I think gradual rollout is underrecognised as the utterly devious way of implementing user-hostile changes that it is. It doesn't take a lot of scrolling through the comments here to find instances of people who are unaffected by some change or another being inexplicably hostile towards posters who are, implicitly accusing them of anything from incompetence to drama-mongering and misinformation. In that way, some of those who would complain about a change are worn down early on, and by the time the change is rolled out to more people they have already resigned and moved on, preventing a critical mass of opposition from forming.
Yes, it's a kind of boiling the frog where instead of slowly cranking up the degree of enshittification you do it with the number of affected users instead. In both cases the goal is to avoid a critical mass of user outrage.
A/B tests in general should require informed consent just like any other study on human participants. But then most software developers don't care about ethics so this is nothing new.
That's the magic of A/B testing. You get to send an entire "B" group into paranoia and upset about the change they didn't want/like while everyone in "A" gets to gaslight B that B isn't experiencing what they're getting and that it would never happen to A...
I never understood what are the technical obstacles to building the phone network in such a way that caller numbers can not be spoofed or suppressed. Then, you could just build a system where receiving an unsolicited phone call from a commercial entity entitles you to a compensation in small claims court, to the tune of 50 EUR, unless the caller can prove that you explicitly authorised them.
The problem is not that the originator can be found. The current, existing, legacy, phone system already can find the exact originator.
The problem is that enforcement of breaking the regulation is so non-existent that the criminals just place millions of calls knowing, at most, they might get a minor slap on the wrist that can be budgeted for as a "cost of doing business".
Every single call carried across the phone network is billed, and every hop along the path knows who to bill for their part of carrying the call. The billing system is the method to trace back to the originators, and then apply a fine sufficiently large enough to no longer be a cost of doing business.
But the regulators seem to have no idea that the billing system provides the traceability to find the criminals and then go after them. Instead we get things like stir/shaken that are trying to patch "authenticity" on top of a network never designed with that in mind.
AFAIK, the problem is that the system works like international mail used to.
There are strict barriers at the borders to ensure everybody pays their dues. But once a call is accepted, there's no control at all about where it's going to.
The problem is that it's a network. The hard part of networking isn't the technology - it's the other people. And short of a government regulation or a monopoly, they'll never all agree.
STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.
Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.
On this topic, phone lines are so ubiquitous that it is irresponsible for representative governments to continue to let private companies mess around with them. Doubly irresponsible to go from public to private after the increase in popularity.
That was in the 2000s. Phone lines are an anomaly now but cellphones are not. The phone number is more like an ICQ number than an identifier of a physical connection, but is still regulated like the latter.
Why are those non-STIR/SHAKEN TDM trunks serving as transit trunks (non-terminating), rather than terminal-only trunks? Seems a pretty obvious hole to close.
The only limitation is cold hard cash. The phone companies make big bucks from telemarketers by providing an endless list of new numbers and multiple lines. The whole racket wouldn't work without the companies' greenlight.
Exactly. The same reason the bulk of paper mail is unsolicited garbage. The spammers/scammers are paying customers, without regulation the incentive for the phone company is to keep them flowing.
Compare to how effective spam filters are on email. It's a much harder problem, but the spam costs the provider money, so they address it.
Historically, in a world of analogue phone lines, spoofed phone numbers were a legitimate feature: if my business has more than one phone line, each of those lines is going to have its own distinct number; but I'm going to want outgoing calls from any of those lines to appear to originate from the same number (the one that I put on my promotional material, invoices, etc.).
Much the same as e-mail, identity within the phone system was, historically, entirely built on trust (because only Ma Bell could make configuration changes, and they could verify that what their customer was asking them to do was legit). Those assumptions were carried through deregulation, and are very deeply entrenched in the technical design of the network. Changing them will hopefully become easier over the next few years as analogue service is turned off entirely (e.g., BT/OR in the UK are set to turn off all analogue phone service by the end of January 2027).
I've seen two reasons. 1) Backward compatibility--you would have to add an additional security layer, and some old legacy switching hardware (5% of the network?) wouldn't support this. 2) Phone companies profit from the calls, so they have no incentive to spend the money to upgrade and stop it.
Yes, but the premise here is that for national calls it becomes harder to spoof the caller id. In fact, here in Italy we're seeing an increase in telemarketing calls from Spain and France, so it's not entirely hypothetical.
The mathematicians could make an argument that applies to everyone. But that probably leads to outright communism, and that well is still quite poisoned. Maybe AI ultimately gets powerful enough to give us Banksian full luxury communism. Alternately, it gives a world where corporations don't need workers and tyrants don't need citizens.
And some people might want to know about [insert your favourite beyond-the-pale-in-the-US topic here, we're on a US forum after all]. I think it would be great if those people could turn to Chinese models, while anyone wanting to know about Uyghur camps can ask the US ones.
There aren’t any. The idea that the censorship environment is the same in the US as it is in China is nonsense used to ‘both sides’ away concerns about the CCP.
The models to themselves are currently generally not censored though and the guardrails are on the application layer?
Of course that might change in the future but as long as the Chinese companies continue publishing their research and models it only makes it easier for third parties to catch up with them.
Can you name one? It's an honest question, first of I'm not American, but also the stuff I do come up with (asking an LLM how to blow up a school or whatever) would also be handled similarly in China, so those would be a wash, and I can't think of any that aren't.
I would imagine a lot of things touching upon progressive politics would be affected (there were a few high-profile incidents demonstrating bias like Google's black Wehrmacht soldier pictures, but has anyone rigorously tabulated how the various commercial LLMs respond to questions about the gender binary or heritability of human traits considered good or bad?). Overall, I'm too reluctant to even write out in the abstract sequences of words that I never want to explain to a future job interviewer or HR employee who used GPT-7 to comb the internet for all text that stylistically can be traced to me, but just imagine whatever you believe to be vile and wrongheaded opinions in that general space which it is certainly more than justifiable to prohibit. The things that make you think "banning this is good actually" are exactly the things most likely to be banned (and this is true in China too).
Another thing I would try if I had access to the models and enough proxies to hide behind is asking for advice on software/movie piracy or seeing to what extent the models can be elicited to straight up argue against the validity of intellectual property, though there it seems more probable to me that the US models would be permissive.
What historical fact is the US trying to systematically suppress, is the question. This beating around the bush about things that are "considered uncouth in some circles" just underlines there either aren't any, or they're so perfect at it nobody knows of any. So let's just admit than and move on, because what you just said is true about any society, ever.
> The things that make you think "banning this is good actually" are exactly the things most likely to be banned (and this is true in China too).
Then make the case why it is better for the world that the Tiananmen Square massacre is memoryholed. You said A, now say B.
In the meantime, I'll make the case against it, and it's simple: totalitarian control of historical truth, by definition, to be 100% watertight, needs control of the whole globe. It doesn't mean everything needs to be controlled, it means everything needs to be controlled by at least an entity that cooperates on this matter. I.e. another totalitarian bloc.
That makes the CCP, just by their insistence about Tiananmen -- nothing additional required, at all, they could not harm a fly and have no prisons and it would make zero difference -- an enemy, a threat marching towards any thinking human who wants to have agency and dignity. Actually, it's more like a river flowing to the ocean, people in the CCP can have lofty ideals about honesty and factual truth, the system they require to survive in turn requires this to survive, as it is. It requires human spontaneity and human freedom to be dead, completely. That is what totalitarianism is.
And by the same token, we must be wary of those who take that lightly. A friend falling asleep at the wheel will kill you just the same as an assassin who messed with your car.
That is not "as opposed to the US or the EU or Russia or North Korea". It is strictly in addition. No other regime can behind another regime or use it as an excuse. Using the US to distract from the CCP is as odious as doing the reverse.
> I never want to explain to a future job interviewer or HR employee who used GPT-7 to comb the internet for all text that stylistically can be traced to me
So you want to work in an office wearing a tie. Well, people who want to work as roadies and fight all night would never hang with you if they found out. And if that was your priority, you would be more afraid of NOT being blacklisted by the corpos than not being part of them.
But seriously, are you saying you are as afraid of being found out as the person you are, because you're not already wearing that on your sleeve, in exactly the same way as people who have to fear that they and their family get disappeared, tortured, for remembering friends that got murdered? That would be totally a you problem.
It's still selective degradation of functionality, as presumably people who download a snowglobe animation program don't do it to see any sort of statement apart from normative depictions of wintery things. The problem would be the same if it showed Russian flags only to users with Ukrainian locale, or ads for Mountain Dew only when the user's locale is set to French, or even just something as impossible to interpret as offensive on its own as adding lots of little cactus men whenever the locale is Dutch.
So it's "selective degradation of functionality" based entirely on your assumptions regarding the motivations of the users? How is this a useful description?
right, which means the software is less useful and as such you might not want to use it. Plenty of software like that listed on repositories, which I think is fine.
Define "come from". Could they have gotten those frontier capabilities, or any capabilities, without internet training data?
It seems to me that without the private data, you might get a slightly less competitive model, but without the CommonCrawl-style data piles used in "pretraining", you get no model at all.
Even accepting the copying-as-theft framing, if I go to a village, steal some vegetables from everyone's gardens and ham from their sheds, and then add some prohibitively expensive spices I bought myself to make soup, do I get to claim it as mine and punish the villagers for trying to take it?
Maybe I'm slightly projecting my European sensitivities here, but I think there is more going on there than just the emptiness. There is a common theme that the spaces depicted are, on their own, quite unpleasant (barren, made from flimsy materials, probably emitting some amount of toxic fumes); it's just that this unpleasantness is normally masked by their human use and interpretation, which invariably some form of commercialism and hype. (Hence the abundance of hastily erected American mall architecture.)
A historical European town devoid of people does not work as a liminal space picture at all, because it still looks nice; and neither do the postapocalyptic settings that Japan is so fond of (YKK etc.). Eastern European commieblock and UK Brutalist hellscapes are actually quite similar in terms of the feeling they evoke, and have their own fandoms, but are considered their own genre - so I would conclude that "liminal space porn" is spaces only made tolerable by commercialism with the commercialism taken away, and the related "/r/UrbanHell" material is spaces only made tolerable by human habitation with that taken away or suppressed (e.g. if the humans are so bereft of vitality that they can no longer overcome the space's badness).
This is more or less my thoughts as well. Walking around the exterior of Nymphenburg Palace even when empty would not be very emotional at all.
Walking around a modern suburban development devoid of people, houses, pets, etc. would be at least unusual in the feeling. The spaces are intentionally designed to put people and their things within obvious boundaries. With the boundaries still there but lacking the things within them it becomes quite a different experience.
There are layers to that suburban setting and I wonder which ones you imagine.
There actually used to be this "empty suburb" feeling at many times per day when a typical bedroom community had sent its kids to school and parent to work. Particularly when they were not wealthy enough to have paid laborers around doing things during their work day. If anything, they got busier since COVID as people have more varied schedules.
Then there is the new but incomplete development, e.g. with graded lots and some subset of streets and walkways. If work is suspended for some reason, it may be decorated with idled earth movers, piles of building materials, or partial foundations or framing.
Or it might turn into the next type, which is an aborted subdivision build or after a severe wildfire, which is basically a moonscape of graded lots with no buildings nor vegetation.
Then there are the abandoned neighborhoods that were once vibrant. Old, decrepit buildings, and wild vegetation, e.g. around dead industrial towns.
I think that's narrowing it too much. Edward Hopper's "Sunday Morning" evokes the same feeling with me - the feeling of something that just was there, that we passed through without paying much attention to it at the time, but which we now remember.
Maybe you wouldn't have that feeling about a beautiful old European town, but I bet some of the people living there would.
I think classic liminal esthetic would also include empty swimming pools, resorts etc. It doesn't need to be barren or cheap, could be relatively luxurious, but needs to be late Modernist as a base - i.e. mass produced and devoid of conscious symbolism or ornamentation.
Its the combination of capitalism and lowest bidder architecture that is alienating to humans. And if humans are present, makes the space tolerable.
Remove the humans, and the space is off-putting, eerie and has a sense of dread.
And yeah, brutalism (usage of concrete as primary architecture) is also seen in the USA. And frankly, most of the buildings feel like prisons, and not where you want to go. Look no further than Indiana Univerity Hermann Wells library. https://maps.app.goo.gl/6FDvKR9sHSk3z8v56
Brutalist buildings feel directly hostile to humans, and not a vague sense of dread.
However I had the pleasure of seeing a brutalist hotel in Iceland (Fosshotel Vatnajokull) which combines concrete with wood. It felt sturdy and powerful, but also soft and welcoming. https://maps.app.goo.gl/wnXEawh2wptmQ3Rd7
But yeah, I do think youre on the right track. It really is related to capitalism and making horrible spaces (malls, etc). And without people, they are alienating and mild dread-inducing.
It's unfashionable but I still love brutalist architecture. It feels stable, like it would still be there whether it had people in it or not. Like living in a cave.
Maybe it feels that way, but that's an illusion, then. The things are often haunted by poor decisions taken when they were built and take a ton of maintenance. Concrete isn't as maintenance-free as it seems!
After reading your first paragraph, I was already drafting a slightly standoffish response in my head, to the effect that the children who grew up on our sanitised fairy tales seem to be blowing each other's heads off on the battlefields of 2026 with undiminished enthusiasm and sadism, and the only difference is that now more of them need a Xanax prescription afterwards. I appreciate that you actually addressed this view with less snark than I was able to.
The problem here is that there is more than two metaphorical people involved: there is the developer, the would-be user, and the evangelist who harangues the developer with "rewrite it in Rust brah" drive-by comments or blog posts about how nobody sane would use memory-unsafe languages/ecosystems without a vibrant community package management ecosystem in the year of our lord 2026.
The last person, I think, most clearly, does "owe" you supply-chain security, in the sense that he bears moral (and ought to be made to bear professional) responsibility for any adverse consequences you may suffer from its lack, though in practice he will probably often protest that he couldn't do anything about it because it's not like he is developer. Whether the developer also owes it is a more interesting question, and I think it greatly depends on what attitude he takes towards the evangelist (does he consider him a nuisance who makes implicit promises the developer is uninterested in delivering, or an ally who raises the dev's profile?).
Long ago, I remember seeing a cartoon which involved a tag-team of two people robbing a third, with A pointing a gun at C and saying "give your money to B", while B comments "I'm really just standing here, but I figure it's best if you do as he says". I'm not sure what exact piece of day-to-day politics this was made to comment on (though it was probably some or another flavour of political violence), but it seems somewhat applicable here as well. The lines just become "accept the supply chain, or suffer my public ridicule" and "I'm just providing the software 'as-is', but you probably should do as he says".
