I really hate the way the word “nihilist” is used in modern English.

That aside - my point is that this was expected.

And they didn’t live during 30 years war or whatever they remembered as scary. Didn’t matter.

WDYM turned out? Reading about it, seems to just be a long-running project. Still in construction, nothing to see there, such stuff.

Why not, WWI and WWII and things around them outdid all the scary stuff people were predicting just fine.

WDYM why not drugs? Strong alcohol and tobacco were a state monopoly in many countries for many years, and still are that kind of business heavily intertwined with state.

And prohibited drugs are in a similar position, just the state monopoly is unofficial. Well, officially they are prohibited. As I said. OK.

There are plenty of different kinds of drugs with different degrees of addiction, lethality, damage to the environment in production too.

Anyway, about AI - were it not profitable, it wouldn’t be rolling. It might be a bubble, but it’s, for the users of this kind of technology, a qualitative change from precise algorithms and industrial optimization to fuzzy decisions based on statistics. Basically machines following human orders as humans mean them. Well, kinda like that, except very computationally expensive and as good as your dataset, but there are tasks hard to do the old way and easy to do the new way. Hence (on Jingle Bells melody) bombing swarms, bombing swarms, bombing all the way. I suppose not all the way, but the essence is here. Also surveillance, detecting and stopping people harmful for some political end without ever alarming them or anyone or using direct visible force, predicting events.

It’s inefficient when used for the same tasks a shell script can do. It starts being efficient when used on the scale of lives and families and groups and communities, and armies and economies. Matter of scale.

In that light I’m glad I never played that, living in Moscow near an internal troops division. Doesn’t matter, though, someone has.

Plus, it’s disgusting and should be illegal anywhere that it isn’t just in general. It’s weird that you’re defending it like it’s diet coke or something.

“It’s disgusting” is not quite the right argument for making something illegal.

And that “you’re defending” presupposition should honestly be your last claim in any group of people before being shown the door.

You seem to have that “all or nothing” mindset in an argument, as if you really didn’t like someone, then they should be prosecuted as a rapist, a murderer and an arsonist at the same time. Exaggerating, of course.

Quoting myself.

I “honestly think” each case is unique. Just like with everything else.

CP is harmful due to normalizing the thing, useful due to redirecting some of the energy people with that pathology have away from, you know, real children.

Well. To hang pictures and hooks it makes sense to have wall panels with holes or whatever. And not drilling bearing walls.

Small-small price might be even fine, it’s scary how we live in a world full of wireless connectivity. Just some wire between rooms, LOL.

Just - if attaching stuff with magnets isn’t generally common (except fridge doors), then making magnetic concrete walls doesn’t seem to have potential in helping with that.

When I saw that headline, I was thinking of something like concrete magnetic floors in space, something sci-fi.

Flying concrete from Earth’s gravity well seems very expensive, though.

it’s essentially iterating on known images

No. It’s iterating on the common traits of known images compressed plus lots of randomization.

If you trained a Stable Diffusion model on only pictures of Rwandan people, and asked for an image of “a man sitting on a chair” the man will look vaguely Rwandan.

If you train a model on adult pornography and non-pornography with children and adults alike, it might be capable of generating plausible child pornography.

When you train an AI on CSAM, it produces images that are based on CSAM. Real people were victims in the base material, too. Close e-fuckin’-nough. Real people’s victimization is literally the core of how those images are made.

I’ve just told you how this is not true.

You seem to have that “all or nothing” mindset in an argument, as if you really didn’t like someone, then they should be prosecuted as a rapist, a murderer and an arsonist at the same time. Exaggerating, of course.

Point being that child pornography without real victims is something not contested here and has its own implications. You are trying to argue on something out of reach.

And he started with police officers being supervised, but the real problem is not what we all see about an event, it’s whether we who see it one way have power over those who pretend they saw something else. So if those deciding also don’t want to reduce police officers’ loyalty to their superiors and readiness to obey on the job, they might find an excuse for a clear murder in FHD.

Usually the place of origin of a technology is also where most its uses are pioneered.

as much as Grok is a CSAM machine if you pay for it.

CSAM is Child Sexual Assault Media, and Grok is not providing that, it’s providing Child Pornography.

You are comparing making non-consensual material with real people to generating material with no real people (based off real media, though, but that’s an implication with everything AI-generated).

There are different kinds of “old cars”, the kind of old cars made before 70s that are really inefficient with gasoline, but might last another hundred years if maintained, and the kind of old cars made up to 90s that are harder to keep from falling apart, and then the kind made later, which is - not really for future generations.

The more optimized their production is and the less luxurious they are as a thing, the closer they are to something that’ll only last their guaranteed time. Preferably for the producer - falling apart into rust a couple of days after that.

Isn’t Skillet kinda fine?..

Sorry, but Java applets, for example, were not established technology and plenty of people were saying things like “it’s impractical, with personal computers and existing communications it’s too slow to fetch those and run them, and the JVM is slow, and the benefit of cross-platform compatibility etc is something too abstract for this day when some people still write practical programs in assembly languages” and so on.

Okay, the comparison here is that for playing a tune on a webpage putting in a Java applet was probably a bad idea in year 1997, suppose that tune was practical to download and play, eh.

But then a few years later it became commonplace to have (not Java applets, but Flash applets and JS, but same idea) such things, until everyone got tired of something blasting once they visit a webpage and people stopped doing that to reduce the risk of having their legs broken IRL.

Now most webpages are dynamic.

OK. Russia. Suppose I’m not.

I think there’s a degree of moving goalposts here.

A mid-XIX-century worker could die of hunger if they lost their job. There wouldn’t be any social services or boarding houses for poor to feed their children, and their wife - you know. OK, I mean, there were boarding houses, but that was even worse than growing up in a poor family.

An early-XX-century worker was still in similar danger, but there were both organized labor and changing level of life. Working their way out of poverty being real and a lot more accessible press and education were some of the changes from the previous. And political rights too.

A mid-XX-century worker could basically live normally through hard work. And one could say that both in Warsaw block and in the West social nets were in place. In the third world not yet. !@#, me and writing about hard work.

“Wage slavery” of a person who’ll die of hunger and of a person who’ll feel bad from looking poor, but will have socialized options for food, board and even help with looking for a job, are two very different situations.

So let’s please remember that we, Americans included, already sort of live in a socialist heaven compared to 100 years ago.

I think humanity is improving.

Americans are also the primary target it’s all adjusted for. Ads are a social mechanism.

Even ads for non-American audiences sometimes copy ads aimed at Americans in various detail which doesn’t make sense there.

Somewhat similar to perception of fashion differing between living in a big city or in a rural area. In a big city everything is happening around you. In a rural area you learn of things happening, might get interested, might not.

OK, I might be simplifying things.

Compared to the rest of the world - yeah. Be that 30 years ago or now. Things that are normal for Americans are something impractically good for the rest of the world.

I mean, there are median and average income maps and such on the web.

But I admit that everything is different, say, in most countries you can do fine without a car. Of what I’ve read and heard about USA, a car seems more important than a place to bunk (I mean, the whole concept of someone with financial problems sleeping in their car seems wild from a country where a car is something less basic than a living place).

Some people might think it’s nonsense to pay more to reach some group than it gives directly, but there might be a degree of diffusion such that it’s not.

Suppose, that computer-savvy woman is the source of advice for her many friends after trying some things out or whatever.

Suppose, that professional man uses occasionally a free tool for their task, that seems to be “first page in Google”, but is in fact the most familiar from 8 things listed on that first page.

Then they use it again or their coworkers or friends know that the tool exists. Then eventually they might buy it.

It’s all probabilities, but those that spread.

Why did I even write this, it’s obvious.