance need not be done with the interest of public welfare in mind. As you said there is no political will.
I agree with you that in some sense it undermines the achievement, but tending to the ego of players that feel undermined by the existence of accessibility features is not high in my hierarchy of values personally.