pseudo0

It's a hypothetical question... But plenty of gay people have children through surrogacy, or they adopt prior to determining the child's sexuality.

Would you want your children to be gay? As a straight person, given the choice I would want my children to be straight, so they could have biological children with their partner and a dating pool of ~48% of the population rather than ~2%. Those are pretty clear objective advantages, even putting aside the issue of societal acceptance.

It's completely understandable to have an attachment to one's own identity, but at a certain point trying to impose that identity on one's children becomes ethically questionable. A good example is the deaf community - would it be appropriate for a deaf couple to withhold medical treatment from their child that would allow them to hear? I would argue no, but some people disagree.

> A valid and reliable survey instrument was mailed to 4,924 households on the mailing lists of six non-profit Down syndrome organizations.

Definitely no sampling bias here... And given that the vast majority of people who do prenatal screening decide not to have a child with Down Syndrome, I don't think the people who choose to have a Down Syndrome child are really representative of prospective parents as a whole.

The revealed preference is clear, particularly in places like Iceland where prenatal screening is ubiquitous. They have effectively eradicated Down Syndrome going forward.

That's a card with a $800 annual fee... And the Amazon Amex requires a Prime membership, so you are paying at least $140/year for that card.

Credit card companies aren't stupid, they offer a few loss leaders but they make it annoying and time-consuming to come out ahead. And most of the big perks are one-time only, they have gotten much better at banning "churners".

In one case it was a personal website, the other was a Twitter account. Both got scrubbed from the IA.

Apparently they will comply with GDPR and DMCA requests, I'm not sure what precise mechanism was used in those cases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...

https://www.joshualowcock.com/guide/how-to-delete-your-site-...

The Internet Archive is significantly less useful because they allow people to exclude their public social media accounts or websites. On a couple occasions I have tried to find a source for old deleted statements using the IA only to find that the data had been scrubbed. Fortunately archive.today still had a copy in one case, but in the other one I was out of luck.

Some tech companies block Iranian users to comply with US sanctions, eg. AWS.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/10/2/locked-out-why-i...

Realistically they can't, unless the service owner lives in a country with an extradition treaty with the UK, and that country has an equivalent law in place. But most service operators don't want to deal with that stress, so they will just IP block the UK and Brits who know how to use a VPN will just keep using the service.

I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a topic in trade negotiations with the US in the future though, since this is a trade barrier that imposes significant regulatory cost on US companies for content that is legal in the US. Eg. the proscribed categories of illegal content include knives and firearms, hate, etc.

Yeah just interpret 3000+ pages of policy documents and if you screw it up, OFCOM can fine you 18 million pounds and hold you criminally liable. Their "simple guide" is 70 pages long and has numerous links to additional policy documents that have more details on how to interpret the law. Any sane company is going to hire UK legal counsel to deal with this, which is easily going to cost five or six figures. And that doesn't include the cost of adding additional technical mitigations to justify a lower risk assessment, or the ongoing compliance cost for services that aren't low-risk. So the rational move for any company that has minimal UK revenue is to just IP ban the country, like Iran or North Korea.

Illegal alien is the correct legal terminology used in immigration statutes. "Undocumented" is a confusing euphemism. Most illegal aliens have documentation from their country of origin, what they lack is legal authorization to live in the US.

For context, the current Labour government has a 12% approval rating.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/government-app...

MIT experimented with going test-optional for a couple years, that might be what he was referring to? They have since reinstated their SAT/ACT requirement.

Illegal migration makes it infeasible to invest in technology to automate the work, because any business that wants to invest in automation will be undercut by a less ethical competitor employing illegal, artificially cheap workers. This also makes it hard to attract investment for companies building technology to automate this work, because investors assume that the government will continue to not enforce the law, leading to reduced demand for labor-replacing technology. We won't get significant innovation and investment in this field until the government sends a clear message that they will be consistently enforcing the law going forward.

That's not what the article says.

> Adani, the nephew of Gautam Adani, was sent a notice by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) last year which alleged he shared information about Adani Green's (ADNA.NS), 2021 acquisition of SoftBank-backed SB Energy Holdings with his brother-in-law before the deal was announced, according to a source and the document.

Some Adani relative is getting a slap on the wrist for a $100k insider trading violation. This has nothing to do with the main issues raised by Hindenburg.

Part of the issue is that they commingle inventory their warehouses receive from third-party sellers based on ISBN. So if you receive a counterfeit, it might be the fault of the seller you bought it from, or it might be Amazon's fault for mixing in counterfeit goods from some other third-party seller without doing proper quality control. Unsurprisingly they don't want reviews that draw attention to this longstanding problem.

They obtain interest from citizen workers by increasing wages. H1Bs artificially suppress wages and make the market inefficient by removing those price signals. This creates a self-perpetuating problem that can only be "resolved" by bringing in more H1Bs, as the H1B impact on wages disincentivizes citizens from entering the field and pursuing the requisite education and training.

> Not included: Fees for optional services, such as baggage fees.

This entire article is about how airlines are unbundling their offerings and doing market segmentation through "optional" add-ons...

Accessibility experts typically end up creating a bunch of requirements that need engineering man-hours to fulfil. That tends to be boring dev work that most people don't want to do for free. It's hard enough to find people to work on the shiny, fun stuff in open-source.

There were no labor shortages during COVID... Low-wage employers just panicked because they were suddenly competing with generous temporary government benefits.

No wonder Canada's productivity is stagnant and on track for the lowest growth in the G7. Why invest in technology or productivity when you can just cry to the government for cheap, indentured labor?

The deployment to Kent State was ordered by Ohio's governor. Maybe you are thinking of the Little Rock Crisis? In 1957, Eisenhower federalized the entire Arkansas national guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division (regular army) to enforce desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, without the permission of the governor.

Dead by Daylight has stayed pretty popular. It's an asymmetric multiplayer game where one player plays as a horror movie killer, while the other four try to accomplish objectives and escape. Balancing the game can be a bit tricky though, since when 80% of your population plays as survivors, there's an incentive to keep them happy.

Juniors and offshore teams will probably be the most severely impacted. If a senior dev is already breaking off smaller tightly scoped tasks and fixing up the results, that loop can be accomplished much more quickly by iterating with a LLM. Especially if you have to wait a business day for someone in India to even start on the task when a LLM is spitting out a similar quality PR in minutes.

Ironically a friend of mine noticed that the team in India they work with is now largely pushing AI-generated code... At that point you just need management to cut out the middleman.

I can't find the ScarJo image you are referring to, so it either looks nothing like her, or it got reported and removed. Yes, people use NSFW models to generate NSFW content... What a shocking discovery.

What exactly are you proposing here that CivitAI didn't do already? Yes, people can scrub metadata from images. This is the exact same issue that image hosts have faced for decades - people can upload abusive or illegal images. The solution has been to do automated filtering, and have users report content that slips through. The solution is not to ban Photoshop because some people use it to make fake nudes.

They had the NSFW detection dialed up to the point where it would flag a bit of cleavage as inappropriate for real person depictions. They were very on top of this issue and really wanted to avoid any bad press over "deepfakes".

Characters are a bit tricky. For example, Lara Croft could refer to the fictional video game character, or the character in the movie played by Angelina Jolie. They allowed the former, but not the latter. Or a model trained on the concept of "Hermione Granger" from fan art would be allowed, but not a LoRA trained on Emma Watson from the movies. That seemed like a pretty reasonable position to take.

I have been using CivitAI practically since it was created. Real person NSFW content has been banned since day one, because they didn't want to get sued. The change in April was a cosmetic update to how they displayed search results. It completely separated out real person content and NSFW content, to ensure that NSFW could not be displayed in proximity to real person content. This changed how content was displayed, not what content was allowed.

I'm sure some people do generate porn with celebrity LoRAs, but there are also plenty of legitimate uses such as parody, criticism, transformative art, etc. If people do post inappropriate content, there are civil remedies and now also federal criminal remedies via the TAKE IT DOWN Act. CivitAI is fully legally compliant, but they are being held hostage by an unelected, unaccountable payment processor cartel.

They always had a pretty strict policy against mixing any NSFW content with depictions of real people. Anything tagged as a real person would get run through a NSFW -detection API and would get automatically blocked if it failed. So no, no one was posting deepfaked nudes.

Meanwhile I used a couple LoRAs to make JD Vance memes when that was the craze a few weeks ago, and now those are getting nuked... No fun allowed, thanks payment processors.

This paper is trash. They preemptively define any models they don't like as "abusive models". This includes any model that can generate real people (including for transformative, fair use purposes like parody) and separately any NSFW model, including stuff like cartoons.

Also they are using a ridiculous definition of "NSFW" to achieve the correlation they want to find. They are putting the prompt (not the image) into ChatGPT and applying an arbitrary metric of NSFW-ness sentiment analysis that returns false positives. Actually NSFW content of real people was always banned on CivitAI.

I seriously doubt the long-term viability of BNPL for merchants. Sure, in the short-term it boosts sales because people who don't have money are able to purchase stuff, but eventually those marginal consumers will end up exhausting their BNPL credit as well. Meanwhile the merchant ends up paying 5% on a bunch of transactions for people who could easily afford to pay now, but don't because it's "free". The only way this model works long-term is if they get enough leverage to force merchants to offer BNPL at the same price as cash, the same anti-competitive model used by credit cards.

The credit card company still takes a 2-3% cut, which absolutely gets passed on to consumers. You get part of it back in the form of credit card rewards and services (eg. fraud protection, charge backs) but it's still a tax on everything.

BNPL is worse, they take 5% and all you get is a small loan for a few weeks. Their whole business model relies on it being "free" for middle-class people who will pay back their loans, because the fee is hidden in the purchase price. This is an area where government regulation is actually required, all transaction fees should be disclosed and charged as a surcharge on the base purchase price, whether it's a credit card or BNPL, to provide a fair and competitive market for consumers and merchants.