Not sure I'm totally understanding here, but it sounds like LinkedIn turned on (probably AI-based) porn scanning on messages, there was a false positive, and the guy wasn't able to escalate to support. Is there an implication that it was blocked for political reasons?
It’s not porn, it’s mixed use technology. The persons decentralized LORA radio messaging platform, is another persons disaster resilience platform, is another persons hobby project, is another persons anti censorship tool, is another persons improvised frontline communications tool, is another persons counter-terrorism ai ban hammer trigger.
WOW that's the reason? I didn't catch that, that's both hilarious and disheartening. Dijkstra is rolling in his grave... I suppose we'll have to move from "nodes and edges" to, idk, "dots and lines", kinda like TikTok has created "unalive"?
Can't wait to see what the almighty AI thinks about the Tits problem![1]
Or the Tits group[2] (I swear, I'm not a member!).
Very tempted to include Tits Alternative[3] as one of my interests on LinkedIn, but I'm afraid the result will be too predictable.
Side note: The two groups that don't satisfy the Tits Alternative are very dear to my heart. Writing software to do computation in Thompson's Group and its generalizations[4] was my introduction to geometric group theory. And I ended up with Grigorchuk as my graduate advisor after learning about the Grigorchuk group.
Actually, why wouldn't people working in porn and porn adjacent industries send porn related content to each other in DMs, totally in a professional context ?
What on earth makes you think people working in porn and porn adjacent industries behave "in a professional context" on LinkedIn, when nobody else seems to?
Given how many people are on LinkedIn, would you doubt that women on the platform sometimes get sexually harassed in DMs, e.g. by people sending them porn?
Unless it’s a burner or malicious account, I can hardly imagine someone being that courageous to sign death warrant to their career if woman decides to call them out and it goes viral.
I'm on the fence about whether I agree with this. The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes. That means a beaver can create a lake, but its descendants have to be able to live with that using the same slow-changing genetic programming, otherwise they die off. With humans, we can adapt new ways to live in the altered environment, even if it would have been incompatible with the lives of our ancestors. If we kill off all the salmon and whales, for example, within a generation or two we can pivot to factory-farmed chicken and petroleum. Once we've tapped that out we can do soy protein and windfarms.
I say I'm on the fence because on a longer time scale, that kind of mental adaptation might not be that much different from genetic adaptation and we'll still have to find equilibrium or die out.
As far as the ethics question goes, if we use the most basic model and say that the ethical thing is that which promotes the most "good-life-years per capita" versus "bad-life-years per capita", where capita means one of the sentient residents of the planet, there are a few ways to look at it:
1. Ethics is just a fiction that humans have made up to support the prisoners' dilemma style of cooperation game we play, and there's no real answer.
2. The billon or two twilight years of our planet are better spent in rough equilibrium, where tigers exist, but most animals get some time to stretch in the sun, nuzzle their young, etc.
3. Life in equilibrium is actually cold, brutal, and short for most of the sentient animals involved, so providing a higher level of comfort for a population of ten billion people is better, even if it eventually crashes.
4. The experience of a human counts more than that of an animal, so a high human population with a decent standard of living for a long enough time pushes the needle past what a much longer natural equilibrium would achieve.
I saw you palm that card! Utilitarianism is anything but "the most basic model" of ethics. If you want to argue from it, do so honestly rather than try to smuggle it in as an unexamined postulate.
Do you care first to justify the assertions you made on the back of yours? I realize it's a common utilitarian habit to believe the quantification they do is meaningful outside the purely reflexive sense, but that is a belief, requiring as much substantiation as any other before it's taken to model anything about the world.
I don't think I actually asserted anything, but let me give a shot at explaining:
The model is that higher values of G/B are better, where G is good years per capita and B is bad years per capita, so the ethical thing to do is maximize G and/or minimize B. I called this "basic" because even though it tends to fall apart when scaled up, I think it captures what most people think of ethics. It's good for making tactical decisions about things like "should I punch that guy" or whatever.
For #1, where ethics would be just a fiction we made up to support a social game, what I mean is: People in a group have to play a prisoners' dilemma game where they find a balance of cooperation and sharing of resources. One way to reach that balance is to assume good will and treat others like you want to be treated. (Right up until someone violates that, then it's hyperbolic response time...) If ethics is just something people made up to get everyone to maintain that balance, then higher G/B being better is rooted in the same fiction.
For #2: My definition of G and B included good and bad experiences by animals, not just people. That means it's possible that over a billion years or so you could still achieve higher G/B by going back to a "natural" world inhabited by sentient but less intelligent animals.
For #3: It could be that the G/B in a natural world would actually be lower than if it was dominated by humans, because several billion people being able to live out their lives before the crash could result in a big enough G value to outweigh the eventual suffering.
For #4: If life as a human counted more towards G than the same amount of life as a beaver, then it could be a force multiplier for #3.
All of which follows from this assumption, which I'll grant you were slightly more overt about than the one I criticized:
> The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes.
Having neatly begged the question of whether a distinction between "human" and "nature" has meaning - in the direction that it does, and on the basis of an understanding no more current than the behaviorism of the 1930s and 40s - you then proceed into the implications of a lot of arithmetic manipulations whose relevance you have declined to establish. So the complexity is wasted, at best without meaning and at worst deceptive by giving the impression of valid reasoning where none exists. (Soundness without validity isn't worthless, but where you aim to describe reality it certainly becomes so.)
To be clear, I don't assume you set out to deceive anyone here or anywhere else. But I have seen the identical technique on occasion deliberately used to that end, and much more often seen people so enthralled with the complexity of their reasoning as to totally overlook the vacuity of the premises from which it proceeds - not always, but mostly, and certainly by all appearances here.
This doesn't render the method totally useless; in my experience, people who hew strongly to it do a good if overly verbose and probably inadvertent job of explaining their own ethical judgment of the world. The trouble is, that's all it's any good for.
I apologize, but I'm trying to parse what you're saying and I can't seem to find the meat. I understand you're trying to insult me or whatever, but are you trying to say anything relevant to the topic?
In response to a request for an ethical analysis of the question of whether the "human/natural" distinction has merit, you assumed that it does - in, again, a fashion demonstrating no knowledge of any research in animal behavior past about 1955 at the most generous possible outside - and then proceeded to give an analysis following solely from that outdated and frankly ignorant assumption. In consequence the analysis is entirely vacuous, and the effort that went into it wasted.
As a declaration of what you believe and a menu of justifications for same, it serves, but no one was asking for that. As a consideration of the question actually under discussion there is simply nothing here, and I don't see anything to suggest you have thus far even noticed the lack.
That is somewhat funny to me, I admit. It probably shouldn't be by now. The combination of overweening confidence in sound reasoning with total lack of care for valid premises is a common theme in online utilitarianism, but I think it's the shamelessness more than anything that gets me - like a Monty Python sketch that doesn't know it is one. A bad habit, I grant, but I think I still prefer it over that of not bothering first to find out what I know and what I don't.
I was in Jutland, in Northwest Denmark recently, and the backstory of that place is that a thousand years ago it was covered in thick pine forest. Medieval people cut the trees down for firewood and agriculture, which led to an ecological disaster from erosion that covered entire farms and villages in sand. Hundreds of years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, however, people started replanting forests and have had success in mitigating a lot of the erosion.
Now, knowing that the line between man and other animals is totally arbitrary, we should be fine to retell that story with beavers instead of people, right?
(I won't even get into how I flew there at 1000kph in a giant metal vehicle and carried a universal translator in my pocket, also neither of which were made by beavers.)
If beavers had done that, why wouldn't we tell that story with beavers? They certainly do on occasion damage a local ecology whose hydrology they've failed to entirely consider. Their scope is smaller than ours in that regard, I grant, but I've also seen spiders and wasps perform feats of engineering that many wouldn't credit. I don't see reason to think what qualifies a project as the respectable product of ingenuity is only its size or the species of those who pursued it.
Addressing the question at hand is an improvement, but arguing your case entirely from assertion and anecdote leaves considerable further scope. You claim the difference is of kind rather than degree. I can see some credible arguments for that claim. Can you?
There was a movie that came out in 2001 called "Artificial Intelligence", at a time when we were still figuring out how things like search engines and the online economy were going to work. It had a scene where the main characters went to a city and visited a pay-per-question AI oracle. It was very artistically done, but it really revealed (in hindsight) how naive we were about how "online" was going to turn out.
When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI, but what it's really going to look like is a graph of oddball AI agents tuned for different optimizations.
One node might be slow and expensive but able to infer intent from a document, but its input is filtered by a fast and cheap one that eliminates uninteresting content, and it could offload work to a domain-specific one that knows everything about URLs, for example. More like the network of small, specialized computers scattered around your car than a central know-it-all computer.
> When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI
I don't think this is entirely fair to "the public". Media was stuffed with AI company CEOs claiming that AGI was just around the corner. Nvidia, OpenAI and Musk, Zuckerberg, and others were positively starry eyed at how, soon, we'd all be just a GPU matmul away from intelligence. "The public" has seen these eye watering amounts of money shifting around, and they imply that it must mean something.
The entire system has been acting as if GenAI was right around the corner.
maybe there's a term confusion here - GenAI has come to mean Generative AI (LLM's, Diffusion models..) rather than General-AI. People call that AIG, now people also talk about AIS which I take to mean "human level on a narrow domain only" while AIG is "generally intelligent at roughly human level".
My personal belief is that AIS is not a real thing (in the sense I wrote above) because narrow domain competence is tightly coupled to general domain competence . Even very autistic people that are functional in some domain actually have a staggering range of competences that we tend to ignore because we expect them in humans. I think machines will be similar.
Anyway, AIG or AIS is not round the corner at all. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of value to be had from generative AI in the near future or now. Will this be a small fraction of the value from Web1.0 and Web2.0? Will it be approximately the same? Will it be a multiple? I think that's the question. I think it's clear that assistants for software engineers are somewhat valuable now (evidence: I get value out of them) how valuable? Well, more than stackexchange, less than a good editor. That's still alot, for me. I won't pay for it though...
And this points to the killer issue: there isn't a good way to monetize this. There isn't a good way to monetize the web, so we got adverts (a bad way). What will be the equivalent for LLM's? We just don't know right now. Interestingly there seems to be very little focus on this! Instead folks are studying the second order value. Using this "free thing" we can drive productivity... or quality... increase opportunities... create a new business?
I was definitely confusing the terms. I was thinking of AGI, but i remembered that the G was for general, and GenAI "felt" right (probably because it's used in a similar enough context).
Replace all the instances of GenAI with AGI in my post.
It's an interesting observation that the economics aren't there yet. I think it's generally assumed that if we find something valuable, we can probably figure out how to monetize it. That's not necessarily true though. In the same but opposite vein, it doesn't necessarily need to be useful to stick around. It's possible AI is forever going to be useless (in objective terms, maybe it will make people less efficient) but find a monetization strategy that keeps it around (maybe it makes people feel good).
A ton of the technology economy isn't really based on objective metrics of usefulness. Microsoft isn't the biggest because they're the most useful. We don't look to the quality of windows to understand if people will buy the next version. We don't look at the google search results as an indicator of google's profitability.
> The entire system has been acting as if GenAI was right around the corner.
To be clear, I think it is. It's just not going to be a hologram of a wizard in a room you can ask a question to for a quarter, which is what these chat bots and copilots you see today are modeled around.
I wear soft contacts and one of my eyes has astigmatism. I've never understood how a symmetrical lens can correct an asymmetrical eyeball. Another strange thing I've seen is that after having put these things in my eyes about 2000 times at this point, I think I can tell that they vary in thickness, sometimes even in the same pack, but it doesn't seem to affect their performance. It all seems a little magical, so I guess I should find some time and go down the youtube rabbit hole that probably exists.
I have tried contact lenses, but it seems they keep rotating around slightly and don’t match the angle of my astigmatism exactly, causing my vision to become blurry. I don’t know if it was a bad fit, but my optometrist told me it is because astigmatism correcting lens come in 15 degree increments, and the angle of my astigmatism falls right in the middle of these increments. I have never heard of anyone else having this issue and would have thought that surely it would be more widespread. Has anyone else had this issue, and have they corrected it?
Hybrid lenses have worked for me. Hard contact in the center with a soft "skirt" around the edge. Ideally, it's the vision of the hard lens and the comfort of the soft.
Or just hard lenses. My first were hard and in retrospect, they were less comfortable, but I had nothing to compare them to so I was more than happy with them. That was quite some time ago, but it was my understanding that hard lenses worked better with astigmatism.
A new doctor said I was on the edge between soft and hard and suggested I trial soft. It felt like wearing nothing. I did sorta notice they would blur on and off at times, but I opted for them and wore them for several years. Then he suggested the hybrid one for one eye and that's what I've been with.
Astigmatism correction requires toric contacts- you should have a small line you have to orient upwards to align it properly, which myopia only contacts don’t have.
Hmm, I have astigmatism and have never had to worry about the alignment of my contact lenses in order to get good correction. Perhaps they are somehow engineered so that they automatically settle in the correct orientation.
It is much more likely that your astigmatism is very mild, and your optometrist decided not to correct it, and corrected only the myopia. This is common because toric contacts are more expensive, more difficult to put in, less breathable, and fall out easier.
As a longtime user of toric contacts, I have tried a dozen brands and every single one has the exact same mark. The shape will keep them from moving out of orientation, but it isn't enough to put them back into orientation if put in wrong, at least not quickly.
Care to share exactly what contacts you are using? Do you have astigmatism in one or both eyes? If it is toric and for astigmatism it will say so on the box- many people have it in only one eye, so the boxes will be different, and only one will say toric.
If you really are using toric contacts, but not aligning the mark, I am willing to bet you will be able to find the mark, align it properly, and your vision will be remarkably better.
Edit: One reason you absolutely need the mark is because the optometrist also needs to be able to tell if they are staying in orientation like they're supposed to, by visually checking the alignment mark. It needs to point straight upwards (vertical). If not, they can prescribe you one that is made pre-rotated to compensate.
No, my prescription is for astigmatism, and my contacts are contacts specifically for astigmatism. In my experience, they orient themselves (and indeed I have never had to worry about their orientation).
I have never previously thought about this in terms of rotation (as I was not even aware that the contact lenses were asymmetrical), but I do normally have to blink a few times after inserting the contact lens before I have sharp vision. But in my experience it takes a few seconds for this to happen and does not depend on inserting the lens at any particular orientation.
I have glasses too, so I would notice if the contact lenses were giving me significantly worse vision!
The brand is '1 Day Acuvue Moist for Astigmatism'.
It might be different for different people, but if I don't align mine, it takes more than a few blinks to align them. I think they will eventually but it could be a very long time (hours?)
The marks aren't the same across brands. Some have three dashes with two oriented horizontal and one up. Others have two equal dashes (My axis was 90° at the time). Others have two with unequal length.
I have astigmatism and toric lenses never worked well for me. I could feel them rotate in my eye and they would never settle perfectly. This was back in 2006, though. And they weren't bad contacts either, they were ordered from Switzerland, allegedly custom made etc. I tried for a few weeks, they never worked well. Every ten blinks or so I'd get blurry vision.
Probably just need a fitting with a different brand.
A lot of times your local distributor doesn't carry many of the astigmatic lenses because they can sit on the shelf for a while (it can 100x the available combinations) so they special order. I doubt they're specially manufactured per order for soft lenses.
That's good to know - thanks! My astigmatism one is definitely special, because it takes an extra two or three weeks to get it from Costco, but I didn't know there was an orientation mark on it. I'll take a look.
I'm blown away that apparently lots of people on here are using toric contacts but their optometrist never instructed them on how to use them ??!!?!? That is horrible.
I think they are pretty much all the same (I've tried almost every brand of them over the years), but will orient themselves... however at least for me it can take a long time, and vision is pretty bad while that is happening. I can't imagine skipping the extra few seconds required to have them perfectly aligned from the beginning.
Interesting! I have always worn symmetric contacts when I (rarely) wear contacts, because I can’t get astigmatism contacts them to sit comfortably in my eyes and not pop out. I wonder if I were to align them first if they would be comfortable enough to wear. I’ll give it a try next time I’m at the optometrist.
Even when they fit properly, they are slightly less comfortable and pop out a little easier, but they have gotten leaps and bounds better in the last few decades. If they didn't work for you a while ago, it's worth trying again.
If you ever get a chance to play with a magnet fishing magnet, it's fun to see how many straight-up magnetic rocks there are lying around, too. Probably not meteorites of course...
I think the answer is that much like an ad for a car or a mattress, the cold call isn't meant to take someone from zero to full interest, it's to find that one person in a hundred who's already thinking about it and just needs an opportunity presented to them.
How many random people would you need to ask before you found someone who was pondering joining a gym this very morning and would love some more info about it?
You're probably right, but I don't get this attitude at all. I could have a burning desire to do X and no time, if you called me out of the blue offering X, I'd still say no thank you, sorry. It's entirely in my DNA that cold calls are never good. Wonder why other people haven't developed this.
Same here. It's simple math for me, really - even if your pitch is compelling and well-targeted to me somehow, it is highly unlikely that your offer and commission overhead are going to be better than something I can seek out myself.
It's minimalist because if the system is unstable you don't want to have to do anything fancy like open a window or look up a bunch of localized resources, as those could run into the same corruption that led to the initial problem.
My major complaint is that they show the stack trace and memory address information first. 99% of users don't care about that. The instructions about options to proceed and their consequences are solid. They should just be put first.
On other hand at this point I think users were coming from DOS where the latest and most relevant information was always at the bottom. Like during boot sequence or in general execution of programs.
It is not like modern Linux when showing startup steps updates to top either, but to bottom.
The crabs analogy isn't a good one, because they evolve independently to play well in a common environment. GNU/Linux is a rewrite of Unix that avoids the licensing and hardware baggage that kept Unix out of reach of non-enterprise users in the 80s and early 90s.
