It’s a position they chose. They could say, mass surveillance is unconstitutional and wrong, but we’d be happy to continue with our mission of targeted intercepts and providing secure communication to our people.
If Pearl Harbor had been the only thing that happened that day, and the nature of the attack had been such that it was automatically prevented from happening again, then what came after would have been a severe overreaction too.
Most of that fear was driven by the response, not the attacks themselves. The government could have tried to calm the people down, but instead it amped them up and treated terrorism as the most dangerous thing imaginable. You can't say that the ridiculous over-the-top response was justifiable because people were terrified, when that is a big part of why people were terrified.
The real trick (if you can pull it off) is to cultivate a passion for something most people aren't that interested in, but where there's plenty of demand. I wanted to make games growing up, as I'm sure many of us here did. It's actually how I got into programming in the first place: I want to make games, oh here's this book on BASIC that came with the computer, maybe that will tell me how. Somewhere along the way I managed to transform that into a broader passion for high-performance low-level programming not necessarily in games, and that has ended up being a great career. There isn't a great mass of people trying to get into the non-game side of this, so I get the benefit of personal passion without the downsides that come from competing with a million other passionate people.
If I had a kid into computers, I'd probably go with the "I want to make video games" sentiment for now, since it's a great hook for many broadly applicable skills, but be on the lookout for interesting non-games things that might catch their eye.
To be fair - I think the world is in such flux right now it's kinda impossible to predict what is a good path forward. I have no idea what to tell my kid.
But yes, I think many of us started with that book on BASIC making little programs for the joy of it. And it leads you all sorts of places.
It's funny to see the evolution of language. Quotation marks indicated that something was a direct quote. Then people started to use them as a sarcasm indicator. Now we're to the point where people can't even recognize them as indicating a direct quote.
“40 beheaded babies” and mass/systematic rape propaganda accepted with zero verification (journalism 101) and, once debunked, zero retractions were made
Hamas-run, but not Likud-run
Condemnation of atrocities by Israel and the US that comes from Israeli and Western voices is given significantly more weight than the same claims coming from Palestinian or Arab voices. After all, the native lacks the capacity to be objective.
Israeli gov statements are taken as undeniable fact, while Palestinian (Gaza or West Bank) gov spokespeople or even Palestinian people in general are barely even platformed
Over-representation of Zionists in editorial teams of every major newspaper and news channel across all Western countries, which (naturally) led to coordinated suppression of any Palestinian voice internally and externally (started to change only relatively recently).
On the BBC specifically, try reading through their articles, especially from early on, and tell me what the editorial slant is. Yes, most of the content is neatly wrapped in quotation marks, but what picture were they trying to paint?
My point is that both UK and Western media immediately jumped on and recirculated the claim in the first few days without confirmation. This was just enough to sear the image of beheaded babies into the minds of viewers & readers in the West, helping to justify Israel’s campaign to starve out the “human animals” and raze Gaza (a least in the mind of the avg citizen).
I'm unconvinced that this is a pattern that is distinguished by the nation being reported on. Headlines vary. Both of your example headlines might appear at different times in the outlets I read.
I think this was just a stylistic choice and that this whole thread is a weird tangent.
I don't think that's true and would be curious to see evidence otherwise.
I believe BBC and other outlets with journalistic standards use quotes when reporting what officials say and only drop the quotes when they have independent verification, like eyewitness reports from one of their own journalists.
Those have the same implication even if it's written slightly differently. "US insists" makes it clear that "open" is a claim by the US, not an independent fact. The first one doesn't match the supposed pattern where one side's claims are stated as facts, despite the lack of quotation marks.
I think it's a fair example given how untruthful the US administration has been about whether the strait is "open" or not compared to the practical reality. Both would work with or without quotes, but the Iranian one is quoted. Still doesn't show systematic bias, but it's what I asked for.
I'm pretty sure the Iranian one is quoted because they used the word, whereas the US one is not quoted because the statements that the reporting was pulled from never used the actual word "open."
I see how it would read as bias if one interprets them as scare quotes, but it really does just mean "this is verbatim" when used here.
Yes, it's been true for a long time. See the book "Manufacturing Consent" for example, but there's been lots of research since. There are numerous ways that the western media biases news to build support for the objectives of those in power.
It would be nice to see research rather than polemics by far-leftists. Especially when that book is itself written by someone supportive of genocidal dictatorships.
I don't see anything stated as fact (without quote marks) here solely on the basis of Trump having said it, and I see use of quote marks for things he has said, eg. 'Trump says Iran war will end "immediately" after US midterm elections': https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/cp7r8vgl2lgt
The BBC's main sin in relation to Trump is sane-washing, treating his bizarre outbursts as if they were reasonable things for a US president to say. Eg. were he to say "I have a solid gold prostate!" they'd have an Anthony Zurcher piece entitled "Is Trump's prostate really made of gold?" with a quote from a doctor saying "while it seems unlikely and would probably be uncomfortable, having a gold prostate would be unlikely to cause any noticeable side effects as the metal is inert" and a discussion of the benefits of replacing a cancer-prone organ with a noble metal.
Not reporting on Trump is not an option because his words and actions have huge ramifications for the world.
I think in general the press has gotten much better at just straight up saying that Trump is lying or wrong, as opposed to previous policy of only reporting counter claims from other parties.
Just because the material was legally required doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it. I can't (legally) buy a physical book, scan it, and put the scan on my web site. It seems to me that an LLM is a derived work of the training materials that went into it, and thus needs permission from the copyright holders.
But OK, the law seems to disagree with me there. But OK, let's say it's fine for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted content as long as they didn't torrent it or whatever. What then makes it illegal, or morally wrong, to do the same thing with their competitors' model outputs? Why is it OK for Anthropic to scrape this comment and feed it into their system, but not OK for Moonshot to scrape the output of Anthropic's system and feed it into theirs?
you can buy a book, scan it, and upload the counts of every letter, distribution of apostophies, use it as the input to some convoluted process to produce weights or a search index though. They got slapped for illegally obtaining the files, not for producing derivative works of them.
distilling another llm is a clear tos violation but no one really knows how much teeth those have. financially probably none all they can do is whack a mole on the accounts doing it which won’t work.
so they’re trying to lobby copyright changes i guess; unlikely to succeed as doing so would also make all search engines illegal
Not sure what part of my comment this is meant to address. I explicitly acknowledged that the law seems to consider this to be legal. My point is that if it's legal to feed random web sites into the training system, why would it not also be legal to feed competitors' model outputs into it?
Because it’s TOS violation. Anthropic have no agreed tos with the websites they’re scraping. The accounts being used to distill Anthropic’s models are all bound by their terms
That's a contract violation, not an illegal act. And I'd bet that plenty of sites that Anthropic et al have trained on have ToS that forbid using them for model training. This site does. Do we think the AI companies aren't training on HN comments?
It's really interesting to go back to some of the old Stevenotes and compare. They have a soul to them that's just not there with these newer pre-recorded ones. They were still polished like crazy, but there's this feeling of spontaneity and risk. At the very least, he had to stop and wait for applause and laughter. And there was this sense that they had something to prove. Now, of course the new thing is slick, easy to use, integrates with all your other Apple stuff. It's a sales pitch. Look at the original iPhone announcement and it feels like half of it is convincing the audience that, yes, this thing is actually real, we actually built this, it really does work.
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