I don't think they shifted their stance, I think the stances of the left and right shifted around them. For example I remember during Trumps first term they announced a rather sensible stance on the internet/net neutrality via an official blog post, and shortly after (maybe even the next day) it turned out that intern who wrote the piece was fired and it was removed. It's not that the stance was particularly anti-right etc, but that the positions of the right solidified more towards pro-big business rather than anti-regulation as they had previously been trying to be.
I worked at EFF during that time, and this is a weird story that I’ve not heard before. EFF doesn’t let interns write blog posts (at least not with a lot of supervision) and certainly wouldn’t sack someone for getting something wrong — partly because that’s a terrible lesson to teach someone just starting out in law or activism, but also and more pragmatically it risks being a PR nightmare.
I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?
yes it was this, not the EFF but the Trump admin, it was a surprisingly normal and level headed policy take, and I was pleasantly surprised, but then it turned out it wasn't their official stance, it was removed and replaced with a statement and stance that was nearly the opposite. But for the life of me I can't find it again, but I swear I didn't imagine it.
a few months back I had a similar thought and started working on a language that was really verbose and human readable, think Cobal with influences from Swift. The core idea was that this would be a business language that business people would/could read if they needed to, so it could be used for financial and similar use cases, with built in logic engines similar to Prolog or Mercury. My idea was that once the language starts being coded by AI there are two directions to go, either we max efficiency and speed (basically let the AI code in assembly) or we lean the other way and max it for human error checking and clear outputs on how a process flows, so my theory was headed more in that direction. But of course I failed, I'd never made a programming language before (I've coded a long time, but that's not the same thing) and the AI's at the time combined with my lack of knowledge caused a spectacular failure. I still think my theory is correct though, especially if we want to see financial or business logic, having the code be more human readable to check for problems when even not a technical person, I still see a future where that is useful.
They're pushing because the loonies are pushing. The loonies are passing age verification laws and big businesses don't want the responsibility.
Now... it just so happens that the loonies and big business are connected another way. Despite not much liking each other, they share a political party to advance each other's goals. Only a relatively small fraction of the country really wants to eliminate porn (which is the real goal), but they have enough allies who are willing to tolerate it to make a majority (or near-majority).
Which enables big business to get everything else that they want.
They want us trapped on their platforms and absolution from obligation to police their platforms
They’re involved in indemnifying themselves legally while jacking up RAM prices to prop up their data center investments and make us use those data centers to compute
And they get the government help making us the bad guy if we lie about age verification
They are playing both sides of this argument because doing so keeps them in the conversation altogether. They sell TIE Fighters and Xwings
The entirety of American society has gone absolutely off the fucking rails kowtowing to office dweebs who need to keep us tending the server fields or their buy in data centers becomes worthless
Same, I've sorta ended up converging on make a rough plan, get second and third opinions from various AI's on it, sort of decide and make choices while shaping the plan, which we turn into a detailed specsheet.
Then follow the 'how to design programs' method which is mostly writing documentation first, then expected outcomes, then tests, then the functions, then test the flow of the pipeline. This usually looks like starting with Claude to write the documentation, expectations and create the scaffolding, then having Gemini write the tests and the code, then have codex try to run the pipeline and fix anything it finds that is broken along the way.
I've found this to work fairly well, it's looser than waterfall, but waterfall-ish, but it's also sort of TDD-ish, and knowing that there will be failures and things to fix, but it also sort of knows the overall strategy and flow of how things will work before we start.
I'm still in the process of having to write letters to lawmakers about the stupid 3D printer law, now I'm going to have to write letters for this stupid thing too. Like how hard is it to take a day to have a conversation with someone that just knows a little bit about these things, a hobbyist even. The minimal amount of question asking, hell they could even ask an LLM and it would still give a better answer.
I keep thinking about something like a search engine integration that would suggest relevant bookmarks at the top of your search results. It might have been even cooler back when we had things like delicio.us and if we could have gotten recommended relevant links from people we followed's bookmarks too. But even knowing how to code like I do I sorta can't think of how to do it, maybe a browser extension that injects over google? I guess I've more thought about how it would interact than how to actually make it.
I use Linkding, and there is https://github.com/Fivefold/linkding-injector which does exactly what you described. I don't use it, though. Usually it brings up irrelevant results, and in the rare case that it would have brought up useful ones, the Firefox search bar history-based autocomplete got me there first.
This is bullshit. It's a clear power grab to re-seize democratized means of production, and added surveillance. Both suck. The proposed bill in Washington is even worse, and blanket bans nearly any kind of machining or manufacturing that doesn't use surveillance. I'm going to have to actually write letters to lawmakers now as if there wasn't enough bullshit happening already.
I did a similar unscientific experiment in the past where I did a juice fast for two weeks and had bloodwork done before and after (similar bodytype, unhealthy, overweight, high blood sugars, high cholesterol etc). Basically the doctor was shocked how all my numbers became the same as someone really healthy during the fast. So I think the lack of junk and calorie restriction is doing more than the fiber.
