I mean, ppq.ai (which I’ve never heard of) had zero to do with the commoditisation of LLMs. The industry did that. And services like OpenRouter are far more serious and responsible in this area than this ppq.ai is.
I didn't find any context for your claim so here is some reddit comment:
So it’s true 3,300 people were arrested for posts online. What they don’t tell you are the statistics or context. The actual law for these arrests covers EVERYTHING online. These arrests include those arrested for terrorism (if the planning/act of terror includes any online communication in the UK), threats of violence, racist abuse, hate speech and unwanted communication (including sending unsolicited sexual photos to strangers). It also includes spreading false information that could cause harm or affect an ingoing investigation.
If you look at convictions, only 137 people were actually sentenced in 2024.
The arrest is the punishment.
Here is a man getting arrested and subsequently harassed by the Police for 13 weeks for just posting a picture of himself with a shotgun in America.
We’re basically seeing this story through media summaries and Richelieu-Booth’s own account, which means the narrative reflects either what he says happened or brief police statements. There’s very little publicly available that allows anyone to independently confirm or contradict either side.
Stories like this are designed to provoke a reaction, but the truth could be far more mundane: he might be a completely unreasonable person who was genuinely stalking someone, and police might have had credible concerns. We simply don’t have the full picture.
For balance, West Yorkshire Police do have a reputation for being heavy handed. the same force that used drones during Covid to shame people walking alone on the moors.
My point is: this isn’t solid evidence of Orwellian decline. It’s difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about Britain from a single case built on incomplete information and media amplification.
> with the situation causing him considerable stress at a point where he was also dealing with an inquest into the deaths of his parents, who had both died in a car crash in 2023
so for some reason, there was something going on about his parents' death two years later. The article also states:
> He said the complaint against him was linked to an ongoing business dispute.
My take is that someone used his pictures of him holding guns (illegal in the UK) as support for a claim that he is an armed and dangerous stalker. Whatever got flagged regarding the inquest into his parents' deaths probably added suspicion. Police acted quickly (as they should, but probably too quickly) and made mistakes, but it looks like they couldn't accept that they were being used, so they decided to continue pressing onwards with the investigation, hoping they were still right and wouldn't be on the hook for a false arrest.
Getting falsely arrested is always terrible, but the way the media spins this as some kind of witch hunt about a LinkedIn post is misleading at best.
> These arrests include those arrested for terrorism (if the planning/act of terror includes any online communication in the UK), threats of violence, racist abuse, hate speech and unwanted communication
All of these attempts to "debunk" this statistic feel like they're missing the mark. How did the UK get a point where planning terrorism and making mean comments online go into the same statistic for arrests? Does it not seem strange that the second half of that list is worthy of arrest?
> If you look at convictions, only 137 people were actually sentenced in 2024.
This, again, does not help. Being arrested isn't a casual thing. It threatens everything from your job to your reputation and your relationships, even if you aren't convicted.
In many countries you do not get charged with every possible crime if there is a larger crime involve. If someone rob a place, they don't also need to have separate charges for illegally entering the place, destroying property when they broke the window, selling stolen goods, wire fraud for using the banking system, and money laundering for concealing that it is illegal money, and tax evasion. Each step is illegal on their own, but time crime statistics won't be written like that. The prosecutor may argue that if the accused are not found guilty for the primary, then secondaries may then be used.
The strange thing is that the UK are arresting people for abusing the telecom system, and not for the more serious crime like terrorism, death threats, harassment and sexual harassment.
> How did the UK get a point where planning terrorism and making mean comments online go into the same statistic for arrests?
In most publications: because the people reporting on these statistics can get more views and clicks that way. FUD sells. If someone online can defuse the statistics, the reporters that spread them also could've, but chose not to.
As for the second half of the list, "racist abuse, hate speech, and unwanted communication" are pretty common things to incriminate. Even the extremely liberal freedom of speech laws in the USA do not permit stalking ("unwanted communication") and racist abuse is criminalized in all kinds of cases (i.e. firing someone because of their race).
Thank you. I heard the number locally at a privacy conference. No hard data, but I saw them being terrified for 1984 becoming a reality.
Even if there's no sentence, the real result is self-censorship, which is NOT shown up in ANY statistics.
... following a police complaint about stalking, against a man involved in a business dispute, seemingly among other things. He may be innocent, but there's more to the story than the picture of the gun.
Ahh yes reddit the most accurate location of truth finding. Could you at least link the source of the comment or are we supposed to take a random redditor as fact?
UK has been self destructing for a looong time now. While things aren't great globally for free speech and privacy, I don't think pointing to UK as an example for anything makes sense. They have been on their path for many decades.
I don't know. You can bet these people were being obnoxious sh*ts to teachers and trying to rally some online mob to get their way. No much sympathy from me, even if arrest (and not a stern telling off and being told to set a good example for their kids and behave like adults) was a bit much.
Yeah I can imagine, I know the sort, however you can't really assume that as you don't know them, people have a right to be upset if their children's education is at stake and in some cases the schools management can be the 'obnoxious sh*ts'.
What is clear though is there has been some abuse of power by the police. I wondered if someone at the school 'knows' someone in the police, which made it go so far.
More broadly it's been a huge issue for a while, tons of articles come out of the UK for people being arrested for criticizing politicians/policies. Even more dystopian is it's hard to report on, because the police might come after you for talking about it. Germany is having similar issues, it's easy to forget most of the world (including Europe) doesn't have free speech
the lowest resistance solution to e.g. cheating at school using ChatGPT will be spyware on kids' devices.
while nobody should be arrested for speech online, here on hacker news, people are downvoted for saying something unpopular (as opposed to whatever, i don't even know what the criteria is, but maybe it should be "toxic") all the time. you are preaching to the wrong audience, not the choir.
I've seen what's said online these days. Open racism and bigotry. This has always been the case but now it's done without shame by prominent people and influencers using their real account. Twitter is as bad as Stormfront these days.
We absolutely need to police hate speech.
> There has to be a line.
There is no line at all these days, with open hatred displayed. Fascism is on the rise across the world off the back of the hatred that's produced on social media.
> Every day 33 brits are arrested for what they say online.
They must be giving them tea and crumpets before releasing them to generate more hate online because it clearly isn't working.
I'd like to think that we all agree that you would be arrested for saying things in person (hate crimes, etc) would be the same things you'd be arrested for saying online... i'd place the line about there.
> we all agree that you would be arrested for saying things in person (hate crimes, etc) would be the same things you'd be arrested for saying online..
And that’s where you’d be wrong - lots of us belief that speech should not be a cause for arrest except in the most extreme circumstances. Hurting someone’s feelings is not that
> And that’s where you’d be wrong - lots of us belief that speech should not be a cause for arrest except in the most extreme circumstances. Hurting someone’s feelings is not that
what is an extreme circumstance?
At least in the UK, hate speech is a crime and is punishable by law, whether people agree or disagree is irrelevant, I do believe that if it's illegal on the street it should be illegal online, obviously in the relevant jurisdiction.
You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
I agree, and I am still pointing to the collapse of society, not civilization. My infrastructure is local. If local society collapses, what reason do people have to maintain transmission and distribution lines and electrical substations, to work at power plants, to maintain fiber optic or copper lines for internet connectivity?
Even if "the internet" as a whole is still around, the inability for someone to connect to and to use it means cryptocurrency is similarly useless.
It started a line of thoughts in me. What if the backend keeps the videos around for a longer period of time, and:
* regularly checks youtube, and whenever one archived video gets deleted from youtube, it advertises the video ID on a specific set of Nostr relays
* have a different browser extension for yt viewers that activates when the user hits a deleted video.
* the backend can stream the video for continuous Bitcoin lightning payment until the stream is kept alive.
Does my computer get involved when person A sends something illicit to person B? As a normal user on the internet, no. That's between them, and the law only deals with them. With certain decentralised anonymous systems, the answer is different. Now there are legal liability issues, at least.
The biggest reason I've never run a Tor exit node, either back when I was running a hosting company or now that I have unmetered gigabit (with 10 gig available) is that I don't want the feds to come knocking about CP and the like activity on my IP.
Great thing about wood is you can build almost-permanent structures with it?
And the remaining biomass (leaves, bark, etc.) is fine to compost and re-enter the carbon cycle.
Also it's clearly not an open cycle, not in temperate climates. The accumulation of carbon in top soils etc. is one of the things that kept CO2 in balance for millions of years prior to us pulling it out of the ground. Peat bogs being another key one.
Yes, it can't keep up with us. But it's not an open cycle. (It is in the tropics, though)
Best thing we can do is stop pulling it out of the ground. Best way we can do that is to build out renewables. Best way to do that is to create a profit incentive for an oversupply of power that sucks up carbon.
It's crazy how fast poplars grow in temperate climates. And absorb excess nutrients and contaminants.
Would love to see huge fields of them grown, then harvested, and the product turned to lumber and other longer-term carbon storage. Even composted or biocharred and the carbon amended into top soils (yes it won't stay there forever, but...) Assuming the process can be done without emitting more CO2 than is captured.
Until you do the math, then you see how bad a solution trees are.
It's the same reason biofuels cannot be a general replacement for fossil fuels.
Growing trees is nice for other reasons, of course, and some limited CO2 capture would come along for the ride. This would not eliminate the desirability of other kinds of CO2 capture.
I harp on this. Unless I biffed my calcs a solar farm produces 25-50 times as much energy per acre as corn. That alone tells you biofuels is a dead technology.
A solar farm doesn't need to be weeded, ploughed, planted, weeded again, topped, and harvested every year like corn does. You also don't need to ferment it to ethanol then burn it at a 70% loss to power a set of wheels.
Possible also that the vegetation growing between and under the panels sequesters carbon.
And the solar farm doesn't transpire quite the enormous quantities of water a field of corn does. So much water goes into the air from a corn field it affects the weather.
I wouldn't say biofuels are a dead technology, but they are niche. They may be useful in a post-fossil fuel age for things that are very difficult to electrify, like long distance air travel and production of organic chemical feedstocks.
I disagree completely, although degrowth may end up happening eventually due to low birth rates.
If rapid degrowth could be enforced, so could switching to sustainable technologies, which do exist and could be employed.
The level of degrowth needed to avoid warming from fossil fuel use would be extreme, if it's the only knob turned. Even a 90% reduction in the rate of fossil fuel extraction and use would not avoid eventual massive global warming. Degrowth would simply delay that outcome.
Just look into cement, steel, mining, medicine &c. we're not even remotely close to replace fossil fuel, not even a tiny bit, no one even pretends that it's around the corner.
> would not avoid eventual massive global warming
Well nothing will because in a couple of hundred millions years the sun will be too warm anyways
Meanwhile 70% of the wildlife disappeared since 1970, 50% of insects, and we're debating about some shitty tech that would sequester 0.1% of the co2 we emit each day. CO2 isn't even our biggest problem, rain water isn't even safe to drink anywhere on the planet anymore, PFAS, microplastics, chemicals in rivers/lake/aquifers
People who think co2 capture and that replacing 1.4b of ICE by 1.4B of 3000kg EVs are the future are delusional or straight up cognitively impaired
I find the microplastics bit has all the odor of an unhinged panic. There seems to be quite a lot of dubious science being done. For example, a few years ago there was a study that said we eat up to 5g of microplastics a week. This figure was widely quoted in the press, with images of a credit card (about 5g) held in chopsticks as an illustration. But critical examination of the paper and the methodology concluded it overestimated the rate of ingestion by as much as a factor of a million.
Underlying all this is the moral approach being taken. It is not enough that environmental problems (perceived or otherwise) be solved; humanity must be punished. Solutions that do not also punish are rejected on that basis alone.
We find microplastics in foetus brains, if your immediate thought is "meh ok it's probably fine" you're already beyond saving, all of that for what ? Cheap gadgets, some convenience and comfort
> humanity must be punished
We're punishing ourselves right now... look at our food, 75% obese/overweight in the west, 15% of US population on antidepressant, life expectancy going down, testosterone levels dropping 1% per year from the 80s if not before, massive wildlife collapse, nutrients in veggies/fruits massively dropped since the 50s, increasing floods/hurricanes/&c.
> Solutions that do not also punish are rejected on that basis alone
If you're about to get lung cancer because your smoke 1 pack a day you can always tell your doctor you started drinking green tea to get extra antioxidants, as long as you smoke 1 pack a day you're doomed.
I imagine if you cherry pick everything that goes your way and trash the rest it makes a very nice little fairy tale in which we can continue on our merry way without ever facing any kind of consequences
