pryce

> Is she not going to say "pretty well compared to a surveillance database"

No, instead she is likely to avoid talking in abstractions and instead talk about personal experiences of getting stalked online by multiple people she has had to show her details to in the past, who may include storekeeps, police, university staff, etc, etc. Eva Galperin is an excellent source on the way many of our procedures are designed in ways that do not at all account for the potential of stalking and harassment, though her focus is on how this continues to unfold in the technology space.

moral panics are useful for creating authoritarian states. If a moral panic is not presently available, in 2025 it may be easier it's ever been before to cultivate one.

It is not that simple: Authoritarians that want to "protect" their gender-questioning or orientation-questioning children from having online access to trans and gay spaces online are not only enthusiastically backing Australia's social media ban, they are involved in the very creation of this legislation, and are delighted in its negative affects on LGBTQ teens.

There is considerable overlap between those who subscribe to the "trans people are a contagion" moral panic of writer Abigail Schrier, and the "ban social media" advocates in AU who were instrumental in creating this legislation.

> Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained...

Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is maintained by this scenario...?

The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is hazardous for a good chunk of people and we need to acknowledge that - even if acquiring a token somewhat ameliorates the compounded risk from presenting ID multiple times

So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the use cases, and happily charges ahead to a proposed solution as though they've sufficiently thought about the people affected and the harms involved.

The ingredients for this legislation trace back to an organisation called "Collective Shout"[1], by Melinda Tankard Reist, who readers may be aware of from their previous efforts to pressure Steam to restrict games with adult content

I happen to think there are plenty of valid points regarding harmful content on steam and valid arguments about the harms of social media, but I do not believe Collective Shout is a benevolent actor in combatting those harms or steering the solutions, as their proposals nearly always deliver harmful effects on LGBTQ people - and this fits with Reist's previous work[2], eg under Sen. Harradine

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_Shout

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melinda_Tankard_Reist

> What can openai do that, even if their models lag behind, will let them keep their competitive advantage?

Regulatory capture. It's worth noting that an enormous amount of time and energy has already been allocated in this exact direction.

Came here to submit this after seeing it linked by another member of the NZ developer community - but I see you already have. An impressive synthesis that deserves to be widely read - this passage landed well with my own unease about the gap betweeen what kind of future we're building versus what kind of future we say we're building:

> It boggles the mind that in an open software culture whose central ethos is continuous iteration and improvement made possible by openness, our licensing stack and its ingrained principles are apparently immutable.

They've invented the 'thneed' from "The Lorax"...

Most of the scarcity in artificial economies like CS is (just as with trading card games) manufactured and vulnerable. Seeing what happens with a rug-pull in a billion dollar artificial economy like this is a valuable lesson for anyone watching.

If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.

We often accept some limits on speech - such as disallowing threats or blackmail. But on what planet is some person stating that Charlie Kirk "devoted his entire life to spreading racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric" an endorsement of Kirk's murder?

How is anyone supposed to believe the administration is being at all genuine when it categorizes that sentence as an endorsement of murder and then applies punitive action toward the man who wrote it?

Are we now at the point where (in Soviet Russian style) the government gleefully makes absurd factual claims and administers capricious punishments specifically as a demonstration of the government power to oppress?

There is an old joke attributed (variously) to Ronald Reagan or Yakov Smirnoff: "In Soviet Russia, there is freedom of speech. In America, there is also freedom after speech."

Government sanctions (not simply those limited to imprisonment) used as a punishment for speech is most definitely a free speech issue.

This is a curious case of one accused academic writing to a second accused academic about the status of a third accused academic, being published widely by the second of the three accused academics in a post explicitly concerned with allegations of (sexual) misconduct against academics in general.

I'm very certain that issues of justice are complicated, and that allegations of misconduct are not always correct and that allegations in and of themselves must not be immediately treated as substantiated; yet surely, if it is justice we are interested in, we must be careful to ensure our fact-seeking methods do not not unduly rely on testimonies of those accused to the detriment of all other lines of inquiry.

I understand in McGinn's case that actual documents of the harassment are available, and I think that if some academics believe they need to push back against allegations of sexual harrassment they consider wrongful, a person with documented harassment is profoundly inappropriate to be spearheading that.

Might be the allegations such as those made by David Farrier this August[1]

> Then, last month, Substack sent out a push notification to some users of the Substack app encouraging them to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter. Like, full-Nazi stuff. Not subtle:

followed by a screenshot of a Substack profile full of swastikas describing itself as news for the "National Socialist and White Nationalist Community"

[1] https://www.webworm.co/webwormisleavingsubstack/

stop being interested in the content of what Peter Thiel is saying, and start being interested in the social and political function of what he is saying.

Content: Antichrist, prophecies, futurism; nothing that holds a truth value. Antichrist prophecies have been well established for hundreds of years as making coded gematria claims about Nero Caesar, a mother-murdering tyrannical ruler of the foreign empire that had recently destroyed the Second Temple ~79CE by the time John of Patmos was bitterly writing in ~95CE. "Nero Caesar" transliterated from Greek ('nrwn qsr') into Hebrew and added up using standard gematria gives 666. "Nero Caesar" transliterated from Latin ('nrw qsr') to Hebrew and added up gives 616, which appears in the earliest manuscripts. It's so plain and so obviously concerned with contemporary political goals of the author as to be almost boring.

Social Function: What is the social and political function achieved by Peter Thiel doing this in today's environment, styling himself as a Prophet of 'antichrist' matters?

It provides a swift pathway to an important role in unifying and binding himself to the anti-democratic theocratic Dominionists which he currently has little influence over, alongside the existing base that he already has vast influence over: the antidemocratic faction of the tech industry. By achieving a role unifying and consolidating power over the two major antidemocratic power blocs - both of which have built in tools of vast social influence (religion, social media), Peter Thiel aspires to place himself in a position of staggering influence atop a worldwide upheaval that is demolishing democratic power structures further every day.

I really think greater fluency in religion and in politics and history would help tech workers equip themselves resist be manipulated and controlled this way.

For the other bloc - the religious bloc being fished here- it has been fertile ground for grifters for decades now, so I hold very little hope that the theocrats (and in particular the New Apostolic Reformation crowd) have any hope of applying the appropriate scrutiny to Thiel's "prophetic religious claims" to allow that bloc to identify and somehow resist this cynical and dystopian power-play.

Further details:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1n9djkf/peter_thie...

That's very cute quip but I notice that it places the blame on 'trade with China' for an alarming problem that is in fact entirely the doing of US voters expressing their values (or the lack of them) in fair elections.

A more interesting question is whether that voterbase's idea of what they were voting for does or doesn't line up with what they got.

It's fascinating that this pattern happened the reverse direction, with a different biblical term: the word 'fool' as used in the KJV Bible translates a Jewish concept that doesn't really mean what we think of today "a person without intellectual wisdom", but at the time of writing meant more closely "a person without moral wisdom" - or perhaps without both but apparently primarily referring to the moral flaw.

I have also seen the argument that our contemporary distinction between moral and intellectual wisdom itself is something we as readers unconsciously impose on the text, with the distinction not prominently drawn in the ancient Jewish view(s).*

This means that "Fool" moved from a meaning close to "an objectionable or obnoxious person" toward "a person without intellectual wisdom" over centuries, while "jerk" apparently has gone the opposite direction within just a few recent decades.

* I'm far from an expert at this.

a P value of 1.00?

It sounds like the payment processors aren't well-equipped to know what item counts as illegal content or not, and that relying on the reckons of some evangelical activist group with a history of homophobia is predictably terrible option. I suppose other than the expensive and years-long task of developing significant domain expertise themselves, payment processors would probably like instead to defer their decisions to some other legal entity, perhaps some kind of government-funded organisation.

With the surge in anti-gay 'groomer' conspiracy theories now retargeted towards trans people comprising much of the electoral campaign of the incumbent president, it is hard to imagine a less appropriate climate for a US government to create anything to fill that gap.

> "Our for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)–a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission."

One remarkable advantage of being a "Public Benefit Corporation" is this it:

> prevent[s] shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation[1]

In my view, it is their own shareholders that the directors of OpenAI are insulating themselves against.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

A particularly memorable short review of "the Straight Story" suggests that he did end in fact end up doing a Lynch thing, however I suggest people don't read this review unless they've seen the film first [1].

> Lynch lives in a very troubled world. His pictures are characterized by being presented through the mind of the protagonist. Here, the protagonist is a simple old man, who thinks slowly and simply. So that's what we get. He has long erotic meditations on fecundity on the path of life (14 kids!), so that is what we see.

> Lynch must be laughing into his gasmask at those who think this is a Hallmark card. Consider these Lynchisms...

[1] https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0579859/?ref_=tturv_perm_18

I think it's fair to conclude that most people stating that they feel like killing themselves "have issues".

Yet: if there is some second person telling the above kid to go through with that, we don't see the kid "having issues" as exonerating the second person.

It is not at all clear to me why we would suddenly see the kid "having issues" as exonerating in the second case, if we replace the human with an LLM.

This kind of proposal is one I hadn't ever really considered. I would be fascinated to know if others here have had similar experiences when seeking contact with malicious attackers.

first commit made in one of JiaT75's other repos https://github.com/JiaT75/STest/commits/master/

additionally, even though the commit messages they've made are mostly plain, there may be features of their commit messages that could provide leads, such as his using what looks like a very obscure racist joke of referring to a gitignore file as a 'gitnigore'. There's barely a handful of people on the whole planet making this 'joke'.

It's less difficult than you think. Tetragametic chimeras for half-sider budgerigars have different genomes on either side, and the mechanism they occur by is through fusion of two distinct embryos with different DNA[1]

Given we know the phenotype of this Green Honeycreeper has a male half and a female half, and given how incredibly likely that the mechanism is following established ways that chimeras occur, it is not hard to say with confidence that the male and female halves of the observed bird are almost certain to have distinct genotypes. Put another way, it would be a much more radical hypothesis that "this halfsider bird with two distinct sexes would not be a chimera."

Obviously we'd ideally wish to collect DNA samples from each side of the bird

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-sider_budgerigar

> they've also decided to bring back pseudoephedrine tablets too

I dislike many of their policies but I'm not convinced this one is wrongheaded.

While meth (called 'P' in New Zealand) was often manufactured from pseudoephedrine tablets here, the outright ban on this medication did not seem to have succeeded in lowering the availability of P in the country; after an initial rise in price and reports of lowering of purity, the street price has overall dropped from around 700 NZD / gram in 2009 to around 400 NZD / gram today, as described here[1]

[1] https://newsroom.co.nz/2023/09/26/pseudoregulation-the-failu...

That's exactly what it is; the money they plan to acquire through this will be used to pay for the flagship taxcut policy of the largest of the three parties in the new coalition government (the National Party).

I have my share of issues from a personal liberty standpoint, but I know what selling us out to the tobacco companies looks like. (3rd rank National Party member is a former Philip Morris employee, and the second largest party, the ACT Party has a cutout org called 'NZ Taxpayers' Union' has been exposed in the past for taking tobacco industry money, which would be bad enough, but doing so while simultaneously running campaigns related to e-cigarettes)

Remember when Musk called some guy in Thailand a 'pedophile' for no reason at all, and it immediately became international news with those keywords. That was so quirky!!

The article literally shows in its second paragraph that "XY" entails male is not valid; it describes an extremely common occurrence of cells losing their Y chromosome. Outside of that example, for overall humans, when Y is present, and SRY isn't, advocates for chromosomal definitions fall flat. When SRY is present but not expressed, same thing. When SRY is expressed but receptors are insensitive to androgens, chromosomal definitions fall flat again.

Aknowledging that there is a difference between "man" and the XY genotype, and being clear about the definitions the article will employ is not some concession to wokeness. It is a scientist being interested in their tools, their theories, and the limits of them, and an article in Nature is a perfectly appropriate place for this; just as much as we can and do to expect articles in nature to differentiate MSM and "gay man".

Libertarian students have a notoriously difficult time in philosophy departments because of these kinds of eager statements.

The question of whether or not organisations, businesses, states, armed forces, educational institutions, self-declared medical providers, and other entities incur some obligation to preserve peoples lives - and if so in which ways and to what extents - are far from settled questions. It helps no one to adopt a hard-libertarian position, omit the framework being employed, and imply the matter is settled.

A fair number of regulatory efforts trace their roots to a groundswell of public distress in the aftermath of preventable deaths; and questions such as "should I, a computer programmer, be undertaking my own untrained risk assessment of the particular type of cladding used in Grenfell tower" are perfectly fair objections to a libertarian free-for-all position.