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so do you just use su?

Just run everything as root to circumvent security problems.

Seriously, it is as if there would be a CVE because sudo allows privilege escalation.

Of course such widely spread tools should be audited and have eyes on them. On the other hand many people are tired of security strategies because half of the time it is about a platform doing it for market domination. Our thoroughly shitty mobile OS come to mind. This age verification crap isn't too different, just slightly different goals where real security isn't really considered too much.


No. Su also has a history[1] of vulnerabilities.

1. https://app.opencve.io/cve/CVE-2025-71263


Then what, do you just work on your root account?

Although he starts with "Lest anyone accuse me of bargaining in bad faith here," I feel that this is a bad faith argument. It seems like he's saying, "we don't need to be worried about malevolent superintelligence, since AI is already doing bad things, and corporations were doing bad things even before AI." But one can believe corporations are bad, current AI is bad, and malevolent superintelligence is a serious concern.

The article later clarifies that the actual crime was to post extensive screenshots and descriptions of movies on his blogs, to such detail that it was essentially like reading a picture-book adaptation of the movie. This is really not the same as "posting spoilers."

If not for protecting media giants - this seems like a wonderful service. There are plenty of great movies I will never watch. Having the ability to scroll through a detailed summary with pictures would make it feel much more real than reading a media-less plot summary.

> If not for protecting media giants - [ … ]

As soon as we start conditioning ethics, we give up and undermine the principles behind those ethics.


Yeah, this seems more like a copyright issue than a "spoilers" issue

I think putting people in prison for "copyright infringement" is inherently illegitimate, so this doesn't change my view of the situation, which is that everyone involved should be ashamed to even continue existing.

It'd be great if this moves developers to consider optimizing for lower-end connections.

> Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Science and ICT Bae Kyunghoon said the scheme is needed because citizens can’t do without access to online services

So indeed it actually is intended to make online services necessary.


He was not blogging under his real name. Scott Alexander is not his real name.


It's his first and middle name. At least that's what he said in the post about shutting down the blog.


It's most of his name. Long before his full name became common knowledge, you could already Google "Scott Alexander psychiatrist" and find him almost instantly.


Yes, but a patient who googled his real name would not find his blog. That was the point.


That part of things is what really made this entire argument all apart of me.

There are ~50k psychiatrists in the US. Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott. Mathematically, that means knowing "Scott is a psychiatrist" brings you down to ~5 people. Even if we assume there's some outlier clustering of people named Scott who are psychiatrists, we're still talking about some small number.

Surely adding in the middle name essentially makes him uniquely identifiable without an other corroborating information.


> Roughly, 1 in 10k people in the US is named Scott.

Seems to be more like one in 425 per SSA.


Take a moment and apply some common sense to your math. Do you really think there are 5 psychiatrists in the country named Scott? That's off by multiple orders of magnitude.


No, but I doubt there are more than 100.

The magnitude is so small that anonymity is essential broken.


It is his real name, and he also used his real surname in early blog posts.


It is not his real name. Once he upended his life, he revealed his real name here[1]. It is not Scott Alexander.

[1]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/still-alive


Scott Alexander are his first and middle names, and Siskind his last name, or that's what I've understood.


His pre-SSC blogging was, and he’d link those posts directly from time to time.


Meant to be free of cultural preconceptions, but it uses 24-hour division.

There might be a natural, Schelling division to use -- the same ratio year:day could be applied, day:minute. Thus, the day can be broken up into 365.25 "Schelling-minutes" (corresponds to 3.94 SI minutes), and further into 365.25^2 "Schelling-seconds" (corresponds to 0.65 SI seconds). I think it's interesting that we get something not too distant from our own minutes and seconds if we do this.

Of course, for practical daily usage, lacking anything similar to an hour would be a problem. A "half-division" might be in order; that is, √365.25, or roughly 19.11 divisions of the day. Sure, that's close enough to SI hours... but it's probably worth remembering that there's a reason we don't like to use fractional divisions. :P


Math is pretty culturally neutral though, and 24 has a high number of divisors, which makes it convenient. I'd argue that hours and minutes being easy to divide up into equal blocks is more important and natural than having the same ratio as year:day.


Yeah, as @kogold mentioned in another comment - turns out if you want to make a clock that's usable in daily life, you have to import some cultural norms.


do they mean move "to" detroit...?


telling someone not to use corporate speech is policing their language.


"Being able to install software is why was why I switched to Android"

This doesn't make sense to me. iOS and Android (and HarmonyOS) all allow you to "install software".


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