> The feeling that it's "not worthy" has completely drained the joy out of it.
It was never "worthy". With the proliferation of free, quality, open source software, what's now a prompt away, has been a github repo away for a long time. It's just that, before, you chose to ignore the existence of github repos and enjoy your hobby. Now you're choosing to not ignore the AI.
> "Sorry we can't catch the people sexually abusing one million children every year because they use a VPN."
Bullshit. The UK police basically ignored a pedophile ring under their noses, with zero VPNs involved. I'm not expert on the matter but I'm pretty sure a E2E is not an essential part of sexual abuse.
And the politician ultimately responsible for (as in "she was in charge and failed to prevent/deal with it") the worst child abuse scandal in the UK went on to hold more senior positions and Blair wanted to make her minister for children at one point.
Exactly. Where is the outcry from the same politicians about the Epstein client list being shoved under the rug by the US? Nowhere? Then they don't actually care about protecting children.
It may hurt them financially but they are fighting for market share and I'd argue short answers will drive users away. I prefer the long ones much more as they often include things I haven't directly asked about but are still helpful.
> Read about the ProtectEU (what a fucking ridiculous name) proposal which will mandate the scanning on device and basically record everything you do on your device.
Where can we read about that? The official documents are quite vague and I don't see anything as specific as mandatory device scanning.
I don't know about scanning (that's the goal of this proposal - ChatControl - including scanning of storage*) but ProtectEU involves creating hardware and software backdoors.
You picked a really bad time to defend a "politicians will eventually do what is best for us" position, given that such a law just came into effect in UK. And I think it's you who don't understand how the EU works. It's the biggest countries that must agree to something. Then they coerce/convince the rest. At best, the smaller countries can put on some kind of resistance until they extract some minor exception. This isn't "some Dutch mayor proposes free Internet". This is a relentless onslaught on encryption and privacy. And it's already in effect in other countries where someone at sometime also said "nah, don't worry, they just messing with us, it's not gonna pass".
Sometimes I think the HN contingent just willfully buries its head in the sand on issues of the EU, because they prefer to think of the EU as some idealist version of whatever they've lost as leftists in the US.
What this person is writing is correct. The reality of EU politics is anything but democratic. The EU is crowned by an unelected commission that does not serve the interests of the governed.
It seems reasonable to theorise it is actually a timezone-dependent effect and there is probably a slightly weird sample of English-speaking tech-focused Europeans who spend a lot of their day checking social media. When the US is up and about the tone shifts.
The EU is quite good at cultivating a benign, environment-friendly, happy family image. I think it is a deliberate contrast to the "gung-ho" American world presence.
The background is pretty machiavellistic, though. There is a lot of money and influence to be managed. It is no secret that Ursula von der Leyen got her first mandate basically from Merkel, a reward for being her loyal subordinate for years.
The commission is appointed in back-room deals by "elected" governments which are in turn often only indirectly appointed by parliaments. From your nickname I do infer you are from Germany, where ministers are not elected and the chancellor is not elected by the voters. Instead the chancellor is elected by the Bundestag, which was elected by the voters, but only after the usual back-room deals of forming a coalition. So there is no actual voter control on who becomes chancellor, as evidenced by several "grand" coalitions that always had Merkel as chancellor. Ministers are then not even elected by parliament, they are simply appointed by the chancellor. So not elected in any sense of the word, not even indirectly.
The only elected body in the EU is the EU parliament which has practically no powers when compared to the commission. It can only vote on what the commission proposes, it cannot make its own proposals. It cannot overrule the commission. And the commission can make rules and regulations of its own, without involving the parliament. The most the parliament can do is hold up the process a little.
The EU is not democratic by any sensible measure. "But there is an election somewhere in the process" doesn't make a democracy. Many dictatorships, communist regimes and even monarchies do have an election somewhere in the process. The emperor has no clothes, and the EU isn't democratic. Any timid initiative to make it so has died ages ago. The last straw was the trumped up non-election of von-der-Leyen. Actually, the parliament should have filled her job with its candidate, as was promised before the election. After election day, that promise which was intended to introduce at least a whiff of democratic accountability, was instantly forgotten. von der Leyen was instated instead of the parliaments candidate by a back-room deal.
Everything you say here is correct. Democracy is not a binary where if you have an election no matter how indirect then it's a "democracy™".
The EU is governed by backroom deals and is extremely opaque. Adding to everything you said: there is no accountability, there is little presence of EU matters in newspapers, EU leaders hardly even attempt to communicate with their people (practically only von der Leyen or António Costa make public speeches).
Just compare: you surely know the names of all or almost all ministers of your country. Do you know the names of even 2 out of the 27 commissioners? Scrutiny of their doings and the laws that are proposed appear in news regularly. Does such scrutiny exist of EU institutions?
If you don't know about EU commissioners or EU matters, then that is purely up to you.
Matter of fact, you're commenting on a news article about EU happenings right now.
If one is only the slightest bit informed, one has probably heard of Kaja Kallas, the foreign affairs commissioner or Maroš Šefčovič, the trade comissioner.
These are not some big secret names, but public figures with well-articulated positions that regularly hold press conferences.
While there have been a tiny numbers of faithless electors in the past, they have never influenced the outcome of a presidential election. Furthermore, about 80% of electors are from states that have laws that require their electors to vote for the candidate who wins the state's popular vote.
That's just ridiculous. The US president is directly elected by the people, modulo the weirdness of state-level FPTP. Flawed as the electoral college is, there's no comparison whatsoever.
The electoral college is a rubber stamp of the popular vote (per state). The commission is selected by the member-states governments with no electoral input. You cannot be making this argument in good faith...
The member-states governments are elected by popular vote, per state, just as electors are. It is the same level of indirection, whichever way you try to reframe it.
There's no way you're seriously making this argument. I don't know what else to say except repeat myself.
The US electoral college is an historical artifact that simply rubber stamps the votes of the States. The member states' heads of government make the decision themselves! The equivalent would be the electoral college simply voting for the president themselves.
The electoral college delegates choose the president of their own free will? There is no presidential election? You literally have to be trawling at this point.
The electoral college is elected. It then chooses the president, who is not elected by the people. The electoral college is not necessarily reflective of the popular vote, as famously demonstrated by the 2016 election.
All of this is simple fact. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at.
The term presidential election is a euphemizing misnomer, more accurately it would be called presidential electoral college election.
If you don't mind me asking, are you autistic? You are conflating the de jure (winning the popular vote wins you the state's electors) with the de facto (the electors are a pro forma/rubber stamp).
The comparison does NOT make sense. One is a body pledged, often legally, to vote for the state's winning candidate, with only extremely rare deviations by faithless electors (which never once came even close to putting the popular electoral results in question). The other is a body who is explicitly tasked with making the decision from scratch. Is it possible that you acknowledge that these are not in the slightest the same?
Switzerland is certainly democratic, because voters can directly vote for laws. Some countries and states do have provisions to that effect, but with more restrictions and less often used.
The US is actually more democratic than e.g. Germany, because the president is elected by the people (though indirectly), not by parliament. Therefore a political oligarchy could be prevented, because the majority in parliament and the president can check on each other, and the president is more accountable to the voters than to parliament.
Generally there is a sliding scale of course, but the less directly officials are elected, the less democratic a country is. A common example would be a soviet (engl. "council") republic, which isn't considered democratic at all, even though it has tons of elections: Each factory/town/village elects a local workers's council, which in turn elects a county council, which elects a regional council, which elects a state council, which elects a national council, which elects the council of ministers, which elects the chairman. Tons of filters that make absolutely certain that the will of the party and state always supercedes the will of the people.
> The US is actually more democratic than e.g. Germany, because the president is elected by the people
The German president is mainly a figurehead with limited power. The office was stripped down after WWII.
The real power lies with the ministers, who can issue absolute orders that have to be obeyed without question. One of many results is that German prosecutors cannot be trusted with issuing EU wide arrest warrants and had the ability stripped from them the moment it was challenged in court.
I was comparing the USian president to the German chancellor. Both head up the government made up of ministers they appoint. It's only the name that is different, and the order in protocol. The USian president is first and head of state in protocol order, the German chancellor is third after the German federal president and the president of the Bundestag (one chamber of parliament).
Sorry for my being imprecise here, Germans tend to skip their own president(s) because, as you correctly state, they are mostly unimportant figureheads.
It is not disinformation. The Commission is unelected by the people. I specifically called out that the Commission does not serve the interests of the governed. That is a correct statement.
What's more the Commission is more than one person, unlike the US presidency.
Again, the commission is appointed by elected officials.
Do you call ministers in your country unelected? Would you call the US president unelected?
I agree the Comission doesn't serve the interests of the governed, but that's because the people keep voting against their own interests and vote in right-wing governments, which in turn appoints a right-wing commission, which then does the right-wing thing of selling out its people.
It is not a structural EU fault, it is the electorate that's to blame.
> Do you call ministers in your country unelected?
Don't know about emptysongglass's country, but in France, ministers are absolutely unelected. The president is directly elected, who then appoints the prime minister, who then "proposes" the other ministers of his government. There is no strict rule by which the prime minister is chosen, only a "habit" to choose from the "winning camp", which was not respected by Macron these last two times. There's also no rule for how the ministers are picked. As you can imagine, this is largely backroom deals.
The last two prime ministers have all been deemed unsatisfactory by the parties with the most votes in the last legislative elections and by those who voted for them (people voted directly for their representatives in the lower chamber of parliament). These prime ministers were from parties that scored lower in the elections.
I'm often using LLMs for stuff that requires recent data. No way I'm running a web crawler in addition to my local LLM. For coding it could theoretically work as you don't always need latest and greatest but would still make me anxious.
My biggest issue is local models I can run on my m1/m4 mbp are not smart enough to use tools consistently, and the context windows are too small for iterative uses.
The last year has seen a lot of improvement in small models though (gemma 3n is fantastic), so hopefully it’s only a matter of time.
Sounds very much sequential, even if very difficult:
> The performer's first reply is not an entire poem. Rather, the poem is created one line at a time. The first questioner speaks and the performer replies with one line. The second questioner then speaks and the performer replies with the previous first line and then a new line. The third questioner then speaks and performer gives his previous first and second lines and a new line and so on. That is, each questioner demands a new task or restriction, the previous tasks, the previous lines of the poem, and a new line.
It was never "worthy". With the proliferation of free, quality, open source software, what's now a prompt away, has been a github repo away for a long time. It's just that, before, you chose to ignore the existence of github repos and enjoy your hobby. Now you're choosing to not ignore the AI.