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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • You can, and likely will, disagree but healthy people shouldn’t escalate into anything resembling an argument.

    Isn’t an argument what you are doing when going back and forth expressing any sort of disagreement? I realize that’s not something everyone enjoys doing but personally I don’t feel like I can get to know someone very well if I don’t have opportunities to argue with them. Though I see what you mean if it’s the sort of argument where you’re getting upset with each other or it’s a dispute about how your lives fit together like whose turn it is to do the dishes etc.



  • do they need to? I don’t think so.

    Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren’t copy pastes of each other. There’s no documented ‘best practices’ that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.

    they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws

    I can’t speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:

    A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.

    To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.



  • In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

    Big Tobacco did the same thing.

    Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

    A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn’t on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

    To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn’t apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.







  • It’s not actually clear that it only affects huge companies. Much of open source AI today is done by working with models that have been released for free by large companies, and the concern was that the requirements in the bill would deter them from continuing to do this. Especially the “kill switch” requirement made it seem like the people behind the bill were either oblivious to this state of affairs or intentionally wanting to force companies to stop releasing the model weights and only offer centralized services like what OpenAI is doing.