My quick summary is that I don’t think only wealthy people/companies should have their voices heard. I just don’t think that attempting to squash lobbying or even “money in politics” is the means to achieve it.

I’ve called my congressman/senator a few times to speak for/against something, and it’s made me wish it was easier for citizenry to meaningfully band together. Im glad I had someone to call, but it was certainly not the access that a fancy political dinner would have afforded me.

I despise and fear corruption, and agree that there an overlap between lobbying and bribery/kickbacks. And I don’t think buying the sitting president’s meme-coin should purchase access. But of course we have (had) laws against such blatantly poisonous arrangements. And many legal arrangements are not much better.

So I don’t mean to say that all “lobbying” is good in all forms, but the term has become so conflated with other illegal or borderline activities, that it’s actually lost meaning, and is actively harming our ability to meaningfully discuss it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this conflation benefits the very criminals that we wish to shut down.

When someone uses ambiguous terms like “money in politics” or “lobbying” to mean everything from running a newspaper ad to slipping someone an envelope full of cash, we will see calls for blunt instrument fixes. Those fixes usually benefit incumbents and existing power structures, and often happen to make it illegal to amplify one’s speech. There are plenty of countries that have very little legal money in their political system, but they also don’t have elections that can be swayed in the first place.

We would see less money in politics if the government was weaker and could not sway an individual’s or company’s fortunes by millions of dollars at the stroke of a pen, or declare that encrypted communications are illegal, or decide that certain ethnic groups are no longer welcome. But since they can, many companies or individuals or civil liberties groups will do the math and purchase whatever insurance they can to increase the chance their side is heard, whether we agree with that side or not.

I wish I had better proposals to fix the things we agree are bad, because we probably agree on a lot of it. I am mainly trying to call out that saying someone or some group is “lobbying” is NOT the same thing as accusing someone of being inherently corrupt, and the fact that it “sounds” like it is just benefits the actually obvious corrupt criminals and disadvantages anyone else who would want to use money to advocate for a position.

I certainly don’t think that this should be the only way to talk to a lawmaker! I should be able to schedule time to go meet with my representatives or his/her people. I should also be able to pay someone to do so on my behalf.

I’m not familiar with the Citizen’s Initiative approach! I’ll look into it, and agree we should have more organized and official ways of doing it. I have called my congressman and senator’s office a couple of times in the US, and it doesn’t feel very productive. I wish it was easier to organize a group to make our concerns known.

Speaking of the EU, I have been surprised to watch the ChatControl stuff keep resurfacing and be struck down over and over and over again. It feels very much like the “government” wants something that the citizens and their private companies do not. Perhaps it is a result of lobbying for it by private interests, but it seems like an effort by the current powers that be to overstep what people would otherwise want to “lobby against”.

If you had read that the EFF was meeting with lawmakers in the US to convince them that there was no secure way to allow the government to break e2e encryption, or had read that academics were banding together to ask the government not to make open weight LLMs illegal, what would your reaction be? What if told you that those organizations had actually paid a consultant to help them navigate getting appointments with the lawmakers?

Lobbying can be bribery, and that’s bad. Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest is definitely less bad.

The alternative that many people claim to want (no lobbying or money in politics legally) is a lot closer to what is happening in more authoritarian regimes. If there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so, political purity and perfect congressional understanding of nuanced topics doesn’t magically appear.

(1password has a “traveling” mode that wipes it of sensitive passwords before going across borders. Is that suspicious? Should it be criminalized?)

If you have something like dolt (not affiliated), a version controlled database, you wouldn’t have to slap change dates on anything OR create your historical table. The changes would be implicit in the version history.

This spawned a very large thread, so I wasn’t sure where to respond, but it is shocking to me how most of the supporters of this in the comments make a fundamental error: they presuppose that people are going to write the game to begin with, no matter what the change in incentives is.

It would be like me making a law that said “every time you purchase a game, you must pay at least $100 for it,” and then proceed to explain how the quality of all games will go up, and that it will help the small Indy developers because now they get to multiply their guaranteed; existing player base by $100!

All of the arguments are: “well yes, this ight change the way you have to architect the game, and yes this might involve dictating what specific technologies and vendors you can or can’t use, and yes, this might increase costs, but…” and then go on to say why that is completely reasonable.

If someone made an equivalent law for websites: “any website you publish and sell access to must be made available, in perpetuity, to anyone who has ever used it” you would not get the open source utopia people seem to think, where everything is just as great, AND every individual and company on the planet took the extra time to ensure that they are compliant, regardless of the change in incentives.

I understand wanting to prevent someone from “artificially bricking” an app, but this vaguely-worded law isn’t it.

Increasingly, I think that an agent (and I) would work much better in a malleable, notebook-like, inspectable program, than it would with its current file-based “edit and re-run” primitives.

“Marimo pair” (built into their notebook-like primitive) is an attempt at this. And they have program introspection tools built in.

I also think that Glamorous Toolkit (https://gtoolkit.com/) might be a similar live environment, but I haven’t investigated it too much other than reading about it.

Is anyone else familiar with “modern” attempts at this?

The demagogues have been shockingly effective at telling people that the size of the pie is fixed, the game is rigged, and the only way to get a piece of that limited pie is to steal it. And the people that are most susceptible to this message are the ones that live in the countries that people are literally dying to get in to.

I wanted to make its VM/machine our default secure agent sandbox, but I couldn’t figure out how to isolate this VM from the host properly. This thread prompted me to find the issue though, and I saw this was recently implemented! https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/169