Consider the cost on local civilians of the Vietnam and Iraq wars (the GWB war likely killed more Iraqi civilians that Hussein did in 24 years). And the literal trillions of dollar these wars costed. And the real possibility that regime change could have occurred anyway by less horrific means. Are you getting at a tiny silver lining or do you actually think these wars were remotely a good idea?

> Are you getting at a tiny silver lining or do you actually think these wars were remotely a good idea?

I'm getting at outcomes, whether or not a war is a good idea in the first place. War is never a good choice, IMO, but can sometimes be a necessary choice or an inevitability.

It's perfectly reasonable to point out that a war initiated for the wrong reasons had good (or some good) outcomes, or that a war initiated for the right reasons had bad (or some bad) outcomes. And that all war is ultimately terrible.

Our own Civil War was initiated for the right reasons and yet it became the bloodiest war in our history. More Americans died during our Civil War than during all our other wars put together, and Britain was able to end slavery across their whole empire without any war at all, though at great national expense (continuing payments until 2015 or so) and with some bloodshed on the seas.

Or at least stop starting wars.

In this case it's especially depressing that the war's rationale exists only because Trump wanted to tank the deal made by Obama. Which was not a perfect deal but better than the status quo back then, and much better than any likely outcome of this war.

The non-profit still controls the board doesn't it?

As shown by Altman, not really.

I asked Gemini to reproduce the poem "The Road Not Taken". I got it in full (as far as I can tell without Gemini fetching anything from the web). I didn't provide any verse of the poem so I guess that counts as a clean room "implementation"?

Reimplementing function is not the same with wholesale regurgitation.

> Yes we are now dealing with an automated Photoshop. And somehow the people in charge have decided to do something about it, probably more for political or maybe darker reasons.

I don't get what's difficult to understand or believe here. Grok causes a big issue in practice right now, a larger issue than photoshop, and it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't, so the state intervenes.

> maybe France or the EU should ban its citizen from investing in the upcoming SpaceX/xAI IPO, and also Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Adobe, etc. ?

You're basically asking "why do a surgical strike when you can do carpet bombing"? A surgical strike is used to target the actual problem. With carpet bombing you mostly cause collateral damage.

> it should be easy for X to regulate it themselves like the competition does but they don't

Yes they do regulate it. But then people find exploits just like the competition.

I don't think that's a candid description of how X handled this.

I don’t think saying other people aren’t candid is polite or advances the conversation.

Just calling out the false equivalence (Grok self-regulation: dragging their feet and doing the absolute minimum too late after deflecting all blame on the users, while the competition proactively tries to harden the models against such use)

Grok's always proactively had limits on adult content frm the day it was first released public. There's equivalence, you're stating that it's false but I haven't seen any reason to think that. I'm calling out the hypocrisy.

> Anyone skilled at photoshop

So let's say there are two ways to do something illegal. The first requires skills from the perpetrator, is tricky to regulate, and is generally speaking not a widespread issue in practice. The second way is a no brainer even for young children to use, is easy to regulate, and is becoming a huge issue in practice. Then it makes sense to regulate only the second.

> People can now 3D print guns at home, or at least parts that when assembled can make a functioning firearm. Are now 3D printer makers to blame if someone gets killed with a 3D printed gun?

Tricky question, but a more accurate comparison would be with a company that runs a service to 3D print guns (= generating the image) and shoot with them in the street (= publishing on X) automatically for you and keeps accepting illegal requests while the competitors have no issue blocking them.

> Where do we draw the line at tools in terms of effort required, between when the tool bares the responsibility and not just the human using the tool to do illegal things?

That's also a tricky question, but generally you don't really need to know precisely where to draw the line. It suffices to know that something is definitely on the wrong side of the line, like X here.

Sharepoint... the only webapp I have to use that feels worse than Teams. I swear when I open the intranet landing page, the loading, reloading, resizing, rereloading, re-whatever takes at least 10 seconds to settle. How can engineers build something be so inefficient?

I think systemd is the one to learn now if you want to learn Linux. Maybe someone can make a Unix from Scratch for people more interested in the Unix philosophy than Linux per se.

SysVInit on Linux isn’t true Unix though as the way it abuses runlevels to start daemons was never intended by the original designers of init.

Yeah, people forget the degree to which sysvinit was hated at the time - "why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?!?".

If the intention is to create a system that users can reason about, then sysvinit offers the worst of all possible worlds.

> why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?

Run levels. That's it, sysvinit is about run levels. Each run level starts or kills off its own specific list of runnable things like applications, daemons, capabilities, etc.

Run levels were a desirable feature back in the day amongst System V Unix vendors, so each run level required its own kill and start scripts for each item. Run levels, for example, could take a running system from single user (root admin) mode to multi-user, multi-login, NFS sharing, full X11 mode in one command immediately as the scripts ran. This allowed rapid reconfiguration of a system, such as from a GIS workstation to a headless file server, etc. etc. as needed. Each system could be configured to boot to a specific run level. Rather than duplicate some or all such scripts across some or all run levels, symlinks were the solution.

For example, Solaris had run levels 0 through 6. Zero was a blunt force system halt; 1 was single root user admin mode; 2 was multi-user headless mode with NFS; 3 was multi-user X11 windows mode with NFS; 4 was unspecified and therefore kept for purely local configuration as desired; 5 was a planned, orderly system shutdown; and 6 was a planned, orderly system reboot. The root user could implement their choice of run level directly with the init command.

Each run level had its own run control directory (rc.d) under /etc/rc.d for its appropriate kill and start scripts, which were run in order of their K or S number, so dependencies had to be kept in mind when numbering, and curing a dependency failure was as simple as changing a script's number to rearrange the list. So, why copy S04blahblah from rc2.d to rc3.d when a symlink is far better?

Its not hard to understand when you get the big picture, and it wasn't hard to administer if you had the proper overview of it all. Admittedly, admins coming in cold would have to sort through it all, which is partly why it gained a reputation for murkiness when not properly documented by/for local admins. Keep in mind it was the era of administering sendmail macros and NIS tables by hand and you get the picture.

NOTE: edited for clarity

systemd is most certainly the most pragmatic service to learn, but if you're doing LFS to "learn" how a Linux system gets brought up, something lower-level may be a better idea to pick up.

All this stuff is versioned anyway so if the point is learning youe can still read an old version of the book and use old versions of the repos.

Would that help in any way with the increasing concentration of wealth? It doesn't seem to be particularly tied to land.

Some variants also tax contrived monopolies like IP.

> The term "capital" is an abstraction that's not helpful here

It was not so abstract when Musk came up with 44 billion to buy Twitter... The details are complicated but in the end it's still wealth.

> Bezos owns 9% of Amazon stock. That's why he's "rich." What should happen to that stock? What happens to his voting control over Amazon?

Presumably he would sell the stock to pay the wealth tax (or whatever mechanism is there to limit wealth)?

As for the voting control: when you're down to 9% this ship has sailed hasn't it? Anyway I don't think society has a moral obligation to allow individuals personal control of a trillion dollar company because they founded it (and if society disagrees with me, super-voting shares can be used as Alphabet does).