mayhemducks

Okay now I'm kind of annoyed by this author's claims. They cite a meta-analysis while claiming: "... a 2024 analysis ... found that links between social media use and poor mental health among youth were small, inconsistent"

Following that link and reading the RESULTS paragraph: "The 143 studies reviewed included 1 094 890 adolescents and 886 effect sizes, 11% of which examined clinical samples. In these samples, a positive and significant meta-correlation was found between social media use and internalizing symptoms, both for time spent (n = 2893; r, 0.10; 95% CI, 0.02 to 0.18; P = .02; I2, 24.59) and user engagement (n = 859; r, 0.12; 95% CI, 0.09 to 0.15; P = .002; I2, 82.67). These associations mirrored those in community samples."

POSITIVE AND SIGNIFICANT meta-correlation.

WTF? This is just blatant lying by the author. I mean sure they could claim the effect is, in their opinion, relatively small, but the study claims the exact opposite of what the author of the article claims!

Less crime, fewer teen pregnancies, less smoking, less drug use, and lower high-school drop-out rates are also coincident with concerns about screen time and social media use. By the same "correlation is not causation" argument, these have nothing to do with each other. It's great that these things are trending in the right direction. But there are still a whole lot of mental health problems among pre-teens, teens, and younger adults.

Not all screen time is the same. Some of it is really beneficial to mental health, and some of it isn't.

For me, the concerns about mental health and screen time come more from issues of body image distortions, bullying, slot-machine mechanics to maximize engagement, and the somewhat rare but abhorrent behavior of some corners of the internet that encourage people to commit suicide. I'm sure there are more examples than this as well.

Oppenheimer was the guy who was pushing that opinion just as much as the military folks. In the case of AI, my understanding is that Amodei is not trying to beat the enemy to it.

What I don't understand is why the U.S. military is turning to a for-profit corporation when they could fund and pursue the development themselves. Why are they trying to "outsource" it to industry?

These two things, fingerprinting to fight CSAM, and the Apple Reference Image, are not the same. They have completely different goals and completely different implementations.

The system is not for detecting deepfakes. It is for proving that the data captured by an apple camera's sensor was not altered by some 3rd party hardware or software chain.

I had the same thought. Like if it's really that critical to make sure an image was not altered, go analog. You can't photoshop something that doesn't have pixels!

This was my immediate thought as well. Though I have not thought through any of the details, it did occur to me that the information needed would be in the "source" section of the header. I wonder if it is too much work to validate it somehow before using it?

I haven't ever done any programming at this layer of the stack, so I'm purely spitballing.

I'm sorry your parents sucked.

I sincerely hope that your ability to make better choices with your loved ones than your parents did with you brings you some comfort.

In my view, removing access to information from my child would be a sucky thing to do to him. But the choice to do so is not a luxury I enjoy thanks to the billionaire ruling class.

Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.

LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.

Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.

>>> I dislike engineers in general because most of them think like this. they have gone all in on embracing alienation in the marxist sense from their own work product and dont understand people who feel a sense of personal craft and ownership in something.

What? This is a very confusing statement...

The word engineer does not refer to only software engineers. And even if it did, I've never met an engineer who thought of their professional work as art. Are you sure you dislike engineers in general? 'Cause that's a pretty big group you just generalized about.

Have you not heard the classic joke? The optimist sees the glass as half-full. The pessimist: half-empty. The engineer sees the glass as twice as big as it needs to be.

This is the essence of engineering - solving problems safely, efficiently and economically.

Many engineers are craftspeople and artists. What makes you think they can't separate their professional duties from their other interests?

In keeping with the spirit of this author's unsolicited advice, I will say that I am quite unsure about the author's awareness of the ways that "tech" companies are behaving.

I say "tech" in quotes because they aren't "tech" companies anymore. They surveil, exploit customers, and engage in anti-competitive activities to maintain their golden egg laying geese.

I have a whole lot of reasons to be... UNSURE about being in tech. VERY UNSURE.

If this is about safety, am I being too naive & idealistic to think that a "Kamar-Taj" rule would solve some safety issues?

The "Kamar-Taj" rule is, no knowledge is forbidden, only certain practices. If a model gives you detailed instructions on how to kill all humans, the knowledge itself isn't the problem. The problem is the person who acts on it.