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He did liberate his slaves, eventually. And one of the last things he did before he died was to formally petition Congress to abandon slavery.

I don't think you really have any basis for that analysis of franklins psychology. If anything, I think the safe assumption is just that for most of his life slavery was there and people don't always question every part of society.

How did anyone manage to do it after slavery was abolished? Did the nature of genius change at that point?

Ben Franklin was one of the greatest minds worldwide of the 18th century. Odds are, even without slavery, he would have contributed just as much as he did with slavery. It's not like he made his money working slaves to the bone in a field and couldn't turn a profit without slavery.

He was a publisher. A few slaves were involved but they were largely incidental to the business. As in, he could have easily paid John and Sam a wage instead of paying to feed and house Peter and George and the business would be entirely unaffected

You're confusing a technology for a service.

Any way, the internal emails are available where you can see the executives of megaupload knew exactly what megaupload was being used for, and even used it themselves to pirate content, and went out of their way to allow copyrighted content to remain up after takedown notices were sent.

Interesting - I'm just the opposite. I had 100 side projects rattling around in my skull for years but had no desire to spend even more time on the computer after all the time at work on one, even though all of them from a technical perspective were well within my skillset. So now I can actually get them out of my head and basically for free with almost no effort. Maybe the way we view side projects is different - if you were doing a side project just for the love of the game, then yes I can see LLM outputs not scratching that itch. But if you are doing the side project because of some tangible benefit of it, then LLMs are great.

I doubt many people are asking anthropic to output Harry Potter for them. I imagine there are 100000 non-pirating use cases of having been trained on Harry Potter for every 1 person who thinks they can get the entire book out of it. Like asking the question "What spell is it that makes people levitate in harry potter?" and things like that which are not infringing on any copyrights

I'm sure it was. Let's also keep in mind that he was offered a 6 month plea bargain.

Yes, it sucks to accept a plea on something that you think was not illegal. But if we are going to argue that he killed himself because of the charges, we need to admit that he killed himself so he wouldn't have to spend 6 months in a minimum security prison. Heck, it might have even been house arrest.

Why would that matter? OpenAI or whatever frontier lab couldn't have built their frontier models without the entirety of humanity unknowingly developing their training set for 5000 years.

It would be one thing if Moonshot was breaking into OpenAI servers and stealing trade secrets, but the only thing they are doing is looking at the output of the program, which is exactly the service that OpenAI offers. So, at best, this is a ToS violation. Sucks for the frontier labs I suppose, but live by the sword - die by the sword.

Aaron swartz lost his life because he committed suicide. Something he had tried multiple times before. If he really only committed suicide because of the legal jeopardy he was in, wouldn't it have made more sense to commit suicide after you're found guilty?

Kim built something designed to help everyone pirate stuff. Anthropic pirated specific content.

It would be easily visible or not visible in the rape statistics if the world had a single variable. In any case, even if the world was extremely simple, 'rape porn' could increase rapes, and we could still observe a decrease in rapes if 'general porn' decreased the odds of rape to a larger degree than rape porn increased them relative to the population that consumed each.

Why would general pornography lead to rape? Most pornography is not rape pornography. Would people watching a bunch of rape pornography lead to more rapes? I don't know, but that seems more likely than general pornography leading to rapes.

60% of respondents who were found looking for CSAM on the dark web stated that they were fearful that consuming CSAM would lead them to do something to a child in real life: https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i2.29

There are only 20 castles in the world?

There's also the argument that CSAM can act as a gateway leading people from just being a pedophile in their head, to going out and doing something to some child.

I can guarantee you that if you're an adult carrying around a stuffed anime doll, many adults are going to perceive you as weird or a loner.

It's generally always better for an academic's career to publish something, rather than publish nothing.

No, it isn't. What's important is "set", and "setting".

Set is your mental mindset. Setting is where you're tripping. If you're mentally in a good place, and you're comfortable in your surroundings, you will probably have a good trip.

If you're dealing with some shit mentally and you're not comfortable where you're tripping you'll probably have a really bad trip.

There doesn't need to be progress at this point. Some models even from 1 or more years ago are useful for some purposes

I wonder how artist pay would change if each artist got a proportional cut of every listeners fee instead of listened bring pooled and paid out that way.

I can listen to only indie artists all month long and they get laid about 15 cents from my listening. Surely more of that from my monthly fee is going to artists, but it is going to artists I don't even listen to like Taylor Swift or whoever

"you wouldn't copyright infringe a car" doesn't have the same ring to it

Renting his boatload of GPUs to Google, Anthropic, et al

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Vanguard, black rock, fidelity etc own /manager 3x the AMZN that bezos does, so more concretely you're taking $3 out of random Americans retirement funds for every dollar you take out of bezos' pocket

This sounds like something out of a historical fantasy novel or a video game. Why wouldn't the robbery victim just get a bunch of dudes to go down and take the rug and kill everyone? I mean, it really tied the room together

There are papyri of tomb robber confessions, but those were more along the line of the thieves needing to fence their goods and bribing various officials. Not explicitly selling stolen goods back to the victim

At 34 cents per kwh how can you afford to not get solar?

I loved being able to say "vint cerf, my coworker, invented the internet"

Vint cerf now vintage cerf

NYT is the biggest brand that I know of that pulls these "easy to subscribe, hard to unsubscribe" antics. Especially galling because if you live in california, you can cancel with just a click, so obviously it is possible, but if you live in 49 other states you are forced to listen to a sales pitch from a human before being allowed to unsubscribe

NYT made it difficult, and they are a pretty good product. If you didn't live in california and wanted to cancel your subscription, you were required to talk to a service rep who would try to get you stay by giving you some free period before normal subscription billing resumed

Is there something about serving people food that means you should get a tax break? Or is that just a holdover of cash tipping to kindly get servers to actually declare the full value if their tips as wages instead of just saying they magically weren't tipped all year

Boz joined in 2006. In 2005 their valuation was $100M. In 2006 their valuation was $500M. Literally all the people he sat next to when he joined all knew they were filthy rich already.