slg

A person defined by their lack of intelligence sees something exciting off in the distance and makes a rash decision to rush towards it, thereby abandoning something that was making them money (not sure how much that part specifically applies to Google News), ultimately leading to lots of unnecessary destruction.

I hadn't seen that. Just a hunch, but it's probably a red flag when someone starts comparing themselves to non-existent mythical beings.

I really can't get over the way almost every piece of consumer technology/software has gotten worse in the last half decade. These companies are killing every goose they can get their hands on because they are so convinced there is some golden goose out there that will be worth more than all those regular geese combined.

I highly recommend Jon Bois' Youtube docuseries[1] on this story that's basically a 4-hour PowerPoint presentation which frames this all through the metaphor of the 90s Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement. That descriptor probably sounds insane to anyone not familiar with his work, but Bois is one of a kind with what he does and I thought this series was one of his best.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmyBSrQodnI

One good media literacy tip, unless a story is massive or there is some possibility of backlash to the writer(s), it's often a big warning sign when an article has a byline like this one "By Space Daily Editorial Team". It usually tells you no author(s) care enough about the story or are proud enough of the story to want credit for their individual work on that story.

It's only made worse when you click on the accompanying "Editorial Process" link and see this:

>We use AI tools as part of our publishing workflow. AI assists with research, source discovery, drafting, fact-checking support, and post-publication quality audits including broken-link scans and source verification.

So this article might have been drafted by AI from sources and research done by AI, before finally being fact checked by AI. But they promise some unnamed human(s) definitely contributed at some point in that process, they just don't feel like putting their name on it.

I mean I get it, but also it's funny that you commented this 5 minutes after you edited the readme[1] to add in the exact type of plausible deniability I remarked was absent.

[1] - https://github.com/stupside/castor/commit/847abd1ad0dbe893fc...

Usually piracy software tries to maintain a little plausible deniability, but here this is suggesting it will help you stream this weekend's newly released $250m blockbuster.

If you believe that AI is powerful enough to help the good people (however you define that), why isn't that also coupled with the belief that it is powerful enough to help the bad people (ditto)? Either the capability of this tech is completely overblown or it can help a wide swath of people including those with conflicting ideologies.

>increasing tax rate rates will likely not yield more tax collection

What's so special about our current tax rates that you're making this claim? Because if you believe that higher tax rates don't yield more tax collected, why not argue for tax rates to approach 0%? So either you're couching your real and unpopular opinion like I described in my first comment or you're claiming that our tax rates are optimized for tax collected.

Should we just do away with democracy?

Scroll down to the Debt By President section and switch over from chronological list to By % Increase. Of the last 11 completed presidential terms, 6 of the 7 biggest increases have been Republican and the 4 smallest increases have all been Democrats. "Both sides are the same" claims simply have no basis in reality when it comes to the national debt.

I feel like the well has been poisoned regarding national debt talk. There is simply no point in having a conversation about the debt without discussing how revenue should be raised and/or expenses lowered. That means someone focusing purely on the debt being bad is likely doing it because they know their specific proposals for addressing it won't be popular.

Thanks for the response, I guess it's rare enough that it was the first time I remember seeing it so it stuck out to me.

>This is why we see so many "just show me the prompt" responses, along with others like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/genai-pushback.

This is totally tangential to your point, but what is that page? It's not your usual link to an algolia search. Is this already part of some sort of manual tagging system? Clicking on the first one, these comments don't seem to be moderated. Are you using these complaints to help detect AI generated content? I think the existence of that page just leaves me confused on whether you actually want people to comment like this or not.

>Ok, but by this logic all freedom of citizens can be taken away, because it could lead to a single child being trafficked.

No one is advocating for this. You're creating a straw man argument and those type of arguments are never persuasive. Once again, if you want to actually end this debate once and for all, you need an actual argument that can persuade people to your side.

>Like actually finding and arresting Eipstein clients?

Genuinely yes. It's a viable political strategy to respond to this with a redirection towards Epstein. "How can we waste time on these chat controls when there are obviously people guilty of the worst version of these crimes that go unpunished due to their money and connections? We need to focus on those criminals instead."

Once again, this is a political problem, it needs to be solved with politics.

>I'm taking it as a given that we shouldn't do things that aren't cost effective, because that's what "cost effective" means. There are things we could do that would cost six trillion dollars in order to save one life, and we're not going to do those things, because it would be patently unreasonable and cost dramatically more lives than that as a result of what those resources would have to be allocated from.

The problem with describing it in terms of cost-effectiveness is that you now have to put a price on how much we can justify spending on child sex trafficking. What is that number? How much is too much to save a child? How can you possibly answer that in a satisfying way?

>It's possible that there are cost effective things we could do that we're not currently doing, but those things tend to be uncontroversial, so when someone uncovers one it generally does actually get enacted and becomes the status quo. That's the issue: Name any given thing you suppose we should do instead of Chat Control. Enact it, as many of them already have been. Tomorrow they propose Chat Control again, so what now? Offering and even enacting an alternative hasn't satisfied them, they keep trying to pass it anyway.

>What are you supposed to do when you've not only offered solutions but enacted and implemented them already and your opponent is a fear monger who will never be satisfied because they have an ulterior motive for their dangerous and ineffective proposal?

The proposal up-thread seems like a good place to start. If we believe that these tech companies have through their software and platforms made it easier to exploit children, that justifies taxing them to offset the negative externalities they create. We then take that money and use it to increase funding for investigation and enforcement. I have no idea if that will work, but it at least puts the people you view as the enemy on the defensive and gives you the chance to win some of their supporters back to your side. Because right now you're letting those fearmongers dictate the terms of this political debate and their persistence on this issue shows you aren't making any progress in changing that.

>There are many, many things we can do that actually protect children -- and we generally already do them. That's the nature of the problem. After you do all of the things that are reasonable and cost effective, it solves 90% of the problem, 95% of the problem, 99% of the problem, but never 100% of the problem.

Genuinely, how do you expect someone concerned about child sex trafficking to receive this? "Oh, good point, I guess we can't do anything more to protect children because it isn't 'cost-effective'." Do you think that will be a common response?

>And then disingenuous opportunists keep proposing the thing that should never be done because they know it lets them paint you as the bad guy for having to tell them no again and again.

I'm not even disagreeing with this point, I'm simply saying your response can't just be "no, they are the bad guy". That is not a winning political message. That's why the democratic socialist faction of the Democratic Party in the US is growing in popularity. You can't just call your opponent bad especially when your opponent is promising to address people's concerns, you need to actually engage with people about their concerns and offer solutions.

Because those questions are meaningless to many people if you aren't offering any solution of your own to address their concerns. For the people who genuinely care about this issue, an obvious response you will get is "how many children are you willing to allow to be sex trafficked to preserve your privacy?"

You can't win a debate by claiming your concerns invalidate their concerns. You need to actually engage with them on the issue they care about.

>It creates a moral asymmetry where one group is "defending children" and another group is "defending an abstract concept", but group A wins out primarily due to millions of years of human evolution. It has very little (IMO) to do with the actual underlying concepts being debated.

You aren't actually engaging with why group A wins. Those "millions of years of human evolution" actually instilled in people a desire to protect children.

If this is your belief, the only reasonable conclusion is that time spent on fighting these chat control initiatives is wasted because it's all downstream of the power of the tech oligarchy. That's the battle you should be fighting rather than trying to play whack-a-mole on individual proposals like this.

Then fund the initiative by taxing those same tech companies. "This problem is hard or expensive to address" does not assuage the desire to fix the problem.

There are countless reasons to be against these chat controls, but it's easy for a layperson to understand how they would address their specific concerns. The only way to effectively counter that is providing an alternative that does a better job.

I feel like if people wanted to counter this push, the more effective route would be addressing the "for the children" motivations seriously rather than fully dismissing them. You could cut the legs out of this effort by capturing the part of the population that does have an honest desire to protect children by offering an alternative that actually protects children. Instead, that concern is treated as 100% disingenuous which pushes many normal people to the side of wanting to enact these controls. This is a political problem, you need to solve it with politics.

It's pretty difficult to go bankrupt turning a profit.

Once again, what is the actual problem here? The company was making a profit at their current employment level. They are laying people off and shuttering studios because that profit isn't enough for them. This entire argument keeps coming back to "money grubbery".

Is a low profit margin a problem for consumers or is it the company's "money grubbery" of not being satisfied with that profit margin that is causing the problem?

No, because the customers bought the games. That means the customers valued the games at some value higher than the purchase price. There's a ton of surplus value for society produced as part of this process that doesn't end up on a company's balance sheet.

>We want to do more with fewer resources.

Who is the "we" here? Because the profit margin not being high enough is certainly not a problem for consumers. The only people who should care about that are the company's shareholders and "shareholders" certainly isn't synonymous with "society".

Quite frankly, I don't think you can compare image generation, let alone NSFW image generation, with YouTube and podcasts. You are simply operating in a medium in which this is going to be dramatically tougher, primarily because most people who consume your content are likely there for the content and unlikely to have any relationship to you specifically. But either way, "It's a rare trait" isn't disagreeing with what I said. The successful conversion rate in my last comment was below 1%.

Yes, there is a reason I said "you would need 900 true fans, patrons, or whatever other label you want to give them". I'm not claiming this is a new concept, I was making specific allusions to Patreon and the idea of 1000 true fans[1].

[1] - https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/