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This is an extremely important point to understand. At face value, it can feel like CSAM should be protected speech, however repulsive. There are no laws against gore videos, though one might argue that death is worse than SA. However, we have substantial empirical evidence that CSAM directly contributes to offending behavior.

We also acknowledge that participating in pornography requires consent, and that the continued distribution of nonconsensual pornography constitutes a continuing crime against the unwilling subject. Because children have zero legal capacity to consent, CSAM is de facto illegal.

It misses the point to think that CSAM is illegal because it is "obscene". It isn't illegal because it's disgusting; it's illegal because it's egregiously harmful to children. It's like thinking the bad thing a murderer did was make a mess.

This is an argument I find myself making depressingly frequently to people I thought knew better...

For reasons already outlined, I have doubts about their math. Targeting $250/kg payload costs is ambitious for a rocket that has not yet successfully reached orbit or proven cost-effective.

Even if we do somehow succeed at affordably dumping tons of GPUs into orbit, what do we do about the Kessler Syndrome?

Let's just put it this way:

The ISS produces about 120 kilowatts of electricity.

An Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPU uses 1.2 kilowatts of electricity.

So, you would need a similar array of solar panels and radiators just to power 100 of them. You probably would need 2-3 launches for a satellite this big, and realistically, you would just make smaller satellites.

That's $4,000,000 worth of GPUs, A couple millon or more of RAM, SSDs, etc., a radiation-proof satellite housing to support all of that hardware, solar arrays, launch costs ($74M per Falcon launch), all for maintenance to be impossible and the hardware to become obsolete in a couple of years.

It's a delusion unless we invent some way to go to space for free.

Oh please, what is with all of these pristine "engineer" workspaces? Every high-powered engineer I know lives in a pile of wires, boards, and monitors that evolves like a living organism.

Oh, that's the really fun part. The unprecedented catastrophic event is already happening. Several of them, in fact.

By the time we notice, it'll be too late.

I don't care that the results are technologically impressive, the automation of creativity is dystopian. As I watched these videos and tried to compare what different AIs can do with similar budgets, is struck me to how utterly soulless and unenjoyable this whole thing is.

AI has plenty of utility, but this isn't one of them. If anything, I want to see AI automate all of the tedious stuff so that human beings can focus more deeply on art and culture. Automating art and culture is anti-human.

The point is that, at least presently, an algorithm lacks the creativity to meaningfully stimulate an intellectual person, and whatever excuse you give for the decisions that algorithm makes, you should never expect a human being to be more impressed with the algorithm than they are with their human peers.

The LLM critics are right, and that's why I try not to use AI in the ways critics point out are bad.

I use AI to code tools for myself, but I don't pretend anything I make is production quality. Duct tape engineering has always been a bit sloppy, and AI just made it faster.

I use AI to troubleshoot issues and plan out strategies, but I basically consider the AI draft of anything to be "draft 0", and use it as a framework for writing my own works for a real first draft of anything I write that will be read by other people. Sometimes the AI spits out a perfect paragraph that I might copy, but I don't ever blindly trust it or let it speak for me. I also double-check everything it says that I don't have existing knowledge of, rather than trust it to be right.

AI images, video, and music are all entertaining, but I only generate these things as a form of self-entertainment and maybe online meming. I could never in good conscience pass these creations off as my own, or publish them online on a personal or business website when something non-synthetic would suffice.

And I am never personally confiding in an LLM like it were a person. I have had it help me brainstorm options for office politics stuff, but I'm not about to ask it for relationship advice or to be my friend.

I do love that it accelerates the tedious stuff, and helps me learn new things pretty quickly if used right. It has definite utility. But I am always really distrustful of it. Sometimes at work we are asked to share how we use AI, and I have actually refused before, on the grounds that I may have found a useful way to use the AI, but I am worried that others will use my same method badly (e.g., not verifying eveything the AI says first), and I would rather not share.

It's like I have a finicky gun. I might be comfortable shooting it since I know its quirks and how to keep it from accidentally discharging, but I'm not loaning it out to anyone I wouldn't want to accidentally shoot themselves with it.

What do you mean by this? The person you responded to never used the words "should" or "should not", and then you basically repeated what they said using more neutral words...

What is so controversial about saying that SpaceX seems overpriced?

A $2,500,000,000,000.00 startup. An underdog really.

This whole article just boils down to the argument "If badly-behaved adults are allowed to have cameras, why shouldn't well-behaved children have access to for-profit social media platforms designed to addict them and feed them misinformation?"

It's complete nonsense. The conversation in the UK right now isn't about whether or not teenagers should be allowed to own cell phones; it's about whether they should be allowed to have access to the myriad of addictive and harmful apps and services available on those devices, often maliciously targeted at them.

The drunk pervert filming them on the train has nothing to do with this argument. He's using his phone like a camera. Teenagers are allowed to have cameras, and assuredly every one of the girls he was filming had a camera of some sort on them of their own. Nobody was on uneven ground in this situation technologically.

If people actually were worried about perverted adults preying on children, they would take a look at the countless examples of perverted adults preying on children via their social media accounts and devices. It's been open season on children online for the past decade.

If people actually cared about accountability, they would stop pushing for age-verification laws, and start penalizing social media companies for their laissez faire attitude towards inappropriate sexual conduct, because currently, sites like Instagram and TikTok cater directly to pedophiles and do absolutely nothing about the predatory behavior coming from their user base towards children that are clearly too young to legally use social media in most parts of the world (<13 in the USA).

We need to reframe this whole conversation. It's not about keeping kids away from social media. It's about keeping trillion-dollar businesses from profiting off of children while actively doing harm to them with addictive algorithms, misinformation, and exposure to malicious actors.

The question "do you trust this directory?" is a world away from "do you consent to upload this directory and all of its contents to a third party?".

My assumption when asked "do you trust this directory?" is that I am being asked if I am certain I understand what is in the directory and that it won't include some sort of prompt injecting attack. I would never dream that I was consenting to the complete exfiltration of that directory.

Forgive my poor phrasing. I used Fable for quite a lot in the time I have had access to it. I mean to say that the only actual utility I have found for it was the final review process.

I can confidently say that Opus is the most powerful model I need 99% of the time. Fable might be marginally more capable than Opus for just about anything you might throw at it, but those gains aren't worth the cost for me.

I have only really used Fable as a final pass on something. A "Take a look at everything we did so far, and make sure we didn't forget something" kind of review prompt.

But it is a huge waste of money for most coding tasks. Opus is still overkill most of the time, too.

I mean, I get that these things are typically matters of opinion, but if you value things like freedom and privacy, these things are objectively bad.

You'd have to industrialize the capital punishment system to handle the demand.

Restructuring the modern lifestyle, allowing people more free time to focus on their health, is unprofitable.

Whereas minimizing the amount of free time people spend on their health, allowing people more time to labor or consume, is profitable.

While I can appreciate the principle of not blindly trusting OTC medicine marketing, it is not realistic to expect every person to be highly competent in fully understanding their medical choices. It is far more reasonable to expect the companies marketing healthcare products to be honest to their customers.

If anything, you need honesty from healthcare companies in the first place if you're even going to begin making an informed decision. You're putting the cart before the horse here: people absolutely should be doing their own research before medicating themselves, but it is the OTC companies that obstruct that.

And, secondary to all of this, your analogy about shampoo is misinformed. Still, it is fitting for this scenario, but not in the way you intended. There are lots of different hair types, including ethnic hairstyles that require specific treatments. There are also a number of lifestyle choices that can change your hair treatment needs. As a result, the shampoo aisle actually is stocked with a wildly varying assortment of haircare choices, but actually figuring out what product works best for your needs can be challenging because it is walled behind layers of marketing nonsense that don't inform the consumer adequately on what makes each product different. This isn't much different than the problems in the medicine aisle.

It took a lot of secondhand research to find the ideal hair care product for my thick, curly hair that would mitigate the damage of thrice-weekly swimming in a chlorinated pool. I can assure you, not everything in the shampoo aisle is exactly the same. It was especially hard figuring this out as a man, when so many products are arbitrarily marketed to specific genders.

Unfortunately, yes. The American right has looked at Russia as a model for what they want America to be for some time.

At least with a PC you have control over the system. You're even freer with Valve because now have the ease of using Linux.

My entire Steam library is backed up to LTO tapes. I can get most everything running without needing Steam.

I will continue to support this business model, because I retain the power to own the system and the data.

If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.

There's an ocean of difference between "moved some magazines" and "helped organize the event and explicitly called for violence". You know that, though; you're just intentionally missing the point.

That's really hard to swallow when the current president, who is responsible for the extreme uptick in ICE activity, pardoned 1,600 people who conspired against the federal government in favor of his agenda, but then that same government hands life-ruining prison sentences to people who weren't even present for conspiring against ICE.

Especially when the crux of this entire case was that the convicted are members of a terrorist organization - a fact that was declared at the whim of this same president.

I'm not saying that some of the people convicted don't deserve consequences for their actions, especially violence like shooting at officers. I'm not saying that this was a lawful assembly, especially given the documented intent to breach the facility and use pyrotechnics offensively. I am saying that this is an extreme escalation in action against dissent against the Republican agenda, with a highly visible inequality in enforcement against those who dissent similarly against the Democratic agenda.

If this kind of heavy-handed action was taken against everyone who challenges our government, I would still be concerned, but it is doubly concerning that some members of our society appear to have the permission to do these things, while we destroy the lives of others with different politics.

There are lots of safety arguments for street lighting.

For one, as a city dweller, I would be absolutely terrified walking around at night, having to rely on a flashlight to see anything. Not just a "scared of the dark" thing, but good outdoor lighting discourages things like robberies and assaults. And sure, cars could just use their headlights, but still, visibility in populated areas would be very bad, and safety for pedestrians at night would be awful.

Why shouldn't someone divest from big tech companies if they think they are harmful?

If I found out that my local bakery was funding regressive far-right politics, I absolutely would stop going to that bakery.

These are silly questions with easy answers if you have basic moral standards. By mocking people for having standards, you just reveal you lack them yourself.

Yeah, what's your point? Plenty of us are actively opposing the evil things our tax dollars fund all the time. If we could safely opt out of paying taxes for those things, we would.

But Mullvad isn't the government. I can get a VPN from somewhere else. I can opt out of funding something that I consider morally abhorrent.

Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking

I agree 100%, which is why the dehumanizing intolerance of the Mullvad CEO completely disqualifies your organization from being on the same side as that statement.

They're married now, too.

What you did say, anecdotally, is that pedestrians would be safer, in direct response to being presented with empirical evidence that pedestrians are, in fact, not safer...

So my point here is that, whatever argument you are making, it is already debunked. You're arguing against statistics with platitudes.