whichfawkes

Do you take a standard deduction?

It's clearly not enough to cover all of the expenses that are required to generate your "revenue", but it's a gesture in that direction.

Seconding the Onyx Box Max Lumi here. I bought one back when they were much more expensive and I still think it's been worth it.

I did the same thing actually. There must be dozens of us! I was continually impressed by how easily and reliably it worked.

It's totally solved, first class is just too expensive for most people. The future is not evenly distributed.

The fact is it doesn't matter what people "deserve".

People who are willing to forsake some degree of convenience can be granted greater privacy by simply informing them.

People who are seeking convenience will always be giving up something else. In this domain, they're often giving up privacy.

A lot of people these days are essentially forced to seek convenience. They don't have the time or money to spare to do otherwise.

I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that they're selling me a service. Just like I might pay for a subscription to Adobe Photoshop or pay per-render fees to a rendering farm.

I could use Photoshop to reproduce a copyrighted work, and in some circumstances (i.e. personal use) that'd be fine. Or I could use Photoshop to reproduce a copyrighted work and try to sell it for profit, which would clearly not be fine. Nobody is saying that Adobe has to recognize whether or not the pixels I'm editing constitute a copyrighted work or not.

It seems weird to sue an AI company because their tool "can recite [copyrighted]" content verbatim.

If I paid a human to recite the whole front page of the New York Times to me, they could probably do it. There's nothing infringing about that. However, if I videotape them reciting the front page of the New York Times and start selling that video, then I'd be infringing on the copyright.

The guy that I paid to tell me about what NYT was saying didn't do anything wrong. Whether there's any copyright infringement would depend what I did with the output.

Human brains are still the main legal agents in play. LLMs are just a computer programs used by humans.

Suppose I research for a book that I'm writing - it doesn't matter whether I type it on a Mac, PC, or typewriter. It doesn't matter if I use the internet or the library. It doesn't matter if I use an AI powered voice-to-text keyboard or an AI assistant.

If I release a book that has a chapter which was blatantly copied from another book, I might be sued under copyright law. That doesn't mean that we should lock me out of the library, or prevent my tools from working there.

Trying to prohibit this usage of information would not help prevent centralization of power and profit.

All it would do is momentarily slow AI progress (which is fine), and allow OpenAI et al to pull the ladder up behind them (which fuels centralization of power and profit).

By what mechanism do you think your desired outcome would prevent centralization of profit to the players who are already the largest?

Why do you expect an AI to cite it's source? Humans are allowed to use and profit on knowledge they've learned from any and all sources without having to mention or even remember their sources.

Yes, we all agree that it's better if they do remember and mention their sources, but we don't sue them for failing to do so.

If society were the customer, society ought to be paying.

How about instead of adding authoritarian restrictive technology to private vehicles, we just take cars out of the cities?

With proper public transit, this would be a no brainer.

I've only ever heard people prefer chains.

So then you have to remineralize it...

But how are those minerals being sourced, and does that mixture contain lead? Ugh, it never ends.

For sure it is. Have you never been outside your city?

There's stretches of flat, straight-ish interstate in the US that continue for dozens of miles with near-perfect visibility. Sometimes, there's no traffic. Go 120 for all I care, just slow down when you're near something.

Sufficiently compromised privacy in conjunction with sufficiently sophisticated data markets starts to look a lot like "having a motive", eventually...

How long before your AI girlfriend is sussing out your feelings and desires in the interest of figuring out how you can most effectively be advertised to?

I'm empathetic to the struggles faced by women. That said, I also realize that those struggles are different than the ones faced by men.

Yes, I believe that women experience this particular problem less than men do, but that doesn't mean that women don't have just as many problems on balance.

The patriarchy is alive and well, and I'm pretty sure it's still harder to be a woman than it is to be a man.

But, if you want to examine why men are expected to be more likely to pay for intimate relationships with AI, I think this area is relevant to the discussion.

Women can more readily get the kind of attention they want, with minimal effort.

Getting emotionally invested in an AI seems to me like it would go hand in hand with giving up on human relationships. I'm pretty sure men are more likely to do that than women.

Presumably they're making a higher margin on the professional cards.

To be fair, if I was writing my own Wikipedia page, I would do the same.

Getting away with it in this case just means "not being cheated by the casino".

They're big enough to cheat you using violence or even the judicial system, so if you do this you're strategizing against that as much as you are strategizing to win the actual game.

Is it possible that in the end the internet will decide that humanity just isn't worth it?

Well, of course they're going to set the requirement high enough that they can be confident you'll survive without them needing to pay to deport you.

Beyond that though, they want you to spend your money in Iceland - why else?

Presumably you aren't paying any income tax. So the only advantage to letting you into the country is that you'll spend money on goods and services.

I've been using MMO-style mice to do similar things for a while.

Logitech's G-whatever software is kind of annoying, but one thing I _do_ like about it is it'll flash the configurations directly onto the mouse. This avoids needing to do any special config in the OS.

I use their tool on Windows to just flash the mouse once, then I can use it on any machine and all my custom key-binds and macros "just work".

Obesity can also be related to environmental exposures.

Why would they keep employees through a downturn? They're profit-driven entities.

Of course they're going to dump externalities onto the public any chance they get, and we should strive to limit their capacity to do so... But in this case I'm not sure what you mean exactly? Nor do I understand what you mean about bringing antitrust because of layoffs? That sounds much more difficult to justify than most of the other reasons you might bring antitrust against these companies.

For me, the main benefit of exercise is immediate. However - the magnitude of the immediate positive effect is somewhat related to the intensity/duration of the exercise that I can tolerate.

So I would say something like "A 5k run would make anybody above a certain fitness level feel pretty good". Like, in a way that you'd notice immediately during, and after. For me, there's runners' high and good body-chemicals and a sharp mind the rest of the day. There's not as much of the good stuff if it's like a real strain to run that far. There's an optimal level of physical stress. Taking a sedentary person and chasing them through a 5k run with an electric cattle prod them is not going to help them feel good. Similarly, someone who regularly runs marathons is not going to notice much of an effect from a short walk at a slow pace.

How to balance this out (how much exercise do you need to feel good) is a very individual thing. Practically speaking, you just have to try stuff and get to know your body.

I will say though that marked changes in physical condition can occur over more like weeks than decades. So if you go for a walk and think "well that was a little bit nice, but not worth taking an hour to do", maybe invest the time to build up to something more intense like cycling or jogging, because, as anyone who exercises intentionally will tell you, it seems to be worth it once you find out what's right for you.

Just because I might turn chicken in my old age doesn't mean that my death wouldn't be a benefit for most people.

There's one other way to "solve" overpopulation, and it's galactic conquest. Everything else we might do eventually devolves into nothing but shades of austerity and deprivation as we divide our planet up between more people.

That's not to say that technical progress won't mitigate that problem. And yet, as it mitigates it, we tend to just make more people...so it's not like we're manufacturing much more runway for ourselves as a species.

If we could cure some aspects of aging without prolonging life, that seems like it would be an obvious and nearly indisputable good.

I'd rather have 80 good years than 80 years of progressive decline.

In the US, for a while I remember we had billboards advertising McDonald's burgers as being "1 <hamburger> <hamburger>% beef". Because the hamburgers were of course circular, it looked kind of like "100%".

I remember thinking that surely an image of a hamburger does not legally constitute a zero.