If youtube is still pushing racist and alt right content on to people, then they can get fucked. Why should we let some recommender system controlled by a private corporation have this much influence American culture and politics??

What I’m saying is, we don’t know what physical or computational characteristics are required for something to be sentient.

Now that I use github copilot, I can work more quickly and learn new frameworks more with less effort. Even its current form, LLMs allow programmers to work more efficiently, and thus can replace jobs. Sure, you still need developers, but fewer of them.

Why is it that these sorts of people who claim that AI is sentient are always trying to get copyright rights? If an AI was truly sentient, I feel like it’d want, like, you know, rights. Not the ability for its owner to profit off of a cool stable diffusion generation that he generated that one time.

Not to mention that you can coerce a language model to say whatever you want, with the right prompts and context. So there’s not really a sense in which you can say it has any measurable will. So it’s quite weird to claim to speak for one.

While I agree that LLMs probably aren’t sentient, “it’s just complex vector math” is not a very convincing argument. Why couldn’t some complex math which emulates thought be sentient? Furthermore, not being able to change, adapt, or plan may not preclude sentience, as all that is required for sentience is the capability to percieve and feel things.

If you are just getting started, this is a good resource for learning hiragana and katakana.

Past that, I used Anki and Bunpro for learning vocab and grammar. However, an alternative to anki for vocab that’s definitely worth checking out is jpdb.io, and Cure Dolly’s youtube videos are good for learning grammar.

There are also some decks that people have on anki which have sentences that you can practice on, I hear those are a pretty good way to start reading so that you can work your way to reading books/manga and stuff.

Here’s another website that’s worth reading through if you’re interested in doing immersion learning with japanese.

Sam Altman is a part of it too, as much as he likes to pretend he’s not.

Section 3a of the bill is the part that would be used to target LGBTQ content.

Sections 4 talks about adding better parental controls which would give general statistics about what their kids are doing online, without parents being able to see/helicopter in on exaxrlt what their kids were looking at. It also would force sites to give children safe defaults when they create a profile, including the ability to disable personalized recommendations, placing limitations on dark patterns designed to manipulate children to stay on platforms for longer, making their information private by default, and limiting others’ ability to find and message them without the consent of children. Notably, these settings would all be optional, but enabled by default for children/users suspected to be children.

I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They’re the types of settings that I’d prefer to use on my online accounts, at least. However, the bad outweighs the good here, and the content in section 3a is completely unacceptable.

Funnily enough, I had to read through the bill twice, and only caught on to how bad section 3a was on my second time reading it.

He co-invented PDF in '91. His PhD thesis, referenced in the summary, is a solution to the hidden line problem in computer graphics.

I switched to vertical tabs in every program that i could, and I think it might have actually made me a little more productive. Visual studio has an option for it, and I highly recommend using it if you use VS. I can have a bunch of different tabs open so that I can quickly reference them if needed.

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and read the full text of the bill. After reading it, I’m pretty sure this is the controversial part:

SEC. 3. DUTY OF CARE. (a) Prevention Of Harm To Minors.—A covered platform shall act in the best interests of a user that the platform knows or reasonably should know is a minor by taking reasonable measures in its design and operation of products and services to prevent and mitigate the following:

(1) Consistent with evidence-informed medical information, the following mental health disorders: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use disorders, and suicidal behaviors.

The sorts of actions that a platform would be expected to take aren’t specified anywhere, as far as I can tell, nor is the scope of what the platform would be expected to moderate. Does “operation of products and services” include the recommender systems? If so, I could see someone using this language to argue that showing LGBTQ content to children promotes mental health disorders, and so it shouldn’t be recommended to them. They’d still be able to see it if they searched for it, but I don’t think that makes it any better.

Also, in section 9, they talked about forming a committee to investigate the practicality of building age verification into hardware and/or the operating system of consumer devices. That seems like an invasion of privacy.

Reading through the rest of it, though, a lot of it did seem reasonable. For example, it would make it so that sites would have to put children on safe default options. That includes things like having their personal information be private, turning off addictive features designed to maximize engagement, and allowing kids to opt out of personalized recommendations. Those would be good changes, in my opinion.

If it wasn’t for those couple of sections, the bill would probably be fine, so maybe that’s why it’s got bipartisan support. But right now, the bad seems like it outweighs the good, so we should probably start calling our lawmakers if the bill continues to gain traction.

apologies for the wall of text, just wanted to get to the bottom of it for myself. you can read the full text here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/1409/text

Idk, after having been in the crypto space in the past, I’m still pretty tempted to call it almost universally a scam.

Regardless of the environmental impacts (which has been solved by some blockchains, like you said), I just think it exposes users to a completely unacceptable amount of risk for very little gain.

You’re required to be in complete charge of your own data security, and if your private key is stolen, you lose your life savings with no recourse. If you make a minor slip up and give permission to the wrong website, you’ll lose everything in your hot wallet. If there’s an error in a smart contract you use (which has happened many times), then all the money you’ve given to it could be taken from under your nose. You can’t even, like, refund transactions – there’s no consumer protections at all.

But like, to what end? What’s the actual benefit of using crypto? Sure, you can make anonymous transactions with XMR, that’s a tangible use case. But what’s the actual benefit to using something like Ethereum?

I am one of those people who’s pretty concerned about AI, but not cause of the singularity thing. (the singularity hypothesis seems kinda silly to me)

I’m mostly concerned about the stuff that billionaires are gonna do with AI to screw us over, and the ways that it’ll be used as a political tool, like to spread misinformation and such.

I agree, fuck russia, I despise the Russian army, but calling people of a specific nationality “orcs” feels kinda racist to me, idk

I’ve seen people calling all russians orcs, not just the soldiers, even though I’m sure there are a lot of russians who are opposed to the actions of their government. It feels like it could become another harmful, racist stereotype if we all keep repeating it and defending it.

Like, when the war is over, will Russians still be called orcs?

I’m all for educating children about sex, and I’m also sympathetic to the plight of data privacy.

However, I also feel like the internet right now is a pretty bad place for minors. Like, there’s so much porn and other harmful content that’s so easily accessible, to the point that it’s easy to find yourself stumbling into it on complete accident. And with the speed that the internet evolves, it seems pretty unreasonable to me to just kinda expect parents just to be able to fully keep up with it.

I don’t think I support this law in particular, but I also don’t know what could possibly be done to any real effect.

Of course kids would still try to access porn, there’s always ways around walls on the internet. Just like how banning guns wouldn’t prevent everyone from accessing guns, and banning sale of alcohol to minors doesn’t make minors stop getting drunk.

In that sense, I do suspect that if there were more boundaries to accessing porn, children would watch it less, and would maybe be less likely to be exposed to it without their consent.

I’m pretty disturbed by the attitude of lot of the comments on this thread. While this law is probably not going in the right direction, this knee jerk reaction of calling any regulation of porn “puritanical” and an infringement of your rights is crazy to me. I feel like access to internet porn is not a fundamental human right, and it’s not puritanical to maybe want to prevent kids from being unwittingly exposed to a shitload of porn at a young age.

Do you have any evidence for that? I find it hard to believe that there wasn’t any CSAM on there considering that there was the whole expose, you know, the one that forced them to delete the majority of their videos, because the site didn’t have any way to verify whether they were CSAM or not.