Slavery as punishment is actually allowed by the constitution...
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Not just permitted, but actually widespread. If you’re imprisoned in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, you are going to be doing unpaid forced labor which is slavery, and many of the prisons are privately owned.
Federal prisons pay roughly $0.12 to $0.40 per hour for regular jobs, which isn’t much better.
The hypocrisy of the US is breathtaking sometimes, and the current administration has the gall to criticise europe.
Just to play devil's advocate, you're okay with forcing a criminal to sit in a room for the rest of their life, but you're not okay if they also have to work for society during that timeframe. What is the main argument why the first case is okay and the second is not.
Because it creates perverse incentive for government to put more people in prison.
Right now the punishment is confinement. When you add effectively unpaid labour in prison as part of acceptable punishment, you're also paving the way for a future where unpaid labor as a standalone punishment is also acceptable. That's just slavery by law.
Outside in society, I have to work to pay my rent, to pay for my food.
Inside a prison, should they not have a similar responsibility? They commit a crime and as such are held in stasis? Should they not at least carry the burden of themselves
The problem is that there’s double dipping and profiteering. The prison company gets paid by the government for the same it costs the government to house prisoners and then contracts out the prison labor to private companies for basically pure profit. Private prisons’ ability to sell slave labor is a perverse system. The government doing so is at least marginally less but still exploitative in that it robs prisoners of their humanity and feeling like they’re part of the social fabric. Pay them a living wage for that effort and they start to learn that there’s respect and reward that come from being integrated in society.
I don't think there's enough jobs in prisons that need physical labour where they can cover the costs. You would then have to train them in useful skills but incompetence is not a crime so you cannot penalize those who "cannot learn/do" skilled work.
Other alternative is to make
them work the same job they did outside but that is a slippery slope with lot of potential for abuse.
the US has had lots of programs where labor can effectively be bought or contracted from prisoner sites by private companies.
I know of prison ran machine shops that were doing die-casting and tool production. I also heard of one (didn't see) that was doing basket weaving for a floral/arrangement company.
these are shallow 'social benefits'; but the companies were privately owned.
I guess the classic example is license plate pressing.. I guess that's a social good? I don't know if it goes on at all anymore.
Why do they have to stay inside? Have a chain gang trim overgrown weeds along roads, fill in potholes, clean leaves, clean and repair sidewalks, plant shrubs, etc.
Or the taxpayers foot the bill for keeping the inmate in prison while private interests (including but not limited to private prisons and select contractors) take additional profit off the unpaid labor instead of passing savings to the consumer
Not really a perverse incentive. The government isn’t making any money here. They’re paying someone from their own pocket only to take it away again?
At that point it really is just slavery, which they can already do as protected in the US Constitution.
(I’m not arguing for this. I agree with restitution and believe that sentences longer than a certain point are also pointless and a net negative to society.)
Hypothetically let's say govt is allowed to use unpaid labour outside menial tasks and the prison system is setup in a way to efficiently utilize the skills of their labour pool and is allowed to outsource their skills to private entities at attractive rate for covering prison costs (i.e. more money left for govt spending)
E.g. tradesmen employed on their related jobs. A programmer employed in software jobs or a technician "loaned" to a nearby lab etc.
Don't you think the local/state governments will then have incentive to fill their pool with "missing" talent according to the job requirements.
thats why for some prison systems main goal is not punishment but rehabilitation. i think this is scandinavian approach.
"The stated goal of the Swedish prison system is to create a safer society by reducing recidivism and rehabilitating offenders rather than focusing solely on punishment. This is achieved through humane treatment, education, and reintegration programs designed to prepare prisoners for life after release."
Probably for the same reason that it's generally seen as less intrusive to prevent someone from doing something, compared to forcing them to do something.
For us commoners sure, but enterprise customers usually have an SLA that defines uptime requirements... And penalties for missing them. I have to wonder how much they're paying out on those.
Title is misleading. They don't claim that the machine is capable of encrypting anything at all, only that the slime mold pattern can form the basis for an entropy source, which can then be used by an existing CSPRNG to generate encryption keys.
Right, it doesn't work the same for humans as it does AI agents.
If you finetune a model and it starts misbehaving, what are you going to do to it exactly? PIP it? Fire it? Of course not. AIs cannot be managed the same ways as humans (and I would argue that's for the best). Best you can do is try using a different model, but you have no guarantee that whatever issue your model has is actually solved in the new one.
> Probably not. All side effects need to go through the js side. So you can alway see where http calls are made
That can be circumnavigated by bundling the conversations into one POST to an API endpoint, along with a few hundred calls to several dummy endpoints to muddy the waters. Bonus points if you can make it look like an normal-passing update script.
It'll still show up in the end, but at this point your main goal is to delay the discovery as much as you can.
As soon as you hijack the fetch function (which cannot be done with WebAssembly alone), it's going to look suspicious, and someone who looks at this carefully enough will flag it.
Game development is a lot different than "normal" software development. Usually involves a lot more crunch/unpaid overtime. Though yes, the comparison is hyperbole.
Seems like a pretty big overreaction IMO. Advertisements deserve more strict regulation than general user-generated content because they tend to reach far more people. The fact that they aren't has resulted in something like 10% of all ads shown being outright scams or fraud[0]. And they should never have allowed the ad to air in the first place - it was patently and obviously illegal even without considering the GDPR.
If these companies aren't willing to put basic measures in place to stop even the most obviously illegal ads from airing, I have a lot of trouble having sympathy for them getting their just desserts in court.
> Advertisements deserve more strict regulation than general user-generated content because they tend to reach far more people.
They deserve strict regulation because the carrier is actively choosing who sees them, and because there are explicit fiscal incentives in play. The entire point of Section 230 is that carriers can claim to be just the messenger; the only way to make sense of absolving them of responsibility for the content is to make the argument that their conveyance of the content does not constitute expression.
Once you have auctions for ads, and "algorithmic feeds", that becomes a lot harder to accept.
>The entire point of Section 230 is that carriers can claim to be just the messenger
Incorrect, and it's honestly kinda fascinating how this meme shows up so often. What you're describing is "common carrier" status, like an ISP (or Fedex/UPS/post office) would have. The point of Section 230 was specifically to enable not being "just the messenger", it was part of the overall Communications Decency Act intended to aid in stopping bad content. Congress added Section 230 in direct reaction to two court cases (against Prodigy and CompuServe) which made service providers liable for their user's content when they didn't act as pure common carriers but rather tried to moderate it but, obviously and naturally, could not perfectly get everything. The specific fear was that this left only two options: either ban all user content, which would brutalize the Internet even back then, or cease all moderation, turning everything into a total cesspit. Liability protection was precisely one of the rare genuine "think of the children!" wins, by enabling a 3rd path where everyone could do their best to moderate their platforms without becoming the publisher. Not being a common carrier is the whole point!
> Congress added Section 230 in direct reaction to two court cases (against Prodigy and CompuServe) which made service providers liable for their user's content when they didn't act as pure common carriers but rather tried to moderate it but, obviously and naturally, could not perfectly get everything.
I know that. I spoke imprecisely; my framing is that this imperfect moderation doesn't take away their immunity — i.e. they are still treated as if they were "just the messenger" (per the previous rules). I didn't use the actual "common carrier" phrasing, for a reason.
It doesn't change the argument. Failing to apply a content policy consistently is not, logically speaking, an act of expression; choosing to show content preferentially is.
... And so is setting a content policy. For example, if a forum explicitly for hateful people set a content policy explicitly banning statements inclusive or supportive of the target group, I don't see why the admin should be held harmless (even if they don't also post). Importantly, though, the setting (and attempt at enforcing) the policy is only expressing the view of the policy, not that of any permitted content; in US law it would be hard to imagine a content policy expressing anything illegal.
But my view is that if they act deliberately to show something, based on knowing and evaluating what it is that they're showing, to someone who hasn't requested it (as a recommendation), then they really should be liable. The point of not punishing platforms for failing at moderation is to let them claim plausible ignorance of what they're showing, because they can't observe and evaluate everything.
Except this isn't limited to ads is it? From the post it sounds like the ruling covers any user content. If someone uploads personal data to Github now Github is liable. In fact, why wouldn't author names on open source licenses count as PII?
The court uses the phrase “an online marketplace, as controller” in key places. This suggest to me that there can be online marketplaces that are not data controllers.
The court cites several contributing factors to treat the platform as data controller: they reserved additional rights to upload content, they selected the ads to display. Github only claims limited rights in uploaded content, and I'm not sure if they have any editorialized (“algorithmic”) feeds where Github selects repository content for display. That may make it less likely that they would be considered data controllers. On the other hand, licensing their repository database for LLM training could make them liable if personal data ends up in models. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
Github does include some small amount of algorithmic feeds in its recommendation engines. I have half-a-dozen projects "Recommended for you" on my github home page.
I doubt that is enough to trigger this ruling, but algorithmic content is absolutely pervasive these days.
The author of the article is claiming it extends beyond ads.
That does not appear to be what the court actually said, however.
And I 100% believe that all advertisements should require review by a documented human before posting, so that someone can be held accountable. In the absence of this it is perfectly acceptable to hold the entire organization liable.
> There’s nothing inherently in the law or the ruling that limits its conclusions to “advertisements.” The same underlying factors would apply to any third party content on any website that is subject to the GDPR.
So site operators probably need to assume it doesn’t just apply to ads if they have legal exposure in the EU.
Personally, I'm not buying the slippery slope argument. I could be wrong of course but that's the great thing about opinions: you're allowed to be wrong :)
> why wouldn't author names on open source licenses count as PII?
They are but you can keep PII if it is relevant to the purpose of your activity. In this case the author needs you to share his PII, in order to exercise his moral and copyright rights.
What "loses energy" actually means here depends on what kind of redshift you're talking about.
If you're talking about gravitational redshift, because the light is climbing out of the gravity well of a planet or star, there actually is a conserved energy involved--but it's not the one you're thinking of. In this case, there is a time translation symmetry involved (at least if we consider the planet or star to be an isolated system), and the associated conserved energy, from Noether's Theorem, is called "energy at infinity". But, as the name implies, only an observer at rest at infinity will actually measure the light's energy to be that value. An observer at rest at a finite altitude will measure a different value, which decreases with altitude (and approaches the energy at infinity as a limit). So when we say the light "redshifts" in climbing out of the gravity well, what we actually mean is that observers at higher altitudes measure its energy (or frequency) to be lower. In other words, the "energy" that changes with altitude isn't a property of the light alone; it's a property of the interaction of the light with the observer and their measuring device.
If you're talking about cosmological redshifts, due to the expansion of the universe, here there's no time translation symmetry involved and therefore Noether's Theorem doesn't apply and there is indeed no conserved energy at all. But even in this case, the redshift is not a property of the light alone; it's a property of the interaction of the light with a particular reference class of observers (the "comoving" observers who always see the universe as homogeneous and isotropic).
Edit: I just looked into this & there are a few explanations for what is going on. Both general relativity & quantum mechanics are incomplete theories but there are several explanations that account for the seeming losses that seem reasonable to me.
1. Lie groups describe local symmetries. Nothing about the global system
2. From a SR point of view, energy in one reference frame does not have to match energy in another reference frame. Just that in each of those reference frames, the energy is conserved.
3. The conservation/constraint in GR is not energy but the divergence of the stress-energy tensor. The "lost" energy of the photo goes into other elements of the tensor.
4. You can get some global conservations when space time exhibits global symmetries. This doesn't apply to an expanding universe. This does apply to non rotating, non charged black holes. Local symmetries still hold.
The consequence of Noether's theorem is that if a system is time symmetric then energy is conserved. On a global perspective, the universe isn't time symmetric. It has a beginning and an expansion through time. This isn't reversible so energy isn't conserved.
Please explain. Noether's theorem equates global symmetry laws with local conservation laws. The universe does not in fact have global symmetry across time.
You are making the same mistake as OP. Formal models and their associated ontology are not equivalent to reality. If you don't think conservation principles are valid then write a paper & win a prize instead of telling me you know for a fact that there are no global symmetries.
The typical example people use to illustrate that energy isn't conserved is that photons get red-shifted and lose energy in an expanding universe. See this excellent Veritasium video [0].
But there's a much more striking example that highlights just how badly energy conservation can be violated. It's called cosmic inflation. General relativity predicts that if empty space in a 'false vacuum' state will expand exponentially. A false vacuum occurs if empty space has excess energy, which can happen in quantum field theory. But if empty space has excess energy, and more space is being created by expansion, then new energy is being created out of nothing at an exponential rate!
Inflation is currently the best model for what happened before the Big Bang. Space expanded until the false vacuum state decayed, releasing all this free energy to create the big bang.
Alan Guth's book, The Inflationary Universe, is a great book on the topic that is very readable.
And no, the severity of the crime does not (IMHO) justify it.
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