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Discussion (48 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
He's not predicting that thousands will die because of mass surveillance--he's saying that the deaths of thousands in the 9/11 attacks are going to let the government deprive millions of their civil liberties.
Thousands dead (in the 9/11 terrorist attacks), millions (soon to be) deprived of liberties.
Even though I agree with the premise of the essay, this is absurdly false today. Computers are really good at this type of thing now, scarily so.
[1]: https://dntls.substack.com/p/the-new-internet
Tor, Tails, Bitcoin, TLS each give freedom. These tools still exist, and still work, and there's a plethora of other tools, too. Something else: security.txt and ethical hacking took off, too.
Patriot Act, Snowden revelations each made us lose freedoms.
Yes, I'm aware of Trump's efforts in this regard, but GOP was rotten ever since Bush. Even before that, right-wing populism existed, too. But WWII was still too fresh for fascism to rise in the West.
Also, law isn't very useful if it isn't applied. For example, copyright law regarding LLMs.
Some previous discussion:
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5839549
I frankly dismissed the idea of "a group of extremely powerful and rich pedos" under a pizza store... and yes there were none under any pizza store.
Doesn't mean he's wrong.
He's not neurotypical.
Once you deal with it, he stops being problematic.
And the striking thing is Cassandra syndrome: Virtually everything he has said:
a) Proves right, decades later
b) Sounds crazy to most people, at the time
Stallman predicting that a technical capability could be abused and then somebody eventually abusing it is not Cassandra syndrome, it's just threat modeling run amuck. It gets old after a while (I should know, I remember classic Slashdot lol). The actual question is whether his proposed cure(s) were worth the cost, and that has very much not been "proven right" (if anything, LLMs/agents are rapidly eroding some of the practical premises his arguments depended on, IMO)
(also I don't think Tourette's is fair to include in that set but whatever)
In this context, his comments tend to be:
a) Correct, if you read them precisely (which is how RMS writes -- precisely)
b) Horrible, if you read them with the subtext implied in mainstream culture (which is how people read what RMS writes)
That combination results in "with the terrorists" in 2001, "with Epstein" in 2026, and a lot of similar things in between.
Coincidentally, it's highly unlikely Minsky did anything wrong. All the people thrown under the bus by MIT were either the people who acted ethically and came forward or, like Minsky, were dead. All the people who did unethical things didn't come forward, and are in the Epstein files. Not all the MIT folks in the Epstein files did unethical things, but many presumably did....
The MIT transparency report is worth reading in the light of the release. MIT had most of that information about its faculty at the time.
Now that we have an actual conspiracy involving the elites of the world in a child sex trafficking ring, the people previously pushing the pizza gate narrative are nowhere to be found. They can't accept that their guy was Epstein's best friend for decades and the second most cited name in the files (after Epstein himself).
Haven't seen a single republican distance themselves from Trump because of his deep ties with Epstein.
... Slashdot still exists?
Ironic given that I left Slashdot for HN so many years ago.