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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Gemini is the most annoying of them to me because they had an opportunity to use the technology “not stupidly”, and instead they doubled down on the stupidity.

    They already had a voice controllable assistant that was pretty commonly used to set timers, change light settings, play music and ask about the weather. Biggest downside is that you had to be really specific with your language or it would get confused.
    LLMs are good at manipulating language. What if you… Made it possible to talk to it better and left the functionality the same, and then added functionality to tie it into things or do more with your ability to handle more freeform requests than before so people don’t need to memorize key phrases? No? Just gonna focus on unremarkable pretty pictures, conversation, and providing information, possibly the least reliable and trustworthy use of the technology? Sounds good.








  • I mean, you’re entirely correct, but there’s also racial politics as in “race relations”. Like “why are we regressing on race based civil liberty protections and seeing an upswing in racial prejudice”.

    Racial groups don’t have homogeneous political opinions, but they are often the subject of political opinions.

    All that to say: there are many different ways to express a disgustingly inappropriate blend of racial and political opinions in a workplace, and we shouldn’t assume they picked any particular inappropriate way.



  • I wouldn’t say it’s ignoring it. I’m incredulous that DHS would pressure Facebook to cancel an account or something for the same reason I’m not as bothered by it happening: it doesn’t have real consequences.

    If the government censors you, it can take your money or your freedom. Not only does it have much higher stakes, it has stakes you can’t get around. You can’t go to a platform that doesn’t mind and keep going.

    If the government leans on a company, first of all that’s still government censorship and it’s not legal for the government to get a company to do what it cannot. If the specifics of the behavior are legal, it’s still government censorship and wrong (with aforementioned caveats).
    That being said, the consequence of that type of censorship is loss of a social media account. You can find another venue and all they can do is keep asking people to remove the content. If someone refuses or you host overseas, there’s not really anything they can do.

    There’s a benefit to society, in my opinion, for people to reject an idea. Refusing to help someone spread a message is about the most passive way to do that.

    I’ve worked in the webhosting industry. If someone has a Nazi website and they need tech support, you need to ask yourself if you’re willing to take that support request or if you’re letting your manager know you’re not gonna help that message.
    If the employees at a company don’t want to help you and it’s not unjust discrimination, I have a really hard time saying that it’s wrong to tell Nazis to take their website elsewhere.


  • I’m not aware of the specifics of that group to know how I feel.

    My feelings are more born from looking at webhosting and hate/harassment websites. I have a really hard time saying it’s wrong to take down a Nazi website.
    I don’t think the government should be able to, because as abhorrent as it is it’s still a political position and protected. But if the people you’re paying to host your shit don’t want anything to do with you and it’s not unjust discrimination, I don’t think society gains anything by forcing them to keep it up.

    I also don’t think that applies to monopolies, quasi or defacto.

    I think there’s a benefit to telling hateful groups and people they aren’t welcome in civil society. The alternative is to say that there’s no line at which society can tell you to gtfo, and people just need to tolerate you no matter what.
    Shunning or deplatforming is how you do that without violence.


  • The grammar is ambiguous, FYI, of if you meant the censorship done by collective shout or the censorship being done to collective shout.

    It doesn’t impact my reply, but I figured I’d let you know. :)

    I’m against government censorship in all circumstances outside the cliche “you can’t threaten people or spread injurious falsehoods”.

    I’m okay with private entities not giving people a platform if they aren’t a defacto institution. Credit card companies and financial services should be agnostic to which legal businesses they process payments and hold assets for. Much like how shipping companies are agnostic to what’s in your package, beyond what’s necessary to move it safely.
    If you’re needed for society to function, I want you to blindly service society, even if people I dislike also get service.

    I don’t want to be in a place where every platform needs to accept all participants as valid. There’s plenty of ways to share your viewpoint.



  • There’s a lot of different things that get pumped into “intelligence”. There’s “reasoning ability”, “knowledge”, “wisdom”, and a whole host of others, some in the category of traditional intelligence, and others around things like emotional intelligence.

    Raw knowledge is something that schools can teach through memorization. You have facts. Memorization isn’t the best way to do it, since context and such can often make information stick better, but some things you’re eventually going to memorize, intentionally or not (I don’t calculate 6*6=36 every time).

    Reasoning or analytical ability is much harder to teach, since you can’t really make someone more able to have insights and such.

    Wisdom is something that can be trained I’d phrase it. I don’t think you can be taught it like you can a history lesson, but it needs to be trained like a sport. How to apply reason to a situation, how the knowledge you have relates to things and other bits of knowledge. Which things are important and which aren’t.

    It sounds like you’re mostly taking what I’ve called wisdom, with a dash if introspection tossed in, which can play very well with wisdom. “How sure am I about this?” Is a question wisdom might make you ask , and you need to know yourself to know the answer.
    Knowing how to question the right part of something, so that you’re not getting caught up in the little inconsistencies and missing the big one, or considering the wrong facts that are unimportant to a situation.
    (A pet peeve of mine) Sometimes people will bring up statistics of race in relation to crime. People with perfectly good reasoning ability and knowledge will get caught up debating the veracity of the statistics, or the minutiae of the implications of how other statistics interplay to lead to those numbers, both in an attempt to deny the conclusion of the original argument.
    The more wise thing to do is to question why this person is making the argument in the first place. Use your knowledge of society to know there are racists who want to convince others. Your reasoning to know that someone more interested in persuasion than truth can twist numbers how they want. Reject their position entirely, instead of accepting their position as valid and arguing their facts.


  • … “Apples can go bad, but so can oranges” is literally comparison.

    the representing of one thing or person as similar to or like another.

    You didn’t have to argue about the meaning of the word comparison if you didn’t care. If you’re going to argue at someone, don’t tell them to stop responding. It conveys a weird energy of “I care enough to respond, but not enough to read a response”.

    My day is going great. I got the day off and good leftovers for lunch, and now I’m just playing games and relaxing.

    Here’s a bewildering product image for the leading brand of rabies vaccine in the US:

    A friend woke up to a bat freaking out in their bedroom. We told him to go to the doctor, who said that he almost certainly didn’t have a rabies risk because the bat seemed fine, he had no visible bites, and most bats here don’t bite, buuut the “certainty of a slow and painful death” compared to “low risk moderate discomfort rabies vaccine series” means they recommend it anyway. To cheer him up we shared the terrible website design of the manufacturer. Seems people aren’t looking for the hip new thing when they’re looking for rabies vaccine.





  • Except that with the website example it’s not that they’re ignoring the price or just walking out with the item. It’s that the item was not labeled with a price, nor were they informed of the price. Then, rather than just walking out, they requested the item and it was delivered to them with no attempt to collect payment.

    The key part of a website is that the user cannot take something. The site has to give it to them.
    A more apt retail analogy might be you go to a website. You see a scooter you like, so you click “I want it!”. The site then asks for your address and a few days later you get a scooter in the mail.
    That’s not theft, it’s a free scooter. If the site accused you of theft because you didn’t navigate to an unlinked page they didn’t tell you about to find the prices, or try to figure out payment before requesting, you’d rightly be pretty miffed.

    The shoplifting analogy doesn’t work because it’s not shoplifting if the vendor gives it to you knowingly and you never misrepresented the cost or tried to avoid paying. Additionally, taking someone’s property without their permission is explicitly illegal, and we have a subcategory that explicitly spells out how retail fraud works and is illegal.

    Under our current system the way to prevent someone from having your thing without paying or meeting some other criteria first is to collect payment or check that criteria before giving it to them.

    To allow people to have things on their website freely available to humans but to prevent grabbing and using it for training will require a new law of some sort.


  • It really does matter if it’s legally binding if you’re talking about content licensing. That’s the whole thing with a licensing agreement: it’s a legal agreement.

    The store analogy isn’t quite right. Leaving a store with something you haven’t purchased with the consent of the store is explicitly illegal.
    With a website, it’s more like if the “shoplifter” walked in, didn’t request a price sheet, picked up what they wanted and went to the cashier who explicitly gave it to them without payment.

    The crux of the issue is that the website is still providing the information even if the requester never agreed or was even presented with the terms.
    If your site wants to make access to something conditional then it needs to actually enforce that restriction.

    It’s why the current AI training situation is unlikely to be resolved without laws to address it explicitly.