JohnStrangeII

I have a bit of a stupid question related to the topic. I'm self-publishing German sci fi and fantasy novels, nothing special, just some good entertainment (if you like my writing style). Since you cannot have a readership without Amazon and do appreciate the pocket money, I sell them on Amazon. At the same time Amazon does not allow me to give them away for free.

Is there a way I can give away my novels as "pirated ebooks" to a German audience without having to seed a torrent and without making this easily traceable back to me as the author?

It would probably even boost sales and also help people with less money, I just don't know how to do it. :(

Some companies just create new needs out of thin air and even manage to replace better technologies with inferior ones. It's mostly a matter of marketing.

If you want, many companies sell prestige, lifestyle ideas, and grand illusions. It's perfect from a business perspective because the customers will always remain dissatisfied in the end, no matter how much they buy.

Aren't there good container libraries for C?

In almost all cases I can think of I'm also against canceling individuals, so I agree with you. If NYT openly spread hate speech or called for murder and violence, then they should be "canceled" (boycotted).

On the contrary your original comment exemplified the thought pattern very well. I fully understand why you claim it doesn't, though.

I've noticed this thought pattern with many people who argue against freedom of speech and for tighter control of media or "canceling" them recently:

1. The arguer claims that negative consequences follow from the exercising of free speech, in this case NYT right to freely chose the topics they write about.

2. The alleged consequence is that people are made to believe wrong or false things (where "wrong" and "false" are defined by the arguer).

3. The arguer portrays himself at the same the victim of those media and the person who knows better than those media and therefore can decide between wrong and right, true and false better than the accused media.

4. The arguer presents no evidence of knowing better and when you ask them about their sources, they tend to be highly problematic, based on blogging and websites who often do not even employ journalists.

Paraphrase: "I know better than large group of people X but everybody else is mislead by X" - I don't think so.

It's ok to be politically biased, but still factually accurate for things that fit their political bias?

Everybody is biased. You, me, and every journalist on earth. Of course, that's okay. The NYT also does not go out of their way to "...pretend they have no political bias."

What is important is to be able to understand the difference between news and editorials (including editorial decisions), but sadly more and more people seem to lose grasp of this basic distinction. This may be a sign of the negative consequences of the politization of many points.

Well, if you start arguing this way, then you can also go all the way back and muse about what the word meant in Proto-Indoeuropean.

It's still obvious that the modern use of the master/slave combo comes from centuries of slavery, not from any prior meanings. As OP said, that can be shown by studying their meanings outside the technical context. The original meaning was retained in Academia but merely as jargon. Magister artium is a "master degree." There is no "slave degree", though. There is also "mastery", master/apprentice, and so on.

In other words, the offensive component of the combo is "slave", not "master." You can safely continue to use the master/apprentice combo.

I didn't see it immediately either, it's amazing how good my brain auto-corrected "maximalize" and "minimilize" without me even noticing.

It's not just for legacy purposes. I've written a few useful personal tools in Purebasic, for instance. BASIC dialects tend to provide the functionality needed and can be handy for quickly throwing something together when you don't have the time to deal with GUI frameworks and complex libraries. You can also use Python or Go, of course, but they do not have integrated IDE and do not have a rich command set in the core language. Easy deployment and compact executables are also a plus of some existing BASIC dialects. If I had the money / the investment in a license would give me a good ROI, then I'd also pay for Xojo, for example.

Whatever gets the job done without wasting time.

Some could be both...

I've listened to one or two and would say he's a very good interviewer who is always well prepared. The ones I've listened to were about the philosophy of AI and related issues. For me personally, his podcasts are too long, I lack the time, but I was positively impressed.

So, no, not a bullshit artist at all in my opinion.

There are no neutral actions, though.

Sorry, I've seen your post only now, so my reply is a bit late. I think we mostly agree, but it appears to me that you might not be fully aware of the magnitude of the metaethical problem and persistent disagreement about them. To give you an example from formal ethics, according to Temkin's Spectrum arguments strict "better than" comparisons are not transitive. Some authors agree with him, others disagree. Some want to give up completeness instead of transitivity, others opt for lexicographic value hierarchies. Others deny having the intuitions and argue for the status quo. Even this one simple issue has far-reaching normative consequences, though. If Temkin is right, then even if we all agreed to be classical utilitarians, the position would be infeasible and any account based on utility functions would be wrong from the start.

If at all, we could try to implement conforming with systems of laws as hard constraints, so at least robots would not openly break the law. The rest of moral behavior could then be learned. Or, so one might think. However, even that is not possible. It is well-known from the philosophy of law that systems of law are not contradiction free. There are conflicts between opposing laws. This is studied in normative systems research and there are solution to it (essentially, by logicians in the computer science tradition). However, these require some form of defeasible rules, and among the myriad of nonmonotonic logics that can express some form of nonmonotonic reasoning, not a single one has a normative justification. So again, as long as human standards are not coherent enough, it's going to be impossible to make a machine conform to them in a way that is satisfying.

Related to that, I believe there are two main issues that you haven't addressed in your post:

1. Different standards for blame and accountability: The standards for blame and correctness of decision making are completely different between machines and humans. Even very intelligent AI would be judged at much higher standards as humans. I simply don't believe that we would accept robots that commit murder, just as long as they commit murder less often than humans. By the same token, we do expect machines to make substantially less errors, and in certain areas would not allow errors at all. So it's not just about teaching them to follow human ethical standards - they need to excel at this and may not break the law. However, as I tried to show with the above examples, we don't know and agree on our own standards well enough to be able to start making sure AI fulfills these high expectations. There is also a much higher need for transparency of decision making for machines than from humans. An idiot driver is an idiot driver. If a car is driving like an idiot by itself, however, you'd expect to be able to at least retrospectively find out why it did what it did.

2. The political dimension: Laws are the result of a political process. Appointed judges resolve potential conflicts between laws and interpret them. More broadly, whatever standards we expect AIs to fulfill hinges on ethical positions and personal preferences. It can ultimately only be decided as the outcome of a political process as well. For example, a safe a self-driving car needs to be, how it makes decisions (e.g. "Should I try to save my driver or save the pedestrian, or not have any priority at all?"), and which standards it needs to fulfill is up for debate. That is not decided by moral philosophers. It needs to be decided by the publicly accountable, democratically elected representatives of the people. The idea of teaching a machine to behave morally is fine, but there are also strict standards of safety and transparency it has to fulfill. This is a political problem and can only be solved in a broader context, within the debate of how much AI should be allowed at all. For example, should AI judge your creditworthiness? If so, what false positive rate would be tolerate? I believe using AI for such purposes should be strictly prohibited. Others disagree - I'm sure AI is already used for that. Such issues can only be resolved politically.

I considered your post a bit naive, because you omitted these two crucial issues, the higher standards we expect from AI, and the political dimension. Other than that, I agree with much of what you've said.

I'm working in formal ethics, mostly on formal aspects of value structure, and agree with you. This article is a hodgepodge of many different ideas, some of them interesting, others a bit naive, and has almost nothing to do with formal models for ethics. There is plenty of research in formal ethics such as deontic logics, abstract argumentation frameworks for preferences and norms, nonmonotonic logics for value-based reasoning, normative systems, input/output logics and formal axiology.

One thing that the author does not address in enough detail is the simple fact that there are many different ethical traditions that come to different conclusions about particular normative issues, and that there are plenty of authors in ethics who (still) consider their business a normative one. A "bottom up" machine-learning based approach to this would invariably fail and miss the whole point. There are some ethicists who consider it mostly a descriptive endeavor - Schopenhauer was one of the first, for example -, but they are in a minority.

As long as experts in ethics cannot agree what the "right" ethics is, it's hard to see how we would be able to teach it to machines. Many meta-ethicists including me would even deny that there can be an "expert" about moral and particularly about ethical questions at all. However, I have no doubts that various robotics companies will implement those ethical rules and approaches that best serves their interests as companies.

That's why I think robot ethics is kind of misguided. What we need is laws that regulate AI and put its use into a legal framework and closes loopholes. This is a political, not just an ethical issue.

I can't really put my finger on it, but this article seems slightly biased against Silicon Valley CEOs.

This kind of sensualism was often defended in the debate, but it has problems, too. I think the history of mathematics makes the position implausible.

For a long time, up until recently, mathematics was way ahead of the applications of mathematics to physics. In Ancient Greece there was a general consensus that infinity and real numbers do not exist. But then some people found out that the side of a triangle must sometimes be a real number. However, you cannot ever measure SQRT(2) precisely. Whatever number you extract from the physical world is only a rough finite approximation. You need to represent the number in a different way and solve the problem algebraically. Many scientists in Ancient Greece rejected this idea vigorously. Still, real numbers are very useful for describing the physical world, so useful that we couldn't possibly do without them today.

Imaginary numbers are another example. They were ridiculed as abstract nonsense when they were described for the first time and widely conceived to have no physical reality or application at all. Despite all that, they play a vital role in modern physics.

There are many more examples like that. To cut a long story short, at least until recently mathematics was always ahead of physics (now they seem to go more in tandem). This fact makes the idea very implausible that mathematical structures are merely useful abstractions from the physical world we invented to describe it. It simply doesn't describe what happened in mathematics. And I find the idea that mathematicians just came up with arbitrary imaginations equally implausible.

no external authority you can appeal to which will state definitively that when mathematicians all agree on something their experience of "true" is absolutely and objectively correct, and not a distorted and limited artefact of human cognition

That is true for everything, it's just a radical skeptic position. Nevertheless, mathematics has the highest standards of rigor for proofs among all disciplines.

The observers are part of the universe, too, as is my pocket calculator.

This is a rather interesting article. I'm a Platonist. From what we know today, real numbers cannot exist in a finite space, but they seem to exist mathematically. The same can be said about many other mathematical structures, including those that can only be characterized adequately (categorically) in higher-order logic.

It's also worth noting that physical and mathematical existence are based on completely different criteria. For non-constructionists mathematical objects exist once they are not demonstrably contradictory (although the absence of contradictions often cannot be proved in an absolute sense). In contrast to this, for physicists an object exists once it can be measured, where measurement is ultimately tied to sensual experience. There are also theoretical entities in physics that cannot be directly measured, but their existence is usually downplayed, they're not supposed to "really" exist but only as theory-dependent entities. In any case,the two "kinds of existence" are very different from each other.

I'm not very convinced of this AI. I got 96% for http://peppermind.com and only 68% for https://talumriel.de - I'm almost certain that most users would prefer talumriel, and both scores them seem overrated to me. I mean, I really have no clue about design...

I have a question about this. Is SEO really still relevant and necessary? Is it really effective?

I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems to me that everybody is doing it anyway, and that in the end what counts is that many pages link to your page. Meanwhile, search engines heavily penalize certain "optimizations".

If you have a page that loads instantly and contains all the standard meta tags and keywords, does additional SEO really make a difference? Are there really any "tricks" that work?

I found it almost unreadable, and I can tolerate a lot. Maybe something gets lost with the translation. As for the worst, I forgot the author's name. It was a military sci fi novel with an alien invasion theme, so you'd expect it to be bad. However, I love the topic and was willing to tolerate the focus on right wing US prepping. I'm fine with all of that, but, SPOILER AHEAD: The problem of the novel was that the fight was pretty much unwinnable, so in the end the author simply just introduced vampires who allied with the paramilitary preppers and swiftly eliminated all aliens in the last chapter. That was by far the worst plot I've ever seen.

In my experience the best software is the one that no longer distinguishes between the markets. For example, I've just found the Serif Affinity graphics software suite. Each of their programs can be used as substitute for ten times more expensive Adobe software and is good enough for professionals (with caveats and limitations, I suppose) but at the same time is affordable enough for non-professional consumers.

Recently, almost the whole pro audio market has shifted in a similar way. They realized that they can make more money by targeting hobbyists and musicians instead of studio owners, so now most companies offer 70% to 90% sales from time to time. Others have started to launch software at a tenth of the price that used to be normal - $30 instead of $300.

I prefer that to the "free plus pro" version model. But I admit that I have no clue about marketing and sales and don't know the downsides of aiming at consumer and professionals at the same time.

It will substantially harm sales of B2C products, but it may make sense for B2B products that require support and training and aren't based on any substantial know how/trade secrets. In that case releasing as open source might even be beneficial. A good trade off is to release libraries as open source but keep parts of your final product (e.g. GUI) proprietary.

Even in the B2B market successful open source companies often use dual licenses and release the open source version as a sort of crippleware by keeping essential libraries and tools proprietary or under very restrictive open source licenses.

I've got to agree, The Three Body Problem was the second worst science fiction novel I've ever read - to be honest, I only read 3/4 of it. But he's not an English author so he doesn't count.

And how do you intend to find out what your government does without reading the news? Do you get all of your "information" from bloggers? Social media? Hearsay?

What an excellent way to end up watering plants with Brawndo - because that's what plants crave.

I agree, what you describe is what terrorists think. Obviously, at some point in their life they persuade themselves that their political goals justify the intentional killing of innocent civilians. They go at great lengths with these justifications precisely because they are so obviously flawed. Attempts to justify their actions involve a mix of denying the Doctrine of Double Effects, speaking of necessary sacrifices, and of portraying innocent victims as guilty collaborators.

You can, see my definition above. The crucial feature is whether civilians are intentionally targeted or not. You can add all kinds of clauses (e.g. to conveniently exclude military forces of nation states), but that's the morally relevant criterion. A group that is intentionally targeting civilians for political reasons is a terrorist organization.

No, not according to a reasonable definition of terrorism. It's terrorism if a group is intentionally attacking civilians (non-combatants) for political goals. Freedom fighters may or may not be terrorists, depending on whether they intentionally attack civilians or only hit military targets. What it means to intentionally attack someone is regulated by the Doctrine of Double Effect, is based on distinguishing between side effects and intentional goals of an action. It's a tricky topic and there is leeway for interpretation, but It's not as if a definition in this area could or should never lead to controversies.

Unfortunately, this definition is rarely used, because it doesn't match the political goals of states. First, it follows from the definition that there is widespread state terrorism. Second, countries that send military occupation forces to other countries have a vested interest to brand asymmetric warfare against their military as terrorism, but this is not covered by the definition.

The same happened with HIV, these kind of conspiracy theories are inevitable. People always want to blame someone, even when there is overwhelming evidence that a natural catastrophe occurred. Remember the Italian seismologists who got sued because they didn't predict an earthquake?

Fact is that if the virus escaped a lab, the incident could have occurred in any other lab, too. It likely evolved naturally, though, and another fact is that it could have occurred naturally in many places in the world - e.g. in the Middle East or in Africa -, and a more dangerous virus could evolve in many regions of the world at any time.

Many people just don't want to accept this, especially those who reacted in the wrong way to the pandemic initially. It's always easier to blame someone else.