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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • The issue with that is, presidential pardons exist for a reason, as a solution to a problem, in part one of injustice and abuse of power of the legislative branch. Among a few other things, It’s purpose is a safety valve against unjust and cruel laws passed by a theoretically tyrannical or apathetic legislature.

    It’s easy to look at this from the lens of “The President is corrupt and Congress is good” and so we decide to let Congress take the pardon power away, but then what happens when you have the inverse situation where Congress is corrupt but the president is good? Now the president has no power to protect genuinely innocent people from injustice.

    This is what the American system of checks and balances is about. Every check is both a solution to corruption and a potential lever of corruption. The point is to split the power up so that while some corruption can happen, it’s the least likely to be able to become absolute. We cannot implicitly trust in the President, Congress, or the courts. And whenever there is a hard choice to make between “Punish innocent people” or “Allow the guilty to walk free”, the framers of the constitution erred on the side of the latter.

    But ultimately, we do have other mechanisms to deal with this. Specifically impeachment (Which pardons cannot be granted for), and the ability for us to vote out the president, or a legislature that is enabling them. Also the president cannot pardon anyone for state crimes.

    It’s a very messy, imperfect solution. But it has largely worked for 250 years.









  • I have never bought into the Proton hate seen on Lemmy, as most if not all of it came from a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works. And if anything, this report confirms that the employees inside Proton really do seem to care about the product.

    But ultimately, if the CEO is this hostile internally, those employees will leave and the product will just enshittify at an exponential rate. This is actually some very damning insight into the future of Proton.

    Proton has a couple competitors that are viable to switch to, if not somewhat half baked next to Proton. But it’s important to understand for the people who have been berating Proton for handing over metadata to authorities and similar things, that Tutanota and other competitors will have all the same problems. Tuta is based in Germany which is a member of 14 eyes, and will if anything be more susceptible to the whims of the US government than Proton was.






  • The companies operating frontier models and AI as a viable technology on the scale it exists today are inseparable. If the big players died tomorrow you’d still have that vastly inferior local model that would be good enough for light work for awhile, but without all the eye-popping amounts of money to continue training and scraping data on unprecedented scale, its usefulness would fade over time. Most companies today would not feasibly be able to host and train their own models to be used in the ways they use frontier models today.

    LLMs would still exist as a niche solution for some things but what AI fundamentally is, and how it could be used would be entirely different in very short order.


  • Depending on when the bubble bursts, It would effectively be. AI needs this continuous terminal upwards velocity of investment with no profit to show for it in order to keep improving despite the diminishing returns we’ve been seeing. It’s viability as a long term technology is uniquely dependent on it reaching a state of efficiency or otherwise capability that doesn’t yet exist.

    I really wonder why it is that the pro-ai fanatics are so sure it will stick around just as it is today without anyway to actually pay for it.