domain:slatestarcodex.com
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
(5) LEWD OR LASCIVIOUS MOLESTATION.--
(a) A person who intentionally touches in a lewd or lascivious manner the breasts, genitals, genital area, or buttocks, or the clothing covering them, of a person less than 16 years of age, or forces or entices a person under 16 years of age to so touch the perpetrator, commits lewd or lascivious molestation.
An offender 18 years of age or older who commits lewd or lascivious molestation against a victim 12 years of age or older but less than 16 years of age commits a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084
See also
(7) LEWD OR LASCIVIOUS EXHIBITION.--
(a) A person who:
- Intentionally masturbates;
- Intentionally exposes the genitals in a lewd or lascivious manner; or
- Intentionally commits any other sexual act that does not involve actual physical or sexual contact with the victim, including, but not limited to, sadomasochistic abuse, sexual bestiality, or the simulation of any act involving sexual activity in the presence of a victim who is less than 16 years of age, commits lewd or lascivious exhibition.
(c) An offender 18 years of age or older who commits a lewd or lascivious exhibition commits a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084
I could go on with all the Florida statutes he could have been charged under, but I don't have all night.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
Sûre, I eat hunted meat when practical- and happily point this out to ethical vegans- for health and animal cruelty reasons. I have western-typical ideas about eg dogfighting even if I think no-kill shelters are impractical and cause too many problems.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
How much of what was admitted to was actually illegal at the time? It’s not illegal to show people your underwear, even if it will likely result in being asked to leave a public place- but had these girls went to Walmart like that they would have been charged with trespass, not a sexual performance or whatever. Masturbating in front of the girls and touching them with a vibrator might legitimately have been loopholes in the law- it’s entirely possible that the girl would have had to have touched his penis to trigger statutory.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
On an intellectual level? I'm well aware that people are using LLMs for smut. I just never looked into the... specifics of it. I regret to say that I think the I read all of the Evangelion stuff, I got off the train when the beastiality station was the next stop. Or is it even beastiality if it's a dragon fucking a pony? Only Satan knows.
If I want titillation, I'm opening PornHub. Text isn't my jam, but if it's yours then I'm not one to actually judge. From a purely technical standpoint, it all came across as competent, probably way better than the average literotica writer.
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
If citizenship is not a matter of ethnic belonging (i.e. an intersection of familial and cultural ties), it must then be ideological, which necessarily means exercising discretion and control over the ideologies of people allowed in
This is a false dichotomy. There are a lot of other possibilities around which to organize citizenship. In the Roman republic and empire, it was for example build around collective military aid: polities on the Italian peninsula which were subjugated by Rome and fought side by side with the legions were eventually granted citizenship. In the French foreign legion, it is individual military aid: mercenaries who are willing to die for French interests get French passports for their service. Or a lot of cultures were willing to integrate women who married their citizens, willingly or otherwise. In Tír na nÓg , citizens and immigrants share a metatype. In Israel, immigrants and citizens (mostly) share a religion (which is only an ideology in the widest sense of the word).
Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom. Having opinions about which group should murder which somewhere in the old world seems pretty orthogonal to that.
Some rights are clearly citizen rights -- the right to vote is a clear example. Some other rights are basically human rights, and should naturally apply to any human under the power of the state. The right to free speech, freedom of religion, due process, confront their witnesses, or the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments are examples of the latter.
Ideally, I would not want the government to change people's immigration status based on any actions which are not actually criminal (or at least narrowly concerning immigration, such as "lying on your visa application"). A world in which each free country has an LLM which searches if visa applicants have made any statement the ruling party does not like and automatically rejects them is not a freer world than one where no free country does such a thing.
thejdizzler
5hr ago
I think this is the crux of the disagreement. We both have axiomatically different reasons for holding our positions. There’s no reasoning across that gap. I’m not going to convince you, and you aren’t going to convince me.
However, it seems from the last paragraph that if we could provide adequate amounts of meat/protein with less suffering you would be in support of that. As would I think most users on this form. That seems like a much more fruitful focus of vegan political efforts than the bullshit that PETA wastes its funding on.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
So you'll often see libertarians defending Corporations, Universities or NGOs for trampling your rights (It's a private entity, it can do whatever it wants!), while they condemn the government for doing the same
To play devil’s advocate(and to be clear I am not a libertarian, even if I don’t like the government very much)- a lot of the reason corporations and universities are on one side of the culture war in particular is due to government policy making it hazardous to take the other side. Theoretically in a libertarian world conservative universities wouldn’t be limited to small religious liberal arts colleges.
hydroacetylene
5hr ago
I do not think animal suffering is a good, or even neutral thing, exactly, but I don’t think it’s in the same category of human suffering- it’s an ordinary evil similar to soil degradation from mono cropping or similar. No, I don’t see gorillas or elephants or whales as meaningfully different in that regard, even if they’re as smart as a child. I don’t care if harambe or dumbo or shamu are as smart as a child they don’t have the moral worth of one, it’s a qualitative difference not quantitative. To my way of thinking elephants are rarer than rats and so killing one should be a much higher bar to clear, but there isn’t a moral problem with shooting a depredating elephant from a helicopter in the same way that there isn’t a moral problem with setting a rat trap.
That’s why I don’t worry about shrimp eyestalk ablation or farrow crates. Doing these things for no reason would be profoundly evil. Doing them to have affordable animal protein is as necessary as tilling fields; and having almost everyone in society eat meat every day is a straightforwardly good thing so much so as to be miraculous, for child development reasons if nothing else.
Supah_Schmendrick
5hr ago
how do we address the issue I mentioned of idealogy changing constantly?
This is the price we pay for being a propositional nation; the proposition changes as the populace does...when the melting pot itself melts and Jeffersonian democracy wears away to nothing, there's a fight over how to replace it. And like most fights, there's swings back and forth until a new consensus emerges.
wayfarer
5hr ago
I don't think there is a complex allegory hiding behind the Avatar movies.
that would imply it being intentional
I see rather it as hilarious exploration of completely unintentional rejection of nature and accidentally revealing that self-proclaimed environmentalist does not understand nature, rejects it and prefers advanced tech.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
The gourmet vegan diet you’re referring to is available to most regular vegans, though. Rice and beans are, famously, among the cheapest things in the grocery store, veggies aren’t expensive, and even the expensive parts like avocados are still cheaper than meat.
Regular vegans don’t eat like gourmet vegans, I suspect, for the same reasons regular meat eaters don't eat like my home-cooked French-Mexican fusion food made with wild game.
I'm about 75% of the way through wiring TRON helmet bike LEDs and the second joint I soldered together is already kind of janky and the connection now winks in and out as I wiggle the LED strips. Either my first few joints just sucked but it'll get better as I finish or I need to give up on this approach and use those bulky connectors kits after all.
Previous discussion of my possibly-too-jank method so far here https://www.themotte.org/post/2271/tinker-tuesday-for-july-22-2025/349091?context=8#context
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
6hr ago
Ok, now look up “BNWO.”
While i agree with the overall thrust of your critique i want to harp on this bit
Will he change his mind if someone presents a chess-focused LLM with a high ELO score?
...i think that part of the problem is a wide-spread failure on the part of Freddie and the wider rationalist community to think clearly and rigorously about what "intelligence" is supposed to mean or accomplish. It is true that by restricting an LLM's training data to valid games of chess documented in the correct notation and restricting it's output to legal moves you can create an LLM that will play chess at a reasonably high level. Just as it is also true that a LLM trained on an appreciable portion of the entire internet and with few if any restrictions on its output will be outperformed by a computer program written in the 70s. The issue is that your chess llm is not going to be a general tool that can also produce watercolor paintings or summarize a YouTube videos, its going to be a chess tool and is thus being evaluated within that context. If stockfish can reach a similar ELO using less compute why would you use anything else? One of the weird quirks of LLMs is that the more you increase the breadth of thier "knowledge"/training data the less competent they seem to become at specific tasks for a given amount of compute. This is the exact opposite of what we would expect from a thinking reasoning intelligence, and i think this points to a hole in the AI booster and AI doomers reasoning which is that the G in AGI is arguably far more operative than the I.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
6hr ago
It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?
Familial/tribal/ethnic loyalties? Nobody is born into a void, into the "view from nowhere"; we're all born into a particular place, a particular family, particular conditions; embedded in a specific social context, full of unchosen bonds and obligations, which indelibly shape who we are.
You (generic/rhetorical "you," not making any assumptions here) love your family not because they're "the best family" according to some prior metric, you love your family because they're yours. Much the same with patriotism. To quote Chesterton, "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
erwgv3g34
6hr ago
Wait, seriously? You are an LLM evangelist and you have never even thought about doing this? Come on. The internet is for porn; there must be something you want to read.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
Meanwhile FIRE has been pretty consistent in criticizing both the left and right, and even defending their opponents right to speech. It's like the early ACLU protecting the rights of KKK.
This attitude seems certainly praiseworthy. The principled org willing to piss off people on both sides of the CW is much more credible than any organization which only cares about their pet issue when it benefits their side.
Also, calling a freedom of speech organization FIRE (in caps) is brilliant naming.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
6hr ago
We could do a Mr Glass / Unbreakable cosplay lol
True story; in college me and my buddies were fucking around in the park at night and my friend jumped out of a tree and accidentally did a flying knee with his full weight right to my collarbone from 10ft up, hurt like shit but I got up and we kept messing around, went and got beers.
Next morning I went to class and then went to work. My shoulder was killing me but I just kept working.
Finally after a week without it getting better I went to the doctor after my girlfriend wouldn’t let up.
Turns out I had a hairline fracture and I had been just walking around like it was nothing. Only time I’ve ever “broken” something.
Both my girls are built like tanks too, so it’s definitely genetic.
Rov_Scam
7hr ago
But the above makes me wonder - the initial girl (Jane Doe) was 15, yes? So if there is evidence (or at least accusations) that he got 15 year old girls to strip down to their underwear, 'massage' him while he was naked, and he used vibrators on them and/or jerked off in their presence, then paid them - surely that is something more than "well he did a little bit naughty in paying for a massage from an unlicensed person"?
I'll preface this by saying that I don't have access to full transcripts of OPR interviews with the people from the State's Attorney's office, and while the grand jury transcripts have been released, I can't find anything specifying what charging options were presented. But my speculation based on what has been released is this: The State's Attorney was concerned about the ethical implications of charging Epstein with prostitution-related offenses without charging the prostitutes themselves. Krischer had previously charged girls as young as 14 with prostitution, but he clearly recognized that the girls here had been taken advantage of, and the office was uneasy about charging witnesses who came forward.
I think that more importantly, though, Epstein was already offered a misdemeanor plea he refused, and if he tried to nail his ass to the wall he'd be looking at a trial that would be a fucking mess. You mention credibility issues, but it's not just a matter of whether the jury believes the girls, but whether the jury believes they were abused. Remember, this was a time when the public was sneering at kids like this on a daily basis, as Maury Povich sending incorrigible teens off to boot camp was mainstream (if lowbrow) entertainment. It wasn't so much that a jury wouldn't believe what happened, but that they wouldn't be able to view the girls as victims. Adding to the problem, the case hinges on the girls testifying to all of this bad behavior in open court, and even if you can keep some of it out, the fact still remains that they have to admit to prostituting themselves, some on multiple occasions, and to recruiting other girls to do the same thing.
These days juries are much more sympathetic to the idea that kids in these kinds of situations often have serious problems, and it's easier to paint a guy like Epstein as someone who recognized how vulnerable they were and took advantage of them. But it wasn't clear yet in 2006. Federal prosecutions require a grand jury indictment, but in state court the normal procedure is to file an "information", which results in some kind of preliminary hearing in front of a judge to determine if there's probable cause to go to trial. Grand juries are only used in unusual situations; they can be investigative tools since witnesses can testify under subpoena, and they're often used for complicated cases involving organized crime, public corruption, etc. I think that the decision to take the Epstein case to the grand jury was a consequence of the State's Attorney's uncertainty about how a jury would react to the evidence, especially in the face of an aggressive defense. It would give them a chance to defer the charges to somebody else, rather than filing the charges police wanted them to file and taking the chance that the case would fall flat.
As I said, I don't know what charging options the grand jury was given, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that the charges the police were pushing for were among the options. After the transcripts were released last year, prosecutor Lanna Behlolovick was criticized extensively in the media for apparently sandbagging her case by only having two girls testify and bringing up all the bad behavior. I disagree with this assessment. I think she knew that the defense was going to bring it up at trial and she wanted to see how a jury would react. One difference between grand juries and trial juries is that grand jurors have the opportunity to question witnesses, and the questions asked by the grand jurors don't evidence much sympathy. Some of them made glib comments to that effect. This was especially the case when a detective presented the evidence of other girls who had been abused (hearsay is admissible in grand jury proceedings), and they weren't at any risk of offending the girls directly. If they were offered a full slate of charges but only indicted on the solicitation charge, it's evidence that the case was a loser. There's also evidence that the grand jury's unwillingness to indict factored into Acosta's decision to seek a pre-indictment plea, since a Federal jury wasn't likely to be any better on that front. Having immersed myself in this whole mess, it causes me to wonder what the public reaction would be now if Epstein had been charged with serious crimes but acquitted. Would this even be something we're talking about now?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
Besides general American values, how do we address the issue I mentioned of idealogy changing constantly?
Evidence indicates that we fight, with ever-increasing viciousness, over unilateral enforcement of our tribally-preferred ideologies, and the devil take the hindmost.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
7hr ago
They could have been a game changer, but that was conditioned on them containing child pornography, or worse, containing evidence that he transmitted CP over the internet.
That's such a huge game changer, and should be painfully obvious to any prosecutor with experience. Possession of CP triggers all kinds of mandatory minimums that increase the prosecution's leverage by absurd amounts (federally, anyway. I don't know if Florida law has mandatory minimums for it). Even a 1% chance of the computers containing it dramatically changes the case, and it's a tiny mental stretch made by prosecutors every day to say, "hey, we're investigating this guy for sex crimes, perhaps he's a CP collector, too."
You could be right that his homemade videos at the time would be worthless in strengthening the case against him with regards to the known victims. But the chance of finding CP has had every prosecutor I've dealt with jumping at the chance to seize every single electronic device possible from suspects. Proving a hands-on offense with a victim with credibility and reliability issues is tricky; proving possession of CP doesn't have those problems. I don't have training materials from USAO from that era, but even in 2005, I have a hard time believing it wasn't common knowledge that finding CP on a suspect's computer was the "easy win" button.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
7hr ago
I'm fine with that. Surely deactivating an artificial womb before perusing the robot is going to be more reliable than ordinary birth control.
it's usually a sub/dom sorta thing involving racial stereotypes or slurs at the low end
Okay. Still not that tawdry given the context being pornography. I suppose they had to draw a line somewhere. An erotic literature version of Brown Sugar would be a bit much. And not like they have an objective way of drawing the line that would satisfy my understanding of what is more or less extreme.
If that Libertarian world were less than completely theoretical, or if the Libertarian movement gave any indication that they had a method of getting us there, this might weigh heavier of the deliberations of former libertarians.
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