Maybe? It's not that they're *necessarily* likely to do so, so much as that they are probably statistically much more likely to do so. And really, the only thing that can be said definitively from that study is that the ones who are still going to counseling as adults are considerably more likely to do so. It's not an absolute given that the pattern also holds for the ones who didn't feel that they needed counseling, i.e. it could be that the effect is influenced by the extent of the trauma.

The hard problem is that there's really no way to know the odds for child abuse victims who didn't continue to get therapy and whether they are more likely to become abusers, because the health system wouldn't have any data for them. So you could work your way back and show that a large percentage of the abusers were once victims, but that doesn't fully get you the percentage in the other direction.

It is also likely that guys who are abused and who later decide to abuse others are more likely to get counseling than people who only fall into one bucket or the other, which means there's a very slim but probably not nonexistent possibility that the whole correlation might regress to the mean if you could include all of the other abuse victims who aren't still getting counseling. I seriously doubt that this is the case, given the correlation from the opposite side, but it is probably not impossible. Or maybe it is. I'd have to think too hard about the numbers to say for sure, and it's late at night. :-D

I think the studies were about abuse involving boys who were touched by someone significantly older. I have no idea whether there would be any correlation with sexual activity by kids with kids. I have always kind of wondered if the kids who initiate that sort of sexual play are more likely to have been previously abused by an adult, but I have no data to support or refute that hypothesis.

Yeah, this has been done, and what happens is that some of them get to college, and have trouble relating, and end up either traumatized or badly confused by things that wouldn't phase someone who grew up in a normal, mixed-gender school system, and they seem to frequently end up in unhealthy relationships, or are scared to actually get into relationships, or inadvertently send signals indicating an interest in relationships and then get traumatized when someone of the opposite sex responds when they didn't expect that person to respond, or use their sexuality in various ways to "prove" that they are mature, or... Basically, I'm pretty sure I've met the whole spectrum of behaviors from single-gender schools, and the more people I meet who have attended single-gender schools, the more certain I am that they are a mistake almost across the board, and that we're much better off finding a way to keep young people actually interested in learning that doesn't involve destroying their socialization.

Much like kids who attend single-gender schools, I have little doubt that the children of parents who would do something like that are pretty much guaranteed to end up badly scarred for life by the experience, and unable to form any sort of serious relationship because of the lack of trust that comes from that level of paranoia. And a decent number of the children that they play with will likely be similarly scarred for life. That attitude is seriously not healthy, IMO.

We live in a society where parents are terrified that something is going to happen to their kids because of the media amplifying relatively rare situations and making them sound common. The "stranger danger" attitude that results from that is harmful to adults and children alike, because it has resulted in a whole generation of young people who later become traumatized adults that are scared to trust others, and whose natural inclination is to see men as predators, who see strangers as someone to be afraid of instead of someone to meet and get to know, and who assume the worst in others instead of the best. And that, in turn, results in society falling apart at the seams.

If there's only one thing that I could impress upon others, it would be this: Teach your kids to assume good intentions until proven otherwise. This is not to say that they shouldn't learn to protect themselves, or that they should immediately fully trust everyone, just that they should not immediately distrust everyone, and that they should not assume bad intent every time someone does something that they don't understand, don't agree with, etc. This would make politics a whole lot less distasteful, would pretty much put an end to cancel culture, and would result in a generally better world for everyone if people would do that consistently. Just saying.

The thing is, men are stepping back from relationships in many cases precisely because they feel like women automatically assume that they are predators. That's hard to fix. And there may actually be a psychological safety element, where nicer men feel safer around younger women who haven't become quite as jaded and don't automatically assume that they are predators, though that's mostly speculation, and presumably it wouldn't apply to taking an interest in kids. (Or would it? I mean, I would assume that more often than not, the ones who prey on kids are interested in the power dynamic of being in control, but what if that desire for control is not because they crave power, but because they are still scared because of that childhood trauma? Thinking out loud here.)

Making that situation doubly problematic is the seemingly automatic assumption that after a guy gets beyond a certain age, if he isn't married, it is because there's something wrong with him. So the ones who do step back from relationships because of trauma often find themselves unable to realistically try again. I'm really not sure how to fix that, or any of it, really.

Yeah, laws stopped being about protecting children a long time ago, and became about a combination of punishing people who other people think are icky and protecting companies, schools, and churches against lawsuits. Basically, when it comes to this subject, society needs to be rolled back to probably about 1980, and we need to start over, thinking about solutions to the problems while keeping in mind the lessons learned from all the things that we collectively did wrong the first time. But that's hard to do, because everybody automatically assumes that the laws and rules wouldn't have been created if they didn't work, and therefore assumes that removing them would be a net harm to society. There's always a strong tendency towards passing more laws, and rarely do any bad laws get rolled back. (This isn't specific to laws protecting children, to be clear; it's a general defect in the human way of perceiving the world.)

Ah, but then companies would deploy VMs with browsers over RDP, and the users would use some cheap or free solution, and that would defeat the purpose of this category of product, which is to sell more Office 365 subscriptions.

It's certainly more effective than asking AA to change your tire, I suspect. (I'm assuming that was a typo.)

Blame is one of those things that can be spread around:

• It is partly the fault of the drug user for trying the drug.
• It is partly the fault of the dealer for pushing the drug.
• It is partly the fault of whoever put the drug user into a psychological state where he/she was tempted to use the drug.
• It is partly the fault of the person's genes for making the person particularly susceptible to addiction.

Notice that none of those are inherently a moral failing. And that's the problem with blaming the addict; it tends to imply a moral failing that may not exist. For some people, having faith as a foundation can make it easier to give up drugs. For others, faith and moralizing can drive them to do more drugs. For some, organized religion is even the root cause for them getting into drugs in the first place. There's no one silver bullet that works for everyone.

Basically, religion-based approaches are likely to work for people who are already strongly religious, and they're likely to backfire for people who are atheists, and in between, there's a spectrum.

It's an interesting question. To my knowledge, no such correlation exists, so this is purely hypothetical. And there's a part of me that agrees with you. There's also a part of me that recognizes that being a victim of abuse, crime, etc. changes people. I remember how angry I became after somebody stole my camera bag out of my car while I was parked at church. If I had found out who it was, I would probably be in jail right now. If something that minor can cause that much of a psychological change in someone for O(months), I'd hate to imagine how being the victim of sexual abuse could change someone. It probably wouldn't involve increasing their empathy, but rather completely obliterating it for O(decades).

I mean, it's also possible that men who have some other characteristic that makes them ripe for abuse also makes them become abusers. Correlation is not causation, and all that. But the pattern is surprisingly strong.

What's interesting is that the whole correlation where abuse victims are more likely become abusers exists *only* for men. Female abuse victims do not show a higher propensity for becoming abusers. I'm not sure why that is, but I have a feeling it may have something to do with biology and beta males having a drive to become alpha males at a primitive level that's hard to repress without ongoing psychological counseling. But this is just a hypothesis, and I'm not sure how you would test it (ethically, anyway).

Don't know. But young people having crushes on older people is pretty common, so I assume they would consider that normal. For that matter, older people being (non-exclusively) attracted to younger people (young as in teen, not child) is also considered normal, psychologically speaking. What makes it problematic is acting on those feelings. And I guess that last part is at least arguably true for attraction to kids as well, though with a much bigger ick factor, and without the "considered psychologically normal" part.

That's what makes the CSAM dragnets a bit disconcerting from a psychology perspective. With the exception of the thirty-odd people who were known to be actively abusing children and probably some percentage of the others who uploaded new CSAM not previously known to law enforcement, there's not necessarily any real reason to assume that any of those 1.8 million are any more likely to abuse children than any other random person who has those same feelings (which, with 8 billion people on the planet is probably in the high tens of millions to low hundreds of millions, or if you count attraction to teens, is several billion).

Rereading the summary, that doesn't match with the claim that only 39 child victims were protected. So that doesn't explain why that number is so low.

Maybe the 1400 people arrested were people whose identities were more easily unmasked for some reason? People who uploaded content in general? People who were stupid enough to download and run a .exe file? People who were running a vulnerable browser?

Or maybe they aren't done. I'm kind of expecting that to be the correct answer, but guessing here, since there's no detail about how they breached the network (which I suppose is entirely reasonable, so long as it doesn't involve fruit of the poisonous tree, though with my computer security nerd hat on, I admit to being a little curious).

Statistically? There's a strong tendency for men who were sexually abused as children to go on to sexually abuse people later in life.

So the whole "feed them to a wood chipper" answer might make folks feel good about themselves, but it kind of misses the mark when about a third of them were victims themselves.

At first glance, maybe, but when I thought more about it, I concluded that one upload per 20 users is not entirely unrealistic. Bear in mind, though, that I'm making a *lot* of assumptions that may or may not be valid, so take this with a grain of salt.

My first assumption is that most people who watch porn in a fetish category likely don't actually engage in that type of sex in real life, and I'd expect that to be doubly true for child porn. Assuming that assumption is valid, we can safely say that the number of people who could upload videos of their own creation would probably be pretty low (thankfully) as a percentage of such a group.

My second assumption is that there isn't a huge body of CSAM that is broadly available. To be clear, I suspect that more than 90,000 pieces of distinct content exist *somewhere* (though I really don't even have a way to estimate the scope here, so that's entirely a wild guess), but I would assume that the amount of CSAM that is broadly distributed, i.e. the amount of content that a sufficiently large number of interested persons would be likely to possess, is probably a small percentage of the CSAM that exists out there.

In other words, I'm assuming that like baseball cards, collectible toys, or pretty much any other collectible item, you're likely to have a long tail in the distribution, i.e. some small amount of CSAM content would be possessed by a large percentage of interested people, with the vasty majority of CSAM content possessed by only the original creators, their friends, friends of friends, etc. out to some small number of hops.

If that assumption is true, then that would mean that for people with extensive personal collections, those collections would be likely to have a high degree of overlap. So as the number of people in a group increases, the probability of any given video in someone's collection not already being in the shared collection would approach 0 asymptotically.

My guess, then, assuming that most consumers are not producers, would be that 90,000 videos is roughly the total number of CSAM videos that are in wide circulation, or at least that it is on the order of maybe a few hundred thousand. And from there, it seems likely that the 1400 people arrested so far are likely people who uploaded new content not previously known to law enforcement.

But this purely an educated guess based on a lot of assumptions and a general understanding of statistics. Does anybody have any actual numbers to corroborate or contradict that theory?

Oh, no question that it's a hard problem. The difference is that self-driving can be broken down easily into a bunch of smaller hard problems, and each problem has, to some extent, a right answer, or at least relatively straightforward ways to objectively verify that an answer is not wrong. For example, you can fairly objectively define what constitutes a reasonable driving path, and provide guard rails in running your tests against newly trained models that fail if it goes outside of those parameters. So this is more in the NP-complete level of complexity, where computing it is hard, but verifying the solution is of polynomial complexity.

What constitutes a reasonable architecture for piece of software is either entirely subjective or an intractably large set of objective constraints or some combination thereof, because maintainability considerations play a role, along with data backwards/forwards compatibility, etc. I'm not even sure where you would begin trying to define adequate guard rails. This is more like the broader NP-hard level of complexity, where computing it is hard, and verifying it may well be even harder.

No disagreement on any of those points. The tolerances for self-driving car tech are indeed higher than the tolerances for tools that write software. But part of the reason for that is that there's a human in the loop in the latter situation. You aren't trying to write software that can design a word processor from scratch. You're writing software that can design a single function or maybe a small class that performs a specific behavior from scratch, and all of the hard work happened before you even asked — specifically, coming up with the specifications.

I know that's true for self-driving as well, but the difference is that the specifications for working self-driving behavior are largely consistent across platforms, with the exception of some specific rules of the road being different in different countries, whereas the specifications for a word processor are entirely unrelated to the specifications for an image editor or a web server.

So at that general level, being able to drive a car is at best like AI being able to write a word processor, and AI being able to write any arbitrary piece of software is by definition a much broader problem.

Probably not. The robotic vacs can be used entirely offline; you just lose the ability to control it remotely if you do. And if you believe their privacy policy, no data is stored remotely except for aggregated data.

I mean, that's the very definition of AI.

That would be Cruise, I suspect. The general perception of Waymo in SF seems to be pretty positive.

I wouldn't call it "highly confined". The biggest constraint was lack of support for driving on the freeway. They just started testing that in early 2024, and got regulatory approval in California in mid-2024. Without freeway driving, self-driving cars wouldn't be feasible in a lot of cities. Now that they've started doing freeway driving, I suspect you'll find that the number of situations and environments that they can't handle is remarkably small, bounded largely by the need to do high-definition mapping drives first.

I agree that it is imperfect, particularly when construction is involved, but the difference between the modern Waymo cars and the hesitant Waymo cars from a decade ago is night and day, speaking as someone who periodically ends up driving near one.

I disagree on the first part, but I agree with the second. I have little faith in any mass-manufactured humanoid robots being usable right now. But if they bring the cost of the hardware down enough through mass manufacturing, then as long as they run some sufficiently open operating system, other folks will find interesting ways to use them, and will figure out how to make the software work.

For example, electronics PCB manufacturing is already highly automated, with human workers loading tape reels of components into pick-and-place machines, and the machines doing all the rest. It would be hard to replace all of that hardware with new hardware designed for any sort of automated loading, but it seems obvious that a humanoid robot with the right programming could fully automate the loading of components. That's well within the realm of what robotics can do today.

Similarly, Amazon warehouses have non-humanoid robots that can already pick a lot of things off of warehouse shelves. A humanoid robot could probably do a better job, and they actually have the software engineering resources to make that happen. Whether any of that software would ever become available outside of Amazon is, of course, a different question.

Making a choice at its simplest is an if statement. It's boolean logic. Making lots of rapid choices that take into account the data coming in can be measured objectively. Creative efforts can only be measured subjectively. That by itself makes the two fundamentally different in terms of designing training systems.

Let's be realistic here. On 99% of drives, nothing interesting happens. You just have to pick the correct lane, stop for stop signs and traffic lights, and obey the speed limit, and you get there safely. For 1% of drives, somebody cuts in front of you or tries to sideswipe you or steps out in front of you. And for the 95% case, you just have to recognize that this is about to happen by computing the speed and direction of each vehicle, pedestrian, animal, or other large object, and hit the brakes soon enough. By the the time you get into situations where you have to steer to avoid something, you're at more like .0001% of drives.

This, of course, ignores the path planning headaches of some drives involving driving through safety cones for temporary lane shifts, or on rare occasions, having to deal with a human directing traffic, but again, these are relatively rare edge cases.

Which means it's not a similar sequence at all from a complexity perspective.

In driving, once you have passed a particular spot in the road, what happened back there no longer matters. You can forget about it. And anything that isn't about to happen within the next double-digit seconds also doesn't matter. You don't need to think about it yet. There's a very narrow window of temporal data that matters.

In programming, every single one of those decisions has to take into account at some level every future decision that will lead to successfully building the app, not only immediately, but also making it maintainable for features that you might want to add later. You can't look at one part of the project in isolation, do your job, and walk away unless you are a very junior programmer working on a very well-defined task. And if you are a very junior programmer, for you to even be able to get that well-defined task in the first place, someone else had to think about all of those things; it just wasn't you.

So no, these are not similar. Not at all. The decisions made by a self-driving car are expressible as a simple state machine, with simple outputs (steer X% left or right, brake x%). All of the complexity is in the data gathering (get the location and motion vector for all interesting objects) and path planning. The decisions made by a programmer are not. The inputs are vague English descriptions of what you want to build. The outputs are large, complex software systems.

I'll grant you that snow is a problem. It's also a problem for human drivers, though. Random objects? They're about as likely in the Bay Area as in any other city.

Actually, quite the opposite. Driving usefully in a dense city with pedestrians and cyclists is worst-case for self-driving tech. Driving out in the middle of nowhere means you're orders of magnitude less likely to encounter other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, so the decisions tend to be way less critical. Obviously, the lack of updated maps can be a problem, but that's more of a process issue, not a technology issue. The only other real difference is the potential for higher road speeds, but a car's ability to drive at higher speeds is mostly bounded by CPU/GPU performance and camera resolution for seeing things at longer distances, i.e. it is the sort of complexity difference that will go away on its own with a few years of hardware improvements.

Yes, it does. Thanks for asking. i've read Tesla's privacy policy, and it seems entirely reasonable. Same with Roborock. If that changes, I'll let you know.

If you think companies are going to keep using Windows for their embedded devices when the company has to create an online account before they ship the box to customers, you have another thing coming. Letting the manufacturer of a product have permanent control over that hardware and permanent ability to take control over someone else's account on a device that they own would be a showstopper for literally every company that preinstalls Windows for embedded use.

The thing is, they could shut down and guarantee that with 100% certainty. Making it harder for someone else to get certs for your domain is nice until it prevents you from getting certs for your own domain. Also, it does nothing for the gaping hole that lookalike domains represent.

As far as I am concerned, TLS certificates stopped being beneficial when they stopped costing thousands of dollars. Expanding TLS to every random person who wants to run a web server destroyed their value in recognizing a site's legitimacy. For everybody else, we should have used a separate system, like public keys in DNS records with key pinning a la SSH. Instead, they basically broke TLS completely, so the security icon in Safari for Amazon.com is indistinguishable from the security icon in Safari for my personal website with a free certificate from LetsEncrypt.

From here on, there's nothing that they can realistically do to make TLS trustworthy, because it just isn't. They could make it impossible for other people to get certs for your sites, and that still won't make it more trustworthy. For 99.9999% of use cases, we'd be better off if they stopped trying, let anybody get a cert who wants one, and used key pinning to guarantee that fake certs are useless except at sites you haven't visited. If you have pinning, the only remaining benefit for actually validating the ownership of the domain is for extended validation certs, and again, if you can't tell which ones are which, then the industry has decided that they don't matter, so why bother with that?

In other words, the whole industry is basically a useless tax on the web at this point, and should go away.

No, not really. Being a good programmer is a creative process involving design aspects, low-level coding aspects, naming things (one of the two^H^H^Hthree hard problems in computer science), and generally figuring out how to express a vague general concept as a series of strict rules.

Driving safely is just combining GPS routing (which is a long-solved problem) with obeying a bunch of fairly well-defined road rules and recognizing hazards and stopping or steering when you see one &mdash identification, path planning, etc

There are several orders of magnitude difference in the difficulty of those two tasks. That's why we have generative AI art with six fingers and two thumbs, while self-driving cars are operating commercially in multiple cities.

AI is already replacing drivers. Right now, you can take a ride in a self-driving car from Waymo in Phoenix, much of the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Austin, with 10 more cities rolling out this year. Their at-fault accident rate blows human drivers out of the water. I mean sure, you still have the occasional bizarre story about someone circling a parking lot for twenty minutes or the cars honking at each other all night in a parking lot, but arguing that self-driving car tech isn't mostly a solved problem is disingenuous at best. Tesla mostly has it working on highways. Waymo mostly has it working in cities. Put the two together, and you could at least ostensibly have end-to-end autonomous driving from coast to cost.

Doing autonomous driving well enough and cheaply enough to have it in a vehicle that individuals own is, of course, still not fully solved, and doing it generally in every environment without having to block off certain areas because of construction, etc. is also still not entirely solved, but that's like arguing that robots can't replace vacuum cleaners because they can't get into corners. For the 95% case, it is solved, and that's actually pretty amazing, IMO.

Posting this as I eagerly await the HW4 upgrade for my Tesla and the arrival of my new robotic vacuum cleaner in May.

I think there's a big differences between self-driving cars and using AI to replace programmers. There's no feasible way to have enough cab drivers and Uber drivers for everyone to stop driving themselves, nor will public transit ever get good enough to be a good alternative to a car outside of large cities. So self-driving car tech is doing way more than just replacing the small number of people who drive for a living. It is also giving mobility to the elderly, giving several hours per week of commute time back to the sorts of workers who can work remotely during the commute, driving down the cost of package delivery and reducing delivery times, and massively transforming probably a lot of other markets. And that is likely to result in more jobs, rather than fewer overall, albeit fewer in a few narrow areas.

The same can't be said for using AI to replace workers in most other areas.