VPNs do not allow you to connect two devices directly, they have to go through the VPN. They also do not allow you to connect devices that are not on the VPN. Iroh does P2P connections and punches holes through NATs when needed, so you can connect directly to devices on different networks that are behind firewalls.
It sounds like the key difference people are missing is that VPN's operate at the network layer, so they require separate integrations for every device os/arch and network stack, where Iroh is embedded at the application layer, so any app can be a P2P VPN client without worrying about device network integrations.
Sounds great to me, and would be a boon for self-hosting and decentralization in general, which is sorely needed considering how captured, authoritarian, and anti civil liberties every democracy is becoming. If I'm not mistaken, I believe I read a tailscale blog about them envisioning application layer embedding at some point as well.
I applaud the Japanese for being capable of recognizing that many parts of their culture are unique and worth preserving. That what makes Japan Japan is not just the land and the name, but the people and their culture.
They are not just asking for more money, from TFA they are imposting additional requirements like better Japanese fluency etc. In general they are raising the bar for who is allowed to live there, and all of that protects Japan.
No, that's not required for this visa. The capital requirement is the major change. Also, foreign restaurant owners are already fluent in Japanese, because they deal with Japanese customers every day. The language requirement change is for other visa types.
The rich people abusing this visa as second home have no trouble depositing a bit more money to meet the requirement. It only affects legitimate businesses that can't raise and float that kind of cash. It's performative punishment to appease the growing far-right sentiment. If they wanted to verify businesses were real, they can go there and foot and inspect. (They already have the right to do this, and all businesses that qualify for this visa must have a public office or commercial space with a clearly listed sign that can be accessed easily.)
Also, they enacted the change and applied it retroactively to existing visa holders who were waiting to have their visa updated. So people are now being rejected on new rules that were announced and enacted after they had filed to update their visa (which you must do every 1-3 years.)
Japan is not a theme park for foreign tourists to gawk at. It's a real place where people live and work.
Struggling to see where you contradicted anything I said besides calling it performative.
There's also the "far right" pejorative in an attempt to make your viewpoint seem not fridge while brushing aside the legitimate concerns of the citizens of the host country whose families have lived there for centuries and made it the place that it is.
Do you live there? I can see how some Japanese would then view such a POV as entitled and insulting. It would only increase the sentiment to boot such gaijin out.
It was more obvious before you edited the comment (and in principle we appreciate it when people edit their comments to dampen or remove personal attacks), but the bit that begins "Do you live there?" and ends "boot such gaijin out" is still saying much the same thing. You can make your substantive points without getting personal like that.
I'm at a loss here tbh because that sentiment is what the article is about. But yes I did edit the comment to make it less personal and more about the sentiment that has led to these changes in the VISA requirements.
> people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced. The reason transgender people do hormone replacement therapies is so that they can change their hormonal balance.
Not so sure, it could have to do with their hormones. I recall experiencing mild gender dysphoria during a period when my testosterone was recorded as below normal. When it returned to normal the dysphoria went away. It could be that some choose to say, "Since I think I'm a girl, perhaps I should swing the hormones even further in that direction."
I'm just one data point though, would be curious to hear other's experiences with dysphoria and what their blood work shows.
EDIT: And think about it, it's a logical contradiction to say that "hormones have nothing to do with it but write me an Rx to mess with my hormones so that I'm more of a girl."
Being transgender represents a misalignment between your internal sense of self and the sex you were born with. Sometimes this is about societal expectations and pressure to conform to gender ideals, sometimes it is about the physical body you were born into/the primary and secondary sex attributes of that body, and often it's both. Hormone replacement therapy is a way of altering the body's secondary sexual attributes to reduce the dysphoria that is cause from the misalignment of ones sense of self and their body.
Doing HRT carries massive life long side effects, which doctors are required to inform patients about. In some places, it requires months of therapy and a doctor's signoff. While I'm sure there are people who have hormonal imbalances, and some of them have perceived gender dysphoria because of it, I find it very unlikely (or at least extremely uncommon) those people would then start taking hormones, given that you have to be _pretty sure_ you're trans before getting near hormones. It seems very unlikely that in the course of a dip in hormone levels where dysphoria was sudden the course of action would be to transition rather than to seek an endocrinologist for answers. If this were common, I would think detransition rates, which many studies have shown to be very low, would be far higher than they are.
Even with 15 years of gender dysphoria, it took me six months post coming out to feel ready to start the hormone conversation, and an additional three months with the prescription sitting in my cabinet before I was ready to actually start taking it. Like I said, my hormonal level baselines were normal for a male.
Edit, RE your edit:
> "hormones have nothing to do with it but write me an Rx to mess with my hormones so that I'm more of a girl."
"Mess with my hormones" is a flippant and inaccurate way to describe a very difficult conversation trans people have with their doctors. You don't start hormones for fun and you don't start them because you're high on estrogen or testosterone. Hormones also don't make you "more of a girl." If you are a trans woman, you are a woman, regardless of whether you are on hormones, have had any kind of sex altering surgery, or have socially transitioned. You take hormones to bring your inward sense of identity outward and reduce the pain that comes from your sense of self not aligning with your appearance and the societal demands and expectations of your behavior.
I am not going to say that I agree with OP, or that OP's language isn't entirely too casual for someone close to this issue but it appears they're most focused on finding out why people have a different inner self than outer expression.
We recognize that the inner self's gender is unalterable (and if it weren't, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with that sort of mind control), so we must bring the outer in alignment.
However where the inner self gender comes from is something I'm not sure we know too well. Is it the womb? Is it early childhood development? Do hormones and nutrition affect this process which we haven't even pin-pointed in anyway?
Personally, I think it's too early to call out chemicals as a cause. That's a bet we can't take until at least we know the process. And if we're at that point, we could do that mind control that I'm so much against.
Why would the "inner self's gender" be unalterable? Almost everything about a person can change, even after reaching adulthood, height, weight, strength, personality, phobias, preferences, beliefs.
> Being transgender represents a misalignment between your internal sense of self and the sex you were born with.
These thoughts, like every other thought anyone has, are mediated by hormones. I'm not saying any particular balance or resulting thought is good/bad/right/wrong/healthy/unhealthy.
But this is akin to saying "being aggressive represents a state of excessive confidence, not elevated testosterone levels." Sure! That's true. But it's also true that elevated testosterone levels tend to increase the frequency and intensity of occasions in which people find themselves in a state of excessive confidence.
Weirdly though, exogenous testosterone tends to make people more generous and social until you cross some boundary. Roid ragers are using too much external T.
Definitely interesting! Aren't people starting to describe testosterone as something more like "status-seeking?" But also testosterone presumably exists in animals with ~no concept of status...
Just goes to show you how incredibly complex and broadly impactful these chemicals are.
I just wanted to say that gender dyphoria is not the same as being gender diverse. A lot of times there can be no dysphoria if you live in a loving and accepting environment.
I have a few people in my life that are gender diverse, and simply changing their pronouns to they/them when referring to them has so far been sufficient to make them feel happy and accepted.
Also, stop your BS about a prison system, its not whats going on globally. You are just buying into the BS that Facebook and company are sending you. Good on you for buying into their propaganda. The world existed before social media and it will keep existing.
OR we can try to move this to the positive side instead of fighting the fascists. We dont NEED social media, its a cancer on humanity. So maybe instead accept this BS and move it towards a place that we can all agree upon. I understand the UK political system is corrupt to its core, like all world goverments, but that's not the reason why to ignore and give in to
what the government is demanding.
There will still be social media. Most of the public conversation will still take place there. You just won't be able to use it anonymously (possibly not even read it).
Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?
It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc.
Before Big Tech springs that trap, we must support and divert resources to open models.
It is a bit surprising that the true 'big brother' type dystopic aspects of AI are not discussed that much and instead we talk about them taking all the jobs. We feed these things so much information. It could be used against us for advertising, control, or worse.
"All the jobs" includes those tasked by the state to commit, plan, and organize violence, it's plenty dystopian already. Like, one important reason why the military and militarized police don't engage in egregious overreach is that the people who'd be responsible live standard lives in their own society and it's hard to get high compliance for that sort of thing. Replace that relatively democratized infrastructure of thousands of intelligence analysts, mid-level management, etc with a bunch of AI agents, and a meaningful restriction on the power of the upper echelons of the state is removed.
Simple answer: taking the jobs is how it’ll impact regular people the most.
We already have personalized, algorithmic advertising and what I would call “control” all over the place: things like consolidated oligarch-owned media.
AI isn’t going to change how we are advertised to or controlled all that much, at least compared to the prospect of being put out of work or taking a huge salary cut similar to the mid-century worker who used to have a $40/hour union factory job and now works at Walmart below health insurance threshold for $15/hour.
Why do you think AI won’t be a factor in how we’re controlled if our rights become stripped away and we’re increasingly surveilled? Or if violence is deployed by the state against its people with broader targeting? You seem to take for granted that nothing will change except maybe the flavor of rhetoric.
My view is even gloomier. They won't have to coerce you, because with everything they know about you and human psychology, they will be able to manipulate you effectively enough for whatever they want.
Hyperinflation is how it will impact most people. You will still have your job, at your pay, but a continually higher percentage of earnings will go to very few at the top.
"You're absolutely right, I think you deserve to treat yourself with Mococoa, made with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua! It's what humans like myself crave."
Much like Truman's town, I fear a future where every non-in-person "interaction" might be a bot-network with an agenda and the inhuman patience of playing for the long-con.
Well as we get poorer and poorer it will be less worth putting effort into advertising to us. Im guessing AI will instead focus its effort on convincing rich people of various things.
huh? You think using it to advertise to us is worse than taking our jobs? Why would anyone advertise to jobless people. How is what you seem to be trivializing not the central problem? I don't think controlling is high on Dario's list. But he is absolutely gleeful, he cannot even hide his arousal in his interviews in which he never looks anyone in the eye about taking people's jobs and destroy our future ... but yes, oh the agony of advertising ...
> Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?
It's worse than this, it's more like our thinking. There's already plummetting math grades [1], handing over our thinking to AI megacorps where there's likely to be a monopoly or duopoly is an incredibly dangerous thing for humanity as a whole.
A few confounding factors come up right away: one of professors removed final project which increased grades; due to less appealing CS career, you do not get the best students anymore: another professor is not a fan of curving so perhaps he just accidentally gave harder tests; math prep for CS courses happened over the last 15 years not last 2 where LLMs have become ubiquitous; many failed because they were caught using LLMs when not allowed...
So really, two professors' gut feel about what the reasons are and not backed by much.
If humanity is over-reliant on frontier labs' models to perform work, the result is a dependence on the actual intelligence of these models -- not on human intelligence. This could be a small reason, on top of many others, why investors are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars a bit "carelessly" to these labs. It's fascinating seeing the models do the "hard work" (the deep, challenging thinking) for you.
The conundrum which tricks me though - is this a net negative or a positive? If humans are less intelligent, but their output is 2-3 times more intelligent (with AI), what's the result? At what point do we, as humans, stop comprehending anything and give all intelligent work to the neural nets?
And if that does happen, could we live in a society where no work, or at least a significantly less amount of work, is needed? To me, it seems like a dystopian net positive.
It might seem far-fetched to ask these, but I think these questions are getting more prevalent by the day.
If there was a way to guarantee that every human would have equal access to external intelligence then it would be hard to argue against it but everyone knows that the US oligopoly will do everything they can to ensure that no one else has the keys to the kingdom.
Just listen to what the SV ownership class says out loud. They openly discuss how China cannot "win the AI arms race" and how China's development is existential. Existential to who? It's impossible to fully subjugate people with agency.
I am going to try to cheer you up. Hear me out. One day, not long from now, I am going to buy a humanoid bot for 40k. This human android will 1) get my groceries, 2) make my elderly parents meals, 3) go to the backyard and plant 1 acre of corn, 4) paint my neighbors house. 5) get the kids from school 6) change my oil.
What will happen? Massive. Deflation. What will you pay for an oil change? Corn? Meals? Everything is about to be free. But tokens will be expensive!! Sure but, you wont do white collar work anymore so it wont matter what tokens cost.
It's not just a dependence on the intelligence of the models, but also their intentions, as programmed by their owners.
A friend of mine asked me if I was optimistic about AI. I told him, it depends on who owns it. If the people own it, I'm optimistic. If the oligarchs own it, I'm pessimistic.
>It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc.
I'd argue that they already are to some extend, given that well-educated people have no saying on the matter when it comes to extensive use (and by extend reinforcement training) of their models. Well, they have a saying, but exercising that means they're willing to end up without a job.
Now, as far as "what is truth" is concerned, the models are already biased towards notions and opinions that are accepted to some degree by Western values. I had an argument with Claude (why would the tool even argue?) that started by asking it what makes a man attractive, which sent it on a yap on how beauty is subjective, there's no objective way to measure beauty (which implies there's no objective way to improve it), and at some point I was just fed up with how dogged it was to convince me of a value judgement that I don't hold.
It's not about how true or false that value is, it's about what we're going to do the moment someone else dictates the values that exist within the models? What happens when what is trained isn't what you agree? Who's to decide what gets to be reinforced and what's not?
The HN crowd is too deep into productivity rampage to discuss the ethical and moral implications of having a machine so powerful that it spreads worldviews as facts, by whichever government/entity happens to be behind the wheel. At least in the case of extremist forums I can just visit different communities. But what happens when there's only a few winners in the AI race, and the cost of just walking away is too high to pay?
Remember: Google started with "do no evil" and where is that now?
I couldn’t agree more. But what can we do? If intelligence confers a competitive advantage, which it does, the incentive are aligned against collaboration to preserve equal access. Asymmetric access is too valuable.
I don't think we're going to be "dependent", because I can't really think of anyone that "needs" this stuff (well, unless you're like attempting to build a business off skills you don't have). I guess this really comes down to if you believe the productivity story. I don't. I think there are some gains, but the evidence that isn't just anecdotes from vibe coders seems to be modest.
It works at the individual level but won't if mass adoption happens.
The mechanism will become like taxes, you don't have to use public services thus pay those taxes, unless most people comply as it's easy to oppress those who don't.
The parallel isn't about legitimacy, but Mechanism. Some companies already oblige employees to use AI to deliver their work. In a near future we may see jobs seekers registering their AI ID for companies to decide which humans qualify to be plugged into the compensation system, at what rate, and usage conditions to avoid terminations.
Food delivery systems already show a glimpse of how it could look like.
I can't even manually resolve the merge conflicts alone that happen between my code and that of everyone else submitting code at agent speed in my team's repo. So long as I have financial obligations toward my family, I cannot opt out. I must use these things.
And then the Amish see the world around them using electricity and cars and think, "Yep, I'm happier without that." And they're one of the few groups on earth with a growing population, so they're doing something right.
1. Your assumption that a growing population is the metric of success is questionable. A population that grows but is subject to famine, epidemics, and natural disasters because they haven’t developed the scientific and technological capacity to escape the existential risks of the physical world is living on borrowed time. Not saying I agree with that, and I would actually agree that there is merit to the Amish hypothesis that a certain existence is more compatible with individual and societal fulfillment. But there are obvious counterpoints.
2. The Amish are not a good example because AI will confer an advantage to those that control access to it that has never existed.
>Your assumption that a growing population is the metric of success is questionable.
It's a better measure than GDP/S&P/401(k) line-go-up especially [re: America] when the native Euro-based population has been aging and dropping for decades, once you strip away all the post Hart-Cellar immigrant lineages.
What are hart-cellar immigrant lineages? And why is that in anyway relevant?
Let’s play a thought experiment.
Let’s say we have a million people that are so technically sophisticated that they are a space faring civilization capable of seeding the universe with living ecosystems capable of perpetuating life and evolutionary processes. But they are entirely infertile and will never give birth to another individual of their species.
And we have another population that doubles every single year but is incapable of leaving their home planet.
Which one is more valuable?
It depends on what your measure of value is, but if it is to maximize the amount of life in the universe, then population growth is not the right metric, expansion of life through technological means is the more appropriate metric.
Eh, they’ll learn soon enough there’s a limit to their power, unless they somehow start acquiring munitions. There’s a reason the electricity companies and other utilities didn’t take over the economy, despite now being essential.
One of the usual claimed benefits of open source software, is that if you find a bug, you can fix it.
Would be nice if someone figured out how to properly debug a model. Without that? OK, so you have your own open source base model trained on your preferred document set that excluded whatever you think is propaganda, and your own open source RLHF training set based on the judgement of whoever you think is a good egg, and so on.
Last I checked, nobody yet knows how to define a precise rule for automatically checking which of two models made this way is aligned better with whatever your standards are.
The metaphor would be like if we knew what a CPU was but had no idea how to do either chip design or formal verification, and instead randomly mutated the connections between transistors until our test set of 2^16 randomly selected pairs of 32-bit numbers only had one error under addition and two under multiplication.
Worse, because we're making them this way, you have to be a fairly big corporation even when you take shortcuts like DeepSeek did.
And note that I'm not disagreeing about the systemic risk that comes if these models become dictators: people are currently demonstrating they're very eager to outsource their own thinking to these models even when they ought to know better, and corporations are currently demonstrating they're very eager to force workers to use them even when they're mediocre and workers spend half the time they might save from a more competent model just fixing the damage done by their current meh-ness: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/10/brit-worker...
> We’ve therefore launched the model with safeguards that mean queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our next-most-capable model, Claude Opus 4.8.
It seems the deleted entries mainly consisted of Protestant denominations and Pagan groups. They also removed Atheist as a specific religion, and various entries like None Provided and Unknown. Many two-letter codes were changed, which may be confusing if you have groups of soldiers with a mix of old and new dog-tags.
Heathen is yet another term to describe Germanic paganism which has a similar etymology as the Latin originated word "pagan"[1]. It describes the people "of the heath"[2] — the rural folk who were the last to change their beliefs (as opposed to the city folk following the latest trends). English is unique among Germanic languages for preferring non-native vocabulary but the cognate of "heathen" is extant in every other Germanic language to describe pre-Christian belief. Among modern reconstructionists there is no consensus for a term to describe a belief system that never had a name (because prior to Christianity, it didn't need one).
That it is also a Christian pejorative term is irrelevant to the former DoD list.
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