Hacker News: broker354690

New comment by broker354690 in "Civics is boring, so, let's encrypt something (2024)"

broker354690 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 11:28:29 +0000

This was hard to tolerate.

Can someone explain to me why wiretapping can't just.. evolve? Upon a court order, send a guy to bug someone's house with cameras and watch him put in his password. Use a microphone to listen to him type in his password, perhaps even from a distance, then use some open source tool to convert the audio data into keypresses & similar. Order the ISP to copy the packets for you so you can do traffic analysis. Order companies the guy has accounts on to cough up whatever data they actually have access to. Intercept his mail. Follow him around.

Encryption doesn't prevent any of these things, so what's with all the focus on it? Wiretapping was never zero cost, and we the people only consented to the norm of court ordered wiretapping in a world in which it took some effort to do. It ought to stay difficult.

New comment by broker354690 in "Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?"

broker354690 — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 22:34:19 +0000

Who cares? Granny is still allowed to buy knives and accidentally chop off her fingers while she cooks. If she ends up doing that it's either her fault or she's too old to be using knives. We don't ban or blunt knives just because you can cut yourself with them.

New comment by broker354690 in "Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?"

broker354690 — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 22:28:31 +0000

A certain kind of arrogant man who hails from the land of theory tends to believe that everything can be perfectly optimized, that even real-world systems can be designed with mathematical guarantees as to some constraint or another. In their world every thing and every one is an abstract variable to be managed and modified, a goat to be herded. User input is modeled as untrustworthy, hostile input and treated accordingly. The unwashed masses have never toiled in their sterile computer science cathedrals, never been anointed with the sacred waters of ROOT, and thus could never possibly deserve to wield the powers of computation without the infallible guidance of Saint Jobs (peace be upon him) and his holy host.

To compute on one's own is to open one's electronic soul to the Sins of Free Software. Such devilish arts must be shunted to the margins of society, till they may be purged on That Day when all shall bask in Google's light forevermore.

New comment by broker354690 in "A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in"

broker354690 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:49:56 +0000

Section 230? I didn't know the outputs of ChatGPT were content generated by random users on the net. Does this mean AI truly stands for 'Actual Indians'?

Preposterous.

New comment by broker354690 in "A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in"

broker354690 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:47:52 +0000

ChatGPT is a service and thus OpenAI should be exposed to even more liability than if they had sold the LLM to the user to be accessed offline. If the user had been running a local LLM, OpenAI would not have been responsible for generating the speech.

As it stands, the human beings called OpenAI willingly did business with this child, and willingly generated the speech that persuaded him to kill himself and sent it to him. That they used a computer to do so is irrelevant.

New comment by broker354690 in "A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in"

broker354690 — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:44:10 +0000

OpenAI's ChatGPT is not an intermediary. Google finds you speech that was produced by someone else. ISPs ferry the speech to your modem. Forums aggregate speech from actual humans who produced that speech and enable you to access that speech.

The group of human beings known as OpenAI is directly responsible for generating the speech that was sent to this child, and they intentionally did business with this child. They did not conduct speech from one entity to another- they produced the speech themselves.

New comment by broker354690 in "A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in"

broker354690 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 23:45:20 +0000

I would go further than that and question whether or not the notions of "safety" and "guardrails" have any legal meaning here at all. If I sold a bomb to a child and printed the word "SAFE" on it, that wouldn't make it safe. Kid blows himself up, no one would be convinced of the bomb's safety at the trial. Likewise, where's the proof that sending a particular input into the LLM renders it "safe" to offer as a service in which it emits speech to children?

New comment by broker354690 in "A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in"

broker354690 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 23:26:50 +0000

Why isn't OpenAI criminally liable for this?

Last I checked:

-Signals emitted by a machine at the behest of a legal person intended to be read/heard by another legal person are legally classified as 'speech'.

-ChatGPT is just a program like Microsoft Word and not a legal person. OpenAI is a legal person, though.

-The servers running ChatGPT are owned by OpenAI.

-OpenAI willingly did business with this teenager, letting him set up an account in exchange for money. This business is a service under the control of OpenAI, not a product like a knife or gun. OpenAI intended to transmit speech to this teenager.

-A person can be liable (civilly? criminally?) for inciting another person's suicide. It is not protected speech to persuade someone into suicide.

-OpenAI produced some illegal speech and sent it to a suicidal teenager, who then committed suicide.

If Sam Altman stabbed the kid to death, it wouldn't matter if he did it on accident. Sam Altman would be at fault. You wouldn't sue or arrest the knife he used to do the deed.

Any lawyers here who can correct me, seeing as I am not one? It seems clear as day to me that OpenAI/Sam Altman directly encouraged a child to kill themselves.

New comment by broker354690 in "Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android"

broker354690 — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 23:06:17 +0000

> would be a catastrophic change to the ecosystem.

Hey we were already on board with this, you don't have to convince us.