Collapse or no collapse I just hope that somebody sets up a HN equivalent in Europe. Discussing technology in a meaningful and fun way becomes impossible when moral values diverge beyond recognition and this is now becoming our reality.
Readit Newsopenrisk commented on America will collapse by 2025 (2010) salon.com/2010/12/06/amer... · Posted by u/inverted_flag
openrisk commented on Critics say new Google rules put profits over privacy bbc.com/news/articles/cm2... · Posted by u/latexr
He and his ilk forget all too quickly why we have regulations in the first place. People wanted them, because they were tired of polluted waterways, bank runs wiping away their life savings, and dangerous poisons being sold as medicine. Now that a functioning democracy has voted for privacy protections, it's a pretty "mask-off" moment that these regulations are the ones he rails against.
Conflating bureaucratic red tape with regulations that actually protect citizens is the deceitful, immoral strategy, by people who are basically... evil.
Simplifying bureaucratic rules can be beneficial and can take countless forms (digitizing trivial manual work, removing duplication, applying materiality thresholds etc. etc.) The result is clearly a win-win for all.
Removing protective regulations is instead a zero sum game. Each fradulent bank behavior not persecuted is siphoning wealth from their clients. Each further exploitation of personal data collection is enriching the surveillance capitalists at the expense of the user-product (and ultimately our very democracies).
Society and politics has a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.
Libreoffice features prominently in the "eurostack" initiative/proposal that was launched today. If there will be ever mainstream self-sovereign compute, it will almost certainly include this incredible project.
The nag I will always repeat: libreoffice should have made much bigger, much sooner, strides to integrate the Python ecosystem in deep ways (striking on its own and ignoring Microsoft's path).
Had it done so, it would now undisputably own the desktop productivity future, with local LLM integration just the trendy example.
openrisk commented on Visualizing data is an art perthirtysix.com/visualiz... · Posted by u/skadamat
What was the major new development in visualization in the past 10 years?
I don’t think there has really been one in decades. We’ve gotten better tools for making viz interactive but that’s about it.
You are probably right. I would not discount the importance of many open source tools for making viz more widely available (and far more powerful than excel graphs) but its indeed tooling, not conceptual and in any case already available for more than a decade. Stagnation indeed.
openrisk commented on Visualizing data is an art perthirtysix.com/visualiz... · Posted by u/skadamat
Visualization seems to have stagnated in the AI craze era. Lots of androids touching holographic screens and what not, as metaphors for the almighty "AGI" coming any day now, but cant recall a major new development in the last five years?
One area that might be "pregnant" for some new approaches is the visualization of large datasets, eg large graphs. Extracting useful (and objective) information instead of ovewhelming with the sheer number of data points. That is indeed the art of visualisation.
openrisk commented on US and UK refuse to sign AI safety declaration at summit arstechnica.com/ai/2025/0... · Posted by u/miohtama
Hard to know how significant this is because its impossible to know what the political class (and many others) mean by "AI" (and thus its potential risks). This is not new, similar charades a few years ago around "blockchain" etc.
But ignoring the signaling going on on various sides would be a mistake. "AI" is for all practical purposes a synonym for algorithmic decision making, with potential direct implication on peoples lifes. Without accountability, transparency, recourse etc the unchecked expansion of "AI" in various use cases represents a significant regression for historically established rights. In this respect the direction of travel is clear: The US is dismantling the CFPB, even more deregulation (if that is at all possible) is coming, big tech will be trusted to continue "self-regulating" etc.
The interesting part is the UK stance. Somewhere in between the US and the EU in terms of citizen / consumer protections, but despite brexit probably closer to the latter, this siding with dog-eats-dog deregulation might signal an anxiety not to be left behind.
> without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two
I'm unsure if that is true or not. Certainly it would reduce yields initially but some high yield farming in the US has already moved away from pesticides. It seems that we could probably engineer out of pesticide use if we wanted to by combination of more gmo crops and changing the crops grown somewhat.
In the longer term various alternatives are conceivable if people put their minds to it. Politically, economically, technically this is very much like the energy transition: There is immense current dependency that cant be just switched off (and vested interests will resist for as long as possible, using every possible means), but there is sequence of low hanging fruit which in time can be expanded. The trick imho is to always apply the highest amount of pressure that wont burst the kettle.
Remarkable story and a glimpse at how nasty vested interests can become as the world starts to second guess the sustainability of an entire century's worth of "growth" at all costs.
Its not black and white, without pesticides we'll probably all perish from malnutrition within a year or two, but the pressure to contain the collateral damage to environment and people will not go away.
openrisk commented on Musk-led group makes $97B bid for control of OpenAI reuters.com/markets/deals... · Posted by u/jdoliner
Well, now that Wall Street offloaded the X debt they were stuck with for some time they can support great new ventures.
It does all have a bit of Wile E Coyote feel to it. Keep gesticulating wildy to propel forwards before inevitably plunging in the abyss below.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banks-sell-5-5-billion-of-x-loan...