"Again, we are not doing this because we want this to be the future. It is not because we want to expand to chain AI-run retail stores across the world. It is not for economic opportunity.
We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold."
I always enjoy how these AI companies try to take a moral high ground. When someone doesn't want something to be the future, usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future than why don't you spend your time building a future you do want? Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this? Literally anything else.
Just be honest, you think this is the future and you do in fact want to be first doing it to be in a position to make alot of money. Do you think people don't know what and ad is when they see one?
I once saw an interview with a guy who was into extreme body modification of an unprintable and life-altering nature. He said something to the effect of, "I like challenging people's conception of what humans are." I translated this as, "I did a dumb thing, but now that I'm getting the attention I was after I need to look smart."
For the guys in this story, my translation is, "We were totally fine with making money with no effort, because F paying more employees than we need to. This social media campaign is our backup plan to ensure we get some press and attention out of it even if it fails. We'd totally be cool with making a lot of money though. Please visit our quirky AI shop and buy our stuff."
For decades we moved to a knowledge based economy, now we have perversely wealthy people saying they're coming for those jobs. The thought of 10s of millions of people with nothing to do but starve to death ought to scare those wealthy people.
> The thought of 10s of millions of people with nothing to do but starve to death ought to scare those wealthy people.
It doesn't, it won't, and it shouldn't. It's not explored in game theory and criminal justice tries to conceal this but the starving will kill and eat each other long before they organize and mob the wealthy.
It plays out in every prison riot, governmental collapse, and other condition of anarchy.
This idea that the poor will mob the rich is feel-good Hollywood idealism that has been wholly undermined by identity politics. The poor will sooner kill and eat you just because you're easier to reach.
If (1) many bright and very online people are going to lose their jobs, and (2) the response has not been mass unionization, might I rethink [1] a more likely future of work or rethink [2] the psychology of the average/collective knowledge workforce, or...
"where union" in short.
Perhaps the concept is too foreign for white collars, or on average folks think they'll be OK and it's the juniors who'll go... maybe too focused on immediate needs... a belief unionization is the wrong response... (and I'm not advocating for anything in particular btw)
A union has the power to organise one thing, to withdraw labour. In the industrial era, the threat of all the workers not showing up was a threat to end a business.
If AI does what is promised, to replace labour, then a threat to withdraw labour is only threatening the owners with a good time.
Yes? I'm saying unions, whose power is strikes, cannot possibly work because the strikers have zero power in the circumstance "we have decided to make you all redundant".
Unions doesn't give you power they just help you use what power you have. Unions don't help if you don't have any power, see Detroit factory workers, they were highly unionized but that didn't help them at all. And if you have power then you can start a union, so there isn't a reason to start a union early before you need it.
...and in America there are more guns than humans, and more potentially unemployed white collar workers than the police, military, and national guard combined.
Nick Hanauer understood this fourteen years ago. Very few others did. And despite him spending his own time and money to explain it in simple English, nobody in his peer group wanted to hear it -- his TED talk on the subject ... took several years before it was published. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.
Freakanomics podcast had a recent episode regarding Cheating with PEDS, and interviewed the (former) head of the Enhanced Games. At one point, he discussed the benefit for society because athletes would be monitored for 5-years post performance.
To me, it seemed like a modern day tech-take of human cock-fighting.
In my opinion, the problem with PEDS isn't adults taking them if they would just admit to taking them.
The problem is with adolescents taking them. Adolescent boys see a really nice immediate payoff for taking PEDS (better musculature and better sports performance->more popular) while the downsides are in the future. It's really hard to fight that.
Even when I was in high school several decades ago, we had a handful of people on PEDS. And we were a tiny school with no significant sports programs. I can't imagine what it's like now with social media pushing everything.
> In my opinion, the problem with PEDS isn't adults taking them if they would just admit to taking them.
The incentive to cheat and hide was one of the points from the podcast. In Cycling, in order to win, you have to compete with other cyclists who are doping, and doing so in such a way that they are unlikely to get caught. In order to win, you have to dope and not get caught. Youre not forced to dope, but the option is there, and yours to take should you choose.
Honestly PEDS are stigmatized and under-researched for the performance enhancing aspect. They have undoubtable side effects - but how much, why, etc. is kind of meh from what I saw when I was looking into this, bro science is best you can get. Few studies here and there giving people modes test boosts and measuring athletic performance.
Not saying we should be promoting them, but if we can eventually get to the point where we eliminate the really bad side effects and get most of the benefits it's going to be a great thing for everyone, the next thing after GLP-1.
I do not have the background that allows me to make medical decisions based reading published medical articles, so I have to trust my doctors advice, and seek 2nd opinions if I'm not convinced.
My issue was the disingenuous use of a "5-year post compete" monitoring as justification for Enhanced Games.
Let's just say the "artist" was never again going to be able to walk normally, wear normal pants, or sit without a doughnut pillow. It was a voluntary disability.
> When someone doesn't want something to be the future, usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future than why don't you spend your time building a future you do want?
“It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the emotional investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting toward the continual development and perfecting of the system, with negative consequences for individual freedom.”
Many actions have a negative value. If I give two toddlers ball-peen hammers, release them into a window store, and then close the front door while I wait in the parking lot, was my action likely to create value or likely to destroy value?
The fallacy is to think value was created by buying someone's labour to fix the window. This is value that's been displaced from something productive to something unproductive.
Instead of going from 0 to 1 (invest the money and create value), you went from -1 to 0 (spend money to fix the window to get back to where you were) and, overall, the value of a perfectly good window got lost.
The Torment Nexus joke is kind of undermined by obviously being a reference to the Total Perspective Vortex from HGTTG, where the joke was that nothing bad actually happened when they used it on Zaphod.
Not sure if this is a spoiler, it’s been a while since I read those books, but if memory serves the only reason Zaphod survived the TPV was because he was temporarily the inhabitant of a pocket universe specifically designed to trick him, and naturally for this universe’s version of the TPV he was the most important being in it, and in telling him so the pocket-universe TPV just confirmed ZB’s own view of himself, leaving him unharmed and a little extra smug. At some further point in the plot this fact is revealed, not sure if it’s the same book, but I remember it as a hilarious deflationary moment for the character.
A lot of things it could be a direct reference to, but the obvious one is Palantir, which is named after the seeing stones used to spy on people by evil antagonists in Lord of the Rings.
I'm not saying you should take them seriously*, but if you were to take them seriously, that when they say "we believe this future is coming regardless" they do in fact believe this, well, how can I put it?
Lots of people write wills, doesn't mean they're looking forward to dying or think they can do much about it. Heck, a lot of people don't even watch their diet and do exercise to maximise quality of life and life expectancy.
* I think that by the time AI is good enough to run a retail store, there's a decent chance there won't be any retail stores left anyway. It's like looking at Henry Ford's production line factories and thinking "wow, let's apply this to horse-drawn carriages!"
tbf this is less preparing for inevitable death by writing a will and more preparing for inevitable death by founding a startup which blogs about euthanizing small animals...
I think it's actually useful to see how AIs behave in such situations. It's going to happen, and understanding what AIs do is good to try to mitigate areas or actions that could be dangerous. It's hard to guard against the unknown if they're unknown.
Um, yes? Very much so. Infant swimming self-rescue courses are life-saving if you live in an area with a lot of swimming pools, especially if you have one of your own.
I see these kids come on deck and enter the water and its hard to not notice their development is behind to those of their peers that went to a swim club that was proper learn to swim to thrive in the water as opposed to just that survive mentality. They are the most watched in case something happens.
I would go further and say that there is just no such thing as "this future is coming regardless" once you get out of the realm of physical facts. One of the things that by turns depresses and enrages me about so much punditry (especially in tech) is this notion that there is some sort of inevitable socio-techno-psychological force propelling human society in certain directions regardless of the will of actual humans.
Nonsense. We as humans make our society; it is nothing but what we make of it; we can make it what we want.
As you point out, people who say otherwise are usually really saying "too bad for you who don't want the future to be this way, because I do want it to be this way and I'm working to make it happen".
We can fault them individually for such corny and groan inducing deceit, but we can't fault them for society's role in rewarding the highest profile and most wealthy founders (OAI/Anthropic) taking the exact same approach with optics.
I am about to go on a long rant, but there is so much money sloshing around the capital allocation machine going towards a vision of the AI managed and optimized future that the propaganda machine for these rose colored delusions must work in overtime. What disappoints me is the question of where the heck are the bears? Did they all go into hibernation 5 years ago when QE gave the retail kindergartener a handgun to pump low quality tickers to the moon? have we just societally accepted that everything should be a hyperreal version of sports gambling now and the world is and ought to be an efficient market of hyperstition?
I may be old and grumpy saying this, but this all sounds dumb and corny. I would like some of the very capable traders who make money repricing mispriced assets to find a way to make money deflating this bubble and bring this environment back to sanity. And I say this as someone who likes the capabilities of AI but continue to see it do little to none of the hard work solving incompressible problems that continue to create and retain enterprise value.
To get off my soapbox for a second and get back to your quoted passage -- what they're really saying is "We are working very hard to make this future coming, and we think so little of your intelligence that we believe you'll fall for the fear tactic of believing it's inevitable, ignoring the fact that it won't happen without someone's hands. And in this case, it is very much our hands, which are incentivized to not just do it but to do it so well that we ensure we do everything possible to make this happen. Part of which means persuading you that it is guaranteed to succeed. If we ever let the honest truth slip that what we're proposing is extremely hard to pull off with pure AI and we're just going to be a any other commercial real estate investor like anyone else, the jig is up."
That's what every single one of these kinds of hypocritical navel gazing faux-concern proclamations amount to for me. Astroturf.
The more typical AI fondation model company claim of “it’s so dangerous only we and people that pay us enough should hand access” is what I think is BS.
I don’t see anything wrong with trying to understand something, which is what this seems to be about. I also don’t see anything wrong with an AI operated store generally, and it of course makes sense, and is valuable, to learn about how the limitations.
> Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this?
How are you supposed to know what sort of regulation is needed if you don't even know what the issues are yet? Similarly, won't it be much easier to make the case for regulation if you can point to results of experiments like this one instead of just hypotheticals?
It's the next step removed from the tablet based ordering that has taken over in restaurants. Like those tablets, it won't be everywhere, but its easy to imagine it being ubiquitous, especially in chain stores.
To be fair, they're running this with oversight, the blog states they're ensuring the people employed are actually properly employed with the parent company. You know for sure that someone WILL run this experiment without those oversights, so while their "care" is probably more about liability there is still some truth to what they say.
If these guys succeed and this thing blows up, do you think they would not stop all this oversight and whatever “moral” boundaries they have now to make more money?
i mean if you're exploring and you find smth cool then you run with it. But I would imagine the people doing it are exploring, its their financial backers who will be looking to monetise.
I feel more comfortable that the people exploring seem to have their head screwed on and don't appear to be dismissive of the harm they might cause.
If I may be allowed one nitpick. Without fully understanding the FAA doc you link to in the article, I think it would be better to say something like loss of a plane is a 1 in a billion event for commercial airplanes. Many types of parts used in airplanes and jet engines break at much higher rates though, they just don't necessarily cause a plane loss when they do.
The articles format is awful and designed to wast your time.
This article also just points out the use of Livekit but doesn't deliver what that means for your security. Maybe instead of writing a hit piece you could have dug deeper, talked to Proton?
I've seen alot of articles and posters here being negative on Proton, calling it "shady", regurgitating facts that are supposed to be gotchas but have tons of nuance if you dig and am beginning to think there is some coordinated effort to get people not to use it.
I recall hearing some controversy around Australian legislation and Proton cooperation with authorities. Though haven't dug into court records or anything yet.
Is there a balanced view someone has summarized somewhere?
Are there some references you'd recommend where I can begin to read up?
From every instance I've seen, Proton has only ever done what is legally required of them by a warrant. They do not get to say no when asked to turn over what they do have; which is going to be things they can't avoid storing - like email addresses or recurring payment information an account has.
But they don't store logs and all actual data is E2E / at-rest encrypted, so that data does not exist for them to give away. There's no master key or back doors.
The problem is the gap between marketing promises and realities. Proton markets itself as a safe Swiss product[0] for activists[1], but the reality is their accounts often expose more than a casual user may expect, like a secondary email address[2] (often required to sign up) or payment info[3]. The Swissness is even more suspect according to this article, if it's true that they rely so heavily on American infrastructure and don't responsibly disclose this even in their privacy policy.
This seems unreasonable. The entire point of Proton is that they themselves cannot access your data, that's how I've seen it advertised. The Swiss thing is more just that they can't be compelled to enable logging. (To be fair, though, maybe that's changed. it's been a while since I saw their home page and I don't exactly make a habit of disabling my adblock).
But I don't see how any reasonable person would not know that the email addresses and payment information that Proton must have access to would therefore be subject to disclosure to law enforcement. And for the vast majority of people, they aren't exactly on a tight watchlist where intelligence agencies are making thread boards to catch them committing for international crimes to make this matter.
Anyway, I especially don't understand the flack they get on this forum with people who do understand and should understand how hard it is to advertise technical features to normies.
Normal people aren't cyber criminals who needs to hide every spec of their trail from all governments. They just want to feel like no one is reading their messages or Internet history or passwords. Proton offers that, full stop.
A recovery email address is your data, and a company that prides itself on encryption could figure out a way to hash it too. Maybe I'm just below average here, but I expected that from them at a minimum. I was shocked to discover they didn't bother.
It's not unreasonable to think Proton should significantly tone down promises like "We support peaceful protest" while seriously downplaying what they will turn over[0], or promising "We are... committed to defending your freedom" on their homepage[1]. It's certainly reasonable to have a complete list of data processors in their own privacy policy.
Proton cannot destructively hash the email address for recovery because they need to use it. And if they can use it, they are legally mandated to give it to LEO in warrants that include that data as scope.
You can argue they should have a password the user holds to encrypt the recovery address, but that's going into the territory of hurting normal users. You use a recovery address when you don't have your password or recovery phrase. Requiring a password for the recovery email would just mean more customers locked out requiring human intervention (if it's even possible for that account) to get access back for the customer. And remember, many users also use the same account for their password manager.
And no, Proton is 100% welcome to publicly support free speech and protest while not destroying their company and going out of business with all their executives jailed for not complying with non-optional, legally required, minimally exposing warrants from law enforcement.
Proton can claim what they want, but when they promote themselves as supporters of peaceful protests while quietly handing over account details for people engaging in them, that is false advertising.
If proton hashed your email how the fuck would they send you an email? Did you even think this through?
They're doing the best they can, but at the end of the day it's literally impossible for them to have absolutely zero data.
They need your credit card number stored somewhere so they can repeatedly bill you. That's just how billing works. They need a recovery email on file so they can email that address.
That doesn't mean that they're not committed to defending freedom.
I'll echo what other people have said: this feels like a psyop. If I were the CIA, I would be doing exactly what you're doing here: spewing unreasonable nonsense about proton in an effort to discredit it so that I can push people towards insecure services.
Nothing even comes close to proton when it comes to email security and privacy. That doesn't mean that we cant criticize proton - we can, and we should. But it has to be legitimate critique.
> If proton hashed your email how the fuck would they send you an email?
By asking you to provide it again if you click the "recover account" button, comparing what you enter against the hash, and then sending recovery into to the valid email you provided
This isn't much comfort when the swiss government bends over and takes other states up the ass at the slightest issue, eg https://www.404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonym.... Why on earth is the swiss state acting like stooge for the fbi? Tell them to go fuck themselves like a normal person.
PGP/GPG (can never remember the difference) is the only privacy solution worth a damn and proton is just a gmail alternative with a nice interface.
If they advertise that they will protect their users privacy, then I don't see how complying with government snooping is an excuse. Either provide what you say you will or don't say that you will provide it.
Proton has never said they will refuse a warrant for what your email address or recovery account are. They say that the contents of your emails, calendars, notes, passwords, etc are not accessible to them and therefore cannot be spied on even if a warrant is fulfilled.
The balanced view is Proton is a service that does not treat you as the product and does what I would describe as, the best it can, to provide privacy. They seem to avoid keeping data where they can but do cooperate with government when legally required to. The location they are in has more legal protections for privacy than most places.
If you are a normie wanting to not have your data sold and not have a company violating your privacy for non-legal reasons, they seem like a solid choice.
If you are worried about government level actors working against you or are the sort that gets put off at the idea of a service marketed as "privacy respecting" using any US based sub services, look elsewhere.
If you want references just start reading through comments on any topic here pertaining to proton.
The point is a country like Iran can, in 2026, force the US Navy to keep an large stand off distance. How much further could a country like China keep the Navy back? What about in 10 years?
Eventually you are beyond the range of being able to project force or risking losing billions invested in one asset to a $50k missile. That is where reality is heading.
Seems like USN can still do whatever it was made for from this large standoff distance, also seems like it wasn't made for chasing individual nondescript trucks in a hundreds-miles-long mountainous shoreline.
One of the primary functions of navies historically has been to secure vital shipping lanes. It’s a big deal that USN can’t seem to fulfill that function anymore.
I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic. Effective anti-ship missiles have been around for a long time. Given how understandably sensitive commercial ship crews and owners are to even slight danger, there's just no way to reduce the risk to the necessary near-zero without a prolonged air campaign and/or land invasion to support the naval effort.
A medium-strength world power that it Iran only figured out how to make anti-ship missiles only 25 years ago. They sure got their hands on Chinese ones a bit before that, but that quantity just didn't amount to strait-blocking capability.
> I'm not sure that the USN would have been any more effective 30 years ago if it tried to make a narrow waterway that is off-shore from a medium-strength world power accessible for safe commercial ship traffic.
Yeah I'm not too knowledgeable about this subject, I'm just theorizing.
My thesis is that the only ways that someone could control a waterway was through naval power, air power, or missile power. Air and naval power is negated by a stronger air force/navy, and 30 years ago missiles were only available to a small number of advanced economies nations. Now, high-quality (or at least credibly dangerous to shipping) missiles and drones can be manufactured cheaply by many nations.
The technology has changed. The navies used to be able to protect shipping.
Now the task is much more difficult.
Just as battleships replaced ships of the line, and were in turn replaced by carriers, all due to technology changes.
Maybe there will be drone swarms or some other future magitech being able to protect shipping.
Or maybe the civilization will collapse due to internal (income inequality, widespread employment of AI), external (ecological disasters) or other (demographics, nuclear WW3) pressures before such technologies are developed.
The USN, specifically aircraft carriers, where designed to project power. No one on the world stage is looking at the USNs inability to open the Strait of Hormuz and seeing successful power projection.
Anduril has yet to deliver anything of consequence. I hope they shake up the industry but to say they are the next hot thing and write off the primes at this stage is premature.
Last gasps? The rent seeking class has literally never been more powerful.
"The Chinese open source model running on the box under my desk can pass the Turing Test. When you call, e-mail, text, or show me an ad, you’ll never know if it’s me or my model seeing it."
And the only thing they'll notice when you are replaced with that opensource model is the slight reduction in the required personnel budget going forward.
Is it any closer to functioning like Solidworks, NX, Creo, and all the other professional CAD software packages?
Edit: After opening it up it seems better than before but still not a replacement. I can use the draw tool to create a rectangle but than immediately cannot apply symmetry or equal length constraints until I delete others which shouldn't overlap. Clicking to create a cut or hole opens up a window that does not make it easy to create a new sketch from within or place something from within (but you can just make a sketch were you want something and then open them up and that they lock onto).
I've generally been a pretty harsh critic of FreeCAD because it represents the only entry in the market of linux CAD and it has frustrated me that it does not just do what is known to work. This seems usable. Still annoying, still not a replacement, but usable. So progress.
My impression of FreeCAD as a project is that for much if its life it has suffered from a certain amount of developer churn and lack of focus. It's like somebody builds a workbench and gets it working just good enough using a workflow that makes sense to them, but then nobody ever really bothers to flesh out the rest of it, so if you try to do things in a different way that may be perfectly sensible to you the result is a broken mess. Eventually somebody decides they can do better, and maybe they do, but the replacement still has a lot of rough spots that never get finished and the cycle starts again.
It seems like the development team has gotten much more organized in the last couple years, so I have a lot of hope for the future. I think that good open source parametric CAD is something the world really needs.
I hope. I only use Windows at this point because of CAD and FEA software and it gets worse every version. For FEA there are options on Linux but for CAD you have been SOL since most major CAD suites dropped Linux support over a decade ago.
It's inherently limited by its geometry kernel. Most "real" CAD suites use something like parasolid, usually with a bunch of extras slapped on top. Making a new one from scratch is a massive undertaking, but I'll remain forever hopeful that we get a new, modern, open-source kernel one of these days...
This isn't really true. The vast majority of problems are in the UI. The geometry kernel is limited, but it's good enough for an open source project. Compared to say OpenSCAD, Open CASCADE is leagues ahead.
I don't necessarily agree in this case - OCCT is more than capable for what FreeCAD is offering. Add to that the development trajectory of OCCT also seems to be really taking off recently (with the 8.0-RC, they've re-worked how all B-Spline algorithms work, with implications for all operations).
There are already at least two geometry kernels being written in scratch in Rust (see fornjot.app for one) --- the problem is the first parts are obvious/easy, so initial progress is rapid, then one hits the difficult/intractable parts and progress stalls, usually to be abandoned.
There are a couple of doctorates available for folks who are willing to research and publish in this space --- the commercial products are all holding their solutions as trade secrets in their code --- even then though, the edge cases are increasingly difficulty to solve in such a way as to not break what is already working, hence the commercial kernels having _very_ large teams working on them, or at least that is my understanding from what Michael Gibson (former lead developer of Rhino 3D, current developer of Moment of Inspiration 3D) has written on the topic.
The entire FreeCAD development philosophy is to not compare FreeCAD with commercial CAD tools. That's a cardinal sin. Basically, they are completely hostile to feedback from people who've spent their entire career doing CAD.
> Basically, they are completely hostile to feedback from people who've spent their entire career doing CAD.
There's an entire working group in the project comprised of people who have spent their entire career doing CAD and now take care of making FreeCAD get on par with proprietary counterparts.
There are numerous discussions online where users have constructive conversations with FreeCAD devs and provide useful input to mutual benefit.
Would you care to point me to a discussion where an actual FreeCAD contributor is completely hostile to someone like you?
That sounds fine except the part where private companies have cameras everywhere surveilling us, directly tied into dmv records to identify us, and then do whatever they want with that data. And not on a random store front or a persons front door but the major roads we all must use.
Even forgetting that, all this means is people that don't care about getting a ticket, either because they won't pay or it's a such a small amount to them that they don't care. just do what they want. Nothing is being "enforced", just taxed.
We’re doing this because we believe this future is coming regardless, and we’d rather be the ones running it first while monitoring every interaction, analyzing the traces, benchmarking how much autonomy an AI can responsibly hold."
I always enjoy how these AI companies try to take a moral high ground. When someone doesn't want something to be the future, usually, their instinct is not to try to be the first person doing that exact thing. If you don't want this to be the future than why don't you spend your time building a future you do want? Supporting people that want more AI regulation to stop this? Literally anything else.
Just be honest, you think this is the future and you do in fact want to be first doing it to be in a position to make alot of money. Do you think people don't know what and ad is when they see one?
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