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Free speech on one hand, legal system capture on the other.

There's unfortunately nothing stopping you from signing away your freedom of speech.

In Germany, this sort of thinking is the reason you can't release anything into the public domain. People are presumed to be too stupid to be trusted with the decision to renounce their copyright and so they are "protected" from this possibility.

Did you mean to say "presumed to be too stupid, or too easily conned or coerced"?

I understand freedom of speech and I understand she's free to speak but there may be consequences. I understand that there are huge complexities in the legal system. I understand you can enter into agreements (part of your speech) that effectively gives away your speech. But if you step back and look at this situation, it's just fucked up that a corporation can do this to you. If freedom of speech is supposed to be inalienable, these types of agreements should not be legal.

disclaimer: She lives in the UK and I'm speaking from a US perspective.


> She lives in the UK and I'm speaking from a US perspective.

But the contract is being enforced from the US.


Is it freedom if you can't make an informed choice to sell it?

I would argue yes. If you have the choice to sell to sell it, you can be forced to sell it.

One can still give up their basic rights if they so choose. The woman in question can cease from disparaging Meta for the rest of her life. A person can opt to enter in to being a slave to another for the rest of their life. I can choose to follow one religion or another or none at all. But one should never have those options taken from them.


Which means it’s not a right

In a normal society courts should be protecting from signing away basic freedoms

That would also preclude non-disclosure agreements. I'm curious if you also find those unreasonable?

Both non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements should—just as many jurisdictions have for non-compete agreements, which do not even implicate free speech the way the others do—be sharply limited as a matter of public policy (non-disparagement even moreso than non-disclosure.) Both are routinely used to inflict public harm for private gain, and government enforcement of either is in tension with freedom of speech; while there is a legitimate case to be made that non-disclosure agreements within certain bounds have a certain degree of necessity in enabling legitimate business, this is a much harder case to make for non-disparagement agreements, at least for ones that are not temporally bounded within an active business relationship.

Depends on what type of non-disclosure. Disclosing technical guarded and not publicly known technical know-how - I am ok with those. Disclosing that boss treats people like trash should be allowed and I think lawmakers should have enough intelligence in their brains to make laws accordingly.

I get that you're not a free speech maximalist, but that's still signing away a basic freedom.

What are 'basic freedoms'?

Speech, for example.

If you don't believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery, you should start by offering your list. If you do believe that people should be able to sell themselves into slavery, then unlimited freedom of contract is a basic freedom for you.

What you shouldn't do is pretend not to understand.


I'm not the one making a positive claim. I haven't even claimed such rights exist so why on earth would be the expectation be that I list them? You've assumed that I believe in this shared fiction.

We sell ourselves into a form of slavery every day. Some would argue that is a big driver of our current society and way of life.


You can’t get people to try to break out of a prison they don’t think they are in

Those that are deemed inalienable.

Freedom of speech is far from inalienable. Non-disclosure agreements are most relevant, but every country on earth also has at least some regulations regarding hate speech, threats, incitement, purjury, or defamation — not to mention security clearances or state secrets.

And that's where the complexity arises in this argument that I don't know how to resolve. In the case of this woman vs Meta, to me it doesn't "feel" legal that one disparaging comment costs $50K. It feels that there's something wrong here that should not be allowed despite her entering the agreement. Maybe I don't believe she should have been allowed to enter the agreement.

But I understand that my point of view doesn't match legal code. Just feels fucked.


The majority of people will self-alienate themselves in exchange for power or even just survival

Think of a person digging their own grave under threat of immediate murder (tons of well documented examples). This is the maximum self alienation: do work to make life easier for your oppressors.

In my 41 years it seems like the majority of people are content digging their own graves


Please enumerate these inaliable basic freedoms that I should not be able to deal in.

If you'd like to research basic freedoms, I would suggest starting here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_rights


It's very boring for you not to actually commit to anything specific, so that you don't have to defend it.

There's a basic list on that page. There are many LLMs out there that you can discuss this with if you want to waste your own time. I'm not going to waste any more time with this thread. You have an attitude that says "Debate me but you'll never convince me". If you'd like to learn something, there are many resources on the internet available to you.

The US will not permit you to sign yourself into slavery, as an example.

Only for a very narrow definition of slavery. Arguably constructing society such that it costs so much to just exist (for example, by artificially restricting housing supply) and thus you have to work is not all that different to slavery. I would say the dollar is but company scrip with better PR.

> Only for a very narrow definition of slavery.

Good. We have "enumerate[d] [at least one] inaliable basic [freedom] that I should not be able to deal in".


Well now you're equivocating. We've established one that you can't deal in in a specific country. _Should_ is quite a different question. You can't establish should by establishing is.


Don't hurt your back moving those goalposts. Lift with hips.


America = literally the whole world and everyone in it so QED inalienable rights exist

Well I wouldn't call it a strong argument...

Nonetheless the goalposts were never shifted. The question was always 'should'. So I'm very confused by your confusion.


What proof, exactly, would you accept for "should"?

Should is an opinion. You're welcome to feel "slavery should be legal". I'm welcome to (and should) think you're insane for holding that opinion.


> Should is an opinion.

Well that would seem to make the rights in question not particularly inalienable. In fact if we're talking about the US slavery _is_ legal in certain contexts. So it's definitely not inalienable. Only in the context of voluntary agreements between private citizens.


> Well that would seem to make the rights in question not particularly inalienable.

You should read up on what "inalienable rights" are about. Even the first couple of paragraphs on Wikipedia will suffice.

They get violated all the time and need constant protecting.


You're taking a strangely ethnocentric view here. I don't take the founding fathers' writings as a form of scripture. Those are but bare assertions.


You're taking a strangely US-centric view here.

This has nothing to do with the founding fathers. The Ancient Greeks talked about natural law. The UN passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 193 countries have ratified at least parts of it.

Again, I beg you to at least read a paragraph or two off Wikipedia.


The specific term 'inalienable' is heavily associated with the founding of the US. The others are different things but not very different in substance, i.e. ultimately some guy claimed these are universal rights. Wikipedia is not going to make appeal to authority work any better as an argument, I'm afraid.


Free speech?

So I can't sign an exclusive book deal? Or write for a newspaper?

Exclusive book deals tend to have defined timespans.

I'm not clear on the newspaper example; do you think reporters aren't allowed to write stuff outside their job? Plenty of reporters publish books.


> Exclusive book deals tend to have defined timespans

Good. We have "enumerate[d] [at least one] inaliable basic [freedom] that peopke should be able to deal in".

Of course, we can quibble over the permissible duration of such timespans, but I think the point has been made clear.


No I just mean in the sense that I give over the rights to my own words. I can't repeat them outside of the context that I've agreed to. They were both examples of the same kind of agreement. They'll keep those rights well after I'm dead, by the way.

Sounds like they're about to have a surge in stock price.

"TSLA is about robots, not cars" is thrown without irony to anyone that questions the car business.

In 6 months post-IPO: SpaceX purchases Tesla

Merger in all stock deal? That could happen... Have to get to be bigger than everyone else.

This was a banter, but... https://www.investing.com/analysis/would-a-teslaspacex-merge...

(article from today)


Everyone on Twitter right now (probably):

“You don’t understand the vision” “This is actually a good thing” “HODL”


The „AI” messaging barrage is relentless. Stockfish is AI, LLMs are AI, neural nets are AI.

It’s a self reinforcing system. We need a major disruption to move on from it.


These have been AI for longer than most people here have been hearing the term. Neural nets have been AI since before most people here were born.

Stockfish uses neural nets for its evaluation function, I don’t see how it’s unfair to call it “AI”.

It is totally fair, but for a lot of average non-tech people, AI == "something you can prompt in a natural language".

I personally prefer to avoid the term altogether in favor of more specific terms, like:

- LLM

- chess engine

- image generation model

etc


I'm not sure most people are that naïve that they can't differentiate between "any computer that acts smartly" (how the term "AI" is used) and the word chatbot. Of course, LLM is even more precise

Tangential question: what do you call transformers-based models that generate images or videos? Are they LLMs? They're not really "language" models. But there's not really an easy term for them. Maybe "image models" and "video models"?

Today I learned, Stockfish moved to neural network on 2023. I knew that it was just a minmax with alpha beta pruning and a really good eval function. Now its not.

> I knew that it was just a minmax with alpha beta pruning and a really good eval function. Now its not.

It is still "just" a minimax with alpha beta pruning, except the eval function is now a neural network. NNUE, to be more specific.

I highly advise anyone who is curious about chess engines, but hasn't heard about NNUE to read about it. I find this technology absolutely fascinating.

The key idea is that a neural network is structured in a way that makes it very cheap to calculate scores for similar positions. This means that during a tree search, each time you advance or backtrack you can update the score efficiently instead of recalculating it from scratch.

Good starting points to read more:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiently_updatable_neural_n...

- https://www.chessprogramming.org/NNUE


I mean, it still is. Now it just has a really good neural net-based eval function. Don't be fooled: it's not that stockfish just has "a really good eval function", and that's the only thing that makes it as strong as it is. The actual tree search is _incredibly_ sophisticated, with boatloads of heuristics, optimizations, and pruning methods on top of alpha-beta.

Hey now, I call linear regression AI if I want senior management to get excited about something.

What are you on about? Is this about how when people use an English term in a particular way, then their listeners/readers begin to use it too? If so, yes, it's a self reinforcing mechanism called lexical dissemination, and I'm very curious to hear about how you'd disrupt it.

Honestly the PELOSI act is a step in the right direction, and should be extended to include all kinds of cryptocurrency and real estate. Also the president and his extended family should be included in it.

The only problem is in the name. It's clearly just to score political points. I'd be surprised if it gets approved.


There are more recent versions with better names, like the Restore Trust in Congress Act[0], and one introduced a few days ago to ban congresspeople and the president (as well as their immediate family members) from betting on prediction markets[1].

I can only imagine the GP mentioned the PELOSI act (which, as I recall, was cosponsored by Nancy Pelosi and blocked by Republicans) because it was designed to be partisan messaging.

[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5106...

[1]: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/03/25/congress/la...


There was a post about astroturfing a while ago.

One theory is that the talking points are seeded by a set of paid supporters on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. These people live in low income countries and can use LLM + broad directional instructions to mass produce comments in support of the regime.

The talking points that are successful are then reinforced by genuine regime admirers, enter the canon and spread. There’s no verification mechanism for bad or wrong ideas, since we’re in a post truth society.

The goal is to uphold the regime. The system trying to be stable and defend itself from the fallout of its actions. The actions are actually guided by an ideology plus personal interests, so they can’t be optimal.



> https://studies.aljazeera.net/en/analyses/digital-occupation...

I'm not sure citing a Qatari propaganda site with a well documented history of employing members of terrorist organizations as "journalists" is helping make your point.


And here I thought aljazeera was a respectable journalistic outfit. They certainly seem to be doing better than most of the corporate US media by my estimate.

Perhaps you should back up your mud slinging?


> And here I thought aljazeera was a respectable journalistic outfit.

While they may do some legitimate journalism they are well known for highly biased articles especially when it comes to anything relating to the middle east.

> They certainly seem to be doing better than most of the corporate US media by my estimate.

In what way? News organizations in the US like CNN certainly have higher standards than aljazeera.

> Perhaps you should back up your mud slinging?

Journalists who did work for aljazeera even held hostages in Gaza[0].

[0] https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-805525


> Journalists who did work for aljazeera even held hostages in Gaza[0]. > [0] https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-805525

Holy shit, you're right! The country murdering thousands of captive civilians and spreading proven lies about the status of hospitals as terror bases reported it, so it must be true! I'll never trust Al Jazeera again, now that I know they take hostages.

That's just a really bad argument that falls flat on its face and discredits you.


> proven lies about the status of hospitals as terror bases

Hospitals being used by terrorists for military purposes in Gaza is well documented fact.[0][1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/politics/gaza-hospital...

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/02/15/gaza-hospi...


Let's the the documents you're speaking of (and not those fake IDF spreadsheets which list some of them as being Hamas members when they were 6 or 7 years old).

Also please justify all of this:

List of journalists killed in the Gaza war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...


Bari Weiss's CBS said a journalist who was killed was someone they worked with or some stupid shit when they were clearly a colleague or possibly more. I don't remember enough to be more specific, but that type of minimalism is rampant.

Israel kills journalists and civilians. Oh shit, civilian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie


You're right, execs keep trying to fit the LLM square peg into the "inteligent agent" round hole.

Developers use it, for groking a codebase, for implementing boilerplate, for debugging. They don't need juniors to do the grunt work anymore, they can build and throw away, the language and technology moats get smaller.

The value of low level managers, whose power came from having warm bodies to do the grunt work, diminishes.

The bean counters will be like when does it pay for itself. Will it? IDK, IDC.


Validation efforts likely become more necessary, so costs rise in another area. And product managers find they still need someone to translate the requirements well because LLMs are too agreeable. Cost optimization still needs someone to intervene as well.

I know there's an attempt to shift the development part from developers to other laypeople, but I think that's just going to frustrate everyone involved and probably settle back down into technical roles again. Well paid? Unclear.


Wasn't there some recent discovery that context switching is harmful to your brain?

Roleplaying a parallel reallity where "Europe" is an oppressive totalitarian regime will never not be funny.

> Roleplaying a parallel reallity where "Europe" is an oppressive totalitarian regime will never not be funny.

Roleplaying inability to read will never not be funny

UK: https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/law-requiring-dis...

France: https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/news/french-court-rules-...

Ireland: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57468750


UK: Police can search phones to counteract human traffickers.

China: Police can search phones of dissidents, and jail them for life for criticising the Party.

You: Europe is worse than China (or will be really soon I promise).

Disingenuous.


Nobody claimed Europe was worse than China, only that if you wouldn't visit China for this reason then you shouldn't visit Europe (or the US) for the same reason.

Speaking of being disingenuous, when you say "Police can search phones to counteract human traffickers", did you think critically about that at all before writing it? Given one of the stated justifications is "preventing terrorism", and the UK has been illegally arresting Palestine Action supporters as terrorists for over a year, this seems a little naive at least.


> Nobody claimed Europe was worse than China, only that if you wouldn't visit China for this reason then you shouldn't visit Europe (or the US) for the same reason.

That would be nonsensical. If you have anti-Xi propaganda on your phone (which could be the reasons you mention), you have nothing to fear in Europe or in the US and a lot to fear in China.

The US is actually worse than both China and Europe because it's 18th century amendments protect human traffickers. Although they do what they can to not have to adhere to those, especially in border control.

> What about Palestine Action...

I'll limit myself to the LARP about "oppressive Europe invigilating your phone".


Indeed anti-Xi posts are unsafe in China, and safe in UK. Equally, anti-UK posts are safe in China and not so in the UK... (eg https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/...). The naïveté in the claim that these are significantly different reminded me of an old joke from the USSR:

American: In America, we have freedom of speech.

USSRian: What's that?

American: I can stand in front of the White House and yell "Reagan is a moron!" and nothing will happen to me.

USSRian: Well, we have that in USSR too.

American: Really?

USSRian: Yes, of course! I go stand in the center of the Red Square and yell "Reagan is a moron" and nothing will happen to me.


I'm sorry, but you're not coherent.

You're saying anti-uk posts, you're linking some heavily editorialized article from a highly ideological media outlet about an arrest "allegedly over criticising anti-trans activists". So not anti-UK posts.

The arrest doesn't seem to have lead to any conviction. So not years of jail and reeducation camps like you get in China for dissent.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You put this things together and you claim they're the same. They're not even close. This makes you seem funny, unserious.


arrest == arrest

You are most welcome to google "UK arrest for criticizing" and find articles you consider less biased. There are so many to choose from


I did that. There are no arrests for criticizing on the first page of Google.

Judging by your previous reactions, you're going to say that your Google is different, and link some news story about an arrest that isn't for criticizing and instead for supporting terrorism.

Hate to break to you that not every arrest is the same. Some include beating, and lead to jail time. Some include questioning and they lead to the arrested walking free within the day.

So you're hyperfocusing on the UK's online posting, which has nothing to do with the original subject of phone passwords, and doesn't even happen in other European countries, because UK has more proactive monitoring of online spaces by police.

And this is your proof that Europe is a tyrranical dictatorship.


You're trying to convince a flat-earther with logic or physics. Western democracies are evil. Worse than China and worse than North Korea. The answer is Marxism.

EDIT: This reminds me of a Russian person I used to work with. He truly believed that elections in all western democracies were fake and rigged. That is you go and vote but the vote is predetermined. This was a long time ago but I think it was some story told in Russia about the west (basically how the west is not really free) that stuck as an unshakeable belief when he left Russia and moved to the west. This was about 40 years ago give or take. People can hold weird beliefs and conspiracy theories (like people that believe the earth is flat) and those beliefs can not be assailed with logic or facts.

The reality is(?) that western democracies with all their flaws are better than authoritarian regimes but a person can not grasp the entirety of reality. One can always find examples where people are treated unjustly or unfairly in western democracies and ofcourse one can find examples of people being "ok" in authoritarian regimes. The key is to apply the scientific method to the question vs. relying on anecdotes but the human mind is not really wired for that.


Increasingly, people in the US get convinced that Europe is pretty much like China (they usually focus on the policing of online spaces in the UK as proof of that).

There was apparently a recent push in their media to introduce and reinforce this narrative. Can’t see what good would that do, except the current leadership wanting to worsen relations with everyone.


Nobody cares about your phone in China, if you are tourist, you are less likely have your phone searched than when visiting US. Nobody is going to ask you for your social media profiles when visiting China, unlike when visiting US. So who is here the free country?

I've spent this summer 3 weeks in China, used 2 VPNs, both of them worked fine (1 cost less than dollar, the other 4-5 dollars), so did my wife, mother and her husband, guess how many times someone cared about checking our phone.

The biggest issue was when we travelled into Beijing province where there are mo strict border checks and police found out we didn't register our accommodation (at wife's family), the scary horrible policemen then locked us for weeks and deport us from country... No, seriously, that would more likely happen in US than in China, in China they just told us to register after the weekend at local police station and let us continue into province to check Great wall, policemen in police station could not care less and be more laid back about it.

Maybe visit some other countries to have actual experiences instead spreading everywhere your feelings about other countries based on some propaganda.


> if you are tourist

It's not the tourists, it's the local dissidents that have something to fear. Or maybe try going there as a tourist, and putting up anti-party posters.


parent said clearly he is not visiting there because if these reasons, he is clearly not a local

But their free speech protects bribing the politicians with campaign donations. It's true that we don't have such advanced laws over here.

Disagree. Personal responsibility should never be publicly discussed. It’s personal.

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