alt Hacker NewsNobody has tried to limit knowledge of chemistry or physics unless it was directly about doing something illegal, to the point of basically being a detailed recipe. Usually not even then. And when they have tried they've had basically zero success.
The ability for a handful of companies, simultaneously very powerful and easily susceptible to pressure from other powerful actors, to do the same sort of thing with the next generation of core learning and engineering tools, is freaking terrifying.
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There are still things considered “state secrets” or similar categories which can very very quickly cause you problems if it’s on a remotely commercial website.
I’m not going to say you can’t find some of this information in shadier spots, but “how do I get my GPS to work on a rocket” or “what kind of math do I need for a fusion implosion” are some of the more extreme examples.
I believe there are several explosive compounds where the formula is decently guarded, although in that case tracking the materials is easier.
I’m not saying anything they’re doing is good, but I feel like since they’re just reinventing the search engine with a lot of this they’re running into similar barriers.
Google has been censoring shit at the whim of governments for years, remotely reasonable or not
I agree, and think the effects on learning should be doubly emphasized. One can lock down everything and everyone to the highest degree possible, think of every possible edge case, set controls 2, 3, 4, 10 steps away from them, but not only is this not beneficial to society overall due to how it hurts adjacent information, it's not even beneficial to the goal in question, since it creates a brittle situation with locks that can't be changed or updated in a world which is always changing and always updating.