Taywee

I don't think governments are infallible, and I didn't argue as such. I don't agree that regulations are inherently bad. If you want to race to the bottom, I can easily pull out some extreme scenario of giving AK-47's to every citizen upon graduating Kindergarten, but it would be a stupid argument based on nothing you've actually said, other than taking your point to the most extreme extent. Please give me the courtesy of not assuming I hold the most unreasonable extension of my argument as well. It only sabotages the conversation.

People driving drunk do profound damage as well. Cars don't kill people on their own. Would you agree with making drunk driving legal again?

When a tool allows a person to do a lot of damage, it should be regulated to prevent bystanders from taking the brunt of other peoples' bad decisions. A race to the bottom doesn't really help anybody.

If you're going to argue that every tool that allows people to do harm should be not regulated at all because the tool isn't anthropomorphized, I'm not sure how we can have a discussion at all about it.

This comment is so disingenuous it's ridiculous. It's like opposing gun regulation with some contrived scenario about water pistols and Nerf guns.

Yes, but gun regulations don't operate under the assumption that guns shoot people on their own. They operate under the understanding that people who do damage can do much more damage with guns than without.

Pretending that any of the regulation of guns or AI is done with the understanding that they are anything other than powerful tools that can be used by humans to do profound damage is a strawman argument. We all understand that guns don't shoot people on their own. Don't oppose regulation by characterizing the opposing viewpoint as something it isn't.

It's as unanswerable a question as "how many lives would have been lost by dangerous medications with long-term side effects that didn't become apparent in the term of testing?"

We can't really know whether it was a net good or a net bad because we can't take a look at the reality that didn't happen. What we do know is that there were deadly medications on the market before the FDA. There were medications available over the counter that were outright poisonous. Arsenic and mercury were in common medicines.

It is a balance. You can sacrifice lives through inaction, or sacrifice lives in the way of progress. Lack of regulation is bad, but so is overregulation.

Replace "software" with "guns" in your post and it's the same effect.

Yeah, like food safety regulations, other places still won't abide. It's not like "other places still will allow abuse of their citizens" is a great argument for us to as well.

Safety regulations exist in every major industry, and sometimes it slows some progress for the sake of individuals. This isn't a bad thing.

The people who worked for the company created something.

The people who work for the company collect rent on things they didn't make.

Is it more creative to use your own company's IP? Most of these copyrighted and trademarked stories and characters are being made by people who didn't come up with them anyway, so what's the difference in creativity whether you happen to work at the company that owns the IP or not?

With long copyright terms, it encourages copyright holders to milk a single work for the length of the copyright (90+ years) and therefore discourages the creation of something new. It also encourages people to obtain copyrights to leverage them for profit, rather than making anything at all. A child of an artist can spend their entire life supported by their parent's copyright, and never has to make anything unique for as long as they live.

How is any of this good for creativity?

The copyright system is what has enabled so few companies (and one giant corporation in particular) to become the owners, controllers, and beneficiaries of the vast majority of American fiction and culture. From visual media companies, record companies, and publishers, you can probably distill ownership of more than 90% of the culture that the average American lives in to fewer than 20 companies.

Copyright has been the most powerful tool in any media company's toolbox when it comes to consolidating power and IP and rolling into a larger and larger ball of what we call culture.

We are descended from chimps in the same way that I am descended from my cousin.

Edit: I'm realizing this could be a language barrier. "Descendent" is the inverse of "ancestor". A descendent is directly downward in lineage from an ancestor.

Correct. But I think the intention is conveyed in the wording itself. When somebody says "deliberately manipulating", you can fill in the extra "for one's own benefit and with no regard to the well-being of the manipulated party" automatically.

Learning to touch type any layout, either when first learning to type or learning a new layout, is seriously hampered by ever looking at your hands. You should use a layout chart and navigate the keyboard by touch. There's a reason that most actual typing education uses blank keyboards or keyboard covers that hide the letter printings.

If somebody who only knows qwerty uses your computer, you should switch the keymap to qwerty for them, not force them to try to navigate an unfamiliar layout. Every major OS makes it very easy to switch keymaps.

As a long time Dvorak user, I'm always baffled by people wanting visual Dvorak layouts and physically rearranging their keycaps (which is a really bad idea on many keyboards, with cap angle differing by row). Dvorak really speeds up touch typing (edit: hypothetically, or at least makes it more comfortable). If you're looking at your hands while typing, just use qwerty. Dvorak won't help you.

You can use Dvorak regardless of what letters are printed on the keycaps.

I have to estimate because I get all mine homegrown from friends and family.

Might be taxed at a really high rate, or production might be low. Took Colorado a long time for the prices to really go down, and it still varies a ton from city to city.

If you're making firecrackers or just throwing rough weed into butter, it can be rough. It's a drug, and you should partake safely. Weigh the flower, estimate the percentage of that weight that's THC (20% is usually safe), decarb it, infuse in a fat, and dose carefully and safely, estimating no more than 5 mg THC max for the first attempt, and giving at least 2 full hours (or preferably another day) before trying more.

Edibles are a lot more work and deliberation, and can give much more varied experiences due to digestion and personal metabolism (there are suggestions of enzyme differences that can make a major difference too). I never suggest it without a full rundown full of details and warnings. I only bring it up because I can't in good conscience simply recommend smoking anything to somebody who might care about their lung health.

That said, I've seen and had some really bad experiences on some badly-dosed edibles, but it doesn't compare to the worst I've seen messing around with real concentrates. Overdoses aside, I've had friends graduate from flower to edibles to tinctures to BHOs and just end up imbibing hundreds of milligrams of THC a day, and the results are often chronic anxiety, hyperemesis, inability to sleep, paranoia, and intense withdrawal when you quit. People who say "it's just a plant, it's harmless" haven't seen the effects of extreme abuse, and that's coming from somebody who generally likes using cannabis.

Here in Colorado, I can get an ounce for under $50: https://cannabisdepotco.com/menu/pueblo?store_path=%2Fmenu%2...

That's what I used to pay for an eighth.

More popular and significantly less expensive, usually.

There are already some extremely potent products on the market, and overuse is easy and can cause some really gnarly side effects.

I always recommend people stick with flower and home made edibles for safety sake. I dabbled in the stronger stuff, and it's nothing like how weed should feel. Insanely anxiety inducing.

In Colorado, I know a ton of people who grow their own. You just have to have a lockable enclosure, but most people don't bother and don't get any heat for it anyway.

Yes, there are other ways to do it, but adding another tool as an option is good, too. Being able to nest containers makes composeability a little bit better, too. For instance, if I want an image that effectively has multiple base images, instead, I can just run both base images in containers inside of the parent container. You can bundle a lot of related containers into an arbitrary app container. It's a natural expression of programming composition into a containerization context, in my opinion.

Containers being nestable components makes a lot of natural wants much more natural to express.

While what you say logically makes sense, it's very difficult to handle the thought for most people. Most people are either racist and disagree with the latter part of what you say, or are anti-racist and reject even the possibility of any intelligence disparity.

I find it uncomfortable, and I personally don't accept it as a fact (there is pretty significant evidence that points at many possible conclusions, as well as many many confounding factors), but I can't, as a reasonable person, reject the possibility.

I would never even voice that opinion in public, though. Even a position like this could make me a social pariah.

The same as you'd have to the severely mentally impaired in general, I imagine.

Maybe.

There's a sizeable portion of the population for whom RSS would be perfect, but they don't know it exists, and if you tried to get them into it, would be baffled by the complete lack of interface (remember when Firefox would show an RSS icon near the URL when a site had an RSS link in the header?)

A newsletter is useless to you, but a lot of people like them. I agree that popups aren't the way to push it, though. A simple newsletter link in the header of the site is more than good enough. I don't care how good the "conversion" rate is, I don't like harassing people who are just visiting my site for the first time.

How have you used it to help people eliminate food waste?

Potentially? Most artists, programmers, musicians, most teachers, huge amounts of finance, marketing, legal and especially paralegal, most journalism and technical writing positions, stock trading (most traders don't do anything that AI can't fully replace), and even more of customer service.

The majority of those will probably be staffed at 10% what they are now at best. Some, like stock trading, will probably be almost completely erased as a human job.

So you didn't know how absolutely crushing it is to spend years trying to get your first novel published while working full time in a manual position, and find that you moved from competing with hundreds of other people every time you send a query to an agent to thousands of mostly AI generated queries, with signs pointing to dozens coming from the same people?

Or how crushing it is to be told that the right solution is to just abandon your dream and start generating a novel a month instead of writing?

I know a lot of authors, published and unpublished. This technology is thrilling for corporations, worrying for the established, and absolutely annihilating for somebody who is just trying to get started. Many of the unpublished ones have given up and just self publish to ~zero sales, because they want to actually have their book out there.

Expert prompt editing is not a niche most people want, and it's not one most people will get. It's not a movement from X authors producing Y novels to X prompt engineering editors producing Y novels. It's a movement to X/N prompt editors producing Y novels. Even as an expert AI user, the progression is way fewer people doing way more work, and the death of the dream for the very vast majority.

What's screwed is nearly everybody.

That's not true of novel writing in the least, and clearly not what I was talking about. AI is already heavily impacting fiction and writing communities. How many active novelists do you hang out with? The ones I know are talking a lot about how much harder it's already making their lives, especially the ones who are still trying to get picked up by their first agent.

The scale is different by a grand margin. If 50% of US jobs are replaced by AI in the next 20 years, and those jobs aren't replaced by other jobs, and people depend on income to survive, what happens?

I'm not saying to ban it. I think the productivity gain could be a gift. Everybody being freed from the need to work would be amazing.

But without actually dealing with it, what's the proposal for dealing with the majority of the population of your country being completely without employment? What do we do for money when there's no work left to be done? The whole country can't trade stocks for a living.