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.

Humans in developed countries are in a position where we can reduce our harm to others. I believe that if you’re in a position to be safely and reasonably able to, that you should do your best to reduce the harm you cause. I would argue that reducing harm includes reducing the amount of animals that I eat.

However, none of this really applies to animals. They don’t really get the same privileges that humans do in modern society, nor do they have the conscious ability to consider their harm on the world. Furthermore, obligate carnivores don’t really have a choice but to eat meat, so they wouldn’t be able to safely reduce the harm they cause regardless.

Animals eat food, too. If you eat meat, you’re actually creating more demand for crops than you would if you ate the crops directly. Furthermore, migrant workers also work on animal farms, in slaughterhouses, etc. I hear it’s not always great.

I guess what I’m saying is, I’m fairly sure that going vegan helps both animals and the children of migrant workers.

One caveat is that I’m assuming you’d eat the same classes of crops that an animal would, namely things like corn and grains. But honestly that sounds about right for most people, vegans included. Many vegans eat a lot of processed shit too lol. (me included)

Edit: I should add that the most commonly suggested vegan diet that I’ve heard from other vegans is to have rice and lentils as your staple foods. I’m fairly sure those aren’t typically harvested by hand, but I could be wrong.

I tried for a while to make those small changes, but I always found it too hard to do, until I finally just decided to cut out all animal products one night, and I never really went back.

I think the difference was how I framed it, mentally. I always saw it as an act of willpower to not eat animal products, like I have to overcome my cravings in the same way I would if I was cutting calories. But quitting animal products altogether allowed me to frame it differently for myself – instead of telling myself “I shouldn’t eat this”, I can just say “I don’t eat this.” Like, it’s not on the table as something I have to consider. I don’t even have to recognize animal products as food.

Maybe if you cut things out one at a time you could do a similar thing. Though one problem is that it’s a series of changes and commitments you have to make, instead of just one thing. I feel like that could be harder, depending on who you are.

The comments responding to you are pretty unnecessarily hostile, but I personally get where you’re coming from. I personally think it’s best to watch the thing so that you can be best informed, even if it’s hard to do. Not even because of veganism being ethical, but because the fear of the unknown is a lot scarier than any documentary could be, IMO. Information is power, and having information (even distressing information) is empowerment.

Also, I loved meat too, but when I went vegan, I never really missed it. I was pretty worried about missing certain foods (one was sushi), but that never really happened to me.

Animals eat plants. If plants are sentient, the animals you eat still eat the plants. If your goal is to reduce suffering, eating animals means more animals eating more plants – more plants than you could eat yourself. Therefore eating the plants directly would reduce harm.

Did you just criticize… having a stance on things? Like the whole concept of believing things are true?

Even if you accept the premise that so-called ethically raised meat is ethical, there’s just not enough land to farm meat at the scale which people in developed countries demand it, unless it’s factory farmed. Ethically farmed, free range animals require much more space than caged up factory farmed animals, and the grass they feed on requires yet more land.

That means that there’s a limit on the supply, so I’m pretty sure that if someone tries to solve the whole animal rights issue by buying ethical meat, they’ll only push the ethical dilemma on to someone poorer than them (the one who would be priced out, due to the increased demand). That person would then have to be the one to make the decision of whether to go vegan or to buy factory farmed meat.

Admittedly, I could be wrong about this? But I’m pretty sure that increasing land use of meat, whether by regulation or economic demand, would necessarily lead to increased prices, so I don’t see how it possibly wouldn’t just shift the problem on to the less wealthy.

Describing vegans as making major dietary changes because they “saw one video” is a pretty dishonest interpretation. Rigorously sticking to a vegan diet can be fairly difficult, and requires you to be very aware of exactly what you’re eating – including innocuous seeming things like food dyes and white sugar, which can often be made of animal products. To me, that doesn’t read as impulsive, but instead disciplined.

Furthermore, while the decision to switch to going vegan could theoretically sometimes be done on impulse, one still has to make the decision every single day. It’s not just a decision you make and it’s done, it’s one you must always choose to continue to make. A vegan has to decide to continue to be vegan every day, likely while under scrutiny of themself and others.

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.

I disagree with your interpretation of how an AI works, but I think the way that AI works is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion in the first place. I think your argument stands completely the same regardless. Even if AI worked much like a human mind and was very intelligent and creative, I would still say that usage of an idea by AI without the consent of the original artist is fundamentally exploitative.

You can easily train an AI (with next to no human labor) to launder an artist’s works, by using the artist’s own works as reference. There’s no human input or hard work involved, which is a factor in what dictates whether a work is transformative. I’d argue that if you can put a work into a machine, type in a prompt, and get a new work out, then you still haven’t really transformed it. No matter how creative or novel the work is, the reality is that no human really put any effort into it, and it was built off the backs of unpaid and uncredited artists.

You could probably make an argument for being able to sell works made by an AI trained only on the public domain, but it still should not be copyrightable IMO, cause it’s not a human creation.

TL;DR - No matter how creative an AI is, its works should not be considered transformative in a copyright sense, as no human did the transformation.

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