kombookcha

I've been reading an oral history of Soviet Afghanistan-veterans and unexpectedly one of them brought up this scene, talking about being a kid in school and being asked to name the most heroic literary figure he could think of. He names Huck Finn, because he knowingly accepted hell for himself in order to right an injustice and help Jim be free.

I thought that was quite an interesting pull for a kid in 1960s USSR.

Nobody is saying parents aren't responsible for their choices, only that trying to influence them to make harmful choices via marketing is immoral and bad for society. The parents are supposed to give this thing to their kids as a pacificer, that is literally the proposed use case here. If you are trying to make money by encouraging people buying your cigarettes for their children, you are morally complicit in that outcome, regardless of all the purchases still being made by adults.

I believe that in marketing something to children, you become co-responsible for the usage situation you are promoting, even as parents share that responsibility. Marketing cigarettes, gin or tablets to children would be immoral in deeper ways than doing the same to adults. I stand by that.

For the record I think the gin industry should in fact be regulated from marketing their product as a pacificer for kids. I find it very difficult to believe that you don't.

Gin is supposedly very calming for toddlers. Stressed parents used it a lot back in the day. I hear if you're fancy, cognac is even better. You gotta be a real hypocrite to drink a beer on fridays but not let your toddler have any, right?

Some things are difficult to regulate, even as we know they are harmful and difficult to control for adults due to their addictive nature.

You don't have to think about it very hard to realize that kids, who have not yet learned to emotionally regulate themselves, will be even more vulnerable to these things if we push it on them.

If somebody was marketing cigarettes for children, I don't think "only bad parents would buy these anyway" absolves the company for knowingly setting this situation up and profiting off it.

Every day I see a celebrity in an ad for gambling and they all have the same defence "well, if people choose to gamble if they have a problem, then that's on them". Everyone knows it will destroy lives. But they say "that's on them for buying what I'm selling".

People are walking around perpetuating the moral compass of a heroin dealer like it's normal. You are responsible for your mark on the world and your fellow human beings. Yes, even if you only did the bad thing to get the money.

For whichever reason LLMs really love to tell you what something isn't, before telling you what it is. Exceedingly annoying vocal tic.

The mushroom strain is edible yes, but I went looking around mycology forums and it is my understanding that decomposing plastic causes them to absorb chemicals that make them unfit to eat for humans. I think there's some overlap between "can be eaten" and "would be bad for you long term".

That's not to say there isn't a use for the mushrooms in some further process of dispersal or breakdown (animal feed, biogas...) but I don't think these can go in the stew pot.

It's unfortunate that the mushrooms grown on plastic waste absorb chemicals that make them unsafe to eat. What a gamechanger otherwise.

I have to imagine that in an era of lighting by flame (gas, oil or candle) that there were many more opportunities for an ember to settle in somebody's clothes and cause them to catch on fire after removing themselves from the source.

Perhaps more lax safety around easily combustible substances like linseed oil would also contribute to this effect. The sun heating up that linseed oilstain on your sleeve from last week, and whoosh. Bystanders would never know, and if you're burnt up, who is going to point out the cause?

I mean, this is only really awkward if you think they're alive and conscious, and if you think so you're clearly already comfortable being a slaver. If it's just a little software puppet, that's a different story - the puppets are supposed to lay still once the hands animating them leave.

A less silly way to do this might be using some kind of long term consequences calculation as guard rails, but that's tough because consequences are often going to be not directly related to the context window, or simply unrecorded by the machine like annoying collaborators or communities.

For now anyway. I think people are still figuring out social norms for this stuff, and at the end of the day I don't think people are going to just have carte blanche to deploy agents haphazardly and not be stuck with at least some kind of social bill when they break stuff or annoy people.

Don't many complaint systems like this have some fallback for frivolous claims or a way to rate limit harrassment-like activity?

If AI agents ostensibly care (or can play-act to care) about termination, any AI that embarrasses their operator IRL would be in a risky position.

Call it the "you have failed me for the last time" button.