It’s a “Don’t make yourself the low hanging fruit” thing not a “If they’re trying to eavesdrop on you they won’t be able to” one and even then only if you’re not using an American OS with built-in automatic surveillance or in fact any network connected product from any large US/UK/Israel (at least) Tech company.

Even if the US Authorities don’t give a shit about you, if you’re running Windows, Android or iOS or using other products of those companies such as Chrome or their Clouds, you’re automatically caught in the bulk dragnet surveillance.

In all fairness, I was thinking mostly of European politicians and added the Americans there for completeness.

I suspect that in America the politicians are mainly just bought (via, for example AIPAC campaign contributions) and any blackmailing that’s needed is done by using the recordings made by a Mr J. Epstein.

Considering that some of the biggest companies hacking smartphones are in Israel and were founded by ex-Israeli Military, I’m sure he’s very well informed about the remote activation and use of smartphones as eavesdropping devices.

Also he probably doesn’t want other to have on them the kind of blackmail material Israel has been using against European and American politicians to make them do whatever is best for Israel even against the wishes of their own Public Opinion.

And by all indications LLMs will never be there - its speed of progression towards that has already pretty much ground to halt.

Mind you, you’re totally right that they will replace everyone if they can (i.e. if they get their hands on actual AGI), it’s just that this tech direction is a dead end and won’t get there.

7" table, 5" phone please, pretty please, pretty please with cherries on top!!!

Generally, good open world games have a lot more emergent content - situations that emerge from the interaction of agents and simple mechanics (in the style of how simple rules create complex outcomes in the “Game of Life”) - whilst good linear games have highly curated set-pieces scenarios which were created by level designers directly.

For an example of the former, imagine you’re running around the Game World looking for a special kind of plant to create a potion that you need. You come across a battle between bears and a bandit group. When they die their drops are free for the taking and both groups are too high level for you to take on your own. None of this was setup to happen when you crossed some trigger line, it literally just happened because those the entities in those groups are part of enemy “factions” and the patrol route of one group (a route which might itself be procedural rather than fixed) passed near enough the position of the encampment of the other.

This kind of thing randomly happen is just not something you get in linear games which are generally just set-pieces and even the ability to pull on group of high level enemies to another group has to be designed in (mainly by making the restricted game area big enough for it in that section and placing the groups in the right places).

This is also why in a linear game if you die and restart you get the same fights in the same places you had before up to the place were you died unless that section of the game was designed with enough alternate paths of mechanics (say, hide mechanics) that you can go around and avoid certain fights.

Emergent content is also why Multiplayer can be a lot of fun, though in this case the “agent” whose interactions can give rise to all sorts of situations are other players.

Whilst I’m not sure about contractors specifically, at least in my technical area “Software Development” having the expertise/insight in the social domain (which is not part of the expertise required for the job) to do things like that is more the exception than the rule.

But, yeah, totally agree that the wise, well-rounded and (IMHO) competent professional would at the very least do a bit of subtle “social discovery” to try and figure out who is the best person the interface with.

Gender stereotyping is a vicious cycle (multiple cycles even) and definitelly goes through both genders.

Mind you, in my experience it does have some cultural component to how far it goes, but even in the most gender-egalitarian country I lived in (The Netherlands) there were still plenty such expectations and, for example, before the remote working era the percentage of couples there with a huisman (the male version of housewife) was only 18%.

How much of this is the contractors being sexists and how much is it them being used to, far too often, having to manage the fragile ego of a male partner who thinks that “as the man of the house I’m suppose to know these things”?

Non-profit Copyright Infringement (a.k.a. Piracy) is a Moral Duty, IMHO.

Copyright nowadays is up from the original “25 years” to around “Death of author + 50 years” (a bit more in the US) which is almost always more than 100 years in total, so those “old” books are nowaday almost a century old or more.

(Well, sorta, if their copyright expired BEFORE new legislation was introduced to extend copyright length as has been regularly done for almost a century, those works didn’t got back under copyright after the extension, and as at least in the US copyright extension legislation was seeming driven by wanting to keep the first Mickey Mouse cartoon under copyright, at least in the US said “old” out of copyright books will mainly be from before 1928).

I disagree with that right-side graphic.

I think that when measured by Quality of Life we have actually been going backwards since maybe 2 decades.

Granted, I’m in Europe, so around here it’s pretty clear that the society-wide support structures built in the 60s in areas such as Education, Universal Healthcare, Public Transportation and Social Security are actively being destroyed.

That said, even in the US you can see things like Equality of Opportunity completely reverse from reasonably equal to highly unequal (just look at the graphic of Social Mobility in the US in the past 50 years).

In other words, even the highly individualist and quite asocial American Model of prosperity (“Anybody can become anything they want”) has been pretty much totally destroyed.

So, untermenschen.

C’est pour encourager les autres

Also it would be seriously unfair to treat a foreigner any better (or worse) than a local that committed the same crime.

Well, now we’re down to “pragmatic responses”.

By which point we’re not “punishing” anybody for being bad boys, we’re doing things for geo-strategical value - basically to change behavior or reduce the possibility of future behaviors which are bad for us.

What the poster that originated this thread wanted - that Europe stops sending any tech to China because in his or her view China “supports” (unclear how much is too much) Russia - is not an appropriate response in pragmatic terms because it is a hostile movement towards a massive and increasingly influential nation - China - to try and change unclear behavior (just how much does China really “support” Russia compared to, say, India?) which supposedly indirectly would change somebody else’s (Russia) behavior. Specifically for the EU, said somebody else is bad for it because they basically bark a lot towards it (whilst not actually biting it, though they do bit others) and have committed crimes in the EU at the level of a small organized crime organization.

How exactly is it pragmatic to go down a route of trade aggression towards a giant nation which is friendish towards a different nation to somehow (magic?) try and deter said other nation from further committing in the EU the level of crime of a small criminal organization?!

The retribution from China would cost the EU vastly more than the problem that action by the EU might (but it’s not at all guaranteed) ameliorate.

That’s not pragmatic in any way form or shape.

If we’re going for punishing them, then that’s not “pragmatic” anymore, that’s at the level of principles, at which point what I wrote about punishing all imperialists, genociders and their supports applies.

If you think denying technology to China because they work with Russia is a proportional response to Russia murdering people in Europe, I have some news for you about CIA activities all over the World including in Europe …

It’s a lot more simple to just follow the logic of Principles and pushing back on those commiting wars of aggression and genocide and those who support them as a rule and without trying to treat some of those one way and others differently for *reasons*, than try and come up with the perfect red-line of actions in Europe which decides between “do nothing at all” and “block anybody in any away associated with them”, that puts Russia on the bad side of the line and the likes of America on the good side so that we can keep on treating one set of murderous imperialists better than the other.

Ah, I see, you’re driven by “what’s in it for me”, not by principles.

Well, by that logic, I as an EU citizen shouldn’t give a shit, since Russia hasn’t attacked the EU (at most they should get a proportional talkie-talkie response when they engage in talkie-talkie “aggression”) and meanwhile it’s more profitable for the EU to engage with China than it is to cut them of, and as for the rest of Europe (most notably Ukraine), well screw them same as the “screw Palestinians” of your position.

Even better, as a Portuguese and thus as far from Russia as possible whilst still being in Europe, by your “self interest” motivation I shouldn’t give a shit about Russia even if they invaded Eastern European EU countries.

Of course, me being a person of principles, I support Palestine against the Israeli Genocide same as I support Ukraine against Russia aggression (no need to feel personally endangered by either aggressor) and what I think the EU should do in the international plane follows from that, but that’s not at all your reason to wanting that Europe behaves towards China in a certain way.

That’s actually an excellent summary of the whole situation.

As an European, I very much prefer that we apply to those who support Israel the same standards we do for those who support Russia.

So I’m absolutelly fine that we do not give BOTH Israel’s and Russia’s allies important technology.

Doing otherwise would show our “European values” to in practice be nothing more than sociopathic hypocrisy.

Of course, then ASML wouldn’t be able to sell its machines to America and at least half of Europe as well as quite number of other countries.