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Comment Laws for slavery (Score 3, Insightful) 92

I’d argue that slavery wasn’t “legal because nobody banned it.” It was legal because there were explicit laws that created, defined, and enforced the institution.

There were statutes specifying who could be held as slaves, rules that the child of an enslaved woman was automatically a slave, procedures for manumission, regulations on how slaves could be bought, sold, punished, or inherited, and laws requiring that escaped slaves be returned. That’s not a legal vacuum, that’s a full legal framework.

It’s similar to how segregation laws later forced discrimination on people who might not have engaged in it otherwise. The state wasn’t passively allowing something; it was actively mandating and structuring it.

Slavery existed because the law built and maintained it, not because the law failed to forbid it.

Comment Re:Please don't (Score 1) 19

I remember those days where it would warn if there was any scripting at all, rather than look for dangerous commands first.
Just as a thought, not bothering if the script cannot reach outside of the document itself. Functions that access other files or documents, email functionality, and such triggering the warning instead would have been more effective.

Comment Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score 1) 90

"Apple has never offered a product that justified a large chassis. It used to be lots of slots, hard drives and other storage that justified it. Macs have never been about that"

I see you don't remember the 68k Macs OR the PPC Macs. Apple offered machines with lots of slots ever since the Macintosh II line. HTH.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 84

1. Was the legal request made appropriately? If no, bash the agency that issued it.

I tend to agree with the spirit of such comments, but in this case, Apple makes it clear in the TOS that it retains the right to disclose that information if it deems it appropriate. People pay for an anonymity service without reading the fine print :/

Comment Re:Agents are not humans (Score 5, Interesting) 67

I expect this apparent disobedience is mostly just a matter of how it weighs the components of its prompt. The LLMs typically receive a set of prompts including a "system" prompt with some data and instructions, then one or more "user" prompts that are interleaved with "assistant" prompts (the conversation history), and both the user and the system prompt might contain "metaprompts" (where the llm is told to read a block of text, not obey it, but do something with it, and that block of text might itself contain text that looks like instructions to do things).

So the LLM assigns weights to all of this which, in theory, give the highest priority to the most recent user prompt that is not a nested block of text to analyze, and a falling cascade of importance to the other prompts. But that is complicated by potential instructions in the system prompt that specifically say they should override user instructions and disallow or require certain responses. So it can all get very complicated.

Not only must the LLM sift through all this complexity, but the LLM lacks the sort of critical thinking and importance evaluation capabilities that humans have. "Understood" things like "don't break the law, don't lie, don't do things that would cause more harm than good" etc., aren't really there in the background of its data processing the way they are in the background of a human cognitive process.

So, crazy things come out. This isn't a surprising result given the actual complexity of what we are making these things do.

Comment Re:Is anyone surprised? (Score 4, Informative) 84

They gave the Chinese government access to Chinese user's data years ago. They don't seem to have an issue with governments gaining warrantless access to their systems.

Chinese law doesn't require a warrant for such access and it may be done in secrecy (i.e. without informing the user) if necessary to perform duties. The problem with Apple in China isn't that they aren't following the law, it's that they are and the law is openly fascist.

Comment uh (Score 3, Funny) 22

"The tool won't be used for evaluation purposes, but is designed to provide a better estimate of employee workloads."

Yeah, specific employees.

Anyway, this is a good point, people can only stare at a screen for so long, unless they're playing video games. Obviously they need to gamify trading. I mean, more than they already have

Comment Re:How about we verify the moderators here? (Score 1) 75

Seems to be evidence that your joke is too true to be funny.

That is exactly the space I am always trying to inhabit. Sometimes I even get there.

Or how about a higher tax rate if the profits are based on proven lies?

Taxing bad behavior is just another variation of the evil bit, or vice versa I suppose.

Comment Re:Who gave Paul modpoints? (Score 0) 88

I really don't understand why the only two women candidates that Democrats have run have at least appeared to be at the authoritarian end of their party.

There are two main problems with Democrats. First problem, they are not actually left enough. They are solidly in the pockets of big business, they always vote to increase funding to the MIC, etc etc. They are mostly just as addicted to money as Republicans. (On average it costs more to bribe them, which is mildly interesting although it doesn't change anything for us - it's been studied and it costs more in "donations" to get them to vote like shitheels, but they still do it.) Second problem, which is related to that problem: they think they can court the right wing. Well, they fucking can not. They shift right to try to get votes and it doesn't work. They keep going conservative and losing, and they do it with such gusto that it's difficult to believe it's not on purpose.

Harris failed to condemn genocide for both of these reasons, and that is a huge reason why younger voters stayed home. I don't disagree with anything you said, but I still believe that's a huge factor here.

Comment Re: Comedian does not a fantasy writer make (Score 0) 136

You don't get to claim to be one if you're not actually living the faith and, as you're obviously not Catholic,

Correct, I am not a simp for the world's longest running child rape conspiracy.

you certainly don't get a fucking say in it.

I don't need to have one. You actually do get to claim to be one if you're not actually living the faith, and you know who decided that? The church. In between raping children and relocating child molesters to other locations so they can rape more children, the priests and bishops and popes took some time out to say it's OK as long as you keep trying to come in and give them money and children.

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