Proprietary frontier LLMs in companies riddled with highly suspect business practices.
My local LLM setup has absolutely been making the equivalence of positive cashflow for me since gemma 4 and qwen 3.8: I need less total time for several groups of annoying (but necessary) tasks, which means my productivity is up and I can use the rest as my own free time.
Yikes. I mean, I get that not everyone’s threat model requires isolating every agent harness into its own microvm jail with externally filtered network access and no [persistent filesystem] write access to anything but allowed project files, but that’s…
That’s “running with weapon in hand at a secret military facility and hoping the guards won’t shoot you” levels of stupidity.
Calling “Die Linke” far-left is imho, frankly, insane. Upwards of 80% of their positions are virtually the same ones the SPD had back in the few decades of them being actually moderately left under Willy Brandt. If you want far-left, that’s the MLPD.
Just because every other major party keeps moving further and further to the right doesn’t magically make the only moderate-left wing party far-left.
And for clarification: Left vs right is the political axis of the economic class struggle. It’s neither liberal vs illiberal nor progressive vs conservative.
How tf this even gets patented?
It hasn’t, yet, afaict. Applying for a patent != it being granted.
As to the latent question of why Microsoft seems confident enough to try:
Because the times of a patent requiring to clear a reasonable inventive threshold (to actually be a motor for innovation) are far behind us. These days, patents’ principal (not exclusive) purpose imho is so big corporations can sue each other to grab some of the others’ earnings.
Because only the sound of orphans being crushed can fill the dragon’s empty heart with joy. Collectively, we could defeat it, but it might burn down all the land in the fight…
Also, most people cheer for the sacrifices - it’s not their children, after all.
Apparently you can’t fucking read. […]
That would be you, because you keep being wrong with virtually every single line. Here’s how it goes with pseudosignatures:
You make an account with Valve. Valve has previously received the appropriate certificate to perform age verification from the state, so Valve does not communicate with the state now: They present their certificate to the hardware chip in YOUR ePerso, which then creates a pseudonymous signature to send back to Valve that digitally proves the legal age of whoever the ePerso belongs to (and nothing more).
But go ahead and keep licking that technofascist boot.
No thanks, but you go right ahead - someone entrenched in blind ideology is for sure not an ideal mark.
Have you even bothered to do any research at all into what pseudosignatures are and how they can be used? Or are you just trolling?
Valve could simply set up an instance of an eID server software and get a digital certificate for it authorized by our respective national PKI chain. Functionally the same to how TLS certificate chains work. There is zero technical need for any information to flow between Valve and any other party - the state or otherwise - about who is being age verified. And Valve would not be able to get any information about you other than what I’ve already explained.
Seriously, the brainrot on here seems to be as bad as on Reddit. And btw: This has been state-of-the-art for more than ten years.
I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That’s what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.
The eID of the ePerso supports pseudosignatures, which allows the seller to only get to know “This ePerso belongs to someone of legal age who also knows its PIN” and the state to only know “someone I [the state] authorized to perform age verification did so”. That is privacy-preserving by any reasonable measure.
They’re not. The seller just has to verify customer age, same as when e.g. buying alcohol in the supermarket or entering a gambling hall.
Valve has simply been refusing to do so, even though eID makes privacy-preserving age verification trivial, frankly.
Stuff I can do myself perfectly well, but the results - after postprocessing - are indistinguishable from me having done so. Even when accounting for everything (including hallucinations) the time savings are real: Renewables-powered electricity is cheaper than my attention. By a lot.
Caveat: This only works if you’re already a domain expert and if you do it exclusively for too long, you might be at risk of ceasing to be such an expert. Don’t use it to try and do the thinking for you.