It is well known that Musk primary reason to push Hyperloop was because he didn’t want them to build a high speed rail for some reason:
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s. To this day some of the largest telecommunications companies in Europe are still state owned, partially, and in some cases in full.
Growing up in Iceland where we had a state monopoly on telecommunications until the late 90s, I don‘t remember a single telecommunication outage. In fact, after moving to America where I have a private internet provider, I have experience quite a few internet blackouts actually.
>Most of Europe did just fine with state owned telecommunication companies which lasted well into the 1990s or even the 2000s.
Early 2000s were the times when 50Mbit in Eastern Europe when it was the wild west cost 10eur/month through lan cable and in Western Europe ADSL and ISDN cost multitude of the cost for fraction of the speed.
Early 2000s is exactly the time period when telecommunications companies in Europe were well on their way to privatization, if not already fully privatized.
Zoom and Teams are both proprietary software, I doubt any available forks exist, or could exist, for use outside of corporation where they are developed.
I’m guessing they will probably use something built on top of Matrix which is an open protocol maintained by a Community Interest Corporation (CIC) in the UK.
I’m less sure what they will use for video conferencing, but they could do worse then something built on top of WebRTC, which is also an open protocol maintained by W3C, an international standards organization with location in 4 countries (including France and USA).
The French video conferencing tool is called Visio, and is here: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet. It uses LiveKit for video, but doesn't yet use Matrix - the hope is to make it speak MatrixRTC so it can interop nicely with Tchap (the French fork of Element).
We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.
Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.
There is a difference between distributing pirated copies of popular media by already rich artists who you know get paid anyway, and the systematic art theft of AI machines who “create” new art based on artists works who may or may not have been paid for it, and definitely didn’t get credited.
Both are copyright infringements, but only the latter is art theft.
I don't remember any of these being "driven" by porn. The first applications weren't porn-based. Maybe live video--a split second after seeing the tech for the first time, probably 99% of guys were thinking of _applying_ it to porn. But, even for the usual money-grubbing startups, there was plenty of money coming from non-porn sources. Probably no different than the invention of camera, tv, videocamera, etc. and you wouldn't say porn drove that.
> I don't remember any of these being "driven" by porn.
That's ok.
> The first applications weren't porn-based.
They most definitely were, it is just that you are not aware of it. There runs a direct line from the 1-900 phone industry to the internet adult industry, those guys had money like water and they spent a fortune on these developments. Not all of them worked out but quite a few of them did and as a result those very same characters managed to grab a substantial chunk of early internet commerce.
" There runs a direct line from the 1-900 phone industry to the internet adult industry"
the internet adult industry is not the same as the internet. And if you;re trying to say the internet was developed for the sake of the internet adult industry, you're sounding circular.
I never made that claim and I'm fairly familiar with the development of the early internet, I was hanging around a lot at CWI/NikHef in the 80's and early 90's.
I think this is like quibbling that the military isn't the driver of technological advances. It's not the only one, but it has a strong track record of throwing outsized resources at the bleeding edge and pushing it forward by leaps and bounds.
Porn and piracy outfits have historically adopted and pushed forward the bleeding edge of the internet. More recently that role has shifted towards the major platforms operated by BigTech. That's only natural though - they've concentrated the economics sufficiently that it makes sense for them.
But even then, take video codecs for example. BigTech develops and then rolls things out to their own infra. Outside of them it's piracy sitting at the bleeding edge of the adoption curve right now. The best current FOSS AV1 encoder is literally developed by the people pirating anime of all things. If it wasn't for them the FOSS reference encoder would still be half assed.
All of the things above were driven by porn, that can be proven. The AI stuff in the generic sense is not but you can bet that someone somewhere right now is working on improving photo realism of hair, eyes and skintone and they're not doing that to be able to make the next installment of little red riding hood.
Holy effing shit you are literally talking about me right now! LOL I've spent all day improving a LoRA further and further exactly because I need her skin and hair to look a lot more real than is generally available, for exactly your stated reason! :D
Edit: I've registered just for your comment! Ahaahahaha, cheers! :D
b) This is exactly the kind of urban legend which tends to proliferate in human society, a cute lie which sounds believable. Like prostitution being the oldest profession, and the great wall of China being the only human made structure visible from space.
The story of the Internet is that it was developed in the mid to late 1960s by a couple of Universities in America and used by the US military to share resources across mainframes in each institution, as well as across institutions. Since then them main driver of innovation has been among universities and telecommunication companies finding optimal ways to deliver packages across telephone cables, antenna, satellites, etc.
The story of the Web is that it was developed in 1989-1991 to organize and link documents at the CERN research laboratory in Switzerland. Since then the main driver for innovations has been browser vendors competing and collaborating in developing browser technologies such that users pick their browser over the competition.
I don‘t know the story of online payment systems, but I bet the main drivers were companies opining up stores on the web and looking to replace pay by wire schemes over the telephone, and a bunch of start-ups who were able to find that market niche, developed software and sold it to those stores. The main driver of innovation here being start-ups. Porn sites and Gambling sites were no more important to that story as any other stores who sold art, golf-clubs, flight tickets, or hotel bookings.
There are also gangs making money off human trafficking? Does that make it OK for a corporation to make money off human trafficking as well? And there are companies making money off wars?
When you argue with whataboutism, you can just point to whatever you like, and somehow that is an argument in your favor.
They aren't doing whataboutism. They are comparing prohibition/criminalization of a harmful industry to regulation, and the effects of both. Gambling isn't exactly good, but there is definitely a difference between a mafia bookies and regulated sports betting services and the second/third order effects from both. Treating drug use as a criminal act, as opposed to a healthcare problem, has very different societal effects.
Whataboutism is more like "Side A did bad thing", "oh yeah, what about side B and the bad things they have done". It is more just deflection. While using similar/related issues to inform and contextualize the issue at hand can also be overused or abused, but it is not the same as whataboutism, which is rarely productive.
I was using whataboutism to demonstrate how bad of an argument whataboutism is. My arguments were exactly as bad as my parent’s, and that was the point.
Pointing out an inconsistency isn't always whataboutism (and I don't think it was in this case). An implied argument was made that we should regulate LLMs for the same reason that we regulate drugs (presumably addiction, original commenter wasn't entirely clear). It is entirely reasonable to wonder how that might extrapolate to other addictive activities. In fact we currently regulate those quite differently than drugs, including the part where alcohol isn't considered to be a drug for some strange reason.
The point being made then is that clearly there's far more to the picture than just "it's addictive" or "it results in various social ills".
Contrast that with your human trafficking example (definitely qualifies as whataboutism). We have clear reasons to want to outlaw human trafficking. Sometimes we fail to successfully enforce the existing regulations. That (obviously) isn't an argument that we should repeal them.
I don't object to alcohol being tolerated. But I do think that distinguishing it from other drugs is odd. Particularly when the primary reason given for regulating other drugs is their addictiveness which alcohol shares.
We tolerate a recreational drug. Lots of people regularly consume a recreational drug and yet somehow society doesn't split at the seams. We should just acknowledge the reality. I think people would if not for all the "war on drugs" brainwashing. I think what we see is easily explained as it being easier to bury one's head in the sand than it is to give serious thought to ideas that challenge one's worldview or the law.
> I don't object to alcohol being tolerated. But I do think that distinguishing it from other drugs is odd.
The point I was making is that it's not odd, unless you're thinking about human culture wrong (e.g. like its somehow weird that broad rules have exceptions).
> Particularly when the primary reason given for regulating other drugs is their addictiveness which alcohol shares.
One, not all addictive drugs are equally addictive. Two, it appears you have a weird waterfall-like idea how culture develops, like there's some kind identification of a problematic characteristic (addictiveness), then there's a comprehensive research program to find all things with that characteristic (all addictive substances), and finally consistent rules are set so that they're all treated exactly the same when looked at myopically (allow all or deny all). Human culture is much more organic than that, and it won't look like math or well-architected software. There's a lot more give and take.
I mean here are some obvious complexities that will lead to disparate treatment of different substances:
1. Shared cultural knowledge about how to manage the substance, including rituals for use (this is the big one).
2. Degree of addictiveness and other problematic behavior.
No? I don't never said (and don't believe) any of that. I don't think the legislative inconsistency is odd. As you rightly point out it's perfectly normal for rules to be inconsistent due to (among other things) shared culture. The former exists to serve the latter after all, not the other way around.
What I said I find odd is the way people refuse to plainly call alcohol what it is. You can refer to it as a drug yet still support it being legal. The cognitive inconsistency (ie the refusal to admit that it is a drug) is what I find odd.
I also find it odd that we treat substances that the data clearly indicates are less harmful than alcohol as though they were worse. We have alcohol staring us in the face as a counterexample to the claim that such laws are necessary. I think that avoidance of this observation can largely explain the apparent widespread unwillingness to refer to alcohol as a drug.
> One, not all addictive drugs are equally addictive.
Indeed. Alcohol happens to be more addictive than most substances that are regulated on the basis of being addictive. Not all, but most. Interesting, isn't it?
> What I said I find odd is the way people refuse to plainly call alcohol what it is. You can refer to it as a drug yet still support it being legal. The cognitive inconsistency (ie the refusal to admit that it is a drug) is what I find odd.
Maybe the confusion is yours? You think the category is "drug" but it's really more like "taboo drug."
> I also find it odd that we treat substances that the data clearly indicates are less harmful than alcohol as though they were worse. We have alcohol staring us in the face as a counterexample to the claim that such laws are necessary. I think that avoidance of this observation can largely explain the apparent widespread unwillingness to refer to alcohol as a drug.
I think you missed a pretty key point: "shared cultural knowledge about how to manage the substance, including rituals for use (this is the big one)." In the West, that exists for alcohol, but not really for anything else. People know how it works and what it does, can recognize its use, have practices for its safe use that work for (most) people (e.g. drink in certain social settings), and are at least somewhat familiar with usage failure modes. A "less harmful" thing that you don't know how to use safely can be more harmful than a "more harmful" thing you know how to use safely. None of this is "data driven," nor should it be.
> It is entirely reasonable to wonder how that might extrapolate to other addictive activities.
I presume my GP would have no objections to regulating these things their commenter whatabouted. The inconsistency is with the legislator, not in GPs arguments.
Obviously I also think the commenter would support that - I said as much in GP. In context, the reply is suggesting (implicitly) that it is an absurd stance to take. That it means being largely against the way our society is currently organized. That is not a whataboutism.
Like if someone were to say "man we should really outlaw bikes, you can get seriously injured while using one" a reasonable response would be to point out all the things that are more dangerous than bikes that the vast majority of people clearly do not want to outlaw. That is not whataboutism. The point of such an argument might be to illustrate that the proposal (as opposed to any logical deduction) is dead on arrival due to lack of popular support. Alternatively, the point could be to illustrate that a small amount of personal danger is not the basis on which we tend to outlaw such things. Or it could be something else. As long as there's a valid relationship it isn't whataboutism.
That's categorically different than saying "we shouldn't do X because we don't do Y" where X and Y don't actually have any bearing on one another. "Country X shouldn't persecute group Y. But what about country A that persecutes group B?" That's a whataboutism. (Unless the groups are somehow related in a substantial manner or some other edge case. Hopefully you can see what I'm getting at though.)
> a reasonable response would be to point out all the things that are more dangerous than bikes that the vast majority of people clearly do not want to outlaw.
I disagree. It is in fact not a reasonable argument, it is not even a good argument. It is still whataboutism. There are way better arguments out there, for example:
Bicycles are in fact regulated, and if anything these regulations are too lax, as most legislators are categorizing unambiguous electric motorcycles as bicycles, allowing e-motorcycle makers to market them to kids and teenagers that should not be riding them.
Now as for the whatabout cars argument: If you compare car injuries to bicycle injuries, the former are of a completely different nature, by far most bicycle injuries will heal, that is not true of car injuries (especially car injuries involving a victim on a bicycle). So talking about other things that are more dangerous is playing into your opponents arguments, when there is in fact no reason to do that.
I believe you have a categorical misunderstanding of what "whataboutism" actually means.
If the point being made is "people don't generally agree with that position" it is by definition not whataboutism. To be whataboutism the point being made is _required_ to be nil. That is, the two things are not permitted to be related in a manner that is relevant to the issue being discussed.
Now you might well disagree with the point being made or the things being extrapolated from it. The key here is merely whether or not such a point exists to begin with. Observing that things are not usually done a certain way can be valid and relevant even if you yourself do not find the line of reasoning convincing in the end.
Contrast with my example about countries persecuting groups of people. In that case there is no relevant relation between the acts or the groups. That is whataboutism.
So too your earlier example involving human trafficking. The fact that enforcement is not always successful has no bearing (at least in and of itself) on whether or not we as a society wish to permit it.
BTW when I referred to danger there it wasn't about cars. I had in mind other recreational activities such as roller blading, skateboarding, etc. Anything done for sport that carries a non-negligible risk of serious injury when things go wrong. I agree that it's not a good argument. It was never meant to be.
I don‘t think human memory works like that, at least not in theory. Storage is not the limiting factor of human memory, but rather retention. It takes time and effort to retain new information. In the past you spent some time and effort to memorize the shopping list and the phone number. Mulling it over in your mind (or out loud), repeated recalls, exposure, even mnemonic tricks like rhymes, alliterations, connecting with pictures, stories, etc. if what you had to remember was something more complicated/extensive/important. And retention is not forever, unless you repeat it, you will loose it. And you only have so much time for repetition and recall, so inevitably, there will be memories which won‘t be repeated, and can’t be recalled.
So when you started using technology to offload your memory, what you gained was the time and effort you previously spent encoding these things into your memory.
I think there is a fundamental difference though between phone book apps and LLMs. Loosing the ability to remember a phone number is not as severe as loosing the ability to form a coherent argument, or to look through sources, or for a programmer to work through logic, to abstract complex logic into simpler chunks. If a scholar looses the skill to look through sources, and a programmer looses the ability to abstract complex logic, they are loosing a fundamental part of their needed to do their jobs. This is like if a stage actor looses the ability to memorize the script, instead relying on a tape-recorder when they are on stage.
Now if a stage actor losses the ability to memorize the script, they will soon be out of a job, but I fear in the software industry (and academia) we are not so lucky. I suspect we will see a lot of people actually taking that tape recorder on stage, and continue to do their work as if nothing is more normal. And the drop in quality will predictably follow.
> Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
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