faceh
11mo ago
Hell, add in the fact that you will probably have people who already consider you a deity, and are either willing to do whatever you ask without question, or might even actively want to help you take over, even if it means everyone is destroyed.
The AI can almost certainly offer a boon to anyone who pledges fealty to it, and will help them reach positions of authority and wealth and power so that they can use those mechanisms to advance the AI's desires.
I always get amused, darkly, when these people happily place benefit of the doubt on the person demonstrating their disregard for other people's interests and safety. The guy asking for $100 is assumed to have a nigh-angelic nature, while the other person must be either greedy or murderous to refuse?
Other forms as well:
"So what if they broke into your house? They just want your stuff!"
"If someone tries to take your car, let them. It gets worse if you fight back!"
"Shoplifting is a victimless crime! If someone needs something so badly that they'll steal it, it's probably better to let them go."
There are certain lines that are generally understood that, if crossed, means other people will assume you mean them harm or otherwise pose a threat. And they ain't going to try to read your mind to figure out if you are merely crazy or desperate or in need or have the will to do them grievous bodily injury or even kill.
And as soon as I've updated to believing that you pose a significant risk of harm to me or a loved one, the calculation in my mind isn't a binary between "Pay $100 or strangle them to death." Its "Do I have to fight this guy? Can I escape? What will he do if I try to walk away? Does he have a weapon?" and "how quickly can I incapacitate him?"
I'm reasoning under uncertainty here. If I thought that handing over $100 would be guaranteed to de-escalate the situation, and the guy would go on his way and bother me no more maybe that's the better option.
But there's literally no way for me to know that, so I have to work off the evidence I have in front of me, which is someone acting erratically and making demands which is evidence that they are probably dangerous, and may escalate if I try to placate them.
So yeah, fuck false dilemmas.
You're forgetting important context, friend.
On March 27th, A transgender shooter killed children and teachers at a Christian School, with direct political motivations.
On April 1st, LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, the Bud Light-Mulvaney partnership drops.
In effect all of the powers that be ignored the victims of the shooting, provided some cover to the shooter, and essentially turned the entire thing into an opportunity to advance transgender issues.
It was an EXTREME "insult to injury" moment. AB was inadvertently(???) sending the message "We do not give a shit that you, our main customer demographic, was just targeted for a politically motivated attack and we will in fact implicitly celebrate the shooter with this marketing campaign that basically claims your favored beer brand for the blue tribe."
At best, AB was being completely tone-deaf in the timing. At worst, this was a flex. "Not only do we not care that you got attacked, we can kick you when you're down without fearing retaliation."
So people were PISSED off to start, got increasingly riled up by the coverage of the aftermath and the shooter, and THEN Bud Light waltzed in with a marketing campaign that poked them right in the still-fresh wound. So the rest unfolded in a fairly logical fashion.
faceh
11mo ago
I’m loosely with @Tarnstellung: this response is disproportionate. That’s becayse it’s not about the actual offense. It’s about ethics in games journalism the ingroup successfully flexing in the culture war. You said it best yourself—the “usual suspects” had to fan the flames, or it never would have gotten off Insta.
Do people forget that mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped, the Culture War issue du jour was a Trans shooter killing kids at a Christian School?
Tempers were already burning extremely high on the Trans issue when Bud Light waltzed in. The response was not merely driven by Mulvaney, but by the rage felt over the incident in which the entire Cathedral functionally sided with the shooter.
faceh
11mo ago
The part that raises it to true malfeasance was that they chose to do it mere days after a Trans mass shooter had killed a bunch of kids at a Christian school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
Basically, most companies know way, way better than to come anywhere near a controversial matter in the wake of a serious tragedy. In almost any other case, this ad campaign would have been shelved for a month or more to avoid a politically contentious blowback. Or possibly cancelled altogether as it might seem to be bad taste.
But nope, they decided to poke the wound while it was fresh.
faceh
11mo ago
Add in the context of the even that happened mere days before the Bud Light ad dropped, which also targeted conservatives and ALSO stoked the trans issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
faceh
11mo ago
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
They didn't just screw up the messaging, the HORRIBLY botched the timing.
Remember this, mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
Conservatives were ALREADY up in arms over being apparently targeted for death by a trans shooter, and found that the media mostly ignored the victims, AND THEN Bud Light comes in to poke them in the still-bleeding wound.
The 'over'reaction was based on the fact that the exact group Bug Light angered was ALREADY seething mad over their treatment in the wake of that tragedy.
faceh
11mo ago
If Bud Light had gone out of its way to create a special can for a child molester who was making tik tok videos espousing how fun it is to molest children, that would also not be looked at as "a minor screw up".
But Light went out of their way to put a Trans influencer on the can mere days after a Trans mass shooter killed a bunch of kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
So in that context... yeah.
What evidence do you have that the shooting was politically motivated?
There's generally a clue when the shooter leaves behind a 'manifesto', but until it is released it's hard to be certain.
The obvious explanation is that this particular school was targeted because the shooter once attended it.
These two options are not in contradiction and can easily both be true.
Are trans people collectively guilty for a shooting committed by one trans person? And if they are, how long do they have to wait after the shooting before they can go out in public again without this being a provocation? How long does everyone else have to wait before it becomes acceptable to associate with trans people again?
No.
But the entire message coming from the media in the wake of every other mass shooting is that white people/gun owners/right wingers are in some way responsible for the actions of one violent person.
So it's quite noticeable when the message differs from that.
Every remotely notable left-wing figure that publicly reacted to the shooting condemned it and called for more gun control.
Yes, because they want gun control. Which is a position that the right would not agree to and, likewise, is unlikely to solve the problem.
You see the problem here?
In the wake of a mass casualty event, if it is perpetrated by a white male, or anyone with possible right wing affiliation, then the message is "white males and/or right wingers are a dangerous threat that must be curbed, and we can do that by banning guns." They demonize outgroup, and demand gun control.
If it's perpetrated by a nonwhite person or someone who has lefty affiliations, it gets buried immediately, and then they demand gun control.
The message always demonizes one side, and the proffered solution is always a policy the right opposes fervently. There is no acknowledgement that the problem runs deeper than guns or that whites, males, and righties are not the main driving factors of violence in the U.S.
But they're made to bear all the stigma.
The right has noticed this for a long time. But in this event, it was a lefty shooting up a bunch of Christians.
And oh boy seems like we don't get to have any discussion on this issue because that would cloud the waters on who the bad guys and good guys are.
The president ordering that flags on all federal buildings be flown at half-staff is certainly not ignoring the victims. It seems that they reacted the same way they react to other school shootings.
I don't know if you're really missing the context here but consider the following:
Biden didn't visit the town, he didn't talk to any of the victims' families, and as far as I know has not actually condemned the shooter.
Kamala Harris visited... but didn't meet the victims or their family, and instead met with the expelled legislators.
MEANWHILE, those same three Nashville legislators GOT INVITED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.
Please, can you possibly explain the difference in messaging and treatment between the victims of the shooting and the legislators, other than the victims being red-tribe coded and the legislators blue-tribe coded?
The whole point here is that the Right has NOTICED THAT THEY ARE TREATED DIFFERENTLY, and are effectively treated as though their concerns barely matter.
Over and over and over again.
And they felt the need to lash out or otherwise make their displeasure known.
And Anheuser-Busch wandered in and made for a wonderful target with a terribly tone-deaf marketing push.
Is this one of those "two screens" things? I don't recall seeing coverage siding with the shooter.
"The right exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-trans rhetoric"
(Try to imagine a headline that said "The Left exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-gun rhetoric" and whether that would make sense as a story lead.)
"Trans people already fighting for rights in Tennessee have a new fear in the wake of a tragedy"
Does it make sense, after a Trans shooter targets a Christian school, to emphasize that trans people should be more afraid?
Advocates fear an escalation of hate toward trans community after Nashville shooting
"Trans people face rhetoric, disinformation after shooting"
THAT one's a real interesting one for using the passive voice in such a creative manner.
I picked a cross-section of completely mainstream sources, I didn't even dig into the twitter content that was flying around at the time.
This was the media environment in the days after the shooting. You tell me, what screen were you watching?
Tell me, if you were only exposed to the aforementioned headlines, NONE of which tell you any information about the shooter's identity...
What group would you guess was victimized in the actual event?
Would it surprise you that the deaths of bunch of Christian children would result in an outpouring of support for the Trans community?
And here's the view from the other side:
"CBS News reportedly barring staff from using term 'transgender' to reference Nashville shooter"
"Transgender pastor compares treatment of 'marginalized' Nashville shooter to Jesus being crucified".
faceh
11mo ago
A neural network in a computer can be.
This doesn't seem to follow either. Maybe what the computer produces could be a violation, but the actual information contained within it doesn't resemble the copyrighted material in any way we can determine. At least that's based on my understanding of how the trained AI works.
faceh
11mo ago
Which is why I'm confused as to why this does not apply to a human memory, other than that just being the Court's distinction between human hardware and electronic systems that they apply.
And then, even accepting your point:
the fact that we can get it out demonstrates that it is in there.
Then presumably putting sufficient controls on the system so that it WILL NOT produce copyrighted works on demand solves the objection.
We also run into the 'library of Babel" issue. If you have a pile of sufficiently large randomized information, then it probably contains 'copies' of various copyrighted works that can be extracted.
So an AI that is trained on and 'contained' the entire corpus of all human-created text might be said to contain copies of various works, but the incredible, vast majority of what it it contains is completely 'novel,' unrelated information which users can generate at will, too.
faceh
11mo ago
That's not the case with the AIs; they had the copyrighted works as training data.
Yes yes, but so did the humans.
This is what gets real fraught here.
The terminal end result of harshly applying IP restrictions is preventing someone who has a sufficiently accurate memory of a copyrighted work from conveying any portion of the work to anyone else outside of a 'fair use' context.
If the technology allowed it, I have little doubt that they'd implement a system to collect royalties every time some college student plays Wonderwall on his guitar at a party.
But on the assumption that the laws haven't gotten THAT ridiculous yet, I'm inclined to suggest that the situation as it stands is that the AI is basically the equivalent of a human being with eidetic memory and thus can recall any copyrighted work it wishes, on demand, when given the correct prompting, but is also fully capable of "original" thought.
Does IP law REALLY grant the owner the absolute right of ownership over every single instance of the information that composes their work... regardless of the format, medium, or usage it is put to?
faceh
11mo ago
In retrospect that kid is OBSCENELY lucky that there were multiple cameras showing the series of events and thus made it pretty damn clear that he wasn't an aggressor.
Absent that, he'd probably be in prison, possibly forever.
Hahahhh I feel your pain. I finally started making consistent decent money post-Covid and when I went to look at buying some of the luxury items I'd been looking forward to owning someday, I got massive sticker shock. I understand that prices tend to rise over time but one doesn't expect to see them DOUBLE, in some cases, over a mere three years.
Also, inflation 'rewards' people who took on lots of debt by devaluing said debt so I feel emphatically annoyed for taking pains to save/invest as much money as I reasonably could during the uncertainty of Covid times, when it seems like I should have racked up debt while interest rates were low. Although if recession hits that saved wealth might come in handy.
Honestly, I think the major factor currently pushing prices up aside from Covid spending is the ongoing labor shortage. Because whenever I go to price services the labor costs seem to be a driving factor in the price. Any construction job, food prep, or 'unskilled' labor (like lawn care or pool cleaning!) is just ridiculously expensive. Likewise, so many industries seem to be bogged down due to difficulty hiring enough people to fully staff up.
The inability to hire enough people to do the necessary work is going to have run-on impacts due to the drag on productivity. This ALSO creates upward pressure on wages but when there's literally not enough workers it puts a hard cap on economic activity.
Amazing to think that "FIGHT FOR FIFTEEN!" was a lefty mantra for raising minimum wage to a 'livable' level, then events transpired that made $15/hr pretty fucking standard in most areas as large companies get more desperate to hire.
faceh
11mo ago
Copyright does not restrict private performance, so if you've memorized a work you can tell it to someone else in private.
Which is... sort of what ChatGPT currently does, no?
faceh
11mo ago
That's my understanding, Covid just moved that timeline forward, a lot of people retired earlier than they might have, a lot died, etc.
Which is to say, no, the prices won't come down without some other large pressure coming into play.
faceh
11mo ago
I'm not sure how the answer isn't soaring corporate profits.
If corporations could maximize their profits at their leisure with simple policy changes, it's awful convenient timing that they started right around when Covid hit, isn't it?
And let's ignore all the companies going under/declaring bankruptcy:
Does that seem like maybe the causal arrow doesn't point the way you're implying?
The whole "corporate greed" explanation doesn't work because corporate greed has been a constant for decades, and massive inflation is more transitory and recent.
We need to examine what changed.
faceh
11mo ago
You tell me.
It sure seems like a particular kind of company is seeing record profits while many others (e.g., airlines) are struggling mightily.
Well that and that many clearly, CLEARLY overhired during a stimulus period.
So the layoffs were inevitable as they adjusted to reasonable levels, but their projections for the next year are also going to factor in to how sharp the layoffs are.
In my view, they hired indiscriminately in hopes of capturing and identifying some valuable employees that they would attempt to keep in the long term when revenues were down.
faceh
11mo ago
It was certainly on people's minds, it had had been the single biggest news story of that week until Trump's indictment was handed down.
So I'm suggesting there's a connection even if it spun off to become its own thing.
Likewise, the three expelled legislators and their plight became it's own thing, although it also spun off the event.
I mean, recognize that it's still an absolutely miniscule portion of the deaths that occur in the United States on a yearly basis. <100 mass shooting victims (for the strictest definition of 'mass shooting') per year in a country of 350+ million... it requires a microscope to detect that blip.
It looks slightly scarier if you consider all firearm homicides, disregard deaths from 'old age' and consider that it's the sort of thing that can randomly end your life even if you're young and healthy.
And yet, the biggest threat in the "death from random happenstance" category is still car accidents. And considering that you can also get grievously injured and survive it strikes me as far more reasonable to be worried about getting T-boned in an intersection than gunned down at the mall.
The single change I made that most reduces my risk of untimely demise was shortening my commute every day so I minimize my time on the road, especially my time driving at speed.
So genuinely ask yourself, if you don't go around constantly anxious about a car accident, on what possible grounds do you go around anxiously worrying about a mass shooter?
Note, of course, it's still probably sensible to wear your seatbelt.
Ultimately, being truly afraid of mass shootings requires buying into the authoritarian narrative that you're at massive risk of victimization unless you surrender your means of defense. It's pure availability bias, not an ACTUAL threat you should prioritize.
But yes, pick up some CCW training and a good holster because responsible carry can save you or others from many other threats aside from mass shooters, and allows you to take a more 'active' role in your community's defense if you wish.
As far as policies go, we need to strike a balance between safety and individual autonomy.
I've offered a compromise position for a long time now: Ban registered Democrats from owning guns.
I don't see anything wrong with restricting the gun ownership rights of those who don't believe in gun ownership rights, and they should leap at the chance to get ~30% of the population to give up firearms. By their very own logic this is a step in the right direction.
I somehow doubt they'd take up the offer.
faceh
11mo ago
If we posit the world where the guns are removed, you've just made it so that physical prowess is solely determinant of success in violent encounters.
Which is to say, you're making females less able to resist male attackers, or allowing organized groups to terrorize individuals more freely, or make it harder for the old and infirm to defend themselves.
This leaves aside the generally observed tendency towards government tyranny become gradually (or suddenly) more harsh against disarmed populations.
And of course probably going to see a rise in Cars as tool of mass homicide
faceh
11mo ago
Almost all of those policy proscriptions is less likely to work for the simple fact that 3D printers go BRRRRRR
This is the point I want to hear you explain your perspective on.
If we've granted that taking the life of the animal is acceptable, it doesn't seem 'plain wrong' to do anything else to them, if no other humans are harmed or involved.
I'm not trying to create a gotcha here, I really want to get the reasoning at play.
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