“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers
> were great but millions of man hours a year are burned navigating cookie banners on every website
Cookie banner are not, in fact, an obligation under GDPR. All you need to do to be GDPR compliant is “not collect and sell data to partners” and call it a day. Cookie banners are a loophole that the EC conceded to an ad industry that is addicted to tracking everyone all the time.
Of course you can. And you don't need any consent from the user for doing so.
The only thing you need to do is to have some document where you list all the personal information you process and store, for how long and what you do with the said data.
What you cannot do is store data that you don't have a legitimate interest in storing. And this is why you have to document what you do with the data, because if you're not doing anything with it (“I want to store 10 years worth of IP address logs just in case”) then you aren't allowed to (on the opposite “I want to store IP addresses for a month for DDoS protection purpose ” is allowed).
That’s not how the law is structured. You CAN do that no problem but it’s then WHAT you do WITH that which is where the law comes into play. If it’s just for security purposes then there’s no problem I believe.
Oh exactly, it's great to have a single cable / charger for many different items in the household.
The biggest downside I see with USB-C in this case is that the cables and chargers get quite expensive if you want to be able to just grab one and charge stuff, without having to worry about wattage etc.
All in all a big improvement, with some future improvements left to make.
Fingers crossed for a more sane USB-D in twenty years.
> Local models are purely for fun, hobby, and extreme privacy paranoia
I always find it funny when the same people who were adamant that GPT-4 was game-changer level of intelligence are now dismissing local models that are both way more competent and much faster than GPT-4 was.
Moon lander computers were also game changers. Does not mean I should be impressed by the compute of a 30 year old calcualator that is 100x more powerful/efficient in 2025 when we have stuff a few orders of magnitude better.
For simple compute, its usefulness curve is a log scale. 10x faster may only be 2x more useful. For LLMs (and human intelligence) its more quadratic, if not inverse log (140IQ human can do maths that you cannot do with 2x 70IQ humans. And I know, IQ is not a good/real metric, but you get the point)
30-years old calculators are still good enough for basic arithmetic and in fact even in 2025 people have one emulated on their phone that isn't more powerful than the original, and people still use them routinely.
If Claude 3 Sonnet was good enough to be your daily driver last year, surely something that is as powerful is good enough to be your daily driver today. It's not like the amount of work you must do to get paid doubled over the past year or anything.
Some people just feel the need to live always on the edge for no particular reason.
And where are all their software putting their data then? Unless you consider only private keys to be secrets…
(In particular the fact that Claude Code has access to your Anthropic API key is ironic given that Dario and Anthropic spend a lot of time fearmongering about how the AI could go rogue and “attempt to escape”).
I really doubt we are anywhere close to this when there has been no published legit prime factorization beyond 21: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf
Surely if someone managed to factorize a 3 or 4 digits number, they would have published it as it's far enough of weaponization to be worth publishing. To be used to break cryptosystems, you need to be able to factor at least 2048-digits numbers. Even assuming the progress is linear with respect to the number of bits in the public key (this is the theoretical lower bound but assume hardware scaling is itself linear, which doesn't seem to be the case), there's a pretty big gap between 5 and 2048 and the fact that no-one has ever published any significant result (that is, not a magic trick by choosing the number in a way that makes the calculation trivial, see my link above) showing any process in that direction suggest we're not in any kind of immediate threat.
The reality is that quantum computing is still very very hard, and very very far from being able what is theoretically possible with them.
The modern world is so cat centric people would rather drive without a license than accept to live without a car. And until you can reliably catch and jail license-less drivers, the bet is worth it for them.
If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication. When there's a real risk of waking up in a jail cell you're less likely to order that third beer. But in the US when renewing my tabs I feel like the joke's on me because half the cars here seem to have expired tabs or illegal plates and nobody ever checks.
> If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
1% is actually negligible, and would not have a deterrent effect. In fact I wouldn't even be surprised if the effective prosecution rate was somewhat higher than this already.
> I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication.
I live in a country (France) where this is still the case, and where driving crimes are the second source of jail time after drug trafficking, yet alcohol is still the #1 cause of death on the road, and an estimate 2% of people drive without a license after having lost it (and are responsible for ~5% of accidents).
Alcohol will likely always be a factor in the worst accidents. But France is doing something right because your fatal accident rate per capita is one third that of America's [0].
It's not France in particular though, America is the outlier among developed nations. In fact France is a bit behind most other European nations (but not by much).
How much of a deterrent can the police possibly impose that would outweigh the deterrent for not driving illegally, which (in your country) is being starving and homeless?
The cops will never deter everyone from breaking the law, but they don't have to. They just need to deter a large enough % of the population to have a positive effect.
Driving while intoxicated is not a crime of desperation. Even celebrities are often caught for DUI despite being able to afford a full-time limo driver.
Most people who drive intoxicated have jobs and reputations they'd prefer to keep, and families at home they would rather not be separated from or have to explain an arrest to.
And to be clear, we can't solve all the problems with a single measure. I'd like to see not just better law enforcement, but also a social safety net that ensures nobody is ever starving or homeless.
The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
>But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
An anecdote related to me by a former (Florida) county sheriff's deputy answers that question:
Many police will stake out bars around closing time, awaiting the intoxicated to get behind the wheel so they can be stopped, breathalyzed and arrested.
However, patrons were aware of this and the deputy saw a patron leave, stumbling, drop their car keys several times, then get into their car and drive away.
When stopping said individual, the breathalyzer and field sobriety test showed the driver to be stone cold sober. As such, the deputy sent the driver on their way.
Returning to the bar parking lot, he found that all the other patrons had departed while he was wasting his time on the one sober person -- dubbed the "designated decoy."
I'm sure other variations are and have been in use in the US for a long time -- since most places don't have public transportation or reliable taxis.
The "cars first, public transit last, if at all" culture in most of the US makes the likelihood of DUI/DWI and crashes/injuries/fatalities much, much worse.
> The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
And there's a large enough population for whom driving without a license is not a crime of desperation. In many places there _is_ a public transport alternative (even if its slow and crappy). I used to give a lift every day to a colleague who had lost his license. I enjoyed the company and he paid for my gas. Many people can make an arrangement like this.
> But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
Having been in this position many times: take an Uber, then Uber back to get your car the next day and plan better (or don't drink) next time.
>How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
When I was in college in Ohio, one of my suite mates had several DUI arrests. After the first, his license was suspended -- yet he was allowed to drive to/from work/school because public transportation was minimal. After the third DUI, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail -- served on the weekends so he could continue going to school without interruption -- and still drive his car to/from work/school.
I was flabbergasted by that. But I guess that's how things are often handled in places without public transportation. And more's the pity.
Am I? The second paragraph is about how to get around legally if you don't have a license. First and third paragraphs are about not making the bad decisions that you get into that situation in the first place (prevention is better than cure). What am I missing?
This thread is about driving without a license, but from the perspective of enforcing the laws to keep unlicensed drivers (who are generally more dangerous) off the roads to make the community safer. The point I'm trying to make is that while yes its unrealistic to expect 100% of unlicensed drivers to stay off the road (for reasons you have outlined), there is a large enough % of unlicensed drivers for whom visible law enforcement would be a deterrent and that would at least be an improvement over today.
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