> Think of [...] all those "Effective Altruists," who claimed the moral high ground by claiming to care about 53 trillion imaginary artificial humans who will come into existence in 10,000 years at the expense of extending moral consideration to people alive today.
That's not an accurate summary of what most Effective Altruists preach or do. The stereotypical EA interventions are "direct cash transfer to super-poor communities", "buying mosquito nets to fight malaria" and "lobbying for animal welfare", long-termism is much much more niche.
In this case the insiders only made their bets a few hours before the kidnapping was publicly announced, so it's not clear whether the betting "revealed facts about the world" in any publicly useful way.
> I also very much doubt it was the Ukrainians in by themselves - as blowing up heavily reinforced pipes 80m under the water is a rather extreme task, but at least they would have had a reasonable motive.
I agree with the first part of your comment, but it baffles me that people keep claiming "Sending some divers from a small yacht plant a bomb underwater" would beyond the capabilities of the Ukrainian special forces.
Saying "we're lucky" makes it sound like Valve's investment in Linux is a happy accident, but as you point out, the Steam Machine was announced in 2013, and back them gaming on Linux was seen as a pie in the sky dream.
Headlines at the time said things like "Valve’s Steam Machines look dead in the water", there was barely any market demand, and they probably lost a lot on the initial release.
The fact that they still doubled down and spent ten years funding the Linux ecosystem before it made them any money speaks of both a strategic incentive (they don't want Microsoft to hold a sword over their neck) and ideological vision (they want gaming to stay relatively open).
Saying "we all got very lucky that the success of the Steam Deck has put the incentives in the right place for Steam to be able to invest in Linux" is getting the causality backwards at the very least. Valve investing in Linux is what made the Steam Deck's success remotely possible, and it wasn't a sure shot.
No, that was the 2010 "diplomatic cables" release. Basically, they disseminated an encrypted version of the data cache, and gave the decryption key to a few key people, including Guardian journalist David Leigh, with the expectation he'd report on the info without sharing sensitive intel.
David Leigh then published the decryption key in his 2011 book about Wikileaks (for some reason) and the info became publicly available. Everyone pinned the blame on Assange.
Moral of the story: journalists can and will disclose ridiculously sensitive info you give them for a bit of fame and you should be extremely careful about covering your tracks.
> Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.
The article where Meurisse admitted to using AI in the pipeline is from April. You're implying a level of dishonesty that clearly isn't there.
It's so frustrating that every other comment in this thread is people giving their pet opinion about the headline and what it means about the state of the world / the inherent authoritarianism of Germany / whatever, and nobody else is commenting on the contents.
The controversial measures the article lists are things like:
> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.
> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.
Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?
Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.
Sounds like horrible overreach to me, even if such activities are legal in America (when did American police become the gold standard that Europe needs to emulate???!!)
Seriously, searching your home with a warrant is one thing. Doing it secretly without the homeowner knowing about it afterwards is some Stasi shit. Are they going to steal your dirty underwear too? And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
> And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
But it's not "merely suspected"! It's "suspected with enough evidence to convince a judge to issue the warrant". These are completely different things, and to intentionally confound the two is wildly disingenuous.
I don't see how that's much better; a judge is just one guy and he's only hearing the cops' side of the story since you aren't allowed to know you've been accused, let alone present your side of the story.
I mean... yes, that's how police surveillance works? People don't want to do illegal things when they know the police is watching, so sometimes the police has to spy on people before they can prove they did something illegal. The person being spied on can't present their side of the story, because if you tell them they're being investigated, they'll just lay low.
So yeah, there's always the possibility that the cops spy on someone innocent or try to dig up dirt on a journalist or something, and that's why warrants exist. If you don't think a judge's oversight is enough for the police to intrude on someone's privacy, then you're basically saying that the police should only ever have access to OSINT sources and nothing more.
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