jay-barronville

To be frank, in my book, relative to inadvertently being fingerprinted and tracked wherever I go, I consider being consistently faced with “let’s confirm you’re not a robot” popups and pages to be a minor inconvenience.

> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

> Zuck: Just ask.

> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks.

> Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

The sad thing is, he was totally right. The Zuck gets none of my data.

> But also yes to the cops arresting a kid who posts on social media that he’s gonna kill all his classmates tomorrow morning.

I think that everyone (yes, literally everyone) would agree that direct incitements and threats of violence such as this would be fine to censor and deal with appropriately. As a free speech advocate, I know a lot of folks with free speech absolutist views yet I don’t know a single person who’d be against any of that.

The reality though is that, in practice, these extreme examples tend to be used to justify censorship only to end up making the rules vague and subjective enough that, sooner or later, folks start being censored for wrongthink.

Also, “moderation” is just a soft term for censorship.

> That is to say I broadly agree with the notion that speech should be relatively unfettered, but I do believe there must be exceptions for speech that actively aims to fetter people. We must limit speech that advocates limiting the freedoms of people to live as independent and equal citizens.

While absolute free speech remains unattainable in practice due to inevitable societal boundaries, it should serve as an aspirational ideal toward which we continually strive, minimizing deviations rather than expanding them. Speech restrictions often and quickly devolve into subjectivity, fostering environments where only dominant ideologies prevail.

So, of course, by all means, restrict speech that harms children, incites violence, etc., but be very careful to not open that door too widely.

Hard agree. I’m always trying to get my fellow young Americans to understand this and it seems to go right over their heads a lot of times. My parents lived through multiple oppressive dictatorships before emigrating to America. Once I understood everything that they and their families experienced (e.g., family members being kidnapped, disappeared, and eventually murdered simply due their political views), I gained a much deeper appreciation for our Constitution (in particular, our Bill of Rights).

Nowadays, watching how easy it is to get folks to give in to censorship and tyranny for psychological “safety” scares me sometimes (especially when it’s all due to politics).

No matter what someone’s views are (and how offensive I may find them to be), I’ll never ever advocate for their censorship, because I understand where that can lead. Today, it’s your opponent; tomorrow, it’s you.

> These governments that block social media or control/monitor the internet to avoid critics of government or dissent, whether that be Nepal, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, Germany, China, Egypt, US, Russia, Israel, are always shocked when there is an uprising.

I beg to differ. I don’t think that any of these governments are shocked that the people eventually fight back. I think that they simply make the mistake of underestimating the power of the people (especially when united) and severely overestimating their ability to suppress the people and their dissent. That’s how tyranny works.

That said, freedom of speech is always worth fighting for! Once you lose your right to speak freely, it’s only a matter of time before you start to lose everything else.

> Bold of you to assume the majority of developers can read code.

Haha. Bold indeed.

As much as it’s true that there’s stochasticity involved in just about everything that we do, I’m not sure that that’s equivalent to everything we do being a stochastic process. With your dart example, a very significant amount of the stochasticity involved in the determination of where the dart lands is external to the human thrower. An expert human thrower could easily make it appear deterministic.

I think that both of you are right to some extent.

It’s undeniable that humans exhibit stochastic traits, but we’re obviously not stochastic processes in the same sense as LLMs and the like. We have agency, error-correction, and learning mechanisms that make us far more reliable.

In practice, humans (especially experts) have an apparent determinism despite all of the randomness involved (both internally and externally) in many of our actions.

> You aren’t specifying your point of comparison. A nightmare relative to what? You might be saying a nightmare relative to what we have now. Are you?

Very fair point.

And no, it’s less about the status quo and more about AI being the default. There are just too many reasons why this proposal, on its face, seems problematic to me. The following are some questions to highlight just a few of them:

- How exactly would “human creators [applying] their own digital signatures to the original pieces they created” work for creators who have already passed away?

- How fair exactly would it be to impose such a requirement when large portions of the world’s creators (especially in underdeveloped areas) would likely not be able to access and use the necessary software?

- How exactly do anonymous and pseudonymous creators survive such a requirement?

> If a piece of work lacks such signature, it should be considered AI-generated by default.

That sounds like a nightmare to me.

Congratulations on getting hired in this garbage market! I wish you well!

> he's 100% the type of person to lean into the controversy it creates

Except, objectively speaking, he actually did NOT do that. He basically just ignored the “controversy” because it was such an obviously false narrative meant only to smear him that I’m sure he had enough faith in most Americans who aren’t consumed by partisanship to see it exactly for what it was.

> At that time, building favor with trump voters was good for him.

Your implication here seems to be that Trump voters, en masse, want folks who are doing Nazi salutes, or am I misunderstanding you?

Exactly. It’s so obvious that Musk didn’t do a Nazi salute that I can’t believe that anyone who considers themselves to be a serious person would still be pushing that. There’s no way that someone can watch the video of that situation and come to a good-faith conclusion that that’s what he was doing.

If the standard is that low, I could easily produce a compilation video of the likes of Obama, Biden, Harris in compromising positions appearing to show them doing things that they obviously weren’t doing.

Partisanship has turned everyone into dishonest and uncharitable actors, and it’s so unfortunate.