DharmaPolice

>So I'm supposed to believe that the intent of publicly announcing e.g. the HuggingFace incident was to simultaneously persuade investors that the technology will rocket ahead, and also to persuade governments that it needs to be thwarted?

No, you're not "supposed to believe" anything. I was responding to your point about it being difficult to believe (i.e. requiring mental gymnastics) that companies would try to spin a story differently for investors and the government. They do that all the time.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. SO was helpful many times but also there were many instances where I found someone asking exactly my question only to see the question was closed as a duplicate of another question which didn't have the same specific issue as I was experiencing.

It seems like their rules sometimes biased towards older questions/answers which in fast changing areas that's the wrong way round.

I don't think it takes mental gymnastics to believe that corporations want the government to believe one thing and investors another. You see the same thing in a number of other areas.

WhatsApp doesn't have any option to enable/disable encryption for standard messages that I can see. Business chat messages are not encrypted and neither are backups (by default) but if Alice messages Bob on a fresh WhatsApp install, the message is E2EE (as far as I know). Is that incorrect?

>Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?

Yes, it would be both of those things. Imagine it the other way round, you create the atom perfect copy of you (which we'll assume has all your memories, intelligence, emotions, etc) and it kills you. Is that murder? The answer would seem to be yes. So why would the reverse be any different? Because you created them? We don't give parents the right to kill children once they're born so creation doesn't give you special rights over another sapient creature. The fact you've built them to expire/vanish just feels like a method of murder, but even if not then slavery still applies.

If you're talking about a clone which somehow didn't have your brain in it's current state or capacity then it's a different question. If you could create a human being with the brain of a chicken (obviously impossible for such a creature to survive) then they wouldn't be treated like a normal human. But I think public policy would frown on creating such abominations.

Trying to access this site on my corporate Windows laptop and it was blocked "by your IT admin" (in Windows itself, not the browser/proxy). So it's already on some kind of list.

As someone who used to go clubbing a lot there was more social interconnections than you might expect. Excluding tourists most of the people you met ended up being people who knew people you knew. Men/women with behavioural issues would often get a reputation. And there was a culture (especially among women, understandably) of warning someone if it looked like they were about to hook up with someone known to have some sort of form.

When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.

That's an interesting analogy as a lot of Factorio players feel like the game becomes fun when you gets bots (to the point where there are mods so you start the game with them).

For me, the individual placing of items gets pretty tedious. Solving nuclear power is interesting once but placing the same thing a second, third or tenth time is pretty dull.

The challenge of Factorio shifts throughout the game - initially you're worrying about individual metal plates and then you're dealing with belts full and then it's entire sections of your factory. This is why the Space Age DLC is so fun, it adds an entire new dimension of worrying about getting things between planets in a timely fashion.

Eventually the final boss is UPS (basically the performance of the game on your computer). Suddenly "the factory must grow" stops being the solution to your problems and usually makes things worse.

I don't think it ever reaches "vibe coding" levels - true, you can end up not knowing how part of your factory works but it's still a lot more active than just typing in a bunch of prompts.

That's why I said "little bit more difficult". It's additional friction for people wanting to check these things on the fly.

I agree one should be suspicious by default but the two scenarios are a bit different. Having 300k followers is an audience which an advertiser would definitely pay to access. Having 300k karma doesn't mean that anyone will listen to your next post any more than anyone else. It might prove you are "good at Reddit" in some sense (or at least, heavily invested in posting there).

>There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind.

Maybe not their state of mind but if you have access to people's betting history you can very likely identify people who are "problem gamblers", especially if you also ask them their annual income when they become a customer (I have no idea whether they do this in the US, but they do on UK sites and will suspend your account if your betting exceeds certain thresholds).

You certainly wouldn't even AI to spot people who are chasing their losses for example.

As to whether they should be obliged to care, I'm not sure. But through public policy you can make it their problem.

I suppose it depends on what the level of proof you need for your purposes. If someone is promoting Sony products at what feels like disproportionate rates then I don't necessarily want the person banned, but it would be useful to just filter that person out.

There's an additional problem that if an increasing number of people are getting their search results via AI summaries, the AI fetch bot is obviously including all this astroturfing.

There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.

This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.

I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.

By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).

I feel like most of these schemes to categorise data as "public but not really" are ultimately doomed to failure. Even if you could trust every AI company in the world to respect these terms, is there anything stopping someone else indexing the data and selling them the information? I know there's copyright law but they're apparently ignoring that anyway.

Ultimately this reminds me of those really early social media profiles (before people understood privacy settings if they even existed) which would say "If you're not my friend you're not allowed to read this page".

If you don't want your content to end up in some database/archive don't publish it for the whole world to see.