People, many of them at least, cannot make this distinction anymore. You can, I can, but people as a whole are having problems with that.

Sounds a lot like "640Kb ought to be enough for anybody"

1. Their German isn't good enough, which limits the pool of people you can connect to

2. They only or mostly hang out in the expat-scene, which limits the pool of people you can connect to

Any solution that can convince the Germans, the most privacy obsessed sticklers on the whole planet, has my support by proxy. If they think it's safe enough, it most likely is. Almost no other country has seen the dark side of what you're saying here as much as Germany, first with the Nazis and then in East Germany.

> To the extent that political discourse is shaped by astroturfing

Both Brexit and the Trump election have been significantly impacted by this, and it's not even controversial to observe that.

> Outside interference in the form of legal bribes (lobbying) and sometimes less legal forms of corruption has orders of magnitude more sway over politics than whatever the public may effect in elections.

Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that we should not address the elephant in the room - the seriously degrading impact that social media has on our society.

> It's ridiculous to imply that there was any serious public debate on this.

There was no debate because almost no one in (for example) tech circles is even acknowledging the problem, let alone coming up with a solution. Give me a better solution and I would argue for that instead. The status quo is unacceptable.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...

Because I believe there are none.

It's not as if there are no downsides. There are, and some of them are so severe that they are impacting the whole of society.

People can impersonate to be 500 or 5000 or 500000 people from another country and all echo some detrimental or even treasonous sentiment, critically influencing and steering voters, which changes politics and election outcomes and thereby the trajectories of whole countries. I cannot understate how serious that is.

If we can make sure that every real person can only have 1 social media account per platform, and if we can check that someone is an adult, and if (and only if) we can do that in a privacy preserving manner... then honestly, I don't see why I would be against that. I'm ok with being held accountable for what I do online. I want to pay that price to prevent the severe outside interference we've seen in elections and in our politics.

You and many others might not be, but it seems like you've lost the argument.

I really believe that in the near-term future we will run our LLMs in hardware, not in software. Hardwire a capable model into a device the size of a graphics card, embed it into a laptop, and you have something that uses less power, does faster inference, doesn't require additional CPU or memory, doesn't cost a monthly fee, and will probably eventually be available for under a (few) hundred bucks.

If an individual country trains a language model, it's not ambitious enough. If we try to do one for the whole EU they will say it takes too long (you need to get all countries on board, you see). If the EU announces it by executive decision it's a dictatorship and government driven economic intervention, if a EU company does it they'll say it's not good enough.

You can't win with these people. In my opinion, you shouldn't even try to convince them.

Screening an embryo that could not survive outside the womb and deciding to stop the pregnancy based on the results is not the same as "wishing the kid wasn't born".