IceMetalPunk

But if I do that, I would have to enter my payment info every time I want to order anything. I order enough that it would be obnoxious.

I've always loved emergence. The entire universe is founded upon it, from physics to chemistry to biology to neuroscience and genetics, and beyond. There's a field of math called complex systems analysis which basically just studies emergence, and if I were more mathematically capable, I would definitely want to make that a source of income. Whenever people say something is "too complex" to be chance or physics, I'm just like, "no, it's not; emergence happens all the time". I would even consider emergence a fundamental property of the universe: scale anything up enough, mix enough simple bits together, and you get something complex and more capable than the sum of the parts.

I've been following transformer-based AI research quite a bit since the first announcement of GPT-3 (though admittedly not as much as some people, for sure), and these emergent spikes have excited me. Especially when you consider that a rat neuron is nearly identical to a human neuron, it's only the number of neurons and the connectivity that separates a human brain from a rat brain. (By analogy to AI, that'd be the number of parameters and their learned values, respectively.)

Emergence: it's everything, everywhere, all at once :)

The way I see it, if they're basing a pay cut on the pay they could offer someone else, they should just fire the employee and hire someone else for that lower rate. If they're not willing to fire an employee, then that employee is providing something beyond what a new hire could, and that makes them worth more than "any other work-from-home employee in the market".

> There are other instances of offices being bombed, but I am having trouble finding it

Offices that are more easily found by Google labeling abortion providers? I still don't see the relevance to these labels.

> Will they label providers which do not provide those services, for those who believe life starts earlier?

No need. People who are pregnant don't need to specifically seek out anti-choice providers; they have services provided to them at every natal-related clinic. Yes, even the ones that provide abortion services will also provide services for someone wishing to carry a pregnancy to term. It's only the ones who provide abortion services who are being removed from public view due to legal shenanigans and, according to the article, people fraudulently misleading people.

You want to carry a pregnancy to term? Great! Go to any clinic and you'll get support. You want to end a pregnancy? Welp, you'll need to find a specific place that will do that, and hopefully avoid fake ones. That's why this label exists.

> Why single out abortion services? Why not list all services and prices?

See above.

> nothing should ever default to opt out

Agreed. Similarly, if DoorDash could stop automatically setting a high tip on all my orders, that'd be great, thanks. I always give a tip, but it's rarely as high as the app auto-suggests, unless I have a tiny order.

I mean, if you use all that, sure. I don't do Prime books, the only media I watch on Prime is Legend of Vox Machina, I don't use Prime music, etc. So I'm really just paying $14.99/month for one TV show and faster shipping when I do order a package. I guess that's still not too bad, but it still feels gross that I was tricked into signing up for it, twice.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I agree! Since the invention of transformers, progress in generative AI models has accelerated exponentially. It's an exciting time to live, and they are definitely extraordinary! (I mention transformers because basically every bleeding-edge AI in the last few years has integrated a transformer somewhere in its architecture. They really spurred an AI revolution.)

That said... it would be lying to claim Stable Diffusion's current generations aren't nightmare fuel :D

I think most of the kerfuffle stems from two misconceptions:

(1) Many people think AIs just reproduce and recompose chunks of their training data. As such, they believe that if an AI produces something "in the style of Artist X", it is copying Artist X's work directly. In reality, of course, that's not how neural networks function, and this is far more akin to the network taking inspiration from Artist X to produce its own work, which I'm pretty sure is perfectly safe, IP law-wise.

(2) Many people are afraid these AIs will destroy artists' niche in society and/or jobs, and so they're trying to denigrate the AIs and nerf what they're allowed to do. But the printing press didn't remove authors, calculators didn't remove mathematicians, medicines didn't remove doctors, etc. These AIs are merely a new tool for anyone, including artists, to use, and human artists can (and, I think, should) work alongside the AIs rather than fear them. The AIs are exceptional, and will only improve, but they learn from humans. The fact that Artist X paints something doesn't take away from the art Artist Y makes. There is value in almost all art.

You know, I've seen that, but I guess I didn't pay much attention and assumed it was opt-in. Silly me for thinking Amazon would have the tiniest shred of ethics in their functional design.

You might be surprised at how many people don't know the difference between a search engine and a browser. If you ask random people what browser they use, especially people over the age of say 45, you're likely to get several people saying "Google". Not Chrome, just... Google. And no, at least some of them are not using that to mean Chrome.

I would hope a TV quiz show would do their research to know the basics of what they're talking about, but... I guess not.

Having seen quite a few of these Stable Diffusion porn generations, can I just say they're less porn and more nightmare fuel? Those faces... and hands... shudder

It does relatively better at generating faces in portraits, but the more zoomed out you get, the worse the faces become. And that's just in general, not specifically nudes.

That said, as long as (a) these subreddits moderate the content to remove generations depicting real people, and (b) the subreddits are marked as NSFW with the usual "I am 18+" acknowledgement to enter, I don't see why the subreddits need to be shut down entirely.

I have an Amazon Prime subscription.

I don't know why, or when I signed up for it.

This is the second time it's happened, so I gave up and kept it. I do order from Amazon enough that it matters, I guess. It's scummy as hell, but effective. I'd much prefer a model like the one mentioned in this article.

1) Private companies can remove content on their platforms for any reason.

2) Not all ideas deserve an equal platform for "exchange". Some are egregious enough to just get rid of. Pretending all ideas are equally worthy of discussion is a dangerous false balance that gives credence to incredulous claims.

3) This author seems to think speech has no effect on actions. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me" -- unless, of course, those words encourage my boyfriend to beat me, or the guy at the bar to rape me. Yes, the actors are to blame for that, but the people promoting ideas that encourage those actions are not blameless.

The January 6th insurrection was spurred on by words. The anti-vax movement was emboldened by words. Hell, at the risk of this sounding like an exaggeration (it's not), Nazis were created and controlled by words.

Words exist to communicate ideas. Ideas inform beliefs. And beliefs determine actions.

Words are not harmless, and harmful words should have consequences. Being erased from the record of private platforms is the least consequence that could happen for it.

Lastly, the author suggests the TikTok purge is using facial recognition. I doubt it. More likely, it's just doing video-matching against the original videos Tate uploaded that have been taken down.

How does that equate to a pay cut for employees working from home? That would be true regardless of what current employees decide to do. In fact, it would suggest that companies would just want to fire those who work in the office and replace them with cheaper work-from-home employees anyway.

I'm confused. The employers are getting more productivity, more hours worked, and lower infrastructure costs, and because of all these benefits... they're cutting employees' pay? Seems like it would be win-win for both sides to let it ride.

(I'm not actually confused. I understand this is corporate politics/greed at its finest. Make people think there's a reason to cut their pay and they will let you profit more than you already are, at their expense. And if they don't, you now have more control over their daily work life.)

TIL! Thank you! Now that I've read the whole article... my original comment stands.

Agreed, but how does labeling abortion providers facilitate violence against anti-choice folks?

This is both good and bad. Good news: it can help people who need these services find them easier and more safely. Bad news: it can help violent anti-choice dickwads find new targets for their violence more easily.

Thanks to the paywall, I can only read the headline and first two paragraphs. From those, here are my thoughts.

Many Americans, especially among those calling themselves "patriots", will loudly proclaim their pride in how free citizens of America are. And at least as many Americans, if not more, will tout the glories of capitalism as the best economic system in existence, and even demonize socialism (which they often conflate with communism).

And yet, to summarize the headline and those two first paragraphs: "Capitalist overlords are threatening employees with potential poverty, starvation, and homelessness at such high rates that they are now more scared to disobey or leave said overlords, even if they're miserable under them."

Ah, yes. Capitalism in the US: a bastion of freedom, where slavery has been illegal since 1865 (unless it's economic slavery as opposed to physical force).

Easter is not on a weekday, but the entire week we got off for "Spring Break". Which, not coincidentally, overlaps with Easter. Unless you can think of another reason that week specifically should be free of schooling?

The secular side of Christmas? Maybe in Europe, but here in the US, Christmas is still a very religious holiday. To the point where saying "happy holidays" to more than 10 strangers in December will likely be met with at least one "It's Merry Christmas" from a Christian who feels oppressed. Speaking as someone from a Jewish family who worked in customer service for many years, Christmas had no secular aspects; we could easily have called it "Movie Day" in my family and it would be accurate.

You're right that we don't get the smaller Christian holidays off. I'm not saying "we get all Christian holidays off", I'm saying "the only religious holidays we get off are Christian". Not all rectangles are squares, but all squares are rectangles.

Many biohackers do this, actually. I've seen it more often in a fingertip than the hand, but you do you.

Weird, I don't remember ever having class on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, or Easter. Funny how it's only an actionable offense worthy of litigation when it's in support of non-Christian religions.

I'm not surprised. Maybe if they called it "Midsemester Break", the way the others are called Winter Break and Spring Break, it would be passable.

This reminds me of an episode of that (now old) TV show Numbers (or, I suppose, NUMB3RS). A suspect was trying not to be found by hitting targets in seemingly random locations. The mathematician protagonist pointed out that whenever people think of "random" sequences -- like this guy's targets, or even just a shuffled playlist -- people don't expect duplicates, even though true randomness would have them. As a result, you can analyze the sequence under that artificial constraint and make predictions to the next element with more than random chance of being right.

This isn't exactly the same, but it's another example of "trying to hide information is, in itself, giving away information".

BTW, tangentially related: I remember reading that the original iPod shuffle function was truly uniformly shuffled, but people started thinking it wasn't and complaining because they'd notice when multiple songs by the same artist played in sequence. So Apple had to make the shuffling less random to avoid those strings so people would perceive it as being truly random.

Because while you're getting the benefit, you're not the only one benefiting. The benefit applies to you as well as to everyone else. So your calculation should be "I paid $58,440 in taxes, but I saved $32,000 on tuition for myself, so I actually only paid $26,440 to help everyone else in the country get the same $32,000 education that I did."

Why do you live in a society, where you depend on other people, if you're not willing to help those who depend on you?

Please look up the term "sampling bias". You have an inaccurate, biased understanding of why the majority of student loan debt happens. Your sample is too small and not representative of the country's overall population. Especially if you live in an expensive area, as you said, you are only seeing how "people who can afford to live in your expensive area" handle student loans.

Are you spending that money on (a) food or medical treatments to survive, (b) mortgage/rent, or (c) an education to improve yourself and the society we share? If so, then sure, I'll go first, if you can prove that's what you're using it on.

In fact, I spend far more than $1 a year doing exactly that. It's called donating to charity.

Someone in another thread suggested that universities will raise their tuition to offset the subsidies, for no reason other than profit. I hope that's not the case (it's dystopian to think education is subject to price gouging out of greed, but then I suppose if medicine is, we're already in that dystopia). But even if it is, the tuition would raise equal to the subsidies and the cost to the student wouldn't increase, it just wouldn't decrease.

Best case is universities aren't entirely heartless and realize that they're surviving and profiting just fine on the current tuition, and the education they provide is so important that they shouldn't just raise costs arbitrarily "because they can" in spite of their students. In which case, the loan principals remain the same, but the student pays less.

Worst case, as mentioned above, is we're in a true capitalist dystopia, in which case the costs won't get cheaper, but they also won't get more expensive.

You mentioned the risk of nonrepayment. There is no increased risk of that: the loan servicers will definitely get repayed by the government, and the remaining balance (if there is any) has lower risk of nonrepayment from the student because the payments will be lower, and thus easier to afford.

> Of course they're going to raise prices because they can - that's literally how every business works.

Then perhaps you've hit upon the root of the problem: education shouldn't be run like a business.

> A college charging more money isn't 'dark'--they too have bills.

Which they are currently able to pay. Governments subsidizing student loans doesn't increase the bills for the college.

Of course there should be a cost/benefit analysis. There should be a cost/benefit analysis for any decision. That doesn't mean it's right for the costs to be artificially inflated beyond what's necessary.

Yep. $12/month in taxes to help their fellow members of society. Less money than a Netflix subscription to help many people literally afford food. People who have massive student loan debt that this "fairly large group" does not have.

I'm not sorry to say that if people think it's valid to argue "I shouldn't have to pay $12/month to help other people live a healthy life", then our society is broken because the people in it are broken.