heartbeats

Surely, the following two statements can be true at the same time?

1. Binance is run by criminals and all sorts of people would go to jail if anyone looked at their books.

2. Binance is solvent.

Not saying this is the case, but there's many other reasons for a crypto firm to be shady than their insolvency.

I think the big innovation here isn't in its grasp of language, but in the way it's able to access data. Comparing ChatGPT against ELIZA or GPT-2 isn't the right comparison, you should compare it to something like SQL or Google.

Against that comparison, it stands out as very innovative, but it also seems like it has big potential to improve. If you could perfectly index a large database and carry out reasoning tasks, this is enough to replace a lot of jobs. ChatGPT is in this regard just on the boundary between a toy example and useful in prod.

It's also worth noting that, up until now, people who have been saying this ("I think this is about where it peaks, it'll never do X") have always been proven wrong by the passage of time. So I think we should assign lower credibility to the skeptics, insofar as their past predictions were incorrect.

Real interest rates have been positive. Unless you were saving in a mattress, your purchasing power increased.

They don't have to spend it per se; by conventional economic theory, as long as they keep it in the bank, it's enough. Keynes:

> Europe was so organized socially and economically as to secure the maximum accumulation of capital. While there was some continuous improvement in the daily conditions of life of the mass of the population, Society was so framed as to throw a great part of the increased income into the control of the class least likely to consume it. The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. ... If the rich had spent their new wealth on their own enjoyments, the world would long ago have found such a régime intolerable. But like bees they saved and accumulated, not less to the advantage of the whole community because they themselves held narrower ends in prospect.

> Thus this remarkable system depended for its growth on a double bluff or deception. On the one hand the laboring classes accepted ... a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they ... were co-operating to produce. And on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. ... And so the cake increased; but to what end was not clearly contemplated. Individuals would be exhorted not so much to abstain as to defer, and to cultivate the pleasures of security and anticipation. Saving was for old age or for your children; but this was only in theory,—the virtue of the cake was that it was never to be consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you.

LinkedIn is pretty walled, and it's a cesspool. What prevents Brian Jones, a 100% legitimate human being, from pasting in a few GPT-generated posts to improve his posting activity?

At the end of the day, you have to filter on quality.

We've had regular GPT for several years now, and nothing has happened. People predicted this with the OG Transformer model from OpenAI, and yet the fake news apocalypse didn't come upon us.

> Won't it result in 1000s of blogs mushrooming over night from purported bots-come-experts with some kind of engineered slant?

I don't say this to be rude, I really don't, but have you Googled something like "reverse a string python" at any point in the past 5 years?

> Whole "online communities" for the unsuspecting to join initially made up of nothing but bots "talking" to each other,

This has also existed for a long time, see SubredditSimulator etc. There are also sites that scrape forums and replace the usernames to do ad fraud.

What about steganography?

If you change subtle details about spelling, spacing, formatting, etc by the source IP, then you can look at one of their pages and figure out which IP it was scraped from.

Then, just add goatse to all pages requested by that IP. Alternatively, replace every other sentence with GPT-generated nonsense.

EDIT: it should be quite easy to use JS to fingerprint the scraper. The downside is that you will also block all NoScript users.

That's far from "easy" - if it were so simple, people would be able to extort big money from drug markets for doing it.

No, that's not true. The first hop (last from the service's PoV) is basically randomly selected. Unless you restrict it, there will be thousands of possible IPs.

What exactly are you trying to convey here? Who else is big within the DDoS protection market? It's not like you could start up your own.

It's true that the existence of DDoS-Guard, VanwaTech, and a few others technically makes it an oligopoly, but you're still at the mercy of large corporations.

I do not work for CloudFlare.

> Everything you've put forth is an exception to the norm because those [...] are regulated industries whose behavior is governed by rules which are the exception to the default, which is free association.

My specific argument is that large, monopoly providers (e.g. CloudFlare) should be regulated industries, because to do otherwise would undermine the authority of the government.

> Whatever worldview you're arguing for here is not the world in which we find ourselves in today.

This is more common than you'd think. In Italy, there was a case where a (registered, legal) quasi-fascist party sued Facebook for being banned - and won. Facebook got a court order to reinstate their access. The reason for this was simply that the Italians had decided that they should be allowed to have a platform, and so Facebook wasn't in a position to say otherwise.

> I must acknowledge that most western governments are failing to provide these for their people.

Agreed.

> No one has argued that bigots should be made homeless.

I'm not sure. The common line of reasoning that I hear goes something like this: "While the government can't shut them down (owing to legal technicalities), they still should be, and so anything that is done to them is ipso facto morally justified.". Grant that this may be a strawman, but it doesn't seem far off from the paradox of tolerance, under which depriving them of things more precious than their homes would seem justified.

> Everyone, bigot or otherwise, has the right to basic human necessities, including food, shelter, healthcare, and so on. You do not, however, have a right to a particular job, or to hosting for your website, and so on.

Where does the limit go?

Firstly, if private corporations can deny people the (de-facto) ability to spread their views, why couldn't they also deny them of their (de-facto) ability to, say, eat? The basic issue at play doesn't seem to be that speech rights are ontologically different from other rights, just that private corporations are not bound by these rights.

On the contrary, denying them of both would obviously be more efficient at preventing "bad" speech - if people had their bank accounts closed as soon as their phone heard them saying a racial slur, this would trivially result in people saying less racial slurs.

Secondly, if people are deprived of all their abilities to, say, host websites, then by what metric do they still enjoy free speech? If I'm running a newspaper, and all the printing presses decide to stop doing business with me, then how am I to get anything published? Doesn't this have the direct and obvious result of moving power over from the (democratic) government to corporations?

> Businesses are not people, but they are made of people, and their freedoms do not go away when they clock in to their job.

This is a very interesting point. But what do you mean by people?

Do you mean the employees? That's fair, but, though I hate to belabor the point, it's not really the employees on the ground making this kind of decision. Maybe we should have more workplace democracy, but the way it empirically works in practice is that the guys at the top tells them what they have to do, and then they do it.

But if you mean the owners, then I will have to most vehemently disagree. "Property rights should be unlimited" is not a natural corollary of freedom of association, and a tiny clique of property-owners deciding who gets to speak is not a desirable social result.

> It's obvious to everyone else that they are, in fact, a hate site, and that their purpose is to organize harassment and violence.

I don't think it's obvious. It sounds possible, sure, but they vigorously deny it, and when it comes to actual, falsifiable claims, I don't think the evidence is terribly strong. (For instance, the alleged "Kiwi Farms death list" contains people who did not even have an active thread on the forum). When you make a serious claim like this, it does seem like some more evidence is in order than "everyone knows it".

> As a private business, CloudFlare enjoys the freedom to choose with whom it does business. If they were required by law to provide services indiscriminately, then they could not be held responsible. But that's not the case. No privilege comes without responsibility, and the means by which they exercise this freedom should be in accordance with their values.

Then where does the limit go? Do you, as a general rule, support large monopoly corporations having veto rights over all public speech?

Private companies are, in some countries, required to do just that. For instance, in Germany, banks have a legal obligation to provide people with basic accounts, even if they would not like it.

I can't take seriously the idea that corporations have any human rights at all. Corporations are distinctly non-human, so the idea that CloudFlare has "freedom of association" seems nonsensical. If I run a newspaper and print bold-faced lies, that's (rarely) illegal, but if you run false advertising that's not permitted.

I think this is a very large and unstated assumption. If you stick with it, where do you end up?

For example, landlords are private corporations and not utilities. Should they be free to kick out alleged bigots, too? Should their banks? If all the private corporations band together to decide to deny you service, rendering you homeless, unemployed, etc., in what meaningful sense do you enjoy free speech?

The entire point here, though, is that the Farms vigorously dispute having done any such thing. How are you to determine who's right?

To me, it seems by far fairer to make those decisions, as a society, via the court system and the laws, rather than by leaving them up to private companies.

How do you know it was them? It wouldn't make much sense for them to SWAT Marjorie Taylor Greene, now does it?

Does it work to repeat "I'd like to cancel my subscription" over and over again, without answering their questions?

If so, why isn't this more prevalent?

Why would it need a civil war? It could be done peacefully.

Grant that people wouldn't want to abandon their friends (on both sides!), but surely nobody would feel it worthwhile to fight a war over people in other states having the right to vote?

So what's the strategy then? To be blunt, it doesn't seem to me like the US and human rights are going to have the best possible relationship in the next 10-20 years. Wouldn't it be better then to cut away from it?

Grant this, but at some point, there's still a lack of majority support somewhere. >50% might support cutting Wyoming down to size, but <50% support removing the supermajority requirement for constitutional amendment.

Are there some other (non-politically controversial, not subject to heavy litigation) well-known uncodified rights in the USA?

I don't live in the USA, so certainly none of my rights are codified there.

> Yes, this is how the system is designed to work. It's a bad system, but the system cannot be fundamentally changed in an environment much short of political unanimity. The biggest changes to the system only came after a civil war.

> No system is perfect. The founding fathers did as good a job as they could at the time, but no system can work well without fundamental rethinking forever.

Why not rethink it, then?

I understand that there was a civil war before, but doesn't secession make way more sense now? If only the Democratic states participate, then the necessary consensus to make serious changes (e.g. European-style parliamentary democracy) would be much easier; the Republicans would maybe also tolerate it, given that it would allow them to introduce the laws that they wanted to.

How are you going to keep your country together with the way things are currently going?

> There are 50 states in the US. Each state gets 2 senators. States with low populations (think, Wyoming) tend to lean republican while the few states with high populations tend to lean democrat. The end result is these rural states end up with a disproportionate level of voting power in the senate where the fillibuster exists.

> Were the US population evenly distributed then this wouldn't be as much as a problem.

Isn't that pretty much what I said? Even if >50% want a national abortion law, <50% want to do the necessary ground-work of "cutting Wyoming down to 0.2 senators".

If people do not want it, then how can it happen? Cutting the filibuster only makes sense if you control the Senate, which is about 50/50 for both parties.

> The next problem is that in order to pass new laws, you need to have a super-majority in the senate, a majority in the house, and the presidency to go along with the law. Pretty difficult when the republican party has decided they want absolutely no new laws and certainly no expansion of rights. (See: how hard they are fighting against the HR-1 the voter rights act [2])

Why isn't this abolished, then? Does a majority of the U.S. electorate actually want to abolish the filibuster and so on? If not, then it seems like a logical series of propositions:

1. A majority of the U.S. population want >60% majorities to pass laws.

2. A majority, but less than 60%, support nationally permitting abortion.

3. Therefore, while a majority of the U.S. support abortion, they don't support any system that would actually allow it to become law.

"The federal government is hopelessly useless" and "the states shouldn't get to decide anything" seem to me like two contrary positions. Either:

1. The current federal system is fine, and there is no need to change anything.

2. The current federal system is not fine, but it can be changed. Therefore, it should simply be reformed.

3. The current federal system is not fine, but it can't be changed. Therefore, the states should have the power instead.

What am I missing, here? Genuinely curious.

> In Roe, the court didn't write a law saying abortion was legal. It struck down laws stating that it was illegal. That's an important difference.

I don't get it - this seems like sophistry. Isn't the end result the same, i.e. nationally permitting abortion?

> It's also worth remembering that there was never a realistic chance of a nationwide right to abortion being passed through congress. There are a few reasons for it. Only about 15% of the country is against abortions in all circumstances, but they're a loud minority. Similarly, 20-30% of American are pro-choice under any circumstance. But the majority of Americans support abortion only in certain circumstances, and they tend not to care as much about it. [1]

Isn't this how the system is designed to work? And if that's not desired, why not change the system instead? "The SCOTUS gets to make the rules" only works about half of the time, and it seems mostly like a matter of dumb luck as for when it does and doesn't.

Using the courts to enforce uncodified abortion rights is like using a shoe to beat a nail in; it's pointlessly brutal, and makes a mockery of the rule of law. I get that it may be expedient for a specific purpose, but why do people celebrate it as a good system in the abstract?

But in that case, what's the problem? If you can't get the legislation through because it isn't popular enough, that seems like a pretty solid case of "Won't fix: working as intended".

Congress still has the ability to pass those laws, should they want to.

Do you have any proof of this claim?

You say that there "is no denying that the GDPR was a catalyst". Well, in what way did it catalyze it? Static pages do not need any GDPR compliance anyway.

People from out of state. The native Californians would not have to pay, since they already live there.

No, in this system, they would be "residents", they would just be residents that haven't gone through the sort of procedures that California would like for them to, and so they get absurd property taxes or whatnot.

e.g. if you go don't go through immigration, you can physically live there, but you'll have to pay 105% of your income in tax

Certainly you couldn't do it like a straight-up visa policy, but you could probably achieve something very similar by giving them strongly unfavorable property taxes and so on.