What did you use to make the illustrations? It looks nice.

Not OP, but these look like Excalidraw.

I think the hard counterpoint is - some ways that American government function are patently insane compared to other industrialized countries. Having moved from US to Nl just having one single source of truth about where I live and who I am for all sources of government is much less of a headache in day-to-day life. Mail forwarding, authentication for municipal governments, health insurance, etc, just takes 0% of my life (compared to the pain of authenticating myself separately to every part of the government, sometimes by answering questions about my life trawled from _private_ data aggregation companies - the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens. Gathering this data for everyone is certainly more tedious but i think avoiding the dragnet completely for the average member of society is functionally impossible.

This administration went in and just flagged people on Social Security as deceased. They said 'those people can just get it fixed'. They also said people that complain are cheats.

There are many people on fixed social security that can't afford missing a payment, let alone the 3 it would take at a minimum if it all works out to get this fixed. By that point they could be homeless, their credit could be ruined. These aren't easy things to fix if you are 80+ and depend on Social Security and renting.

Concentrated power even for the best on intentions (in this case deciding in the 1930s 'old people shouldn't have to eat dog food') is extremely easy to abuse.

These kind of systems work perfectly and smoothly as long as the human in question lives his life within the box decided by the government. If not, these systems are hell.

Where "the box decided by the government" means having a mail address?

Most advanced countries also view that as a basic human right...

In some hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your individual tax number. In other hyper-bureaucratic nations, everything is tied to your bank account.

It can also be tied to a postal adress in some nations, which makes it hell for people like sailors, seasonal workers, or other very mobile citizens. You're basically dependent on having to know somebody which you can completely trust to make sure they relay your mail to you. One of the "boxes" the government wants to put people in is that they reside at one adress, but many people do not live like that.

> the lack of a central civil register does not seem to be particularly effective right now in stopping the Us government from terrorizing its citizens.

What do you base this on? How can you be sure that it's not a major impediment to the ambitions of certain political actors, and that their impact wouldn't be far worse if they had access to centralized sources of data?

Because they DO have whatever data they want: From Palintir.

Preventing the government from accumulating a database is meaningless. But it doesn't matter anyway. Even if they didn't have any data, that's not an impediment, because there is zero pushback to literally blackbagging people off the street and sending them to another country. They just want to harass brown people and you don't need a damn database for that. Bootlickers have eyes.

This bullshit about government databases has always been a meaningless distraction. Oppression doesn't want to be precise or efficient, it's counterproductive to the goal of scaring people into compliance.

Tell me, how do you believe they are stymied at all? They've arrested anyone they want.

So I'm in general agreement, especially as things stand. But there is one hell of a counterargument that says if the US govt had an authoritative database of all citizens+residents, and effectively enforced that database, then there wouldn't be so much energy based around demands to remove "the illegals" in the first place.

Once again I do generally agree with the desire to limit the abilities of the government, especially pragmatically in the context of the current situation. And politically I'd say that the general topic is being used in bad faith to drive support for fascism rather than earnest policy fixes (eg killing bipartisan immigration bill, in favor of this).

But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.

> But in general there is an American blindspot of fallaciously seeing system layers as something like a gradient of less-to-more control rather than a yin-yang where diminished control in one area makes it pop up in another.

Can you provide some examples of this phenomenon?

One of the big ones is the calling to naively eliminate government regulation, imagining that will always make things "more free", while ignoring that corpos are perfectly willing to create private regulations on their own. This often ends up amounting to facilitating de facto government, despite some epsilon of choice.

There are many more-specific examples of this, but maybe a straightforward and less-partisan one is how the (incumbent) electronic payment networks ban a whole host of types of uses, and do so basically in lock step, despite those uses not actually being illegal. That is private regulation, not even accountable to the democratic process by default. And it avoids becoming accountable by fooling people with narratives of "avoiding regulation".

It seems fairly obvious that few South Korean students harbor deep anti American sentiment, but many are not clear what shitposts would block entrance to the US.

Is this article llm generated?

I use whisper.cpp and it works pretty okay on a mac. Runs locally. Wish i could finetune its vocab.

With all due respect, That is the price you pay for your users doing _free_ software testing for you! We are on the “listen to your users” mecca and you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.

>for your users doing _free_ software testing for you!

In comparison to _paid_ software testing, which doesn't change the point at all: if they were paid to find bugs, they wouldn't be paid for useless and unactionable reports.

>you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard

Sometimes - and I'd wager most of the time - they are, yes, unless your product solely attracts technically competent and advanced users that can attempt to understand/reason about what is causing the issue.

> you’re complaining that listening to your users is hard and you wish a machine could help you with it.

That's entirely the wrong take, IMO.

Listening to users is easy, but the users often don't say anything when they speak. Those non-reports are basically spam that should be automatically thrown away.

When a mozilla application crashed it'll ask you to leave a comment to try and help resolve the issue when it prompts to send crash info, and you used to be able to see all those comments on https://crash-stats.mozilla.org (it seems to be behind login or restricted access now). There was a lot of vitriol and unhelpful comments that any developer would need to wade through to get to anything to give them a lead

It also leave a coredump, they can remove repeated entries and then filter by good comments

I have a tiny bit of sympathy for this, I have received a bug report that said “Your software doesn’t work”.

I’d always reply though, usually with something equally terse.

Most recently, a github user opened a issue on one of my projects and asked "Why should I use this instead of Y".

As a developer sharing my code online, I don't even know where to begin answering that.

This is typical non-tech spam.

If I'm writing FOSS and someone asked me that, I'd just reply with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm not making money from it, so trying to convince some random individual to use it is a waste of my time. Sure, I'll describe the features in the README and possibly include comparisons to other software, but I won't go out of my way to convince a specific rando just because they asked.

It’s just not that common for the same person to have serious engineering chops and writing abilities.

He is absolutely not saying that his songs are borne out of suffering in everyday life. I am losing my mind reading these comments.

The suffering he is talking about here is the frustrations and compromises of the artistic _process_, which llms short circuit entirely

No matter what the work is _about_, any art made by a human is going to encounter this feeling.

Current SOTA models are really bad at RE and i don't really expect this to improve through training on open data.

There are just not a lot of high quality examples on the internet, and more importantly the people writing this code are doing their best to make it actively more difficult.

It is quite easy to produce high quality synthetic data to train reverse engineering. Just take any open source project and ask the model to produce the code (or something equivalent) given the binary.

Right. You could even run it through code obfuscators and such to create more diverse, realistic examples.

It sure would be a more accurate title, but it wouldn’t be a better one.

The title is a let down. I was earnestly anticipating a sensationalist portrayal of the author's experience, irrespective of its nature.

I have certain expectations when I hear about someone being "done dirty". Now I have to read what looks like a modest and respectable account...about reading...and stuff like that.

Fine.