If one of the possible answers to your question is "yes, I am indeed armed, and committing a felony by impersonating a law enforcement officer", you should reconsider your most recent life choices. In particular, asking them that question.

Observe from a safe distance, and call 911. What on earth do you hope to gain by going up to them for a chat?

excuuuuuuuse me. Are you actually taking people hostages? Or is this some kind of publicity stunt? Hellooo?! Are you really shooting at me? That's just, like, so rude.

One would assume you are not alone when you do this. Confrontation in public is not just important but demonstrably working. We have seen plenty of communities scare off ICE.

You are far more likely to be dealing with ICE than someone impersonating them. Acting like you're the next potential target for a political assassin is a bit weird.

Always be safe, always be careful, but the fact is if you're out at a protest or live in a community with a substantial immigrant population, you are likely to encounter ICE/the police.

I have cautioned people to be thoughtful about their actions when opposing the ruling class. I have also told people that if ICE shows to your door, it's best to just consider yourself already cornered and soon to be dead, so fight and kill as many of them as you can.

You're making shit up.

You are far more likely to be dealing with ICE than someone impersonating them. Acting like you're the next potential target for a political assassin is a bit weird.

There's your class traitor apologia.

Stop telling people to assume that active criminals are law enforcement. If they refuse to identify themselves they aren't law enforcement, and should be immediately detained, or if necessary put down.

The civil servants need to be reminded who their bosses actually are.

So again to be clear: you are openly advocating for killing people because you’re afraid they are either unidentified law-enforcement or somebody posing as one?

If you actually believe this, then how the hell are you actually here to comment? Or is it a tough guy act about something you would “totally do with given the chance”?

I understand it’s cool to cosplay as a cop killer, but you’re actually going to get people killed with your chest pounding, keyboard warrior nonsense.

Have you ever actually interacted with a cop? Have you actually been in a dangerous situation with law-enforcement? Because I have. And you have no clue what you’re talking about

Securitization is a tool and only part of why the markets collapsed. The reduction of the problem to securitization fails to recognize the bad loans and ineffective ratings given to collateralized securities, and the hidden tranches not disclosed to investors.

If your mortgage/loan market isn't fraudulent then you don't have underlying assets with impossibly high risk. If the ratings agencies properly rate securities then investors know what the risk is. And if the government regulates the issuance of these securities through prospectuses (which they do now) then investors will know what's in them.

Makes more sense to control the factors that play into the investment risk through regulation instead of shutting down a useful tool for investors.

Or you can just say edgy bullshit.

Aaron Schwartz was harassed by the feds until he took his own life for releasing publicly-funded academic works wrongly locked behind paywalls, yet we let venture capital funded slop machines assault the cornerstones of our public knowledge, to the point where they are rendered inaccessible by the general populace.

When ChatGPT 3.5 dropped, there were lots of people calling for “guardrails” and “common sense legislation.” They were shouted down and called Luddites. These are the kinds of situations we should have been able to prevent.

404 has been on fire lately by the way, everyone should consider bookmarking and supporting them

This seems contradictory. On the one hand you're saying that these works are wrongly locked behind paywalls, but on the other you're saying that scraping them is an "assault on the cornerstones of our public knowledge." Is this information supposed to be freely viewable or not?

IMO the ideal solution would be the one Wikimedia uses, which is to make the information available in an easily-downloadable archive file. That lets anyone who wants the whole thing to have it without having to "hammer" the servers. Meanwhile the servers can be protected by standard load-balancing and DDOS prevention systems.

so every single repository should have to spend their time, energy, and resources on accommodating a bunch of venture funded companies that want to get all of this shit for free without contributing to these repositories at all themselves? You think that is a fair ask? That these (often underfunded) institutions should have to accommodate the American private sector’s free lunch because they’re entitled to break our sites without warning?

Honestly the more I write the more this sounds like capitulating to hackers.

so every single repository should have to spend their time, energy, and resources on accommodating a bunch of venture funded companies that want to get all of this shit for free without contributing to these repositories at all themselves?

Was Aaron Schwartz wrong to scrape those repositories? He shouldn't have been accessing all those publicly-funded academic works? Making it easier for him to access that stuff would have been "capitulating to hackers?"

I think the problem here is that you don't actually believe that information should be free. You want to decide who and what gets to use that "publicly-funded academic work", and you have decided that some particular uses are allowable and others are not. Who made you that gatekeeper, though?

I think it's reasonable that information that's freely posted for public viewing should be freely viewable. As in anyone can view it. If they want to view all of it and that puts a load on the servers providing it, but there's an alternate way of providing it that doesn't put that load on the servers, what's wrong with doing that? It solves everyones' problems.

I don’t think you understand what is mechanically occurring. He was not putting strain on public servers, he downloaded on-site as one person at a reasonable rate, and then distributed it to the public. It was essentially ethical piracy. No site or entity was put under strain. No one was denied access.

The reason I drew the comparison is his treatment as one person downloading journals and releasing them, vs AI companies scraping countless website/public repositories, taking them down for the public in the process, and then monetizing it internally.

The reason they are being compared is their treatment for extracting publicly funded information. AI companies are being far more destructive. It’s not even close. They are actively harming public data and access with their unfettered sense of entitlement.

Certainly far less objectionable than taking down public resources, though there’s more to it than that - again, it puts the onus on everyone else to protect themselves from companies that are essentially acting like malicious hackers, Companies that should be the ones responsible for not tearing down public resources. But I don’t really get what you’re trying to prove, because your proposal is not what they’re doing. They’re just doing whatever the fuck they want and don't care who it impacts. They never do.

I don’t feel like this is very complicated. I’m not allowed to block public roads with my car. I’m not allowed to cut the power to a library and bar the doors. You can’t just deny people public resources like that as a private entity, unless of course you are an AI slop company, in which case states literally aren’t even allowed to make rules about you for the next decade due to our corrupt commander-in-chief. These AI companies are allowed to steamroll any private or public entity they want so long as they condense the right people they will make them a lot of money. It is wildly unethical and the fact that I have to spend so much time convincing you they deserve a little more scrutiny is kind of baffling.

Aaron Schwartz didn’t do anything like the above and your insistence that he is somehow critical to proving some perceived hypocrisy or inconsistency on my part is…well, i’m not sure what the word is, but it’s just not accurate at all.

I have said it twice already, but I will do it a third time:

It is not right to expect everyone else to accommodate private, venture capital fueled AI companies. This is their problem, they are the ones who have to train their models, so they are the ones who have to figure out how to get the data without fucking everyone else in the process. They are not entitled to breaking everything and going “whoopsies!”

I don’t understand why the burden is on the victims here. You are telling libraries et al that it is their responsibility to keep corporations from breaking into their homes, scattering everything everywhere, and forcing them to clean it up themselves.

I don’t understand why the burden is on the victims here.

They put the website up. Load balancing, rate limiting, and such go with the turf. It's their responsibility to make the site easy to use and hard to break. Putting up an archive of the content that the scrapers want is an easy and straightforward thing to do to accomplish this goal.

I think what's really going on here is that your concern isn't about ensuring that the site is up, and it's certainly not about ensuring that the data it's providing is readily available. It's that there are these specific companies you don't like and you just want to forbid them from accessing otherwise freely accessible data.

That is absolutely ridiculous. The pressure AI scraping puts on sites vastly outstrips anything people built for, as evidenced by the fact that the systems are going down. Building out for that kind of assault costs a lot of money and time. I’m honestly wondering if you understand what it takes.

You know these systems are underfunded. You know these people are underpaid and underappreciated. This is absolutely ass backwards and I don’t understand why you're defending these companies that are getting unholy amounts of money to inflict this upon our public resources. Do you know what happens if I do this to websites? It’s called a DDoS attack and I get a visit from the feds.

And for the record, I am all about the data being readily available. Readily available to all of us. I don’t care if AI companies use the data or acquire it, but if it comes at the cost of our access, then yes I am opposed. You should be too! Yet here you are misrepresenting the situation and drawing Incredibly crooked parallels.

AI evangelists are all the same, they can’t see beyond the religion they’ve built. Anyone that remotely questions the process these companies feel entitled to are branded as Luddites and shouted down. This can’t be emphasized enough. Do not buy into their cult.

Marketing firms have to pay for surveys or data acquired by other organizations. Political analysts have to pay for polling data or pay to conduct their own.

Let me ask you this: Why are AI companies special? Why do they get to take out my public library without warning and profit off of the act? You keep trying to reestablish what I am saying, so how about you actually express what you believe.

That is absolutely ridiculous. The pressure AI scraping puts on sites vastly outstrips anything people built for, as evidenced by the fact that the systems are going down.

Yes. Which is why I'm suggesting providing an approach that doesn't require scraping the site.

At this point I’m tired of you ignoring whole swaths of what I’m writing. I responded to that particular thing several times. I made it a point to tell you I was doing it for the third time. Clearly you are not reading what I am writing. You are skimming it at best.

You have tunnel vision on this issue. It’s sad that you’re on the wrong side of it, but at this point I’ve wasted enough of my time. Have a good one dude

I am once again begging journalists to be more critical ~~of tech companies~~.

But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.

[...] Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.

This is the wrong comparison. These are taxis, which means they're driving taxi miles. They should be compared to taxis, not normal people who drive almost exclusively during their commutes (which is probably the most dangerous time to drive since it's precisely when they're all driving).

We also need to know how often Waymo intervenes in the supposedly autonomous operations. The latest we have from this, which was leaked a while back, is that Cruise (different company) cars are actually less autonomous than taxis, and require >1 employee per car.

edit: The leaked data on human interventions was from Cruise, not Waymo. I'm open to self-driving cars being safer than humans, but I don't believe a fucking word from tech companies until there's been an independent audit with full access to their facilities and data. So long as we rely on Waymo's own publishing without knowing how the sausage is made, they can spin their data however they want.

edit2: Updated to say that ournalists should be more critical in general, not just about tech companies.

to amplify the previous point, taps the sign as Joseph Weizenbaum turns over in his grave

A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision

tl;dr A driverless car cannot possibly be "better" at driving than a human driver. The comparison is a category error and therefore nonsensical; it's also a distraction from important questions of morality and justice. More below.

Numerically, it may some day be the case that driverless cars have fewer wrecks than cars driven by people.(1) Even so, it will never be the case that when a driverless car hits and kills a child the moral situation will be the same as when a human driver hits and kills a child. In the former case the liability for the death would be absorbed into a vast system of amoral actors with no individuals standing out as responsible. In effect we'd amortize and therefore minimize death with such a structure, making it sociopathic by nature and thereby adding another dimension of injustice to every community where it's deployed.(2) Obviously we've continually done exactly this kind of thing since the rise of modern technological life, but it's been sociopathic every time and we all suffer for it despite rampant narratives about "progress" etc.

It will also never be the case that a driverless car can exercise the judgment humans have to decide whether one risk is more acceptable than another, and then be held to account for the consequences of their choice. This matters.

Please (re-re-)read Weizenbaum's book if you don't understand why I can state these things with such unqualified confidence.

Basically, we all know damn well that whenever driverless cars show some kind of numerical superiority to human drivers (3) and become widespread, every time one kills, let alone injures, a person no one will be held to account for it. Companies are angling to indemnify themselves from such liability, and even if they accept some of it no one is going to prison on a manslaughter charge if a driverless car kills a person. At that point it's much more likely to be treated as an unavoidable act of nature no matter how hard the victim's loved ones reject that framing. How high a body count do our capitalist systems need to register before we all internalize this basic fact of how they operate and stop apologizing for it?

(1) Pop quiz! Which seedy robber baron has been loudly claiming for decades now that full self driving is only a few years away, and depends on people believing in that fantasy for at least part of his fortune? We should all read Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil to see the more likely trajectory of "driverless" or "self-driving" cars.
(2) Knowing this, it is irresponsible to put these vehicles on the road, or for people with decision-making power to allow them on the road, until this new form of risk is understood and accepted by the community. Otherwise you're forcing a community to suffer a new form of risk without consent and without even a mitigation plan, let alone a plan to compensate or otherwise make them whole for their new form of loss.
(3) Incidentally, quantifying aspects of life and then using the numbers, instead of human judgement, to make decisions was a favorite mission of eugenicists, who stridently pushed statistics as the "right" way to reason to further their eugenic causes. Long before Zuckerberg's hot or not experiment turned into Facebook, eugenicist Francis Galton was creeping around the neighborhoods of London with a clicker hidden in his pocket counting the "attractive" women in each, to identify "good" and "bad" breeding and inform decisions about who was "deserving" of a good life and who was not. Old habits die hard.

nobody should have nuclear weapons.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if the scientists working on the Manhattan project had all agreed it's too much and intentionally sabotage every test.