It says “RF module”… That would be one hint.

You shifted the definition of ‘authoritarian’. I mean Germany today is a democracy, which is not a single-party state as the GDR de facto was, as the other bloc parties were subordinate to the SED via the National Front. They spied on their own people and suppressed dissenting thought. People that tried to flee were shot under standing order. It clearly was an authoritarian regime. Under your definition, any system with a ruling class, would be authoritarian, and that would also include the GDR.

The GDR was run by SED, which later formed into the PDS, with many of the same people, even before the unification. That party got votes and was and still is in form of ‘Die Linke’ an important political party. They weren’t ‘eradicated’… What happened in the unification to GDR that was bad was the de-industrialization. People were left behind, and the far-right stepped in. Now, I would say that the unification was still good for the people of the former GDR, because they gained more freedom, but that is subjective, of course.

In the early years the workers in the GDR were coerced by USSR to mine uranium for them. They were subservient to the USSR, not just run by the workers.

KPD and DKP are electorally negligible, so they aren’t representative of Germany’s left.

Ah… I see you are from .ml…

First, currently whole Europe is shifting right, so its not only the dissolution of the GDR at play here. However, that the former GDR is a bit farther along can be explained partly by the older generation in the GDR having been socialized in an authoritarian regime, a neo-liberal shift in the last decade(s) afterwards and missing strong civil society, where they felt left behind which affected the youth. And the right was there to gain traction over all these years.

I don’t agree to your framing as ‘all organized socialists’ getting ‘purged and punished’, because many individuals are still alive and well today. The PDS, now ‘Die Linke’ had or has a couple of them in their ranks. Many mistakes where done in the dissolution, but it has been a generally positive change for the people in east Germany.

BSW, the ‘other left’, and Putin sympathizer party, founded by an ex-SED politician, is actually closer to the far-right AfD in term of foreign policy, immigration and other topics, then other parties, supporting my point that the common thread is actually authoritarianism then actual social values.

AfD is bigger in east Germany.

If you are rich and powerful, everything you do becomes legal. Because rich and powerful people are all trustworthy and would never do something for only their own interests.

I don’t think ‘true free market libertarians’ exist. They only want free market because it benefits them at the specific time or circumstances they want it.

I more and more think that there is just one dimension starting by authoritarian and ending with social.

Faschistst, Tankies, free market libertarians, autocrats and feudalists, are just authoritarians in with different origins. Their team should be in power, their team should be supported by everyone, while they profit from it.

While social people want nobody to suffer, everyone to be in power and have self a determination, etc.

And nobody really knows if numbers exist, if there is nobody there to count.

Usually sure, but as we see with drive assistants, getting more and more advanced, and potentially resist the control of the driver, then the manufacturer could become liable.

Question is: Who is the person controlling the AI?

The one that allowed the agent to do stuff on its own?

The one that wrote the sandbox, that didn’t work?

The one that wrote the user prompt?

The one that wrote the system prompt?

The one that provides the tools to the AI agent to do stuff?

The one that hosts the model?

The one that fine-tuned or post trained the model?

The one that pretrained the model?

The people that provided the input data to the model?

Oh, you are another shot aircraft poster?

“Toupée fallacy”? Interesting, I only know that as survivorship or selection bias.

Json Carter

Yeah… But LM has spotify, Google Earth, Dropbox and Sublime Texteditor mixed in open source software (like d-feet, a dbus inspection tool) in their repos… Those aren’t propritary Codecs, WiFi driver or firmware…

Debian and Ubuntu have different APT repo sections for closed source stuff. That is what I would have expected…

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I don’t care if a Linux distribution offers proprietary applications or not. I just want to be able to filter it out, and that they offer open alternatives first.

I’m not a purist, I want people to be informed users, not just sheep that get fed whatever corporations want them to eat. If they still choose to use closed source software, then that is fine.

I’m in an organization that helps people install Linux on their devices, and we collectively decided to install Linux Mint. I never used it myself, and to me, the distribution doesn’t matter too much.

However, I was negatively surprised that Linux Mint decided to mix closed-source proprietary software together with open-source software: http://packages.linuxmint.com/search.php?release=alfa&section=import&keyword=

They also advertise them in top positions on their package installers, which also doesn’t show the packages licenses anywhere. To me advertising them and mixing them like they are the same is bad… They also don’t offer ways to filter them out… So… while I still install LM for others, I’m not a fan…

You seem to be missing my point. You are arguing against a point I did not make.

I’m not the owner of that laptop, I would just be a user. So with my argument I wouldn’t have a right install my own keys on it. I don’t need to trust that device. It isn’t mine. It is the one of my employer in that case the bank.

So I never said that the bank should trust my personal laptop with their data.

However, if I am a customer of that bank, and they give me access to my account data from my private laptop or smartphone. Then they have no right to enforce someone else to put their root of trust on my device. I need to be able to trust my device to protect my data, so the root of trust needs to come from me. If I don’t want to manage my device or if I don’t trust myself to do so, I should be able to transfer my trust temporarily to some other third party, and pay them to do it for me.

Imagine if you went to work at a bank in IT for example. They issue you a laptop.

Who is the owner of that device? The Bank.

Who is the owner of that network? The Bank.

So they are the arbiter of trust in that area. They are free to exclude non-bank-owned devices.

I work in IT, and I’m fine with getting a company laptop for company work. I don’t trust that laptop. I isolate it when I work at home. But the company trusts it, and that is fine.

Sure, we can do that, but keep in mind that unilateral individual actions will not make the difference, all you can do is trying to create more broad awareness, form coalition and support for tighter laws and regulation, in order to have meaningful effect.

Also avoid blaming or moralizing individuals for their own choices, this will cause fatigue and infighting, which will distract from focus on policy change.