> “You are not allowed to do illegal things” is meaningless, since they already can’t legally do illegal things.
That's not quite right.
First off, I don't expect that "you used my service to commit a crime" is in and of itself enough to break a contract, so having your contract state that you're not allowed to use my service to commit a crime does give me tools to cut you off.
Second, I don't want the contract to say "if you're convicted of committing a crime using my service", I want it to say "if you do these specific things". This is for two reasons. First, because I don't want to depend on criminal prosecutors to act before I have standing. Second, because I want to only have to meet the balance of probabilities ("preponderance of evidence" if you're American) standard of evidence in civil court, rather than needing a conviction secured under "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. IANAL, but I expect that having this "you can't do these illegal things except when they aren't illegal" language in the contract does put me in that position.
I don’t think the language does, or is intended to, give OpenAI any special standing in the courts.
They literally asked the DoD to continue as is.
Their is no safety enforcement standing created because their is no safety enforcement intended.
It is transparently written, as a completely reactive response to Anthropic’s stand, in an attempt to create a perception that they care. And reduce perceived contrast with Anthropic.
If they had any interest in safety or ethics, Anthropic’s stand just made that far easier than they could have imagined. Just join Anthropic and together set a new bar of expectations for the industry and public as a whole.
They could collaborate with Anthropic on a common expectation, if they have a different take on safety.
The upside safety culture impact of such collaboration by two competitive leaders in the industry would be felt globally. Going far beyond any current contracts.
But, no. Nothing.
Except the legalese and an attempt to misleadingly pass it off as “more stringent”. These are not the actions of anyone who cares at all about the obvious potential for governmental abuse, or creating any civil legal leverage for safe use.
I would never have expected that "Shatner and Henry Rollins ranting while Adrian Belew and Matt Chamberlain go absolutely wild on guitar and drums respectively" would be anywhere close to as good as it is.
Incidentally, Rollins talking about the recording[0] of it is freaking hilarious.
Well, thanks for cutting another one and a half hours from my already too short period of sleep at night and making me waste more time tomorrow at looking up more stand up shows from Henry if available.
I highly recommend watching his live show if he's ever in your area. Great experience. Henry is the epitome of intensity for 2 hours. He doesn't stop. He doesn't sit. He doesn't drink. I'm not even sure he breathes.
One is "I don't want to use Meta products as a matter of principle", and WhatsApp's a no-go if that's your posture.
The other is "I don't want to drown in horrible, algorithm-curated junk content". Instagram is just as bad as Facebook there, but WhatsApp is definitely not the same.
> For many years I wanted to believe they had a consistent and defensible legal viewpoint, even if I thought it was misguided.
Watching from across the Atlantic, I was always fascinated by Scalia's opinions (especially his dissents). I usually vehemently disagreed with him on principle (and I do believe his opinions were principled), but I often found myself conceding to his points, from a "what is and what should be are different things" angle.
Because in practice the US Supreme Court is a partisan body, the United States is deprived of the potential for excellent jurists you'd expect with a population of hundreds of millions and some of the world's best law schools. Only a subset of your best will exhibit the desired partisan skew.
Despite the larger population and improved access, my guess is that the quality of Supreme Court Justices today is probably worse than in 1927 when it decided Buck v Bell (which says it's fine for states to have a policy where they sterilize "unfit" citizens, straight up Eugenics)
It would be worth looking at how other countries with comparable legal systems do it.
Eg., members of the Supreme Court of the UK are appointed by the King on the advice of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is required by law to recommend the person nominated by an independent commission.
The selection must be made on merit, in accordance with the qualification criteria of section 25 of the Act, of someone not a member of the commission, ensuring that the judges will have between them knowledge and experience of all three of the UK's distinct legal systems, having regard to any guidance given by the Lord Chancellor, and of one person only.
This seems to work fairly well and, although specific decisions are argued over as part of normal political discourse, it is generally seen as being non-partisan.
Ireland (which also has a common law legal system) has a similar setup, with the President appointing supreme court justices based on the recommendation of the government who, in turn, are advised by an independent panel. That advice is technically not legally binding, so this is in theory a less-strictly non-partisan system - but in practice it works out about the same.
I think the difference is that you can specify independently verifiable criteria for the selection process and require participants to decide based on those criteria alone without forcing them to become political actors who must directly bear the consequences of political decisions.
Not totally immune to issues of partisanship, but at least somewhat insulated.
BTW, the original intent of the Electoral College in the United States was pretty similar to this. Electors were supposed to be independent actors exercising their independent judgement in selection of the president. It wasn't sustainable for long.
I actually agree with you that the independant commission can lead to partisanship with extra steps.
Possibility to beat this deadlock: one party picking few candidates from the commission and OTHER party (parties) accepting one of them. Still can lead to "choose the lowest evil" and I can imagine Repiblicans not accepting anyone of Democrata were ruling.
This understates the failure: it was about as close to “immediate” as it could be. The whole structure was pointless just about as soon as the new state began to operate.
The electoral college is basically an appendix, except it was never a useful organ. It malfunctioned completely, right out of the gate.
Sure, so that suggests that these so-called "independent nonpartisan panels" are likely to fail immediately as well. It illustrates the principle that good intentions are no match for incentives.
It works fairly well because your PM and King aren't complete loons. At the end of the process there has to be someone making decisions, and when that person is a narcissistic 8-year-old in an 80-year-old's body, bad things are going to happen no matter how the system is written.
Given that the current system maximises partisan bias, it's actually hard to do worse.
Ideally you'd want to reform this hierarchically, but supposing we can only fix that final court, you want say a committee consisting of roughly a couple of academics who've taught this stuff, a couple of real on-the-ground attorneys who've argued before this court, a couple of retired judges from this court (if it had age limits, but today it does not) or the courts below it who've done this job, and five otherwise unconnected citizens (no specific business before any court now or expected) chosen at random the way most countries pick their juries.
That committee is to deliver a list of several people best qualified to fill any vacancies on the court which arise before the next committee does the same, if such a vacancy arises you just go down the list.
>roughly a couple of academics who've taught this stuff, a couple of real on-the-ground attorneys who've argued before this court
How are these members of the committee chosen then? Seems like you're just moving the problem around, if choice of committee member is also subject to partisan incentives.
This court case has nothing to do with the claim made that US government explicitly stated that they want to promote racists and fringe-right ideology among our allies.
Sure, but it is not the same thing as explicitly promoting racist and fringe-right ideas.
JD Vance may have voiced support (I didn’t listen to his speech) for conservative or right-wing political forces in Europe, but it is not the same as promoting explicitly racist and fringe-right ideas. There is a night and day difference between the original claim, and the evidence presented.
Sorry but you are just riding semantics here - what is the difference between far-right, extreme-right and “fringe”-right?
AfD is classified as extreme-right by German intelligence.
The US vice president gave them an endorsement in public speeches and met with their leaders privately.
The AFD is actively promoting racist, fringe(sic!)-right ideas such as “remigration” (aka trying to get rid of all German citizens that don’t look “german” enough)
The US government is explicitly promoting the racist ideology that parties like the AFD represent.
If that isn’t enough to open your eyes, please explain what level of “evidence” would be enough - but I rather feel like you have made up your mind long before and aren’t really looking for an honest discussion
> Sorry but you are just riding semantics here - what is the difference between far-right, extreme-right and “fringe”-right?
I have no idea what is the practical difference. I would say that far right is a party or a group that believe in inherent superiority of certain race over the other. Like, white power, etc. I do not think that saying things like “my culture is better” is racist or makes you far right.
> AfD is classified as extreme-right by German intelligence.
> The US vice president gave them an endorsement in public speeches and met with their leaders privately.
> The AFD is actively promoting racist, fringe(sic!)-right ideas such as “remigration” (aka trying to get rid of all German citizens that don’t look “german” enough)
It shows support by JD Vance, sure.
> The US government is explicitly promoting the racist ideology that parties like the AFD represent.
I would not agree that this constitutes as explicitly promoting. In my view explicitly promoting an ideology is standing on a stand and repeating the goals of said ideology. Did JD Vance said that reimigration is a good thing, and that he fully supports it for Germany? Idk, if he did, let’s see, and I will concede.
> If that isn’t enough to open your eyes, please explain what level of “evidence” would be enough - but I rather feel like you have made up your mind long before and aren’t really looking for an honest discussion
I didn’t make my mind. I’m very much against racism, and any other form of discrimination. I’m also against intellectually lazy forms of debate.
In my view and my experience the journalists discredited themselves so much in the past 5 years, so I simply do not trust their interpretations at all (regardless of their political affiliation). Show me the source, so I can see myself.
I showed you all the sources but you prefer to close your eyes.
Of course even the most hardcore AFD racists wouldn’t go on a stand and proclaim that they support remigration, because that would get the party banned and destroy all chances of them getting to power.
I know it’s a tired example online but at least I know a bit about it: do you think the Nazis wrote in their party agenda and proclaimed in their public speeches that the white race is superior and they would start a genocide to exterminate subhumans?
Of course they only revealed their true faces between each other or AFTER they achieved absolute power. Anything else would be ridiculously stupid.
> I do not think that saying things like “my culture is better” is racist
It’s not as racist as the other example you gave but it’s very nationalistic - and from that it’s just a small step to go “if my culture is better, why shouldn’t we rule the world?” - “if my culture is better why should we allow other (worse!) cultures to exist”?
If you arrived at that point you almost have to exterminate other cultures - how could you allow something bad to poison and destroy the people? They could be saved by your obviously better culture! You would almost be a monster not “liberating” them!
“Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” - look it up
> shows support by JD Vance, sure
He is the vice president of the United States - it’s not like he is some random guy whose opinion has no weight
> Show me the source, so I can see myself.
Then just listen to the speeches and proclamations of your heads of state.
If you are as antiracist as you claim it should be easy to reveal the agenda they never quite state openly but that is always present between the lines
> do you think the Nazis wrote in their party agenda and proclaimed in their public speeches that the white race is superior and they would start a genocide to exterminate subhumans?
This is funny. Are you saying that germans of the early 20th century had the same perspective as you?
> It’s not as racist as the other example you gave but it’s very nationalistic - and from that it’s just a small step to go “if my culture is better, why shouldn’t we rule the world?” - “if my culture is better why should we allow other (worse!) cultures to exist”? If you arrived at that point you almost have to exterminate other cultures - how could you allow something bad to poison and destroy the people? They could be saved by your obviously better culture! You would almost be a monster not “liberating” them!
Maybe, maybe not. The same thing can be said about left as well, and we have a lot of examples in history how left ideologies were taken too far and millions of people had perished in the process: industrialization of USSR by Stalin, Mao's great leap, etc.
So, the bottom line is that extremes are bad.
> Then just listen to the speeches and proclamations of your heads of state. If you are as antiracist as you claim it should be easy to reveal the agenda they never quite state openly but that is always present between the lines
Which ones? Why is it always a referral to something abstract that I have to go an look up in order to prove your point? Do you have a particular speech in mind that you've listened to, where on minute XYZ JD Vance stated something that made you believe that he pushes racist or what not agenda? Please share.
Or, perhaps, you've read about the fact that JD Vance made the speech (and you never listened to it in its entirety), and you've read an article where the journalist attributed some things to JD Vance and his speech?
The court case established the ability for ICE to go and harass anyone who they think looks like they're potentially a migrant. Hmm, I wonder what they'll use to profile those people...
And this domestic ruling is, in your view, an evidence of the “very explicitly stated goals of sowing discord within the US's former "allies", to weaken Europe, and to promote racist and fringe-right views.”?
You can’t be serious. The original claim is about the foreign policy of US government to promote racist ideologies, and your “proof” is a ruling about constitutionality of using race and language as a indicator to investigate someone’s immigration status?
So yeah, this is promoting racist views of "assume everyone who looks non-white and speaks a language other than English as a potential undocumented migrant and go harass them with impunity".
I see that you still do not understand the difference between the stated claim, and its scope, and your evidence. You also seem not to understand the difference between the US government, which is an executive branch, and the Supreme Court, which is a judicial branch, and by design has no policy to push.
Who do you think was involved in this supreme court case? Who was racially profiling people and doing the harassment based on race again? Which group was doing this policy that the SC gave a green stamp to continue doing?
You're ignoring that "to promote racist and fringe-right views" isn't grouped with the foreign things.
Do you see the difference?
I see that you still do not understand the stated claim. Let me break it down for you, maybe English isn't your first language (do be worried about a Kavanaugh stop if you travel in the US though, sorry, I hope they don't detain you for too many weeks):
The claims were:
- sowing discord within the US's former "allies"
- to weaken Europe
- to promote racist and fringe-right views.
Where is the entirely foreign requirement for racist and fringe-right views?
But sure, continue moving the goalposts. I guess to you its only a bad thing for the government to promote foreign racist policies. Is it not a bad thing for the candidate for VP to openly say racist lies and openly acknowledge he knew he was lying and he would continue saying such lies if it accomplishes his political goals? Are you OK with him doing so? Why continue supporting it?
I did not move goal posts at all. In my first reply to your comment I asked for evidence. Even if I use your current parsing (and yes, English is not my first language), I am sorry, but using a Supreme Court decision that is related to domestic matter as evidence of sowing discord and weakening of Europe is ridiculous.
Even if I focus on the "promotion of the racist and fringe-right views", this court decision does not prove it at all. The court is independent, and rules based on their interpretation of the law and the constitution. It has no goal to promote anything.
> Are you OK with him doing so? Why continue supporting it?
No, I am not. But politics today are like this, and you won't find a politician who does not do it.
This whole discussion stemmed from your wild claim, and I did not believe your claim, and I was interested to know how you would prove it.
And yet here you are, moving the goal posts again.
> using a Supreme Court decision that is related to domestic matter as evidence of sowing discord and weakening of Europe is ridiculous.
The statement "to promote racist and fringe-right view" is a separate concept you just continue to choose to ignore. Adding it as a requirement when it wasn't is precisely the definition of moving the goalposts. Painting that statement as having a foreign requirement isn't arguing in good faith, especially after this gets pointed out multiple times.
I'm glad I didn't bother wasting my time providing you with more evidence. It wouldn't have made any difference to you. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
> this court decision does not prove it at all
This court decision tells the administration feel free to use race as much as you want to harass people even if there's zero other signals they might not have legal status. Once again, if you can't see the racist enablement of this decision you're choosing to be blind to it.
> But politics today are like this, and you won't find a politician who does not do it.
I can absolutely find politicians that don't call black people monkeys and claiming foreigners are eating your pets. It's really not that hard. It's sad you seem to think that's normal. You might want to re-evaluate who you support if you think they all do this stuff.
The context is somebody asking "Mainland US or Mainland China?" The comment you're responding to brought up Taiwan because that's the natural "not-mainland" when you're talking about China.
Almost. Both China and USA have threatened military action in Taiwan and Greenland respectively, but legally the USA and Greenland are not one; Greenland is a territory of Denmark despite having an independent government. Taiwan and Mainland China also have independent governments, but legally both consider themselves China, so it would be like North and South Korea if they had never agreed that they are separate countries now. Recently Taiwan has begun changing their identity as an independent country, and began the legal updates, however this is not internationally recognized because mainland china has resisted it, and frankly few countries want to go against china and risk sanctions or other political action from china. Even the USA doesn't recognize taiwan as separate, officially, although actions speak louder than words, and it is clear that most respect Taiwan's desire for independence and treat them as sovereign.
Sort of, except not really, except yes really. It's complicated.
The China that was a founding member of the United Nations was the Republic of China (ROC), and it controlled both mainland China and what we call Taiwan. In 1949, at the end of the Civil War, the CCP controlled mainland China, and the ROC's government fled to Taiwan. Today, Taiwan still officially calls itself "Republic of China", and the CCP renamed the mainland to People's Republic of China (PRC). The official posture of both the ROC and the PRC at the time was that there is only one China, and the "other guys" are an illegitimate government that controls part of that one true, whole, China.
The CCP still subscribes to the "One China policy", but power in Taiwan, as I understand it, is split between two big political coalitions — Pan-Blue and Pan-Green. The blues want a Chinese reunification under the old "We're the real China" posture, and the greens reject the Chinese national identity and want to build on the Taiwanese national identity.
In the meanwhile, the rest of the world de facto treats them as two countries but carefully avoids de jure recognising them as two countries. Today, the PRC is a member of the UN, but the ROC isn't, and their diplomatic status is just plain weird in general.
There are two governments that contain the substring of "China" and their constitutions claim a single unified Chinese country that includes mainland and Taiwan island, most of the world, seems ok with that.
Sounds like 5D chess, since Taiwan applied to be the "sole legal government of China" in the UN back in the 50s. (which was rejected) then they rejected the 70s resolution of "two Chinas". So it comes through as ambitious. But I will let the Taiwanese correct me on that.
Yes, the situation was different in the 50s and 70s. But for the last few decades it has been explicit chinese policy that any change of the status quo would lead to an invasion.
Somewhat similar to HongKong where China apologists always bring up that HK never had any democratic autonomy while conveniently not mentioning that China explicitly stated that such would instantly result in an invasion.
Putting a gun to someones head forcing him to say something and then using that against him.
> Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China Principle, and any attempts to split the country are doomed to fail.
A company as large as Microsoft has resources to do a lot of things, but you’re not borrowing resources from the Office team to help on this project.
The relevant measurement is the resources Mojang has as a studio. And I expect the decision here is that they don’t want to commit to the long term maintenance of three renderer implementations on the Java side.
Another concern is that modding is a major part of why Java Edition is so popular, and that includes shaders specifically. This is already going to cause chaos in the modding world as it is, no need to compound that by making shader mods that much more burdensome to maintain.
Java garbage collection gets out of control when cramming 100+ poorly optimized mods together. The bedrock edition is great in theory but the proper mod API never appeared. Regardless, people have accomplished some really impressive stuff with commands, but it is an exercise in pain.
The other issue with bedrock is it is far from feature parity with java. If these two things were hit then java could be reasonably retired. However we are decades too late in it being acceptable to introduce a breaking change to mod loading. So it's java forever.
>Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?
Of course. Because they would fail loudly and would have to be fixed in order to run. Garbage collection is a crutch which lets broken things appear not broken.
Memory leaks very often don't fail loudly. Especially if they are slower leaks which don't immediately break the application.
A lot of the memory problems that you can see without a GC are hard to find and diagnose. Use after free, for example, is very often safe. It only crashes or causes problems sometimes. Same for double free. And they are hard to diagnose because the problems they do create are often observed at a distance. Use after free will silently corrupt some bit of memory somewhere else, what trips up on it might be completely unrelated.
> A lot of the memory problems that you can see without a GC are hard to find and diagnose
The nastiest leak I've ever seen in a C++ production system happened inside the allocator. We had a really hostile allocation pattern that forced the book-keeping structures inside the allocator to grow over time.
To be fair, I've seen something similar with the JVM, though it recovers. G1GC when it was first introduced would create these massive bookkeeping structures in order to run collections. We are talking about off JVM heap memory allocations up to 20% of the JVM heap allocation.
It's since gotten a lot better with JVM updates, so much so that it's not a problem in Java 21 and 25.
> Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?
Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems. For example
- keeping a reference too long,
- much more subtle: having a reference to some object inside some closure
will also cause memory leaks in a garbage-collected language.
The proper solution is to consider what you name "poorly optimized mods" to be highly experimental (only those who are of very high quality can be treated differently).
> Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems
It solves a class of memory leak problems which are much harder to address without the GC. Memory lifetimes.
It's true that you can still create an object that legitimately lives for the duration of the application, nothing solves that.
But what you can't do is allocate something on the heap and forget to free it. Or double free it. Or free it before the actual lifetime has finished.
Those are much trickier problems to solve which experienced C/C++ programmers trip over all the time. It's hard enough to have been the genesis of languages like Java and Rust.
There is no "must use GC" mode, as far as I'm aware, but the footguns you describe only exist if the programmers opt-out of the GC. It's somewhat similar to using JNI/FFM in Java: it's possible to escape the safety of the VM. Though it's much easier to do so in D.
I always had trouble running bedrock as a household server. Specifically it would stop accepting connections and required daily restarts. Java was much more reliable.
Skins, media packs, servers, hosted realms, upsales through all consoles, multiple copies for multiplayer with/between your kids… also a mass revolving shit tumbler of account stuff on the backend that invalidated lots of old accounts…
I bought during the beta for a lifetime of goodies, had to buy it again after the buyout, then again after an update to MS accounts wasn’t acted on, and then for the Switch. I’ve bought Minecraft 4 times, with another on the horizon if it keeps popular.
That was probably their intention, but Bedrock has proven to be full of papercut sized bugs, and maintaining 1:1 behaviour with Java has also proven really difficult. Redstone is notably different/broken with the exception of trivial circuits.
Until it's possible to convert your world to Bedrock and not have anything in your 'finished' world break, except maybe some giant Redstone machine or one or two known annoyanced, I doubt they'd do it. Mojang presumably still has some autonomy within Microsoft so long as the money keeps coming in, and Mojang presumably knows that pushing this too early is a bad idea. But Microsoft being Microslop, who knows, maybe they'll just do it anyway.
I don't think 1:1 behaviour with Java was ever the intent. Redstone works differently due to a combination of different design choices, like not breaking in water (although I can imagine that being an accessibility thing for console players) and less technical debt, making things like movable tile entities possible.
I don't know what you mean by media packs, but the server software is free, and I believe all of the skins and maps released by Mojang itself on Bedrock's marketplace are also free. It's the third-party stuff that costs money, although I assume Mojang takes their cut.
They do have a bunch of add-ons now with Realms notably, but I wonder if this revenue goes to Mojang or to another Microsoft branch for tax reasons. To say nothing of derived media, plushies, Legos etc.
It's a giant "fuck you" to accessibility in general. It reminds me of the first designer I ever worked with, who designed for pretty screenshots and put zero thought into the actual interaction.
E.g. the pervasive use of transparency means that you have text overlayed on text all over the place, so just literally can't read things.
It's not just the transparency (and distracting highlights and slow animations and inexpressive icons), but also the floating controls and other elements that make it harder to discern what is content and what is UI chrome/controls, not to mention the associated layout bugs.
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