Then why is animal abuse a crime?

If youtube is still pushing racist and alt right content on to people, then they can get fucked. Why should we let some recommender system controlled by a private corporation have this much influence American culture and politics??

Now that I use github copilot, I can work more quickly and learn new frameworks more with less effort. Even its current form, LLMs allow programmers to work more efficiently, and thus can replace jobs. Sure, you still need developers, but fewer of them.

Why is it that these sorts of people who claim that AI is sentient are always trying to get copyright rights? If an AI was truly sentient, I feel like it’d want, like, you know, rights. Not the ability for its owner to profit off of a cool stable diffusion generation that he generated that one time.

Not to mention that you can coerce a language model to say whatever you want, with the right prompts and context. So there’s not really a sense in which you can say it has any measurable will. So it’s quite weird to claim to speak for one.

It’s not exactly proof, but this graph seems to support that claim to an extent.

I don’t think a recursively self improving AI (a la a singularity) is something that will be made soon, if ever, especially as we push the limits of available computing power. There’s no such thing as infinite exponential growth in reality, as there’s always an eventual limit to growth.

I think AGI, in some form, could possibly happen relatively soon (like next three decades or so), but I’m not sure it will be of the recursively self improving variety. Especially not the sort that magically solves all of humanity’s problems.

I find it difficult to accept your description of a vegan lifestyle, being subsumed and made digestible by mainstream vegans who don’t care much for the politics aspect. I don’t believe that accounts for the majority of vegans, at least based on the surveys I’ve looked at. Perhaps I am wrong and many vegans just don’t really care, but based on my experiences, I just find that a little hard to accept.

Also, on the topic of hunting locally sourced meat, I think it’s sort of irrelevant to the discussion of veganism. Regardless of my, or another vegan’s opinion of how ethical it is, hunting doesn’t provide enough quantity of meat to ever fulfill every human being’s current demand for meat. To be able to provide good, healthy and ethical food for everyone, the majority of it would have to be plants. The end of monoculture crops and factory farming cannot possibly happen without a significant reduction of demand for animal meat in developed countries, regardless of how the meat is sourced.

It’s not that I aim to villify hunting, it’s just that hunting is neither here nor there, in my opinion. It is what it is, and I’m not primarily concerned with it.

I apologize for my wording, the intent of my statement was not to refer to you as a “colonizer corporatist”, I was referring to your comment about multinational corporations in bangladesh. I meant to say that many vegans care about situations like that, in the same way that you care about them. Deepest apologies for my poor wording there.

He co-invented PDF in '91. His PhD thesis, referenced in the summary, is a solution to the hidden line problem in computer graphics.

I switched to vertical tabs in every program that i could, and I think it might have actually made me a little more productive. Visual studio has an option for it, and I highly recommend using it if you use VS. I can have a bunch of different tabs open so that I can quickly reference them if needed.

Vegans and vegetarians are on average poorer than people who eat meat, so the penthouse thing is mostly fiction.

Also, veganism is defined as not consuming animal products where it’s possible and practicable. If it’s not practical for someone to not consume animal products, then that’s just how it is. A vegan would not argue for one to eliminate animal products to the detriment their own health, well being, or livelihood. Instead, a vegan should only advocate eliminating animal products when you’re in a position that it’s safe and reasonable to do so.

Vegans are just as much concerned with people who have been forced into shitty living situations by colonizers and multinational corporations as you are. Just because they care about animals, doesn’t mean they think animals are more important than people.

I don’t like SBF at all, but I also think veganism should be a respected ethical position. Just like how I don’t like Caitlyn Jenner, but I’ll still use her preferred pronouns.

I’d personally consider it pretty cruel and inhumans to force someone to violate their own ethics on a daily basis.

I disagree with your interpretation of how an AI works, but I think the way that AI works is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion in the first place. I think your argument stands completely the same regardless. Even if AI worked much like a human mind and was very intelligent and creative, I would still say that usage of an idea by AI without the consent of the original artist is fundamentally exploitative.

You can easily train an AI (with next to no human labor) to launder an artist’s works, by using the artist’s own works as reference. There’s no human input or hard work involved, which is a factor in what dictates whether a work is transformative. I’d argue that if you can put a work into a machine, type in a prompt, and get a new work out, then you still haven’t really transformed it. No matter how creative or novel the work is, the reality is that no human really put any effort into it, and it was built off the backs of unpaid and uncredited artists.

You could probably make an argument for being able to sell works made by an AI trained only on the public domain, but it still should not be copyrightable IMO, cause it’s not a human creation.

TL;DR - No matter how creative an AI is, its works should not be considered transformative in a copyright sense, as no human did the transformation.

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and read the full text of the bill. After reading it, I’m pretty sure this is the controversial part:

SEC. 3. DUTY OF CARE. (a) Prevention Of Harm To Minors.—A covered platform shall act in the best interests of a user that the platform knows or reasonably should know is a minor by taking reasonable measures in its design and operation of products and services to prevent and mitigate the following:

(1) Consistent with evidence-informed medical information, the following mental health disorders: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.

The sorts of actions that a platform would be expected to take aren’t specified anywhere, as far as I can tell, nor is the scope of what the platform would be expected to moderate. Does “operation of products and services” include the recommender systems? If so, I could see someone using this language to argue that showing LGBTQ content to children promotes mental health disorders, and so it shouldn’t be recommended to them. They’d still be able to see it if they searched for it, but I don’t think that makes it any better.

Also, in section 9, they talked about forming a committee to investigate the practicality of building age verification into hardware and/or the operating system of consumer devices. That seems like an invasion of privacy.

Reading through the rest of it, though, a lot of it did seem reasonable. For example, it would make it so that sites would have to put children on safe default options. That includes things like having their personal information be private, turning off addictive features designed to maximize engagement, and allowing kids to opt out of personalized recommendations. Those would be good changes, in my opinion.

If it wasn’t for those couple of sections, the bill would probably be fine, so maybe that’s why it’s got bipartisan support. But right now, the bad seems like it outweighs the good, so we should probably start calling our lawmakers if the bill continues to gain traction.

apologies for the wall of text, just wanted to get to the bottom of it for myself. you can read the full text here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text

Idk, after having been in the crypto space in the past, I’m still pretty tempted to call it almost universally a scam.

Regardless of the environmental impacts (which has been solved by some blockchains, like you said), I just think it exposes users to a completely unacceptable amount of risk for very little gain.

You’re required to be in complete charge of your own data security, and if your private key is stolen, you lose your life savings with no recourse. If you make a minor slip up and give permission to the wrong website, you’ll lose everything in your hot wallet. If there’s an error in a smart contract you use (which has happened many times), then all the money you’ve given to it could be taken from under your nose. You can’t even, like, refund transactions – there’s no consumer protections at all.

But like, to what end? What’s the actual benefit of using crypto? Sure, you can make anonymous transactions with XMR, that’s a tangible use case. But what’s the actual benefit to using something like Ethereum?

One thing to note, though, is that honey bees are likely a factor in declining native insect populations. Their ability to outcompete native species results in a direct decline in the populations and effectiveness of native pollinators in areas nearby where beekeeping is practiced.

I don’t know much about hfcs production, though, so I’ll have to look into that.

Sources: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.1641

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-41271-5

I am one of those people who’s pretty concerned about AI, but not cause of the singularity thing. (the singularity hypothesis seems kinda silly to me)

I’m mostly concerned about the stuff that billionaires are gonna do with AI to screw us over, and the ways that it’ll be used as a political tool, like to spread misinformation and such.

I agree, fuck russia, I despise the Russian army, but calling people of a specific nationality “orcs” feels kinda racist to me, idk

I’ve seen people calling all russians orcs, not just the soldiers, even though I’m sure there are a lot of russians who are opposed to the actions of their government. It feels like it could become another harmful, racist stereotype if we all keep repeating it and defending it.

Like, when the war is over, will Russians still be called orcs?

I didn’t know that about the Texas one. Those “health warnings” are pretty bad.

I’m all for educating children about sex, and I’m also sympathetic to the plight of data privacy.

However, I also feel like the internet right now is a pretty bad place for minors. Like, there’s so much porn and other harmful content that’s so easily accessible, to the point that it’s easy to find yourself stumbling into it on complete accident. And with the speed that the internet evolves, it seems pretty unreasonable to me to just kinda expect parents just to be able to fully keep up with it.

I don’t think I support this law in particular, but I also don’t know what could possibly be done to any real effect.