topynate

> Why would that make it easier?

Because the immediate problem you're trying to solve as an employer isn't writing a commitment satisfying all situations, it's having a valuable association with your employees, and if employees know under what conditions they will be fired your problem is easier to solve than if they don't. Gene's rules-lawyering is not relevant. Refusal of an idea is not relevant, why would you try to make a window into men's souls that way, are you a better administrator than Elizabeth I? No.

If not being racist is one of those things that everyone fucking knows then that should make it easier to agree a standard commitment to not being racist. Breaches can then be dealt with in the same way that your hypothetical sexual harassment thing is dealt with, i.e. your boss (not "management", if "management" are responsible then you have bigger problems than people Stallmanning in the workplace) telling you to stop that, or firing you, or whatever, depending on what you agreed to when you were hired. If everyone really does know not to do X then being fired for doing X was a predictable consequence and you really have no-one else to blame but yourself. Moreover if you want your job then you probably will not actually do X whether you like being obtuse or not, which is the point of the whole thing.

None of which resembles the rank-system self-report antiracist-in-a-particular-way bollocks that is under discussion. That is not in fact a wonderful innovation. It's actually a lot closer to tribal politics than your excellent suggestion of a "promise not to be racist". Specifically in that it's something that "everyone knows" but you nevertheless get ranked on it; which is to say, it's not something everyone knows how to do but rather something everyone important knows about you, it's about your social status, it's a popularity contest.

Thank you for your concern about the situations I've found myself in! I did find myself in much better situations once I learned to treat business more seriously than high school.

The social issues may be messy. Why does that mean the employment conditions must be messy?

> I can tell you, from experience, it's a lot easier when you drop the "Okay, if I have to put up with it, let's get some strict definitions!" bullshit.

My experience is that if you take that attitude into a serious negotiation you have a great chance of being fucked over by people who "tell you things from experience".

> It just means that if you can't even promise to not be racist

Can I take a look at this Minimum Credible Commitment to Not Being Racist? Are there standard terms? Are there standard reciprocal commitments? For example, I would want any counter-party to commit to not treating me worse on race-related grounds than anyone else signing the same commitment. (That excludes any kind of rank-system, by the way, apologies if that's obvious to you.)

If liberal US colleges just want to filter for people who aren't so racist that they can't even be professional, then it's clear, to me at least, that there must be some other process that's frustrating their aim and making them expend a lot more resources than they would want to, to achieve a much worse result. In that case ISTM that what would be good for them is for some sort of overriding power to impose a Minimum Credible Commitment standard on them.

The two issues aren't exactly the same but they do seem intimately connected. When you consider what's involved in generating a weights file, it's a mostly mechanical process. You write a model, gather some data, and then train. Maybe the design of the model is patentable, or the model/training code is copyrightable (actually, I'm pretty sure it is), but the training process itself is just the execution of a program on some data. You can argue that what that program is doing is simply compiling a collection of facts, which means you haven't created a derivative work, but in that case the weights file is a database, by definition, so not copyrightable in the US. Or you can argue that the program is a tool which you're using to create a new copyrightable work. But in that case it's probably a derivative work.

GPT3 works quite well at following instructions if adequately prompted, just not as well as ChatGPT. ChatGPT was trained separately for ability to follow instructions and for harmlessness (sic). Not only is a non-moralising ChatGPT possible, one was actually created during the research process. You may also wish to know that most readers of erotica are women.

If you're referring to HN policy then for an established account it's not really shadowbanning, because dang will tell you that you're banned and why. Being treated as a useless noob until proven otherwise is being treated as an adult.

Twitter is different (although perhaps more different than it needs to be). Seeing as you ask, here is how to handle content deletion on Twitter without infantilizing users.

Don't ask a user to "delete" a tweet – something which has no effect on that tweet's visibility anyway. Just hide it and tell him why. If the user chooses to appeal, that appeal can go forward without restricting the use of the account. Give time-outs sparingly. They should be more of a final warning than a routine measure. If it's necessary to give a time-out, start the clock immediately, not when the user takes some action.

It's called a temporary suspension. Twitter asks you to acknowledge your tweet was bad by deleting it yourself. If you do, you get a time-out in the naughty corner for 12 hours, or a week, or whatever, and then you can tweet again. If you don't, you stay in the naughty corner. Whoever designed this process could stand to learn how to treat people like adults, in my opinion.

The 'brand safety' super omnia argument isn't nearly as straightforward as it's made out to be. Twitter already has an enormous amount of content that is perfectly within the terms of service, yet that you wouldn't think most companies would want their ads next to. Hardcore pornography, for example. It more or less works out, because Twitter ads aren't associated with particular tweets in the same way that YouTube ads are associated with particular videos.

The argument only goes through when you look at the platform reputation as a whole. That's why platforms like Parler have trouble attracting ads. There are a lot – a lot – of people trying to hit Twitter's platform reputation right now, but their problem is that the best place to degrade companies' (and people's) reputations is Twitter.

Do you have showdead enabled? To me, it looks like a post that's been automatically made dead – i.e. I see [dead] but not [flagged]. I know there are certain (very few) things a user in good standing can say in a comment to produce that outcome, not sure what's happened in this post though.

I just opened the YouTube android app and looked at some videos from this channel. I saw three ads from about 15 videos watched. I then looked at some videos from an apolitical channel I'm subscribed to and saw considerably more ads. They also seemed to be 'higher quality' in some sense. The ads on the Ukraine channel were for things like an earwax removal tool. The ads on the other channel were for luxury sunglasses, a political party†, and so on.

You're quite right that there's some confusion between Partner Program eligibility and demonetization proper. This Ukraine war creator actually talks about being removed from the Partner Program in the video linked in this post.

† It was a deepfake of the current Israeli Prime Minister explaining why I should vote for Shas, a party of which he is most definitely not a member. Not relevant to this issue but too crazy not to mention.

See for instance the replies to this guy's clever idea yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubers/comments/xxlkvi/using_dem...

It may depend on what country you're in or if you're on mobile or not. I wouldn't know for certain, I'm a uBO/NewPipe man.

The term 'demonetization' can be misleading. It's the creator who is demonetized on a demonetized video or channel. YouTube still often shows ads on such videos, it just keeps all the money instead of 45% of it.

There's also a difference in co-ordination capacity and social dynamics more generally. In this case, there'll be some channel or chat group where the petition and complaints were arranged. It's pretty safe to say not only that the professor won't be on that channel but that students who aren't on it or aren't allowed to be on it will suffer some fairly significant social penalties.

What right does Google have to store the data about this kid necessary to enforce a lifetime ban against him? The click-through contract that he was legally unable to enter into?

"he has already earned over £300" implies he's in the UK, so UK GDPR applies.

No, 'unofficial' is a euphemism. They're questionable. It's just that sometimes the answer to the question is "who gives a damn?"

Israel has quite a serious problem with looting of antiquities. I was talking to an archaeologist a few months ago and suggested adopting something like the UK's Treasure Act so that people who find artefacts have a way of legally being paid for them and was met with blank incomprehension.

Most eliminationist rhetoric is still protected in the States under current precedent. It advocates unlawful action but without "imminency". It could have been forbidden under the old "clear and present danger" standard.

Forbidden eliminationist rhetoric is quite rare and would be something like the "cockroach" broadcasts in Rwanda.

I don't. I'm going on what I think about Matthew Prince, who wrote the post we're talking about.

It is in America, for the most part. You can absolutely organize to harass people if the harassment is in the form of verbal abuse, for instance. Cloudflare is saying that something happened in the last few days on KF that was a genuine "emergency". I don't think this is just an excuse, actually – Prince seems unusually committed to honesty about this sort of thing. I presume people were organizing specific violent acts on KF, which is not "free speech" even in America.

Yes, I was looking for a point of comparison. Pu-239 is probably also quite expensive, as both isotopes are prepared by using a reactor to irradiate stuff. Only way I can see a "$2k" cost as relevant is if it's the cost to someone who's already acquired the nuclear material.

Yeah, we've got better at making neutrons since 1970. Mostly this is a good thing!

I meant a modulated neutron initiator, not the explosive detonator. India was still using vapour deposition of polonium to make theirs, around the same time. I'm no engineer but that sounds like it costs a lot more than $2000.

Funny enough, Pu-238 was on the market at one point (with plenty of restrictions). It was used to power pacemakers. It's still used for spacecraft.

I'm not sure how expensive it was in the '70s but it is very expensive now. American production is supposed to be scaling up, but only to about 1.5 kg a year.

I imagine that between the '40s and '70s many of the really hard problems became a lot easier. E.g. using solid-state electronics for the timing, modelling shaped charges as a textbook exercise rather than a research problem, etc. What surprises me is that he managed to get a dirt-cheap initiator.

You have my sympathies. I skimmed the article but I've read quite a lot of the report, which is considerably more detailed.

Viewed from the Right, these guys have a pretty standard left-liberal internationalist agenda. For example, my country Israel gets the yellow alert status more or less because HRW said the word 'apartheid'. Of all the various impositions Israel makes on Palestinians, limiting their freedom of expression is probably close to the bottom of the list. Or the USA remarks are about Trump and the 6th of January, even though FOSTA-SESTA is demonstrably doing far more every day to restrict free speech. (Between MAGA and FOSTA, which is getting Cloudflare to terminate people's accounts?) Or more generally, 'discourse control' as used to describe the strategies both of Putin and of Bukele – come on.

I could go on, but I probably shouldn't. To me, the interesting thing is that in despite of the report's slant, it is thorough, specific and quantitative. If I just ignore the blah blah, it's still quite apparent that there's a real trend across all continents towards restricted speech. It's really remarkable when you see the same thing happening on all continents. If the thread had been about which parts of the report are bullshit and which are accurate, maybe some people would have learned something, because I'm pretty sure there'd be wide agreement about maybe 70% of what's in there.

Just to give an idea of what the actual trade-offs are between the benefits of wind and the immediate ecological impact, I ran some numbers a few months ago and reached an estimate of somewhere between $1700 and $2500 saved in "social cost of carbon" per dead bird, for on-shore wind power in Scotland and the north of England. Social cost of carbon is the estimated value of the benefits of reduced carbon emissions, including benefits to human health. For a non-endangered bird, even $1700 saved is a good deal. Clearly a pigeon's life is not worth $1700 (not that pigeons are particularly at risk from turbines). For a critically endangered bird, it is not a good deal at all (extinctions are very bad). At some point there's a cross-over.

The problem is that as you build out wind power, you kill more birds, which starts putting populations under stress that weren't stressed before. In other words the cross-over point moves. That makes effective mitigations more important the more wind power gets built. Ideally a doubling of capacity should be accompanied by a halving of the kill rate per unit of capacity. A mitigation strategy that could cope with all the planned capacity increases would probably look like: paint jobs on all new build, plus effective radar that can brake the turbines, plus a form of active deterrent (i.e. microwave or sonic repellent). All this while policing the wind companies by tracking tagged birds.

The Israel Nature and Parks Authority studied bird and bat kill and the effectiveness of mitigations and ended up calling for a moratorium. So did the environment ministry and the Society for the Protection of Nature [1].

That article is worth reading not so much for the absolute numbers of birds and bats killed, as for the mitigation study. The wind company, Enlight, put a Portuguese radar system in to stop the turbines when large birds flew close. (This was a condition of their permit.) The INPA cross-checked this against data from bird tracking tags. The system didn't activate even once when the tracked birds entered the supposed range of the radar.

I've had a bee in my bonnet about bird kill since reading the last graf: "An Enlight spokesperson defended the company’s actions. The company did not respond to requests to comment on the INPA study showing the Portuguese technology to be ineffective." Either the radar really is that bad, which I think is unlikely, or Enlight configured it not to trigger. Either way it's pretty unconscionable for them to play coy.

For all the comments here and elsewhere about no-one really caring about incidental bird take, this seems a clearer case of bad faith to me. It's a company refusing to engage with the public about a proven failure of its systems while seeking additional concessions.

It's OK to be an anti-NIMBY. Saying everyone who cares about birds is arguing in bad faith isn't laudable, but it's besides the point, really. Just bear in mind that wind companies are not operating to save the environment, but to make a profit. They can act in bad faith too. Therefore, if you have any interest in reducing the ecological stress turbines create, you should also be interested in keeping those companies honest.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/environment-minister-seeking-m...

The referent of "utters" (sic) is ambiguous, so I can imagine a model having more difficulty with it than usual. Regardless, the current SOTA does need more specific and sometimes repetitive prompting than a human artist would, but it's surprising how much better results you can get from SOTA models with a bit of experience at prompt engineering.

This article is complete bullshit because it effectively corrects for inflation twice. The CPI is a measure of the nominal change in cost of a basket of goods. This should be compared, like for like, to nominal income, not inflation-adjusted income. The CPI was already used to adjust the income to which it's compared in this article!