catreadingabook

I’d imagine it’s the things that still kinda make it as headlines today, but don’t get much coverage anymore because everyone is used to it by now.

“By the way, this weekend’s mass shootings led to 10 deaths and 29 injuries total, a little more than last week. Parents, remember to bundle up your kids this fall semester with the latest BulletBlocker Youth Jacket, 10% off if you order today! Now back to the news you actually wanted to hear about: the former U.S. President allegedly commits even more crimes…”

🎶 oh, I can so just sit here and cry 🎶

but fr what worked well for me was blocking, deleting, getting rid of (or stuffing into a rarely used closet) anything that reminded me of them, then distracting myself 24/7 long enough to later process my emotions with a little bit of distance from the event itself - not to block out the feelings but to just avoid ruminating on them.

Mostly the point was buying time to provide my monkey brain with hard proof that I can survive without that person, that way it stops shooting me up with the Bad Chemicals every time I think of them.

I think it has to be somewhere in between. This ‘real deal’ theory doesn’t explain the popularity of hentai, but at the same time, OnlyFans shows that some people reaaallly care about the personal element. I would bet niche kinks (especially those ‘illegal to make but legal to watch’?) will lean heavily on AI for content, but the rest will probably change based on our culture’s attitude toward AI in general.

Judge Albright is kind of a (controversial) celebrity among intellectual property lawyers. Until the district started randomizing case assignments, everyone used to try to file in Albright’s court because he’s so plaintiff-friendly. The plaintiffs here got lucky with this judge assignment, too bad the Circuit Court is not amused lol.

Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.

It isn’t commercial labor when an adult does their own chores (I think), as it’s more related to the people in a household maintaining their own home. It likely wouldn’t be labor for a child for the same reasons, though I’m not sure.

But it could start to look like labor when it’s something that produces commercial value, for example, it’s more like a ‘chore’ to water the vegetable garden in the backyard, but it’s more like ‘labor’ to tend to 20 acres of farmland.

Excessive chores, though, could be prevented under child abuse law rather than child labor law, depending on how it’s enforced. Doing all the household work voluntarily for no reason other than it’s fun? Almost certainly legal. No video games until you clean the dishes? Probably legal. No food until you sweep, mop, dust, and shine every surface in the house? Probably abuse.

Ok, let me be more specific so that it’s not open to uncharitable interpretation.

What happens when it becomes easy to make something as reliable and complete as, e.g., ChatGPT-4 without the hardware costs and other costs currently associated with it?

That’s true, but thinking about AI that is made to generate speech, processing power is still expensive enough that developers are careful with it. But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

For example, what happens when a developer decides to train a LLM extensively on scam emails, and spammers love to buy copies of it - but the developer markets it as just “a helpful generative AI”? Or, what if a person trains their LLM on an extremist forum full of hate speech and disinformation, then offers it to a suicide prevention center as a 24/7 alternative to human labor? (Treating these as hypotheticals, where we assume the difference isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps they also used some legitimate training data, so that most outputs seem innocent enough.)

To me it sounds more involved than selling just a word processor with autocorrect, but less involved than selling an instruction manual for committing crimes.

No way they don’t force you to agree to some “terms and conditions” along the lines of, “You accept full responsibility of all risk and if we get sued, you agree to pay on our behalf. And because we know you won’t read this, here’s all the risks so we can say you gave informed consent: …”

Completely speculating, because I don’t know many courts that have been willing to decide either way, but maybe:

If it causes harm in a way that was reasonably foreseeable, the person who turned it on and/or the person “operating” it might be generally liable on a theory of negligence (but not always).

If the harm was unpredictable, it might be on the manufacturer and the retailer under a theory of products liability (but not always).

Or it could be treated as “ferae naturae,” where owners are liable for their ‘dangerous animal’ pets because they knew the pets were dangerous and still decided to keep them (but not always).

If it’s an AI not associated with a physical device, maybe the programmer who “authored” the lines of code could be criminally liable for criminal “speech” (writing an AI) that incites and enables crime, even as a conspirator – that’s reeeaaally doubtful on Due Process grounds, but it would definitely light a fire under every developer’s chair to make sure their algorithms are explicitly trained against criminal behavior. (but still not always.)

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I’m not a lawyer (yet) as I haven’t taken the bar exam, but I remember learning this in law school.

I can’t find the original court filing that all these news articles are reporting, but presumably, this is a special kind of suit seeking a “declaratory judgment” - a suit asking the court to prevent a harm before it happens.

Cornell Law School discusses it in a somewhat lengthy read but put “simply”, for standing in this kind of case, the court would want to see:

a concrete controversy (as opposed to a hypothetical one, e.g. you can’t seek a declaratory judgment “in case my neighbor decides to hit me”),

between adverse parties (some random citizen can’t sue you for breaking a promise you made to your grandma),

that is ripe (where enough has already happened that a decision right now wouldn’t require much speculation),

not moot (has to be able to affect the current case, for example, declaratory judgment isn’t appropriate to determine “should he have done that?”), and

the court’s decision is needed to prevent imminent harm (has to be relatively certain that a party would be adversely affected if the court doesn’t prevent it from happening).

Here there could be issues of ripeness: the court might not want to act on the mere possibility that Trump will be found guilty of insurrection etc. Courts don’t like to tell people what they can and can’t do unless a real situation makes it necessary, otherwise the court would risk encroaching on powers that belong to the other branches of government.

Almost certainly, or else the suit could be dismissed on Double Jeopardy grounds. Even then, he would probably just appeal to the Supreme Court and get them to make up some reason to rule in his favor.

As much of a Trump as he is, my tinfoil hat theory is that we really, really need to keep this guy from getting Epstein’d. Have extra windows and livestream cameras if necessary. Cause if it happens, dems are 100% getting blamed and a few riots would be the best case scenario.

(No, I’m not advocating for it, just predicting it would happen in my rando crackpot theory.)

Interesting, so what happens when an AI creates art that would infringe on a human’s copyright? Would AI art of Mickey Mouse be public domain, meaning AI could be the end of Disney’s insane licensing fee?

Edit: Nevermind, turns out this article is just editorialized. It isn’t public domain, it just isn’t eligible for the AI’s creator to copyright it if it’s fully autonomous.

I get this in theory but it gave me the hilarious mental image of someone gathering their phone, keys, wallet, going to their local polling station, showing their ID, walking to the voting machine, then thinking, “Oh no, I’m allowed to vote for TWO people?” and immediately bolting out the door.

Which would be scary, if the article wasn’t completely misstating the law. Nowhere does the bill state that it will ban “depressing” content. Nowhere does the bill control what people can and can’t say. At worst, a platform may need to provide resources to help with mental health disorders.

For example, at the end of a depressing commentary, a site may be asked to add an automated reminder that if a person is feeling XYZ symptoms of depression, they should reach out to a qualified professional for help. Maybe same for content that actively promotes or glorifies untreated mental health issues, like that Tiktok trend in 2021 that had hundreds of kids deciding they suddenly have Dissociative Identity Disorder but also don’t want to be diagnosed or treated.

Or as another example, if a minor on social media is repeatedly reporting another user for harassment, the platform may be asked to automatically suggest for the minor to block the user.

It’s obvious enough that depressing content doesn’t cause depression. No one is going to prosecute a news organization for reporting true facts. Even then, it would be more than a “reasonable effort” to ban an entire type of content - at the very worst, content creators who post “Top 10 reasons to commit suicide!” might be asked to label it properly so minors can’t find it unless they search for it. Just add it to the site’s community guidelines and enforce it. That’s a reasonable effort and doesn’t affect most adults at all.

I’ve just read the full text of the bill and other than section 6 (requiring yearly reports from big platforms, seems kinda unnecessary) the terms are actually pretty reasonable and they all seem directly related to protecting minors in particular. Especially looking at:

Section 2(3), the bill’s definition of a “covered platform,” which has some pretty broad exceptions such as email services or “an organization not organized to carry on business for its own profit or that of its members.”

Section 3, the duty of care, which still allows minors to deliberately search for information in 3(b)(1). The covered platforms just need to avoid enabling literal crimes against the minor, as well as a probably-unenforceable duty about mental health disorders. It only requires a “reasonable effort” - where, legally, ‘reasonableness’ is usually decided by judges and takes into account how burdensome it would be for a particular defendant to prevent a particular harm.

Section 10, which would give examples of what is or isn’t enough, so that platforms don’t have to guess whether their effort is enough.

imo this uproar sounds more like alarmism from those big platforms who don’t like the fact that they would have to do actual work. I don’t see any censorship involved other than preventing minors from getting doxxed and not being allowed to advertise gambling and alcohol to kids. Maybe I’m missing something?

Galaxy brain idea: Just encrypt your messages manually. Agree on an algorithm and trade keys in-person, then send each other encrypted files that you decrypt with a separate program (and for added privacy, on a separate device that doesn’t have network access). It’s not convenient at all but the idea is hilarious.

There’s an urban myth at my university that two students did this to test rumors that the school emails were being monitored, and after a few weeks later IT emailed them asking them to stop.

It’s a clever take, but if true, then it may be inevitable. Politically, even if one party tries to pass the regulations proposed here, the other will 100% use the catch-all “we need to regulate AI!!!” scare tactics as an excuse to accept corporate bri-- I mean, to permit lobbying against any rights to free information.