ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
3d ago
How to make CSAM is widely known, and plenty of places don't cooperate usefully with the USA in stopping it. Despite that, the USA does manage to broadly limit how much it proliferates.
I'm not saying that it's a good idea, and I'm not saying that open weight models could be completely eliminated. I am saying that they could be quite effectively suppressed, as there are plenty of tools that the government can use to enforce a ban, imperfectly but substantially.
ThenElection
3d ago
The goal wouldn't be to make it so literally no one in the USA could run an open weights model; it would be to add friction points to make it more trouble than it's worth, except for the most dedicated people. You wouldn't need any kind of global agreement, just a national focus and working with large tech companies to limit it. DNS blocks, removing them from Google search results, etc. A relatively small amount of effort can prevent the bulk of casual users from having access to them.
That's just if you get the domestic consensus to look at open weights models as something comparable to copyright violation. If instead the public started seeing them the same as CSAM, you could go a lot whole lot further: still theoretically accessible, but very rare.
ThenElection
3d ago
You could make it pretty broadly inaccessible: ban all open-weight models; require any image generation to have strict safeguards and reporting of attempts to authorities; enforce severe criminal penalties. Your existing model would be pretty much untouchable, but it couldn't easily be shared, and a decade from now most copies of it would have been lost to end users. You could even require manufacturers to include firmware on new hardware that bails on unapproved workloads, but that seems like it'd be overkill.
Not saying that this is what I'd like, but it seems doable.
ThenElection
3d ago
I would have felt very differently: I would have cared much less, quite honestly. "Oh, someone's a weirdo, anyone whose opinion of me changes because of it isn't worth caring about." And I'm not sure that making the AI-generated nude clearly a fake joke (giving her purple skin or whatever) would change anyone's opinions. I think the crux of the matter is that it's a sexual image, and we cordon off sexuality as requiring unique, almost spiritual protections around it.
ThenElection
3d ago
So, back in high school, someone made a fake photo of me and posted it in a classroom. It wasn't a nude, but it was political, depicting me as Stalin, as I was an outspoken socialist. I was outraged ("the photoshop is not even accurate! I'm a TROTSKYIST!"), and it definitely hurt my feelings and hurt me socially. Pretty clear case of bullying, but, in retrospect, it was pretty hilarious and a useful learning experience. Should that kid have been punished?
I don't think so, and I suspect you don't either (though I'm curious if my suspicion is right). Which shifts the question to, what is the difference between a nonsexual representation and a sexual one? I think, to many people who don't see harm, harm categorically isn't something that can be done with an image or words--sticks and stones can break my bones etc. If people start physically attacking someone, or destroying their property, in response, there is harm, but the harm originates from the physical act, not the instigating image. The introduction of a sexual element doesn't change this. (I'm speaking here in terms of conceptual framework, not legal definitions.)
That doesn't mean that the school shouldn't do anything about the boys--schools can and should regulate behavior above and beyond the minimal standard of harm. But the idea that actual physical violence should be punished less than images and words is weird to me, especially when school administrators had no actual evidence of the images.
ThenElection
3d ago
Stranger Things was disappointing.
The first season was great, and it was all about the settings and vibes. After that, they didn't know what to do with it: sequels demanded they simultaneously up the stakes and explain the universe. S2 went with a kind of eldritch Lovecraftian approach, which was exciting to me because it's a genre that's nearly impossible to do well (explanations are self-undermining), and that season gave a reasonable go at it. But the task of following through proved too much for the writers, so we got creature features and supernatural slashers instead.
The weak story thus forced the focus onto interpersonal relationships that turned into soap opera, with an ever-expanding cast (with outrageous plot armor) to pander to more market segments with fan service. By season 5, it was impossibly unwieldy.
Will's coming out was entirely unnecessary, but it's important not to treat it as some departure from an otherwise good season. Every scene involved some long-winded heart-to-heart with unearned development. Somehow there's no tension at all: the world is ending, but you wouldn't know it by how the characters acted. The final journey to Vecna's layer (which is supposedly on a timer, as it's literally actively traversing a wormhole to destroy our own world) becomes a calm stroll (through a brightly lit, demogorgon-less set) where two guys just talk about their shared like of a girl and find out actually we're not too different after all!
So, does it matter that Vecna and the Mindflayer are weaker than the L1 demogorgon in season 1? Nope, because they're entirely secondary to the real goal: shoveling slop and 80s nostalgia to a bunch of Millennial Netflix watchers who want soap opera but want the imprimatur of prestige television.
ThenElection
6d ago
Injection is for the benefit of the public, not the criminal. At some point we got squeamish about visibly physical punishment, and injection sweeps all of that under the rug, making execution a bloodless, bureaucratic affair.
ThenElection
6d ago
More cynically, the main thing Trump actually offers is breeches of decorum, which angry voters interpret as the best thing available. Not through any bad faith on his part, but his short attention span and lack of actual follow through. The US will be in approximately the same cultural and political position in 2028 as it is today, just as it was in the same position in 2020 as 2016.
The establishment is happy to use him as a useful patsy, and the hysterical shrieking about him being neo-Hitler confuses people into thinking he is a more substantial threat to the establishment than he is. So he's a vessel to channel discontent and anger into dissolution.
ThenElection
6d ago
Local change seems critical, but the issue is that 99% of the attention of politically-interested people seems to be at the federal/culture war level, now. A debate about whether a road should be converted into a park becomes a debate of whether the pro-road people are crypto-Trump supporters. City supervisors spend hours debating whether they should pass a resolution supporting the Palestinians. Questions about how to best educate students during COVID get supplanted by questions about naming schools in a progressive way. And these abstract/cultural signifier questions are what people actually vote on even for local elections, instead of focusing on the concrete issues at hand.
ThenElection
6d ago
The Puritans also engaged in missionary efforts, e.g. the praying towns and Algonquian Bible translation of John Eliot. That seems more like trying to bring Native Americans into the fold than genociding them.
ThenElection
6d ago
It's useful for governments to be able to name and identify people, for tracking, taxation, etc. The name a person goes by is useful beyond a unique numeric identifier: it allows for easier resolution of the individual a government wants to interact with, as the knowledge of the name-individual link is dispersed in the community. Better to just capture a wide latitude of names than refuse to than to increase the number of hard-to-track people.
ThenElection
6d ago
Interestingly, early 20th century Chinese linguists also invented a particular written third person pronoun to refer to a god or deity (祂), again pronounced the same.
Other pronoun tidbits: it was strictly taboo to refer to the Emperor with 他。Using that pronoun, or any pronoun, for him would result in "cancellation."
ThenElection
6d ago
Looking at the allele frequencies of rs53576:
| Population | A allele freq | G allele freq |
|---|---|---|
| AFR (African) | 0.19 | 0.81 |
| AMR (Admixed American) | 0.36 | 0.64 |
| EAS (East Asian) | 0.65 | 0.35 |
| EUR (European) | 0.35 | 0.65 |
| SAS (South Asian) | 0.45 | 0.55 |
| Global | 0.39 | 0.61 |
It's true that Europeans have a relatively high frequency of G, but it looks like Africans have them beat.
Maybe the aggregation here is obscuring subgroup heterogeneity, and Somalians don't share the well-known cosmopolitan universalism of Bantu cattle herders.
Manuel Noriega was, what, two weeks? New record set? Impressive indeed.
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