Because violence tends to either escalate or peter out. Either you run out of people that support you or you eventually force the government to throw all its might at suppressing you. Unless you are very well-prepared, organised and have sufficient and resilient support, it might fail and not achieve much other than provide further pretext for crackdown.

Historically, non-violent resistance has a good track record, if (and only if) it is targeted well and applied with resilience and persistence. It has a potential to galvanise the participants, stir people into action (which helps with recruiting more) and cast the injustice of a violent system into relief.

Mind, non-violently doesn’t mean writing stern letters or standing on the wayside looking pissed. It absolutely includes disrupting, getting in the way, being a nuisance, being impossible to ignore. The Nashville sit-ins, for example, obstructed the business of lunch counters that refused to serve black people by taking up spots reserved for the people that the establishment would actually like to do business with. In our example, people might occupy the offices of the corrupt administrators, asking to talk to them and making them listen to their constituents in the most literal way, refusing to leave until they get results.

It most certainly will be considered some form of unlawful conduct and will possibly be met with force. The police will be called and start making arrests. But a well-organised and patient campaign to coerce the corrupt officials into rescinding their decisions or resigning (at which point their successors will be subjected to the same demand) doesn’t need to hurt people.

It just needs to erode their will until complying with the demands looks like the most bearable option.

Sure, if the provider is RFC882 compliant. I believe 882 has since been superseded too?

I believe when I last researched the question to address some issue in my own regex, some Stackoverflow comment brought up an example of an address that could receive mail but wasn’t compliant.

Hence the more robust approach, which is also the only feasible way to ensure that there are no typos and that the recipient is actually the one signing up: Send a verification mail to that recipient. If the correct confirmation token gets back to you, someone or something probably got and read that mail.

You can do some minimal check to avoid things like spaces, ensure there is an @ in there somewhere, but beyond that, it’s really not sensible to check them against some long-winded regex.

Particularly when you’re vibe-coding, can’t know whether the generator got the regex correct and also can’t debug it.

Most likely, it won’t do much; a drop in a bucket.

But enough drops can fill a bucket, and enough letters can at least bog down their mail handlers, send a message and hopefully get on their nerves.

A guy I know is trying to pitch a tool to people he made with AI. Which is to say AI made it for him, because his coding knowledge just about covers HTML and CSS, as best as I can tell, so everything else (and probably a good chunk of those too) is slopped up.

Recently, someone apparently had difficulties signing up with their email, but only their email. Their partner’s worked fine. The guy was at a loss. I’m not sure he could read the code at all or has any idea of how troubleshooting works.

If it was open source, I’d probably look into it just out of curiosity. My money is on “AI trained on junior devs’ output did the junior dev thing where they discover RegEx and try to use it for email input validation”, because the provider has a dash in their domain and that’s the simplest explanation for email address troubles.

He also should hire an actual developer to fix his shit. My rates start at 100€/h, increasing by 10€ every time he suggests I ask AI.

I think the difference is that his issue with the child-fucker accusations is the bad press, not that he considers it a failing. Iran and the pool are objectively something that visibly went wrong. He doesn’t want people to give him shit about his involvement with Epstein, but he doesn’t even want people to acknowledge the other two being failures.

The effort has just not been worth the time or the expense
I’ve exhausted all my energy, for minimal recompense
The distinct lack of acknowledgement has now begun to gall
And I’ve come to realize that I don’t give a fuck at all

Bonus: A game you no longer play could still net something on the second-hand market, or maybe you’d trade it with someone. I know there was a group of people at my school that collectively had like two or three copies of the various Pokemon games they’d pass around, exchanging and loaning them on the fly.

Steam Family Sharing is a thing, but not quite so trivial to set up as handing them the cartridge. Never mind about reselling digital copies of games.

It requires exponential levels of labor for every cosmetic

Unless all games use the same models and shit so the cosmetics actually are directly transferable because we’re only getting “generic variant of the One Game every game is now a generic variant of for the sake of content portability”. If you get too creative with your designs, you can’t participate in the universal cosmetic sharing and mutual marketing thing all the cool kids do.

I wonder whether the engine will actually lock down your range of options to prevent that problem? Or maybe just heavily discourage developers from not implementing the “One Game” stuff. I’m both put off and curious to see how it’ll develop.

legal agreements with disparate game owners

Actually, the “stamp all your stuff from the same mould, and because we own all the things you stamp from that mould, we can freely share them between games and also hold your work hostage” approach would solve that too. If it all becomes too generic to copyright individually, whoever holds the rights to the One Game has freedom to do with his games whatever he wants.

Sure, I make an asset in my game for a skin the player bought in your game, who keeps the money?

The longer I think about this, the more I worry that my One Game joke is the only way to actually make this work, and also very desirable for Epic. That would make it less of a joke and more of a foreshadowing.

Because I’m pretty sure the answer to that question is gonna be “the owner of the One Game”. Whoever first published that skin will get a cut of the sales, but since they’re so easily transferable across the standard objects you’re expected to have used, you don’t need to do much to have it transfer anyway. Besides, your skins also get shared with other games, making for free advertisement!

Unfortunately, one game made Nazi uniforms, Epic refuses to ban them because they make good money off it and now you’ve either got Nazis running around your game or you need to somehow get out of the asset sharing thing.

Okay, now I’m horrified at the prospect of how this might develop.

Yours was a concise rhetorical question. Mine was a lengthy answer to support your point.

Generally, the chief objectives of a country are to maintain its borders, protect its people, enforce its monopoly on the use of force and maintain sovereignty over its external politics.

Protecting its people implies preventing them from death, but there is no direct implication about the death of other people in this purely utilitarian framing.

However, there is also no justification for attacking other countries and infringing on their borders, harming their people or threatening their sovereignty. In fact, considering that such a war may end up hurting your own people, it seems to me that starting and prosecuting one without necessity (e.g. the need to fulfil your other objectives in absence of less destructive implements of power) contradicts these objectives.

So basically, yeah, unless necessary to protect their constituents, it would be their job to prevent death. And that’s not even taking morals and human rights into account, nor the charge to represent the will of their constituents in democratic systems.

Now now, let’s not speak of violence.
~Announcing intentions is a bad idea.~

Please don’t give me hope…

Defeatism is the catalyst of resignation. Resignation is the enemy of progress.

If movements get more successful the more support they have, then participating in hopes of success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more people hope, the more people stand together, the more likely it is that their hope will come true. It’s worth a try, because the more people try, the better their chances.

The Civil Rights Movement was fueled by pent-up frustration, catalysed into courage by hope, guided by cunning strategists. It didn’t achieve all its goals, and what it did achieve is being rolled back bit by bit, but it did achieve something. It took more than just hope, but without, it would have never taken off.

Hope is the antidote to defeatism. Allow yourself to hope, no matter how ridiculous it may look now. Better to hope and be wrong than to despair and be right.

Either way, it seems like Trump is the one who is terrible at his job.

Sound reasoning but his feelings don’t care about your facts

In some cases, providers group multiple end users under one public-facing IP and do some address translation magic to sort out what goes where. Kind of like your whole neighbourhood having a single shared address and a central post office sorting mail into internal post boxes.

So that “abnormal traffic” might not have been you personally. It could have been some other background process on your computer, or it could have been someone in your vicinity.

Or their heuristics are spewing shit, who knows. Degoogling isn’t a bad idea, at the end of the day.

To die for?

If you need an army of assassins, I’ll allot a lot of alots to you.

to lie about the results and to generate more anxiety in others to keep up with your made-up achievements

Emperor’s New Clothes style “we all need to pretend to like it” is an unfortunately common effect of decision-makers deciding they know some brilliant thing and any naysayers just aren’t suited to appreciate the brilliant thing.

I think at least some of the wasteful or even harmful ways you describe of using LLMs come from this push to use it and “be more productive” with it.

Some, sure.

Others from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language models. They’re text processors and generators designed to sound human. They can’t tell facts from filler.

Just earlier, I saw a post elsewhere about someone having generated an article or something which cited three experts – wrongly, because it doesn’t actually know what the relation between the text in quotes and some supposed source is or why it needs to be verbatim to be a correct quote. That’s not a bug, nor a hallucination or whatever anthropomorphic euphemism people come up with for “random output happened to be wrong” (though, to be fair, “random” glosses over a highly complex prediction system that can predict plausible text quite impressively, even if it can’t predict truth).

Students relying LLMs to generate their coursework are falling into that trap without any pressure of productivity. They don’t get that the purpose of coursework is to learn about the source material and the structure of academic writing rather than just produce text. They also don’t get that the LLM won’t look up, interpret and cite sources accurately in accordance with the subject of the question. It will generate a plausible-sounding answer to the question, and therein lies the danger: If you don’t already know the answer, how could you tell if it’s true?

The same goes with people “looking up” information. Gemini will produce some text statistically correlated to the text it has read, but you never know whether that correlation reflects facts or whether it falsely attributes some shady business to companies who had nothing to do with it (about which there was a court case in Germany recently).

Vibe coders without programming experience cannot qualify the output of their generator. It’s always harder to understand code you didn’t write (or maybe wrote long ago), but if you don’t even know how to write code, you’ll have no experience to compare it to.

People using AI for coping with stress may run into a trap where they end up unlearning to cope on their own and potentially take on even more stress.

The common thread behind these is that these AIs lack the understanding of the concepts they’re producing text about and semantic connections between them, and accordingly cannot treat these things with the same nuance and precision that humans can.

But the ways they’re harmful doesn’t immediately become apparent. “Report where it’s harmful” doesn’t really work if it takes two years for a critical security flaw to surface that some code generator produced and nobody with experience caught. You may never notice your ability to deal with stress being eroded until some day you can’t ask your robot buddy for help and just crack instead.

They plant traps in your education, your knowledge, your work, your psyche. To encourage people to use them without thoroughly preparing them for those traps is reckless.

You get all your teams to build some expertise and (hopefully) get a sense of where the technology might have some ROI

You’d run the risk that they instead develop a dependency or overreliance on the tech. They probably won’t think about the “I” part of ROI and evaluate how many tokens a given task produces relative to the saved time and effort.

Throttling it later might then cause a drop in productivity until they relearn how to do simple stuff they could do themselves but delegated to AI instead, whether or not it’s ideal for the task.

For example: “search and replace” requires the LLM to ingest and then produce the whole document as output. Aside from the question whether it’ll have caught all instances and replaced them without otherwise altering the text (which a casual user won’t check), the amount of output tokens correlates with the size of the text.

That’s a lot of wasted tokens for a task they could have done without AI, but so long as asking the computer is quick and convenient, they won’t think twice. Then, once the tokens are throttled, they’ll suddenly realise they’ve run out of tokens early because they burned a ton on tasks that seem trivial to them, leaving none for the more complex tasks they’d actually prefer to delegate (whether or not they should). They might not make the immediate connection which tasks eat so many tokens either, so they’ll take a while having to try all their use cases again, see how expensive they are, run out of their allotment early and wait for the next period.

If you’re gonna have people figure out how to use it, you’ll have to throttle from the start to make them also figure out how to use it economically.

Also, mandatory classes on the limitations and reasonable uses. Don’t let it get to the point where they find out the hard way that it’s not actually intelligent and has no concept of truth.

Without knowing what else went down, a lot of diplomacy hinges on otherwise minor gestures to signal intent. Stuff like the head of state summoning the ambassador to receive an admonishment on behalf of their country isn’t technically a big deal, but it’s a safe, nonthreatening way to express discontent. It doesn’t threaten sanctions or worse, but it does demand the other take it seriously.

To extend your hand is a token of trust and good faith, or just basic respect for the other party. Snubbing it is then an act of disrespect, a breach of protocol that could end up sabotaging negotiations. Why should I trust you to negotiate in good faith, if you refuse even the most basic gesture of good faith?

But Iran clearly isn’t worried whether the US will take offence or trust them. That is the part that makes it clear who’s desperate: Iran believes and signals that belief that the US has no choice but to trust them. They can afford to be rude because the US has no effective recourse. The negotiations are going to happen on Iran’s terms, because the US needs them to happen at all.

It’s kind of a bully move, but Iran can’t exactly afford to choose the moral high ground and the US doesn’t have a leg to stand on to complain about bully moves either.

Edit to add, upon reading the article: The same logic applies to making the US delegation wait. It’s not polite, but the US needs the negotiations and accordingly their delegation will grit their teeth and wait rather than making their indignation clear by walking out.

In the early days of the steam engine’s success, what helped it find an economic footing was the need to pump water from coal mines. At the time, logistics of transporting things over large distances were difficult, so having the coal supply on-site was an obvious benefit. So while using a steam engine to pump water from a pool would be quite archaic and inefficient, but at least for emptying the pool, it could technically be used.

Of course, a locomotive moving the engine around would be entirely impractical for pumping a somewhat steady stream. Chlorinated water would also make for poor steam, I imagine.

I guess driving a scrubber back and forth would be possible, but I could do that more efficiently by hand. I drink less water, eat less coal, don’t require rails and skilled operators and I’m easier to transport to the site. I’m not sure how the carbon footprint for a human compares to that of extracting and processing iron, but it won’t be favourable if at least one human is involved.

The scrubber couldn’t be as large and heavy though. If you need a heavy scrubber, you’d also need a powerful motivator. That’s where a steam engine might have an edge over me: sheer power output.

To match that, you’d have to employ and pay multiple people. So if the steam engine’s rent seems cheaper than that…