I do wonder here whether the core problem here is that github is outside your firewall, and so you are always one secret leakage/misconfiguration away from disaster.
> this stuff is hard, you will fail a lot, and you will fail a lot more if you don't have an extremely clean environment to do this in
The Oxford Nanopore sequencing technology is one of the most robust to use. You need to buy some kit - but defo doable. Nothing compared pouring your own gel and doing radioactively labelled Sanger reactions :-)
Though you could just go to an sequencing company that services labs ( that just does sequencing outsourcing - rather than a personal genome company ).
Totally agree on the dangers around interpretation.
1,2,3 are dominated by platform stickness or even active lock-in.
Can't say I see the same advantages to stop you switching the model you use.
> It seems that enterprises will pay top dollar for service guarantees, integration, and someone they can sue.
Sure. Though it does depend on whether you need regular updates. If you want the model to be aware of the latest research - then fine. However it already does the job, you might prioritize stability over constant change.
> It's nobody gets fired for buying IBM all over again.
Except they when they did when IBM was no longer good value for money.
> but I don't see any historical analogues
None at all? You mentioned IBM - who is using AIX on IBM hardware in 2026? Who is using Solaris on Sun hardware? It's pretty much all gone to linux on commodity hardware.
Remember Netscape - thew browser company? Killed by Microsoft bundling of IE.
How hard would it be for Apple to bundle GLM based services?
I think you underestimate, in the time before the everyday internet, how many people's world views and values were largely set by their direct personal experience, rather than any media they consumed.
Sure, church and state, and to a lesser extent newspapers all were involved in shaping culture - however the values grounded in personal experience drove many societal improvements in the 20th century.
I don't see that so much now, and the power of persuasion has widened from those big institutions to anybody with money - domestic or foreign and at the same time society is atomising.
It's not hard, or a new problem. For example in the UK paid for political campaigning on radio and TV has been banned pretty much since the dawn of those mediums. In terms of print, you can have media pluracy rules, to stop the concentration of power.
Any kind of election spending, at the local and national level, is regulated and capped.
Now people have been using less visible targetted online ads using dark money to try and get around this - in my view this is an extremely serious offence and people should go to prison.
You could go further and make it illegal to spend money on online ads for any kind of political campaign whether it's aligned to a party or not ( ie single issue ) - with penalities for the companies hosting those ad campaigns as well as the people running them.
You could include astroturf botnets as part of this definition.
Sure these things can be worked around - but the point is the risk of being caught breaking the rules, and the political damage as a result, will make people think twice.
One of the problems at the moment is people are getting away with a slap on the wrist - in my view undermining democracy is a serious offence - and it's about creating a culture where that's the prevailing view.
A key principle of justice is laws are not retrospective - you can't be put into prison for something that was legal at the time.
Again, yet another example of a failure of natural justice in this case.
>Judges don't need jury trials to find facts, they do bench trials without juries at all.
Again you missed the point - trials without juries are for minor things where the person on trial is unlikely to be deprived of their liberty. Juries are there to stop the state from imprisoning people at a whim - indeed they are fully able to choose to refuse to convict, without needing to explain why, even if the facts clearly show the defendents did it.
The safe guard is about 'juries of peers' personal opinions - not about the letter of the law - as the establishment can control that.
Seems like your investment in the outcome is blinding you to the obvious abuse of process.
I can see why the establishment was keen to make examples of these people - however that's not a good reason to undermine the very foundations of justice.
The parent was around direct democracy - where a particular question is posed - and frequent hybrid is randomly selected people to work on a specific question.
If you are saying choose people at random to be an MP for 5 years ( or whatever ), then sure that's different and it would be an interesting experiment - though that would be a pretty stressful job to pitch people into at random.
It would be interesting to see how those random 600 people would organise to get stuff done. In the current government you have specialisation - home secretary, foreign secretary etc - you wouldn't want to keep that structure and randomly allocate roles - but if you have the 600 vote on everything then you still have a bandwidth problem.
With humans bandwidth is pretty much always limited - however it's clear that a representative has a higher bandwidth for politics than the average person - because it's their job ( and note they normally have a team of researchers around them as well ).
In terms of persuasion - if a representative votes in a way that's at odds with the people who elect them, then there is a risk of the representative losing their job.
If you have a small group of citizen, selected at random for a particular decision, if they are bribed/lobbied/copted - they aren't at risk from an electorate down the line.
Obviously given that large scale persuasion is now cheap and automatable - even in a representative democracy you might well choose to set the political weather by directly targeting the electorate.
Right now this is a major threat to democracy - you only need a few people skilled int he dark arts, no morals and a sackful of cash to change the political weather currently.
> I'd argue that the fiefdoms within parties come primarily from their corporate likeness. Since the ultimate goal of any party is to capture power and remain in power, the structures that emerge serve this goal first, everything else second.
If this is true, which doesn't seem that unreasonable, then the crucial factor then becomes what are the key factors in terms of staying in power - responsiveness to the electorate or raising money to persuade the electorate?
Ensuring the latter doesn't take over, in my view, is a top priority to ensure a working democracy - and from the outside, appears to be why the American system is now largely broken.
> There's implication, that representative democracy selects for a group with inherently higher average bandwidth allocated per proposal \
Eh? It's a representatives full time job to consider these things as oppose to the general public doing a full time job and then having to consider legislation.
The difference between lobbying for representatives versus people directly is that representatives have to answer to the people - whereas no-one loses their job as a citizen if they get persuaded by story tellers.
A consequence of democracy means average people get a vote.
However average people are actually pretty good at making the right moral, common sense calls, if not the technical legal detail. I suspect that's in part because they are not living in the Westminister ( or whatever your seat of power is ) bubble.
So any system needs to blend that common sense, with specific expertise. In theory that's what a representative democracy does - however one of the failings currently is the party system ( note designed, in part, to overcome the bandwidth problem - people grouping together to give a single consistent message rather than 100's of independent ones ), where capture of the party by a few people has become too easy and some options that the majority of people want never being offered at the voting time.
This results in an increasingly angry and volatile electorate.
I heard this idea, or variants of it, quite a lot recently.
Some of the examples I've seen it tried - I've seen the people setting it up trying to fix the outcome by carefully choosing the question, then providing expert advice on options scoped by the question.
Framing of the question is a powerful tool to promote the outcome you want, and avoiding ever asking certain questions is another.
Not saying it doesn't have it's place - you just need to be careful that the process isn't used to try and legitimise what would otherwise be unpopular policies via concentrated persuasion on a small number of people.
Rather than direct usage, I suspect a lot of Gemini capacity is being use for the AI summary presented with every google search or AI features of android phones etc.
And I'd expect Google will want to prioritize capacity for those - they don't want their google pixel phone to error or google search to barf.
I can see this happening, but I suspect it will have the opposite to the intended effect - it will mean companies will move or move their R&D to countries with the appropriate freedoms.
You are confusing the ability to bring information to people, with the ability of people to consume it.
As has been mentioned elsewhere on the thread - the real issue is often there are complex 2nd and third order effects, often there are devils in the details.
I'm not saying people are not capable of consuming it, I'm saying people don't have the bandwidth.
Direct democracy is best when it's used for very specific proposals with lots of time for debate - not every decision.
If you use it for every decision, time poor citizens will end up at the mercy of professional story tellers.
You are missing the point, this is not about the merits or otherwise of the case - that's for the jury to decide - it's about due process.
The whole point of a jury is that you are, in the end, judged by your peers, not by the state.
It's a key protection from abuse of state power.
When the jury convicts they are giving the power to the judge to pass sentence within the remit of that conviction.
If the jury convicts for one thing, and the judge sentences for another, then you could go to prison for life for a parking fine - it's clearly an abuse of process.