Absolutelly!

With the US the EU should ACT, not talk - there is no point in talking to actors which are neither honorable nor reasonable: even if they agree with you it means nothing at all because their actions and their words don’t match.

Removing itself from any treaties with the US that allow recognition of American Copyrights and Patents in the EU would be a wonderful start, and a proper crackdown on the many crimes of American tech companies operating in the European Free Trade area would also be wonderful.

Sure, a proper trade war with the US would also hurt the EU, but better a short sharp pain as that rotten tooth is pulled than leaving it there as the rot spreads out from it (which it already has and we in the EU are getting a lot of needless problems from things like damage to European innovation due to accepting US-style IP like Business Patents, anti-circunvention laws and ridiculously long Copyrights and the nasty societal effects of the practices of US tech companies like Meta, Google and even Palantir).

The US has turned into an anchor you don’t want to be tied to so that it won’t pull you down as it quickly sinks.

Oh, look, dealing with a bully by negotiating with him hasn’t worked.

What! A! Surprise!

Nowadays I’m fully convinced that the politicians in the EU Commission are either profoundly incompetent, rotten as fuck, or both.

“Computer says” is a pretty standard excuse for doing fucked up shit as it adds a complex form of indirection and obfuscation between the will of a human and the actual actions that result from that will.

Doesn’t work as an excuse with people who actually make the software that makes the computer “say” something (because the complexity of what us used is far less for them and thus they know what’s behind it and that the software is just an agent of somebody’s will), but it seems to work with even non-expert (technology fan) techies, more so with non-techies.

With AI the people using the computer as an excuse just doubled down on this because in this case the software wasn’t even explicitly crafted to do what it does, it was trained (though in practice you can sorta guide it in some direction or other by chosing what you train it with) further obscuring the link between the will of a human which has decided what it does (or at least, decided which of the things it ended up doing after training are acceptable and which require changes to training) and the output of a computer system.

Considering that just about the entirety of the Justice System. Legislative System and Regulatory System are technically ignorant, using the “computer says” as an excuse often results in profit enhancing outcomes, incentivising “greed above all” people to use it to confuse, block or manipulate such systems.

Nowadays it’s filled with giant, powerful, activelly predactorial entities using teams of Psychologists to come up with ways to subvert human falibilities and weaknesses to their ends no matter how much it fucks up their victims.

Back in the day pretty much the worst that could happen to you was getting hurt when trying to do for fun some kind of explosive based on a FAQ from Usenet.

What was like a sleepy village with some shady corners has been turned into Blade Runner’s Los Angeles whilst some governments are trying to make it more like Mega City One.

Surely he at least knows the name of the one he used to carry around as a human shield after the Health Care Insurance CEO got executed?!

Even the LLM part might be considered Plagiarism.

Basically, unlike humans it cannot assemble an output based on logical principles (i.e. assembled a logical model of the flows in a piece of code and then translate it to code), it can only produce text based on an N-space of probabilities derived from the works of others it has “read” (i.e. fed to it during training).

That text assembling could be the machine equivalent of Inspiration (such as how most programmers will include elements they’ve seen from others in their code) but it could also be Plagiarism.

Ultimately it boils down to were the boundary between Inspiration and Plagiarism stands.

As I see it, if for specific tasks there is overwhelming dominance of trained weights from a handful of works (which, one would expect, would probably be the case for a C-compiler coded in Rust), then that’s a lot more towards the Plagiarism side than the Inspiration side.

Granted, it’s not the verbatim copying of an entire codebase that would legally been deemed Plagiarism, but if it’s almost entirely a montage made up of pieces from a handful of codebases, could it not be considered a variant of Plagiarism that is incredibly hard for humans to pull off but not so for an automated system?

Note that obviously the LLM has no “intention to copy”, since it has no will or cognition at all, what I’m saying is that the people who made it have intentionally made an automated system that copies elements of existing works, which normally assembles the results from very small textual elements (same as a person who has learned how letters and words work can create a unique work from letters and words) but with the awareness that in some situations that automated system they created can produce output based on an amount of sources which is very low to the point that even though it’s assembling the output token by token, it’s pretty much just copying whole blocks from those sources same as a human manually copying a text from a document to a different document would.

In summary, IMHO LLMs don’t always plagiarize, but can sometimes do it when the number of sources that ended up creating the volume of the N-dimensional probabilistic space the LLM is following for that output is very low.

Yeah, anybody with eyes and a working brain back during the Leave Referendum saw this coming.

I lived in Britain as an EU immigrant until the actual Brexit and saw the whole shitshow from the inside.

I say NO to EU membership for Britain - we don’t need another Fascist country in the EU with voting and even veto rights on things that affect all 470 million of non-Britons in it, especially when 1/3 of the population there were very clear about how much they detest the rest of Europeans (the Racism against other Europeans became very overt there when the Leave Referendum started).

Britain should never have the rights of an EU member until that country has a serious cultural, political and social revolution.

Britain becoming a member of the European Free Trade Area in some way might be alright (though they’re highly likely to try and abuse such a position, as they already did abuse free trade access as EU members, for example by de facto being an uncontrolled gateway for importing non-compliant products into the EU market).

British elites having a saying on how the EU is run by using their country’s votes and veto would not be alright, especially in light of all the authoritarian shit coming out over there - from insane civil society surveillance, mandatory online ID and even treating those implementing end-to-end encryption as anti-state actors to anti-Demonstration legislation and imprisonment of people demonstrating against the Gaza Genocide as “Terrorist Supporters” - which manages to beat even Hungary.

It’s bad enough to have EU countries turning Fascist, but bringing into the EU the country in Europe which after Russia and Belarus is the most de facto authoritarian and most similar to present day MAGA America (though their Fascism is painted in “posh” rather than in “strongman”) would be insane.

It’s even simpler than that: using an LLM to write a C compiler is the same as downloading an existing open source implementation of a C compiler from the Internet, but with extra steps, as the LLM was actually fed with that code and is just re-assembling it back together but with extra bugs - plagiarism hidden behind an automated text parrot interface.

A human can beat the LLM at that by simply finding and downloading an implementation of that more than solved problem from the Internet, which at worse will take maybe 1h.

The LLM can “solve” simple and well defined problems because its basically plagiarizing existing code that solves those problems.

The problem is that LLMs don’t generate “an answer” as a whole, they just generate tokens (generally word-sized, but not always) for the next text element given the context of all the text elements (the whole conversation) so far and the confidence level is per-token.

Further, the confidence level is not about logical correctness, it’s about “how likely is this token to appear in this context”.

So even if you try using token confidence you still end up stuck due to the underlying problem that the LLMs architecture is that of a “realistic text generator” and hence that confidence level is all about “what text comes next” and not at all about the logical elements conveyed via text such as questions and answers.

• How do you know when Trump is lying?
• His mouth is open.

Democrats: Hard Neoliberalism at home, Fascism abroad.

Republicans: Fascism everywhere.

In case you haven’t notice the kinds of shit the Techbros are loudly pushing, the US most definitelly does things at the behest of its own fatcats first and foremost.

Granted, their interestest seem to be aligned in the most with mainly Israel and also partly Russia.

If you want a low power, cheap x86 mini-PC to run a Linux box for low demand uses (personal TV Box, PC for a family member that only ever does light web browsing and e-mail) they do have some nice processors.

I mean, you can also use an ARM SBC for some of those things, but it’s handy to have an x86 processor because of easier availability of binaries, plus even the low power ones are actually more powerful than the ARM stuff.

That’s about the only thing, really.

In the UK there’s quite the tradition of using the Justice System to merelly whitewash the crimes of the Aristocracy, so better wait until the trial is over before one starts celebrating this.

They’re not going after him for Pedophilia.

Apparently as per the rationale of some very pro-Royal British newspapers, the police doesn’t have the resources to properly investigate and prosecute him for Pedophilia, even though according to the news just the other day they arrest 1000 people a year for that very crime.

Go check out the fawning coverage of The Royals by The Guardian over the years.

It surprises me not at all that “on such an unfortunate occasion” The Guardian would be busy spinning a “reasonable” rationally for not taking to court a member of the Royal Family for those crimes which would result in a lot of dirty linen being washed in public.

“The policy have limited resources, nothing we can do about it, best let it go”

(Curiously, the police have the resources to, for example, go after people against the Genocide in Gaza as Terrorist Supporters or Demonstrators for “Disturbing Public Order”)

Note that he didn’t got arrested for the pedophilia part.

Also, this being Britain, best wait until the end of the trial to see if he gets convicted and if the sentence is in line with that for similar situations

When comes to nobles over there using the Justice System as a form of whitewash is pretty standard: there’s this story of some Peer getting convicted for a second time for Fraud and the high court judge letting him go without any penalty saying that “the shame of a conviction is enough”.

Yeah, that does make sense.

However I suspect that what’s charged in Portugal for that cost is way beyond a fair value, with rent-seeking “administrative costs” of the power provider which far exceed actual real costs in the era of smart-meters and computing (plus which are already included in the price for power itself, which is why retail power prices are much higher than bulk market prices, thus there’s double-dipping going on there) as well as “taxes” to pay for subsidies for renewables which were often de facto politicians needlessly shoving money to their mates so that they had higher profits - the big power company in Portugal is very well connected politically and is involved in at least on major Corruption case - rather than actually needed to incentivise provision of things which would otherwise not be provided.

The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.

And this is just State surveillance.

When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.

That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.