All Linux distros are usually very stable. I have been using Linux for 15 years (multiple distros) and for me it "just works". Sure, I am an advanced user, so I never end up breaking my system and having to format it. But in my experience, users who say "it's the fourth time I reinstall Linux this quarter, it's just not stable", what it means is that they, the user, broke it. Their distro is most certainly more stable than what they claim.

Now some distros are more beginner-friendly than others, and for the most accessible (Mint comes to mind), I guess they could be compared to Windows. I couldn't say if Windows is easier to use than Mint for someone who does not already know how to navigate Windows. Just like I genuinely don't understand when people say "macOS is easier than Windows" or "iOS is easier than Android". To me they are almost exactly the same, I just don't get it.

My feeling is that most users just don't care about their computer and just need to be able to start their browser and maybe Outlook/Teams. If their very first system was Linux Mint with the browser preinstalled, maybe they would end up thinking this is the absolute simplest system they can imagine?

It's easy to say it when there is absolutely no consequence for whatever mistake you make, even if they hurt many people.

* Whoever controls it can leverage it to gain a competitive advantage and reinforce inequalities: a country can decide to prevent other countries from using it.

* Whoever controls it doesn't have any guardrails (by definition: they set the guardrails), and is receiving a massive amount of data from all their users. Say most of the world is using LLMs based in the US, it means that those companies have access to the data exposed by most of the world in a system that is very good at leveraging information. So the US government (in this case, but any government with control over the major players really) can leverage that information to get a competitive advantage.

What happens if you get full access to the technology of a major LLM company to the point where you can ask questions like "here is a list of people close to that political opponent, please give me a list of actions that can be taken to ruin their career, from the most legal to the least legal"?

Who says that Huawei is a national security risk? Seems to me that LLMs are orders of magnitude more dangerous.

> that awareness of Goodhart's law doesn't mean "never trying to objectively measure anything at all".

Goodhart's law doesn't say "never try to measure anything at all". It says "if you try to optimise for the metric, then your metric is doomed". What EA does is pretty much say "let's devise a metric and optimise for it". It does NOT say "let's measure something without influencing it at all". That is totally different.

Wikipedia says (happy to read your corrections if you think it is incorrect):

> Effective altruism (EA) is a [...] movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good. It is motivated by "using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis".

While I appreciate the idea of "trying to provide the greatest good" (difficult to go against that :-), my criticism is about the method.

* It is not very hard to convince oneself that if we stopped eating animals, then we would stop abusing chickens (did you know that tens of millions of chickens die during transport in trucks every year in England?) and emptying the oceans, and it would be objectively better in terms of animal suffering and for the biodiversity.

* It is not very hard to convince oneself that our CO2 emissions are literally going to get most of us killed, and that it would be globally better for us "humans who are currently alive" to do something about it. But there already, it's not entirely clear to me if the better outcome for life on Earth is to save the human species. Kind reminder that the human species is currently, measurably destroying all other species at a speed orders of magnitude faster than the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Effective altruism wants to do "the greatest good", but what is "good"? It may be good for a subset of humans to bomb another country and steal their oil, but obviously that would not be good for the subset of humans in the bombed country. It may be good for humans to find a clean magical energy, but that wouldn't change the current mass extinction for the other species (kind reminder that the current mass extinction has nothing to do with climate change, it is all about... well humans having easy access to energy and doing what humans do when they have cheap energy).

I feel like effective altruism says: "We can't define what the greatest good is, but we want to believe that anything is better than nothing. So we define a metric that we call 'impartial' (but that obviously isn't) and optimise for it, knowing that optimising for a metric defeats the purpose of that metric". Really it's rich people who want to do something good but don't want to bother getting informed and convincing themselves about what they want to do. "I'll give a ton of money and in return I get philanthropy points to share with my rich friends, but I don't want to have to think about what is being done with that money".

When someone invests a ton of money and energy into something they genuinely care about, they don't call themselves effective altruists, do they? They are just working for that cause. Effective altruism seems to be about rich people delegating the work of "doing something good" by donating some extra money, while they keep doing what made them rich in the first place (which almost always is something that is going against whatever I would consider the greatest good).

I believe that the people who want Firefox want it because it's different, just like the people who want Linux want it because it is different. And similarly in Linux, many people keep explaining how Linux should look more like Windows if it wants the year of the Linux Desktop.

But I wouldn't be on Linux if I wanted Windows. I am not on Linux because I want everybody to be on Linux, on the contrary. Same applies for Firefox.

"Look. I see that it doesn't work. I want it to work, so I will continue trying, even if it fundamentally cannot work. I am not interested in thinking about whether or not it can work. I am interested in showing to the world that I am well-intentioned and trying to do something, even if that something doesn't make sense".

I disagree with the implied idea here that "engineers are better managers". The solution is to have good management, not to assume that "engineers are better managers". I have seen good and bad managers, and in both groups there were engineers and non-engineers.

I see a fundamental difference between thoughts and whatever words I pronounce. You're saying "you should share your thoughts", and I disagree. My thoughts are mine. Whenever I want to share something with the world, I phrase it and share the result of that process.

I find it sad to see it as a battle. Can't we agree on the idea that different people may have different preferences?

"Converting everyone to Linux or vim" would be an uphill battle... if it was worth fighting at all. I don't care what OS or text editor others use, as long as I can use the one that is best for me. If I am happy with commits, I don't want to fight with people who aren't... what would be the point?

I understand how one may wonder if there was a way to do that, but it feels insane to me that one would actually conclude that "yes, it is possible". We have examples everywhere showing that it is generally impossible to define a metric that correctly represents the underlying concept we want to measure.

Said differently, I feel like Effective altruism fundamentally starts by saying "I don't believe in Goodhart's law". Which seems intellectually dishonest to me.

Why wouldn't an AI company do exactly the same? You seem to be an employee of a BigCorp already locked in? Let's make you use more tokens, nobody will see. You seem to be testing our product for your company that is currently using a competitor? Let's give you more token to bias you.

Even if such behaviour was punished for purposely doing it, the companies would converge towards doing it without realising, by "tuning stuff" without understanding exactly what it does other than increase profit. But we don't have to go there: that behaviour is simply not punished, we know it.

But that's compared to alternatives that virtually nobody uses, isn't it? No public service is using ChromeOS. In Europe they probably all use Windows, I would guess? So the question reduces to: is Linux worse than Windows in terms of security in this context?

The goal here is not to have the perfect system, rather to be sovereign. It's enough to not be significantly worse than Windows.

Wouldn't ChromiumOS and AOSP count? Though I read a lot of people generally complaining about secure boot on desktop (for reasons I honestly don't understand: secure boot seems to be part of the Android security model, and it seems valuable to me).

Secondly, are you sure that it is impossible to secure a system for a whole department? I have seen relatively big companies having an IT team managing their own Linux flavour. That is, whitelisting the packages that can be installed by the users. Given that most computer users in the administration use a handful of programs, it doesn't seem super hard to audit them?

If you want to go back to the origin, sure let's do that. My criticism was really JUST that one could explain privacy-preserving age verification in a constructive way, without always framing it in the manipulative way that implies that it is not technically feasible. And apparently you agree with that.

> I've heard literally 0 complaints about whatever Switzerland might be doing.

Haven't you? I have heard many comments just like yours, implying that "whoever wants to verify the age is an authoritarian".

Let's stop here, we're not going anywhere.

The EU implementation is work in progress. I am not aware of any country using it for age verification.

I am not sure I get the argument of "it's not finished, but I will pretend that it is because it's convenient for me".

> You can try again if you like.

Switzerland is another one that seems to be going towards a privacy-preserving solution. Is Switzerland known for being an authoritarian country?

The problem for many parents is that all the other kids have it. It's not always easy to develop a relationship with your kid to convince them that they don't need to conform and have friends.

So I can imagine that many parent would be relieved if access to social media was slightly more complicated, such that maybe it would be more normal to not have access to social media.

I am confused. Did you? Do you mean this:

> [the solution] is regulating social media companies to stop abusing their users, and by extension, children. strict laws around adtech and tracking tech

Pretty sure it has been tried in some countries, and the solution that those companies were happy to implement was... identity verification. There was a drama about Discord doing this, recently.

> Or are you now expecting me to draft up a legislation draft

Not at all. Just give me the name of a viable solution, so that I can search for it. It doesn't take a full day to write something like "privacy-preserving age verification", does it? I can't easily search for "JohnMakin says there are many good solutions, which ones are they?".