We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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I think you confuse keeping secrets with censorship. The people who knew the details of D-Day or of the breaking of Enignma absolutely agreed to keep those secrets prior to learning the details. There is nothing tyrannical about criminal penalties against people who consent to keep classified secrets knowing there is such a penalty.

Your comment applies to yourself more than parent comment. It's hard to think of any systemic oppression that wasn't enabled by censorship.

You can tell leaders are lying about how much they care about CSAM by how they reacted to the Jeffery Epstein scandal. They look the other way even when named specific individuals with strong evidence show up. Stop trusting the oppressors.

Is this the same guy that proved time travel was possible by generating a negative energy density gravitational lens using any common coffee maker?

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A license that forbids use in a commercial use is no license at all for use cases that matter. This is disclosed source, not open source. It maybe helps some researchers, but even for them, I'd prefer they work with solely open source, since my tax dollars fund them, so I want to benefit directly from their output, which means giving me code that I can use without restriction.

I heard an interesting observation that a lot of the price increases are driven by price-gouging rather than supply shortages since the price stayed high after supply chain blockages cleared, and continued to rise. Oil prices are well off peak levels as well and doesn't account for the rising prices in the various goods and services. Essentially, companies observe that consumers expect that prices are going up in this inflationary period, therefore they've got a greenflag to raise prices on consumers. Normally you'd hope that a competitor would undercut them by selling cheaper and stealing their share, but having also recognized the opportunity to raise prices and their margins, they too are taking advantage of the opportunity to raise prices rather than attempt to take market share. The incredible growth in corporate profits and margins is both evidence and incentive for this behavior.

If this observation holds true then, raising interest rates doesn't stop the price inflation, because supply shortage wasn't the cause of the price inflation anyway, it was market sentiment that everyone can raise their prices. So the main tool of the Fed to combat inflation may not be relevant to the type of inflation we're seeing today. In which case, new tools for combating price inflation may be needed. Price manipulation is heavily frowned upon because in the past it was foolishly wielded to disastrous results by setting prices below cost of production, causing supply shortages and skyrockets blackmarket pricing. However, if price ceilings are set to curb unjustiable price growth in an inflationary period, at a level where it's still profitable to continue producing at existing margin levels, then hypothetically it'd be possible to stop inflation more directly. The challenge of course is figuring out how to implement such a mechanism without the many many unintended consequences it could incur if such direct action is carelessly applied.

Yeah, the federated sites are a lot less intuitive than Reddit. I feel like the kbin one is a lot more reddit-like in look and feel though, maybe it'll get there someday, but I don't know if it's good enough as a substitute today.

Can the federated social media system scale to handle something like Reddit's volume? Technologically, I'm guessing that it can, but does the model impose costs on instance owners in a way that'd be impractical for them to scale to that kind of volume?

Yes, I'll definitely miss Reddit.

People keep saying:
1) It's easy to set up a replacement.
2) No good alternatives exist.

If both of those 2 claims are true, that's an inherently unstable state. Here I am back on Slashdot after being away for so many years because after clicking through several of those alternatives, so I'm pretty confident #2 is true. I'm thinking #1 is wrong. I've checked out those federated social media sites and the barrier to entry is too high for it to ever scale to be anything like Reddit. Low barrier to entry is an absolutely essential quality for growing fast enough to hit critical mass and see accelerating growth.

Also, who would want to invest in building another Reddit if the predecessor(s) are so thoroughly unprofitable and fickle?

Perhaps someday a good alternative will come, maybe not, but I think that in the best case it'll be a long wait for a replacement, and more likely, a replacement won't come and people will just silo into passive consumption of Instagram, tiktok 1-way postings rather than large-scale conversational forums.

Rather than see grading end, I'd prefer to see this nonsense end. It's just an obvious attack on the concept of merit based achievement. They arrived at this conclusion by working backwards from their equality of outcomes axiom. Sorry, that axiom is false. It's from the same people who want kids to stop keeping score in sports. Everyone should be paid millions to be a professional baller, right. If we are all equal, then I should be tied with LeBron for all time scoring, along with everyone else.

The purpose of grades is to make most students work harder. Measurement is actually the secondary purpose to motivation. You learn more by setting and then meeting a self-imposed standard for your understanding that you reasonably expect to align with the grading scale. When I ran out of classes to take in graduate school, I had developed this skill of setting self-expectations during learning to the level that grades were no longer necessary. That was really hard to achieve and it's the most valuable thing I got out of graduate school, actually (learning how to learn on my own) but it could NOT have been achieved without a couple reality checks that happened when I went into tests thinking I had mastered the material, when I hadn't and the grading scale is what revealed this.

Being able to learning without grades what a masters degree represents. It's fiction to pretend that's what a bachelors represents and to say it's what a high school diploma represents is beyond stupid, more on the willful deceit level. The higher education system in the US has traditionally been a source of competitive advantage for the US, but it's failing harder and harder in both directions: it's offering less and costing more and both are trending in very bad directions. We need disruptive change in education now or we will lose this national advantage.

Yeah, this automobile thing isn't very innovative either. Sure you get around a little faster than horse and buggy, but not much and there's so much more infrastructure that's needed.

In all seriousness, smart chatbots are clearly a major breakthough. It's not clear if chatGPT has an exclusive quality. I expect to see a whole industry of smart chatbots that can tailor to different domains. What's not clear is if chatGPT specifically will be around in 5 years, but something in the space will be.

The real question is what the societal effects of the chatbot genre will be. I think this is yet another major diminishment in the value of many college degrees.

It's good to talk about global risks to humanity, true. I just don't like the choices for what they consider the biggest threats. Ignoring the risk of malevalent AI and demographic/fertility collapse are major oversights. Putting covid and climate change on now (as opposed to years ago) is kind of absurd. In 2023, I'd argue the long term view of each is substantially better than it was in say 2020.

There is no scientific basis for the claim that climate change or covid are existential threats to humanity. Climate change will certainly cause economic upheaval and extinction for many non-human species, but the fusion, fission, and green energy progress of late should easily take the worst case scenarios off the table long term. The worst case never threaten human existence in any reasonable way.

The covid alarm is just absurdly late, and in 2023 the prognostics are that we've turned the corner for the positive. The pandemic is over. Covid just another disease now. Policy wise, we clearly overreacted and need big improvement on how to have real time policy making as biological science of new diseases evolve. Too many policies were adopted without clear guidance for how to end them. Stupid policies caused a loss of credibility and trust that ultimately caused significant harm. For example, the disruptions to the fertilizer supply chain caused by covid policies could easily cause widespread famines this year and next year that will kill more people than died of the actual disease.

Tesla has never done any marketing. Also, Musk bought in to Tesla as majority shareholder within a year of its founding and has led it as CEO since shortly afterwards. Yes, technically it existed before he got there but everything worthwhile has happened under his tenure.

The first amendment constrains the government, not corporations, so tech censorship can never violate the first amendment. However, Texas passed this law, which regulates a commercial activity in the social media space. The first amendment issue here is whether the companies can claim this law violates their first amendment protection. I read the 5th circuit opinion and I found their argument pretty persuasive that the typical social media company does not participate in the content creation process enough to qualify for first amendment protect.

The social media companies aren't the ones creating user content, so it's a question of whether they act as a publisher exercising "editorial control". The 5th circuit found the typical social media company does no editing of content at all. This requires they revise and modify content prior to its publication. Responding, after the fact, to user complaints means they have already published the work without editing it and so the censoring simply controls the duration of an unedited publication. The 5th circuit also found that media companies are not accountable on either the reputation or legal liability fronts for the content. That this is true, in part, due to section 230, means Congress recognized social media companies aren't responsible for editing content. Shouldering accountability for content is the foundation for why editorial control is part of protected speech. Since social media moderation doesn't create or edit the underlying content, it is fair game for legislative regulation from states.

Argentina is not banning emoji, Italy is not requiring all babies to be dressed in pink or blue, and Morocco is not going to require GPS to tax bicycles by the mile.

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