It adds insult to injury, since it shows that they expect that some people will want to apply those filters, but then they don’t care enough to make the filters work. They just waste even more of my time by creating the false impression that they have made a tool that does what I want.

I’m not a fan. I don’t like looking at swastikas in any context. Sometimes it’s necessary as part of learning about history, but I would prefer not to see one twice a day if that was the metro station I used to get to work.

Also IMO it has little artistic worth; it’s not much more sophisticated than putting up a portrait of Hitler and labeling it “Bad Guy” would be. Something like this takes fundamentally the same idea (destroy the symbol of a hated enemy) but expresses it in a far more aesthetically interesting way.

Your argument is reasonable, although I don’t think the fact that Google is aligned with the USA and Western Europe is a coincidence. This anti-trust action is itself a demonstration of the power that the US government does have over Google, and Google knows better than to provoke the use of that power. Anti-trust law is largely a matter of the government’s opinion rather than objective rules, so Google has no effective legal defense other than keeping the government’s opinion of it favorable.

I don’t think Google could get away with deliberately manipulating elections in the way that you propose. Even if it were to tilt the outcome from one established party to another, that party would not be beholden to it. (If the party that it helped knew that it helped, then unless that party controlled Google, it would rightly consider Google a threat rather than an ally.) Furthermore, manipulating elections would have a huge risk of being revealed and facing devastating blowback. Engineers rather than the board of directors are the ones who actually make Google function and those engineers would be neither oblivious to nor loyal to some plan for domination by the board of directors.

With that said, I disagree with you primarily because I’m very risk-averse when it comes to matters like this. Right now, the “juggernaut like Google that is The Internet” is working in our favor and if we break it up then we won’t have a juggernaut working in our favor anymore. We would be better off if we were able to accomplish what you propose while retaining dominance of the internet, but IMO the reward is not worth the risk of forfeiting that dominance. Those who are losing need to take risks but those who are winning should not, and right now the USA is winning.

I don’t see how this is bootlicking. I don’t gain anything from saying it; it’s just my sincere opinion. The USA as it is now, with the tech billionaires, is very rich and very powerful, and this does benefit ordinary Americans and not just tech billionaires. My impression is that many people on Lemmy focus on the problems in the USA and lose perspective of how good it is here compared to pretty much everywhere else. There’s a reason why so many people are desperate to immigrate, and that’s because they will be better off here even as poor Americans.

I expect some people are going to think of countries like Sweden where the standard of living is claimed to be better than it is in the USA. I’m not convinced that it actually is; I’d rather live here than there. However, even if people in Sweden do enjoy a higher standard of living, it’s because they benefit from the world order established and maintained by the USA since the second world war. Their defense and their access to international trade is subsidized by the USA. (That’s one thing Trump is right about, although the way he went about saying so was foolish because it undermined the perception of NATO unity that is so important.) If they USA declines, Europe will decline with it.

And yet somehow I trust Google acting in its own self-interest to benefit Americans more than the government breaking up Google with the intent of benefiting Americans. American companies dominate the internet (outside of China), this is to America’s great advantage, and I don’t think the government should risk losing that advantage.

Nothing can fix things because teenagers will not cooperate. If Instagram could identify all its teenage users, those users would move to a platform that couldn’t. The only thing the restrictions achieve is a reduction in the market share of the platform with the restrictions.

I don’t understand why browsers support this “functionality”.

So far “more data” has been the solution to most problems, but I don’t think we’re close to the limit of how much useful information can be learned from the data even if we’re close to the limit of how much data is available. Look at the AIs that can’t draw hands. There are already many pictures of hands from every angle in their training data. Maybe just having ten times as many pictures of hands would solve the problem, but I’m confident that if that was not possible then doing more with the existing pictures would also work.* Algorithm design just needs some time to catch up.

*I know that the data that is running out is text data. This is just an analogy.

What occasions are you referring to? I know people claim that Israeli use of white phosphorous munitions is illegal, but the law is actually quite specific about what an incendiary weapon is. Incendiary effects caused by weapons that were not designed with the specific purpose of causing incendiary effects are not prohibited. (As far as I can tell, even the deliberate use of such weapons in order to cause incendiary effects is allowed.) This is extremely permissive, because no reasonable country would actually agree not to use a weapon that it considered effective. Something like the firebombing of Dresden is banned, but little else.

Incendiary weapons do not include:

(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

(ii) Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.

The issue I have with referring to the current situation as a bubble is that this isn’t just hype. The technology really is amazing, and far better than what people had been expecting. I do think that most current attempts to commercialize it are premature, but there’s such a big first-mover advantage that it makes sense to keep losing money on attempts that are too early in order to succeed as soon as it is possible to do so.

Multiple studies are showing that training on data contaminated with LLM output makes LLMs worse, but there’s no inherent reason why LLMs must be trained on this data. As you say, people are aware of it and they’re going to be avoiding it. At the very least, they will compare the newly trained LLM to their best existing one and if the new one is worse, they won’t switch over. The era of being able to download the entire internet (so to speak) is over but this means that AI will be getting better more slowly, not that it will be getting worse.

I don’t disagree, but before the recent breakthroughs I would have said that AI is like fusion power in the sense that it has been 50 years away for 50 years. If the current approach doesn’t get us there, who knows how long it will take to discover one that does?

It would be odd if AI somehow got worse. I mean, wouldn’t they just revert to a backup?

Anyway, I think (1) is extremely unlikely but I would add (3) the existing algorithms are fundamentally insufficient for AGI no matter how much they’re scaled up. A breakthrough is necessary which may not happen for a long time.

I think (3) is true but I also thought that the existing algorithms were fundamentally insufficient for getting to where we are now, and I was wrong. It turns out that they did just need to be scaled up…

The important thing here isn’t that the AI is worse than humans. It’s than the AI is worth comparing to humans. Humans stay the same while software can quickly improve by orders of magnitude.

This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:

1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.

2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.

4. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.

What makes you an actual libertarian?

I don’t have anything to suggest on Lemmy. There’s so little activity that I participate in every community where I see an interesting post, except for those communities which are specifically for people with some particular set of beliefs which I don’t share.

If you’re looking beyond Lemmy, there are are the comment sections of the SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen blog and the blogs it links to as well as some associated forums and subreddits. You’ll find plenty of liberal libertarians and the comments tend to be polite and high-effort, but keep in mind that a dedication to free speech means that people with opinions that can’t be discussed elsewhere participate too. It’s a bit much for me sometimes.

I acknowledge that almost all people (including me) couldn’t survive on their own. Even those that could survive (let’s say that their bunkers have robust long-term life-support systems) still couldn’t live completely alone for many years without going crazy.

I don’t reject relationships with other people, but I think they should be between independent individuals who associate with each other only because they both want to. (Violating this principle is sometimes necessary but always undesirable.) You appear to think otherwise, and I suppose that’s a fundamental value difference that can’t be resolved through debate. I do want to point out that if I were in charge, my rules wouldn’t prevent you from voluntarily living life your way. I suspect that your rules wouldn’t leave me the analogous option.

Edit: I suppose that I do feel like I have some obligations to my family members despite being related to them through no choice of my own. Is that how collectivists feel (to a lesser extent) about everyone else?

The preppers are different because they want to be left completely alone. They don’t see any acceptable role for government in their lives. I don’t think they’re being realistic. Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes.

The techno-libertarians are much more engaged with society and do see a role for government, even if that role is small and (at least according to some of them) bizarre by conventional standards. I’m not going to deny that the bunker-building types are involved in the movement. I often don’t agree with the weirder people involved, but I like that techno-libertarians are willing to hear people out and judge their ideas rationally rather than shunning them for being weird.

(I think I might have a bunker built if I was rich enough. The expected utility of it is higher than that of, say, a second yacht. Human guards are a dead end. Probably the best thing that can be done if civilization totally collapses and you manage to get inside is blowing up the entrance so that anyone who wants to get to you has to move a thousand tons of rock first. You probably won’t ever get to leave, but it’s better than what would happen if you did.)

Yeah, and while vegan imitation meat is delicious (so much so that even my meat-eating friends will happily eat it with me) vegan imitation cheese ranges from mediocre to terrible. And then it costs several times as much as real cheese too!