That the current administration is also purging viewpoints it doesn't like, adopting the same authoritarian mindset, but having it enforced by the government (which is worse, IMO), that goes to show horseshoe theory is true.

Compare that to the parodies made by someone like "Weird Al" Yankovic. And I get that these tools will get better, but the best parodies work due to the human performer. They are funny because they aren't fake.

This goes for other art forms. People mention photography a lot, comparing it with painting. Photography works because it captures a real moment in time and space; it works because it's not fake. Painting also works because it shows what human imagination and skill with brushes can do. When it's fake (e.g., not made by a human painting with brushes on canvas, but by a Photoshop filter), it's meaningless.

Maybe some day I will, but I find it hard to believe it, given a LLM just copies its training material. All the creativity comes from the human input, but even though people can now cheaply copy the style of actual artists, that doesn't mean they can make it work.

Art is interesting because it is created by humans, not despite it. For example, poetry is interesting because it makes you think about what did the author mean. With LLMs there is no author, which makes those generated poems garbage.

I'm not saying that it can't work at all, it can, but not in the way people think. I subscribe to George Orwell's dystopian view from 1984 who already imagined the "versificator".

As an EU citizen, I'm not concerned about your need to observe my behaviour or to prevent ad-click fraud. What I care about is websites sharing my navigation history with Google or the rest of the advertising industry, so yes, I'd like to be informed of it.

Personally, instead of having banners, I'd just ban the practices altogether (e.g., targeted advertising, 3rd party analytics), which would certainly simplify business.

https://opensource.org/definition-annotated

I agree partly with the article about entitlement, but you need to define what "open" means, and "access to source code" doesn't cut it due to IP laws. It can't be "open" if it's a legal landmine.

And yes, Open-Source does mean "FOSS", always. The definitions of Open-Source and Free Software being very much equivalent.

Stop overloading terms for your own gain.

With enough propaganda, it's easy to blame whatever self-inflicted problem on others.

Huawei famously shipped devices without Google Play and many were fine with it. And Samsung's devices, AFAIK the most popular Androids, can have the Google account removed. Play stops working, but you can still use Samsung's own app store.

That may not last, of course, Android could become closed source, but in the meantime I dare say it's strictly more open than Windows. And I hope Microsoft gets slapped by EU's DMA.

It's simple: global trade is good, isolationism is bad. It's as simple as that.

The “EU common classes” don't want higher prices or poorer services. This is a fact that the US's elites in power will soon discover. And it's easy to see why this trend is a train wreck in progress: unemployment, in both the US and EU, is at an all-time low, and if you significantly lower imports via tariffs and economic wars, who do you think will work on those local products and services? Never mind that US's investments and exports are also crashing as a direct result of this administration's policies, so I'm guessing they rely on future software developers that end up unemployed to become lumberjacks.

But yes, now that the US is no longer a trustworthy ally, I want the EU to cut its tech dependencies from it for as much as possible, while strengthening ties with all of our other allies, such as Canada, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India. There's no conflict in this reasoning.

If the future can't be predicted that's because one can't predict when Trump and his imbeciles will be stripped of power.

For bookmarks, I recommend Linkding: https://linkding.link

Couldn't the US government also kill all Windows workstations, iPhones or AWS servers? Of course they could.

Smaller companies or individuals may not care, but governments or bigger companies that are risk averse? Of course they'll care.

If you're talking about Mahmoud Khalil, that was probably unlawful, and you should wait for your judicial branch to pass judgment before reaching the conclusion that fascism is lawful.

The surveillance laws, no matter how often you repeat the word "draconian", are irrelevant because…

Email isn't safe, and most of your email probably ends up on Google's or Microsoft's servers anyway, in which case US companies can be coerced by the US government to give them everything they have, while not being able to tell the public about it. And they do just that, a fact that came to light with Snowden's revelations. Australia cannot be worse than the US.

For emails, the government surveillance is irrelevant, as it happens anyway. And solutions like Proton Email are just privacy theatre that also happen to interact poorly with established standards (e.g., SMTP, IMAP).

I also fear Australia much less than I fear the US these days. I have always feared the US, especially due to their massive security apparatus, but at least I considered them valuable allies. These days we'll just add some extra fear points due to the techno-fascists in charge, voted-in by the people with a popular vote.

Whenever I see such comments on popular forums, such as HN, I lose faith in humanity a little, either because people don't think about the threat model (this being vibes-based) or the consequences of boycotting the underdogs, or because they are disingenuous about it.

Fastmail is a fine service, built and operated by trustworthy people, which also contribute to standards (e.g. JMAP) and to open source. A service that's also not monetized by ad-tech, unlike what the Big Tech email services are doing.

Also, DMA specifically targets monopolies and it will most likely encourage innovation. I mean, let's be honest, legislation isn't the reason for why Apple's AI sucks.

Nevertheless, US's Big Tech can either comply or GTFO.

I also have a feeling the Five Eyes agreement is about to end.