S410

“What are your thoughts about setting your hair on fire?”
“This Wikipedia article about burns covers it pretty well”
“Aha! So you’re a parrot!”

There’s a finite number of possible conclusions one can come to if they use this little thing called “logic”. If multiple people apply it to the same problem, they’re likely to come up with similar, if not identical, answers. If your conclusions about some given thing aren’t shared by anybody else, it’s more likely than not because they’re illogical nonsense. It’s even worse if your conclusions are outright nonexistent. That’s not good. Means you stoopid.

Something like a centralized financial system has some very obvious, glaring issues that should be instantly apparent to anyone. And I’m, obviously, not the first person to think about it. So, why should I write something, if people who thought about it before me already outlined all the logical concerns about this system? And, likely, in a more detailed and in-depth manner than I’d care to write in a comment on a random website.

The “Criticism and risks of the digital euro” section on Wikipedia outlines my concerns about such a system pretty well.

Unless they are going to implement a cryptocurrency with centralized minting (essentially giving themselves both as much and as little control over the digital currency as they have over physically printed money), it doesn’t seem that much different from what we have already. Just because it’s going to be a new system, doesn’t really mean it not going to have issues with false-positives suspending regular transactions or fees that are higher than they need to be.

If you’re in the US, it’s not very practical to try to pay for things using Turkish liras either, for example. But it’s not any less “real” because of it. There is still a market for that currency, even if you might need to look around for a bit to actually use it or exchange it for a different one. Same for WoW gold or crypto.

Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.

If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.

There isn’t a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn’t a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn’t mean they’re immune to speculation, nor does it mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are “not real”.

I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I’m an artist) and to pay my VPS’s rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.

And, honesty, it’s pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I’ve used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.

The vast majority of “real” currencies are fiat currencies and don’t have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it’s collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.

CIA can cobble together questionable evidence against an entire country, proving the US administration with more reasons to start a “preventive war”. A war which would eventually end with “whoopsie-daisy, there are no WMDs after all”.

Yet, planting evidence on a single guy who just leaked a whole bunch of their secrets? No, of course they’d never do anything questionable or immoral to him!

I merely pointed out that in the context, his statement was, most likely, not trying to claim that CSAM is a victimless crime, but that his alleged possession of it is.

Substitute CSAM for something like murder, for example: It’s one thing to have a video of someone committing murder and a very different thing to commit murder yourself and record it. One is, obviously, a violent crime; the other, not so much. It’s a similar argument here.

He might be 100% guilty, he might not be. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure, is that CIA and other alphabet agencies have a history of being… less than honest and moral. So, I exercise caution and take their statements with a fair bit of skepticism. Pardon me of that doesn’t come off as I intend it to.

The sentence previous to the one you’re quoting, the one you’ve omitted, changes the context quite a lot.

When he heard that the government was pushing to keep him detained pending trial, his stomach dropped. “The crime I am charged with is in fact a non-violent, victimless crime,”

In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it’s fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.

The wording of his statement is… questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like “you’re are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine”.

Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren’t, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users’ permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.

“Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars … by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail.”

How do you get 2.4k images on a jail computer? Manifest it out of thin air?

Considering CIA is involved, which is known for torture, human experimentation, poisonings, planted evidence, etc. I’d not be too surprised if that file was straight up planted as an extra “fuck you” to the guy.

Disclosing found exploits allows developers to patch them out and improve security of everyone, which includes all the other alphabet boys and regular citizens.
There’s no way to know that you’re the only one who found any given exploit. Letting an exploit stay unpatched opens up an attack vector for everyone, not just you.

Corporations have been trying to control more and more of what users do and how they do it for longer than AI has been a “threat”. I wouldn’t say AI changes anything. At most, maybe, it might accelerate things a little. But if I had to guess, the corpos are already moving as fast as they can with locking everything down for the benefit of no one, but them.

“AI” models are, essentially, solvers for mathematical system that we, humans, cannot describe and create solvers for ourselves.

For example, a calculator for pure numbers is a pretty simple device all the logic of which can be designed by a human directly. A language, thought? Or an image classifier? That is not possible to create by hand.

With “AI” instead of designing all the logic manually, we create a system which can end up in a number of finite, yet still near infinite states, each of which defines behavior different from the other. By slowly tuning the model using existing data and checking its performance we (ideally) end up with a solver for some incredibly complex system.

If we were to try to make a regular calculator that way and all we were giving the model was “2+2=4” it would memorize the equation without understanding it. That’s called “overfitting” and that’s something people being AI are trying their best to prevent from happening. It happens if the training data contains too many repeats of the same thing.

However, if there is no repetition in the training set, the model is forced to actually learn the patterns in the data, instead of data itself.

Essentially: if you’re training a model on single copyrighted work, you’re making a copy of that work via overfitting. If you’re using terabytes of diverse data, overfitting is minimized. Instead, the resulting model has actual understanding of the system you’re training it on.

So… You say nothing will change.