Pizzacut for the neurodiverse:

Not Open Source hardware or firmware.

License is CC-NC-SA, which fails all formal definitions of Open Source.

But “Sacred animals” AFAIK doesn’t mean all animals, but very specific one. Like you shouldn’t eat cows, but eating pigs is fine. So it isn’t against religious people general morales to avoid killing animals.

But maybe you know of a religion where all animals are sacred.

Update: I somehow misunderstood ‘inane’ as ‘mundane’. So ignore my comment.

IDK… I think banning a regular scarf, without religious meaning is weird. There may be any reasons for wearing them. Cold weather, covering up something that might look bad, or just because it looks cool.

Banning shoes indoors or on carpets because of dirt, fine, but otherwise, its like reverse indecency laws…

You shifted the definition of ‘authoritarian’. I mean Germany today is a democracy, which is not a single-party state as the GDR de facto was, as the other bloc parties were subordinate to the SED via the National Front. They spied on their own people and suppressed dissenting thought. People that tried to flee were shot under standing order. It clearly was an authoritarian regime. Under your definition, any system with a ruling class, would be authoritarian, and that would also include the GDR.

The GDR was run by SED, which later formed into the PDS, with many of the same people, even before the unification. That party got votes and was and still is in form of ‘Die Linke’ an important political party. They weren’t ‘eradicated’… What happened in the unification to GDR that was bad was the de-industrialization. People were left behind, and the far-right stepped in. Now, I would say that the unification was still good for the people of the former GDR, because they gained more freedom, but that is subjective, of course.

In the early years the workers in the GDR were coerced by USSR to mine uranium for them. They were subservient to the USSR, not just run by the workers.

KPD and DKP are electorally negligible, so they aren’t representative of Germany’s left.

Ah… I see you are from .ml…

First, currently whole Europe is shifting right, so its not only the dissolution of the GDR at play here. However, that the former GDR is a bit farther along can be explained partly by the older generation in the GDR having been socialized in an authoritarian regime, a neo-liberal shift in the last decade(s) afterwards and missing strong civil society, where they felt left behind which affected the youth. And the right was there to gain traction over all these years.

I don’t agree to your framing as ‘all organized socialists’ getting ‘purged and punished’, because many individuals are still alive and well today. The PDS, now ‘Die Linke’ had or has a couple of them in their ranks. Many mistakes where done in the dissolution, but it has been a generally positive change for the people in east Germany.

BSW, the ‘other left’, and Putin sympathizer party, founded by an ex-SED politician, is actually closer to the far-right AfD in term of foreign policy, immigration and other topics, then other parties, supporting my point that the common thread is actually authoritarianism then actual social values.

AfD is bigger in east Germany.

If you are rich and powerful, everything you do becomes legal. Because rich and powerful people are all trustworthy and would never do something for only their own interests.

Usually sure, but as we see with drive assistants, getting more and more advanced, and potentially resist the control of the driver, then the manufacturer could become liable.

Question is: Who is the person controlling the AI?

The one that allowed the agent to do stuff on its own?

The one that wrote the sandbox, that didn’t work?

The one that wrote the user prompt?

The one that wrote the system prompt?

The one that provides the tools to the AI agent to do stuff?

The one that hosts the model?

The one that fine-tuned or post trained the model?

The one that pretrained the model?

The people that provided the input data to the model?

Json Carter

You seem to be missing my point. You are arguing against a point I did not make.

I’m not the owner of that laptop, I would just be a user. So with my argument I wouldn’t have a right install my own keys on it. I don’t need to trust that device. It isn’t mine. It is the one of my employer in that case the bank.

So I never said that the bank should trust my personal laptop with their data.

However, if I am a customer of that bank, and they give me access to my account data from my private laptop or smartphone. Then they have no right to enforce someone else to put their root of trust on my device. I need to be able to trust my device to protect my data, so the root of trust needs to come from me. If I don’t want to manage my device or if I don’t trust myself to do so, I should be able to transfer my trust temporarily to some other third party, and pay them to do it for me.

Imagine if you went to work at a bank in IT for example. They issue you a laptop.

Who is the owner of that device? The Bank.

Who is the owner of that network? The Bank.

So they are the arbiter of trust in that area. They are free to exclude non-bank-owned devices.

I work in IT, and I’m fine with getting a company laptop for company work. I don’t trust that laptop. I isolate it when I work at home. But the company trusts it, and that is fine.

Sure, we can do that, but keep in mind that unilateral individual actions will not make the difference, all you can do is trying to create more broad awareness, form coalition and support for tighter laws and regulation, in order to have meaningful effect.

Also avoid blaming or moralizing individuals for their own choices, this will cause fatigue and infighting, which will distract from focus on policy change.

You are not giving a reason for your statement. The owner is the one that bought a device. The sole arbiter about what a device should do or shouldn’t do. The person responsible of the device. The owner must trust their device in order for the device to be trusted. It doesn’t matter what if other people do or do not trust that device, they are not the owners. They should take care to protect their own data on their own devices.

I disagree. For any actual security, the owner of the secrets is the only one that can be trusted. It is their secrets. Their own interest to keep them save.

Any company or government is a shifting entity, maybe now they are trustworthy, but maybe in some years they aren’t.

Owners are the only stabile point, because it is their data. They should be able to transfer the trust to a company or government to handle security, but they also need to be able to take away that trust and access, and either handle it themselves or transfer that trust to some other entity.

It is not okay for companies or government to hold the data of individuals hostage… That is not security, that is a business strategy.

Also software… I would love to have regulations that make it clear that the root of trust on all devices need to start by the owner of the device, not by the vendor… That would allow the end users to repair the software on their devices… Replacing it with whatever else they want. Next would be to provide hardware documentation to the owners to program their own devices… I don’t expect that to happen, but I can dream.

An old professor of mine made the half-joke that anything with ‘science’ in its name isn’t really science. He was a computer science professor.

I suppose he meant that computer science is closer to applied science aka. engineering than ‘real’ science like maths and physics, and all their subcategories.

Anyway… In the end everyone that graduated studying computer science got a Bachelor/Masters degree of science, not engineering… And it doesn’t matter anyway…

Oh, just wait when all these AI companies ask for a government bailout… Free market in action…

On some systems you can clear all secure boot keys, including Microsoft’s, then provision your own and sign your bootloader or kernel with it. Windows cannot boot from such systems.