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You might say that the legal grey area involved here is significantly smaller than the legal grey area involved in training these models on literally all of the copyrighted material they could find. The difference seems to me that it's more likely that Sony would pick a fight about this becoming a thing, whereas the training data is a horse that has already bolted with an unclear path to remedying it.

Read-along audiobooks on tape were a staple of my childhood. Even before they can read the words, they are seeing pictures that correspond to the narration. I knew the soundscape of Star Wars years before I ever saw the actual movie.

I wonder if those kinds of things still exist in some format.

I've been reading an oral history of Soviet Afghanistan-veterans and unexpectedly one of them brought up this scene, talking about being a kid in school and being asked to name the most heroic literary figure he could think of. He names Huck Finn, because he knowingly accepted hell for himself in order to right an injustice and help Jim be free.

I thought that was quite an interesting pull for a kid in 1960s USSR.

Nobody is saying parents aren't responsible for their choices, only that trying to influence them to make harmful choices via marketing is immoral and bad for society. The parents are supposed to give this thing to their kids as a pacificer, that is literally the proposed use case here. If you are trying to make money by encouraging people buying your cigarettes for their children, you are morally complicit in that outcome, regardless of all the purchases still being made by adults.

I believe that in marketing something to children, you become co-responsible for the usage situation you are promoting, even as parents share that responsibility. Marketing cigarettes, gin or tablets to children would be immoral in deeper ways than doing the same to adults. I stand by that.

For the record I think the gin industry should in fact be regulated from marketing their product as a pacificer for kids. I find it very difficult to believe that you don't.

Gin is supposedly very calming for toddlers. Stressed parents used it a lot back in the day. I hear if you're fancy, cognac is even better. You gotta be a real hypocrite to drink a beer on fridays but not let your toddler have any, right?

Some things are difficult to regulate, even as we know they are harmful and difficult to control for adults due to their addictive nature.

You don't have to think about it very hard to realize that kids, who have not yet learned to emotionally regulate themselves, will be even more vulnerable to these things if we push it on them.

If somebody was marketing cigarettes for children, I don't think "only bad parents would buy these anyway" absolves the company for knowingly setting this situation up and profiting off it.

Every day I see a celebrity in an ad for gambling and they all have the same defence "well, if people choose to gamble if they have a problem, then that's on them". Everyone knows it will destroy lives. But they say "that's on them for buying what I'm selling".

People are walking around perpetuating the moral compass of a heroin dealer like it's normal. You are responsible for your mark on the world and your fellow human beings. Yes, even if you only did the bad thing to get the money.

This thread for example - the oyster mushrooms break down the plastic polymers into smaller polymers, but you don't necessarily want to be eating those either. There's also the added complexity of there being many types of plastic, with many types of additives, and unless your waste plastic is single-source it is difficult to know exactly what is being released into your mushrooms when they're working on the plastic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mycology/comments/10wboly/blue_oyst...

For whichever reason LLMs really love to tell you what something isn't, before telling you what it is. Exceedingly annoying vocal tic.

The mushroom strain is edible yes, but I went looking around mycology forums and it is my understanding that decomposing plastic causes them to absorb chemicals that make them unfit to eat for humans. I think there's some overlap between "can be eaten" and "would be bad for you long term".

That's not to say there isn't a use for the mushrooms in some further process of dispersal or breakdown (animal feed, biogas...) but I don't think these can go in the stew pot.

It's unfortunate that the mushrooms grown on plastic waste absorb chemicals that make them unsafe to eat. What a gamechanger otherwise.

I have to imagine that in an era of lighting by flame (gas, oil or candle) that there were many more opportunities for an ember to settle in somebody's clothes and cause them to catch on fire after removing themselves from the source.

Perhaps more lax safety around easily combustible substances like linseed oil would also contribute to this effect. The sun heating up that linseed oilstain on your sleeve from last week, and whoosh. Bystanders would never know, and if you're burnt up, who is going to point out the cause?

I mean, this is only really awkward if you think they're alive and conscious, and if you think so you're clearly already comfortable being a slaver. If it's just a little software puppet, that's a different story - the puppets are supposed to lay still once the hands animating them leave.

A less silly way to do this might be using some kind of long term consequences calculation as guard rails, but that's tough because consequences are often going to be not directly related to the context window, or simply unrecorded by the machine like annoying collaborators or communities.

For now anyway. I think people are still figuring out social norms for this stuff, and at the end of the day I don't think people are going to just have carte blanche to deploy agents haphazardly and not be stuck with at least some kind of social bill when they break stuff or annoy people.

Don't many complaint systems like this have some fallback for frivolous claims or a way to rate limit harrassment-like activity?

If AI agents ostensibly care (or can play-act to care) about termination, any AI that embarrasses their operator IRL would be in a risky position.

Call it the "you have failed me for the last time" button.

In the book Red Plenty, on the Soviet economy of the mid 20th century, there's a section on an abortive attempt at optimizing the command economy using early computers and algorithms to have more effective production and distribution.

The attempt never materializes because some kindly clerk deliberately buries the letter from the enthusiastic engineer, who clearly does not understand that writing Stalin to tell him you figured out a way to build communism better than him, would be suicidal.

It's a fun counterfactual to think about, given that the vast bureaucracy needed for the command economy was one of its major limiting factors. Anyway, interesting book if you are into economic policy or quirky ways that systems can go haywire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Plenty

What a charming read. I love this type of adventure.

I think there's also a self selecting element to this where being the sort of person who either feels like they're too clever to get caught, or have the sort of risk-seeking gambler mentality that makes you much more willing to tolerate say 10% chance of life ruining consequences for X payout, makes you more likely to do this sort of thing in the first place.

That same impulsivity or arrogance probably lends itself well to brazenly chatting up your crime plans with your secret friend the computer, who would never snitch, because how would he, he lives in your pocket.

Back in 2022 they briefly wanted their users to submit a sort of verification nude of themselves, in order to use it to scan for future revenge porn of said user.

Now as you might imagine, this was not popular or long-lived.

I hear you, but there's a difference between eradicating an invasive species and trying to fully exterminate the species entirely, which is what a lot of the discussion in this thread has been about.

Hmm. I feel that "male mosquitoes are pollinators" and the claims being thrown around of "mosquito eradication would have no impact on the ecosystem" do not match up. Surely losing many, many millions of pollinators would have some kind of impact? Even disregarding impact on the species that eat them.

God damn. I read a bunch of them as a teenager and went back as an adult to read one of the later installments and I was pretty weirded out by domestic scenes that I can only describe as Flintstones-esque. It surprised me because I remembered the series having a reputation for being well researched (albeit some of that research was outdated by the time Shelters of Stone came out).

Likewise the sex scenes struck me as very frequent and drawn out. Odd to pivot that series to caveman themed romance novels!

Hard same.

Perusing small blogs over feeds any day of the week.

I remember it as portraying them using lots of subtle gesturing, sign language and slight head/posture changes to supplement sparse verbal communication, which made it seem like they knew what the other was thinking until you learned to decode it.

Did they actually have telepathic abilities in the book? Did I mentally erase that?

"AI is not as good as it is hyped up to be" and "AI is 'good enough' for the overlords to replace some amount of workers, or at least to leverage into depressing their wages significantly and permanently" are not mutually exclusive claims. You don't have to buy the hype to agree that it is dangerous.

A chimp with a gun is not dangerous because of how good a shot he is.

This would (at least in part) mirror the dynamic during another major period of collapse and upheaval - the migration period. Displaced people trying to survive by raiding or squatting on new territory, thus displacing more people and collapsing complex networks of trade which were sustaining large local populations, thus displacing more people etc etc.

Similarly to the end of the bronze age, it was also a period in which shifts in climate stressed social structures. A runaway dynamic of lots of desperate people on the move is not great for stability, and if everyone is already experiencing some scarcity, then that's all the more vulnerable.

Work hard, play hard!