I think people saying that stuff are serious about advocating for political violence. I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t make things worse. Violence is a core element of fascist ideology, there’s clear utility in using the attention it brings for recruiting, the trauma it inflicts for hazing, the experience for training. I remember when I saw a particular famous clip of a nazi speaking in public and being punched in the face by a masked assailant, I had never even heard his name before then, but after that clip was all over the internet that changed for a lot of people, and it definitely didn’t get him to shut up. Maybe there’s situations where people need to be defended, or there is need for someone acting as a bouncer, but I suspect in many cases it’s some combination of useful idiots giving them what they want, or extremists on the other side who share their goals of agitating for armed revolution giving them what they want.

I liked The Yellow Wallpaper

I doubt the school administrators who would be buying this thing or the people trying to make money off it have really thought that far ahead or care whether or not it does that, but it would definitely be one of its main effects.

I think it’s less that they have found an “excuse” to raise prices (companies always want more money, that’s what companies do), and more that they have acquired the leverage to do so. Fast food restaurants have accumulated brand recognition and customers that are psychologically attached to their products. People are less used to cooking their own food and have less time with which they might do it. We are poorer in relative wealth terms, companies are richer and more vertically integrated, we are in a worse negotiating position.

The output for a given input cannot be independently calculated as far as I know, particularly when random seeds are part of the input.

The system gives a probability distribution for the next word based on the prompt, which will always be the same for a given input. That meets the definition of deterministic. You might choose to add non-deterministic rng to the input or output, but that would be a choice and not something inherent to how LLMs work. Random ‘seeds’ are normally used as part of deterministically repeatable rng. I’m not sure what you mean by “independently” calculated, you can calculate the output if you have the model weights, you likely can’t if you don’t, but that doesn’t affect how deterministic it is.

The so what means trying to prevent certain outputs based on moral judgements isn’t possible. It wouldn’t really be possible if you could get in there with code and change things unless you could write code for morality, but it’s doubly impossible given you can’t.

The impossibility of defining morality in precise terms, or even coming to an agreement on what correct moral judgment even is, obviously doesn’t preclude all potentially useful efforts to apply it. For instance since there is a general consensus that people being electrocuted is bad, electrical cables normally are made with their conductive parts encased in non-conductive material, a practice that is successful in reducing how often people get electrocuted. Why would that sort of thing be uniquely impossible for LLMs? Just because they are logic processing systems that are more grown than engineered? Because they are sort of anthropomorphic but aren’t really people? The reasoning doesn’t follow. What people are complaining about here is that AI companies are not making these efforts a priority, and it’s a valid complaint because it isn’t the case that these systems are going to be the same amount of dangerous no matter how they are made or used.

They are deterministic though, in a literal sense. Rather their behavior is undefined. And yes, a LLM is not a person and it’s not quite accurate to talk about them knowing or understanding things. So what though? Why would that be any sort of evidence that research efforts into AI safety are futile? This is at least as much of an engineering problem as a philosophy problem.

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The company being successful probably wasn’t doing humanity any favors anyway

Anti-money laundering provisions in the EU have been adjusted several times though

Adjusted to give more leeway? Can you cite a source on this happening

Better but still pretty bad, in that case can only hope the software/trading ecosystems for p2p improve enough to be more generally viable and that once that happens there won’t be reactive legislation to stamp it out.

Because of inflation, it’s not going to stay 3k. All rules of this type have fixed amounts that never get updated and every year encompass more transactions.

Supposedly this legislation also bans anonymous cryptocurrency.

To me the most obvious tell is, these costumes would be a lot of work, seems like intricate body makeup, and coordinated between five people. And then they’re somewhat anonymous and the cops have to ask on Facebook about them, instead of aggressively trying to put out viral videos of themselves doing this? There is no way.

Explicit types are just laziness, you should be catching exceptions anyways.

“We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard us all screaming, and yet they still left us,” he told the BBC.

"The first child who died was my cousin’s son… After that it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning seven or eight children had died.

It replied that its staff worked “tirelessly with the utmost professionalism, a strong sense of responsibility and respect for human life and fundamental rights”, adding that they were “in full compliance with the country’s international obligations”

…

I used to write that kind of stuff for a living when I was really poor and scraping by, it paid by the word and so low that you could realistically only crack minimum wage if you kept typing continuously and didn’t stop to think or do any research.

Really interesting article. The general idea seems to be that people having their access to banking shut down has been a real problem for a long time, and is most commonly imposed on marginalized groups, but people don’t realize it’s going on, and the people on the right making noise about this issue ignore where the bulk of the problem is.

This is sometimes how I feel when I appear on the ‘anti-mainstream’ ‘free thought’ media outlets. They want to hear about the financial censorship of the Freedom Convoy, but they don’t want to hear about restrictions on Aboriginal payments. This hints to a skew in their freedom of thought, and it’s certainly not open-minded. When they approach me, they’re trying to recruit that mercenary side of me who is nominally prepared to defend their narrow free thinking, but this poses an ethical dilemma, because their selective curation of what examples of payments censorship they’re prepared to ask about or listen to amounts to a silent form of censorship in itself. Selectively hearing, and amplifying, one set of injured voices - the Truckers - can be very similar to blocking another set out.

Firstly, yes, it’s very important to fight the general principle of payments censorship (and, by extension, to protect the cash system that provides a buffer agai nst it). Secondly, I must inform them that the actual chances of payments censorship being used against them is smaller than the chances of it being used against refugees, migrants, the homeless, or sex workers, who face recent real-world cases of financial censorship.

If there are two or more cell towers within range of the phone and they have access to those towers they can triangulate the location of the phone already.

Bring your own wet wipes and destroy company plumbing

No, I mean, I’m saying I doubt they even really need the trucks, except maybe as an explanation of how they got the data legally.