> which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred.
If you point out that one racial demographic is responsible for more crimes than another, would that run afoul of the statute?
If not, what if you additionally point out that the reason these crimes were committed is likely because that behaviour is normalized in their culture? This seems like it would definitely run afoul of the statute, and if this logical deduction were valid, then this sort of criticism would be suppressed despite being legitimate, and could be weaponized against people.
I'm frankly not so convinced that it's possible to define hate speech in a way that does not allow for these failure modes.
Does the law explicitly specify that dry facts would be excluded? Or is it sufficiently broad that dry facts could be included if some over-zealous bureaucrats get it in their head that some speech or people are problematic?
I am interested in the letter of the law, because that's what matters, not how it's being applied while the winds are blowing in a particular direction.
Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted under hate speech laws for stating facts in the 40-odd years since its passage? Why is this not just concern trolling?
As to the general question, no, a statement being true does not immunise it from an accusation of it being used to stir up or incite hatred, or at the very least such a defence is not defined within the Public Order Act 1986. We do have the Human Rights Act which protects Freedom of Expression, but whether you could use it or other defences is pure speculation on my part: I would need to see some actual caselaw.
I've attempted my own searches but have only encountered the usual suspects: holocaust deniers and their ilk. Please let me know if you find such a case because I genuinely think that would be interesting to debate, but debating over pure speculation and innuendo is very boring.
> Okay, so just to be clear, you don't have even a single example of someone being prosecuted
To be clear, I haven't even looked, but being a recent topic of debate, it seems important to clearly establish the letter of the law.
> Why is this not just concern trolling?
Because the law-as-written is what matters, like I said, not the law-as-it-has-been-exercised-so-far. Unless you think people inclined to abuse the law will never be elected.
> I've attempted my own searches but have only encountered the usual suspects: holocaust deniers and their ilk
Depending on the specifics, that already seems problematic. There are also chilling effects that are not clearly visible until after the fact. How long have some people wanted to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of these laws?
> How long have some people wanted to discuss the over representation of some ethnicities in sexual assault clusters, but couldn't because of these laws?
I don't know, perhaps you should give some examples of this actually happening rather than relying solely on implication.
It's pretty apparent that the arrests are happening to people who explicitly call for violence, eg the woman who called for burning down all hotels housing immigrants. Musk, Rogan, etc are patient zero of the ones amplifying the false idea that you can get in legal trouble "for posting an opinion."
> It's pretty apparent that the arrests are happening to people who explicitly call for violence
Unless the statute specifically makes that distinction, then that's not very compelling. There are already laws against inciting violence. Hate speech laws are specifically understood to be about outlawing speech that contain or incite "hate", whose definition is typically broad.
> In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense.
I think part of the absurdity being pointed out is that "just standing there with your eyes closed and silently praying" is considered "harassment" at all. It just stretches the meaning of the word part the point where it seems meaningful.
Edit: I think this ultimately becomes a Sorites paradox. Obviously a whole mob of people gathered around an abortion clinic and silently praying while you're trying to enter is intimidating and should qualify as harassment, but one person doing that clearly is not. There is no point at which the number of people become "a mob" though.
> bviously a whole mob of people gathered around an abortion clinic and silently praying while you're trying to enter is intimidating and should qualify as harassment, but one person doing that clearly is not.
The case I know of all involve individuals.
Apart from silent prayer, a woman was arrested for holding up a sign saying that coercion was a crime and offering to talk to anyone who wanted to. Is that intimidating?
"Apart from silent prayer, a woman was arrested for holding up a sign saying that coercion was a crime and offering to talk to anyone who wanted to. Is that intimidating?"
Depends on the context. Body language etc. But the main context is probably they were gathering in a place where it is forbidden to gather. Not arrested for praying or holding up signs.
Precisely this - it's the being there that was forbidden, not the act of praying - I'm not aware of any modern case where such a thing has been proscribed (at a guess, I would have said the last time was probably around the era of Cromwell, without checking).
Being there was forbidden for a specific group of people because they had a track record of harassing behaviour, much like a restraining order will likely be granted if someone has a track record of abusive behaviour towards another person. The praying thing is always mentioned as it makes it sound like some astonishing intervention in personal religion, while in reality, it's a complete red herring designed to rile people of a pre-existing viewpoint.
Why? The core vision of free software and many open source licenses was to empower users and developers to make things they need without being financially extorted, to avoid having users locked in to proprietary systems, to enable interoperability, and to share knowledge. GenAI permits all of this to a level beyond just providing source code.
Most objections like yours are couched in language about principles, but ultimately seem to be about ego. That's not always bad, but I'm not sure why it should be compelling compared to the public good that these systems might ultimately enable.
> If we were to re-write browser standards today, cross-domain POST requests probably just wouldn't be permitted.
That would be a terrible idea IMO. The insecurity was fundamentally introduced by cookies, which were always a hack. Those should be omitted, and then authorization methods should be designed to learn the lessons from the 70s and 80s, as CSRF is just the latest incarnation of the Confused Deputy:
Ah, so true. That's what i mean! Cross domain requests that pass along the target domain's cookies. As in, probably every cookie would default to current __Host-* behavior. (and then some other way to allow a cookie if you want. Also some way of expressing desired cookie behavior without a silly prefix on its name...)
It wouldn't be the first time the specs have gone too far and beyond their perimeter.
C's "register" variables used to have the same issue, and even "inline" has been downgraded to a mere hint for the compiler (which can ignore it and still be a C compiler).
inline and register still have semantic requirements that are not just hints. Taking the address of a register variable is illegal, and inline allows a function to be defined in multiple .c files without errors.
> We're not gonna see significant model shrinkage until the money tap dries up.
I'm not sure about that. Microsoft has been doing great work on "1-bit" LLMs, and dropping the memory requirements would significantly cut down on operating costs for the frontier players.
> while LLMs are just echoing narrow portions of the intelligent output of humans
But they aren't just echoing, that's the point. You really need to stop ignoring the extrapolation abilities in these domains. The point of the jagged analogy is that they match or exceed human intelligence in specific areas in a way that is not just parroting.
It's tiresome in 2025 to keep on having to use elaborate long winded descriptions to describe how LLMs work, just to prove that one does understand, rather than be able to assume that people generally understand, and be able to use shorter descriptions.
Would "riffing" upset you less than "echoing"? Or an explicit "echoing statistics" rather than "echoing training samples"? Does "Mashups of statistical patterns" do it for you?
The jagged frontier of LLM capabilty is just a way of noting the fact that they act more like a collection of narrow intelligences rather than a general intelligence who's performance might be expected to be more even.
Of course LLMs are built and trained to generate based on language statistics, not to parrot individual samples, but given your objection it's amusing to note that some of the areas where LLMs do best, such as math and programming, are the ones where they have been RL-trained to override these more general language patterns and instead more closely follow the training data.
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