Assuming this is true, the pink pigs would be the smart ones in this situation. Tricking latinos and asians to do all the hard work while they get to enjoy life!
I've often wondered about that. It seems we've gone backwards since the social democratic promises of the 60s and 70s. A higher level of technology should translate into more leisure and less work, not the opposite.
There's a lot of people here trying to blame capitalism or the right, but it seems like trying to square that circle with the collaboration of Silicon Valley and the Chinese Government is a bit of a stretch. History is important and all, but even if I stipulate your theory about the past (which I don't, but for the sake of argument let's let it go), it's SV and China doing this today. Anyone who wants to try to convince me that the SV+China collaboration is "of the right" is welcome to try but I warn you you're basically facing Mt. Everest here. Blaming it on people who are not even proximal to today's manifestation of the will, at best, make you briefly feel better, but do nothing to solve the problem.
What relevance does that have to what is happening now? Are you seriously proposing that it's OK to not worry about what Silicon Valley and China are doing, because someday in the past and maybe someday in the future, right-wing people will try to squash freedom? That makes no sense.
I think you'll be willing to admit that SV's interest in China is the good old capitalistic rule "rational actors will make deals that most benefit them" coupled with the fact that publicly traded businesses are generally targeted at profit for shareholders.
You'd need quite a few obstacles/penalties to make a rationally acting company not jump on the more money bandwagon. Whether that's shareholders with that inclination and enough power to block such actions, blow back from other parts of the company(customers boycott/supplier not supplying/workers walkout) to lower the value of Chinese deals, or laws and regulations that make dealing with China while disregarding ethical issues less profitable.
In that non exhaustive list on making companies behave ethically the first two are "vote with your wallet" the last is "vote with your vote".
Both the left and right vote with their wallet on these issues, but when it comes to the laws and regulations it is fair to say that the right has a more laissez faire approach than not to adding regulations and laws. It's also arguably this one that is most effective with very large or monopolistic companies (as there are more barriers to voting with your wallet).
Thus the left blaming the right for not coming to the party on regulations that would stop or regulate this. I'll point out that this is just one viewpoint on why those more to the right can be blamed for this and ofcourse it misses the underpinnings of why the right to left spectrum differ on their views to the spectrum of regulation. I'd expect that those underpinnings would be part of why you feel changing your mind on the connection would be climbing Everest. Still, I'd hope you agree that it's not straight "Blaming it on people who are not even proximal" as regulations do change company behaviour.
"I think you'll be willing to admit that SV's interest in China is the good old capitalistic rule "rational actors will make deals that most benefit them" coupled with the fact that publicly traded businesses are generally targeted at profit for shareholders."
I'm not. Personally I think helping a leftwing authoritarian society is actually something that the SV leadership is interested in doing, because it is something they want for the US as well, and they want in at the top. I don't feel this is a very big leap from the demonstrated political proclivities of the area, what people say, or the actions being taken.
"Thus the left blaming the right for not coming to the party on regulations that would stop or regulate this."
Actually, if you want to fall back to "I blame the other people over there for not stopping us from doing this!", I'll take it. It's a silly argument but I'll take the premise it's based on without question. It's still you doing it. And I say "you" not necessarily as "greycol" personally, but because this is HN and the line workers actually doing this work are indeed here. And 95%+ of them are on the left.
Reagan fired air traffic controllers who were striking illegally. It then makes the huge jump that this caused private sector companies to not negotiate.
Is this really Lamarckism though? It seems that what the paper describes is a mechanism in which specific cells "infuse" sperm with information relating to specific stresses.
Ultimately, we could interpret this mechanism as a trans-generational evolutionary defense against stresses (for instance, famines). But those mechanisms would themselves have evolved through the process of natural selection, and these "sperm influencing" cells would themselves be coded in our DNA.
That is to say, introducing a new kind of stress or environmental factor would not trigger any of these cells and would have no effect.
Correct me if I'm wrong but that's how I understood the paper.
Exactly, so extending this, the capacity to respond to these stress markers is in the DNA, but the specifics of how that will be expressed appears to be picked up environmentally and transmitted to offspring.
> but the specifics of how that will be expressed appears to be picked up environmentally and transmitted to offspring.
I mean I guess that is a possibility, but that would be incredibly generic wouldn't it? That a cell could somehow identify novel environmental factors and figure out what gene expressions to enhance/neutralize in the next generation to adapt to that novel environmental factor? Strains credulity.
In my limited understanding, the credible version of this story involves the transmission of quite crude information, like a response to famine.
Lots of animals starved, since there were animals, and the ability to tune the behavior on a time-scale of a few generations might have been valuable, so it might have evolved. The basics of our hormonal system have not changed much since very simple animals, I think.
The burning man guy is another guy (who still works at Google afaik).
This Rubin guy was no doubt a creep. From the NYT article:
"The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”"
>"The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”"
I don't understand why Americans are so concerned with what happens in somebody else's bedroom. I don't give a single flying f about what two consenting adults decide to do in a bedroom. There are all sorts of sexual kinks that I find disgusting and sometimes disturbing - but it turns out it's not really any of my business. The second you introduce a non-consenting adult, or someone not old enough to consent, then we've got a problem.
Otherwise - why do you care? It's none of your business.
> Otherwise - why do you care? It's none of your business.
When your boss is sleeping with one of your co-workers, how do you know that they are not in a quid-pro-quo relationship?
This isn't an American thing - this is a workplace thing.
If you're a manager, there's seven billion other people in the world, who don't report to you. You'll probably find your soulmate, or whatever the hell you're looking for - outside of your reporting chain.
>When your boss is sleeping with one of your co-workers, how do you know that they are not in a quid-pro-quo relationship?
And as I've said in just about every post I've made, he should've been fired for sleeping with a subordinate. There are countless reasons that's not OK. I was responding to and quite obviously referring to the guy making a big deal about him telling someone he "owns them" - or whatever terminology he used. Do I think that's disgusting? Sure. But that's between him and whomever he has that relationship with. If she's consenting and willing, so be it, not my place to judge.
Though I can't find the exact context at the moment, I believe that was from his divorce. Most of the world seems to think it is your spouse's concern whom else you get involved with, both for health reasons and financial ones.
First off, why do you assume I am american? And my point is that this kink of his, which involves dominating and "owning" his employees, should raise alarm bells considering the accusations levied against him.
There are totally fine sexual and romantic relationships involving consenting "ownership". That part shouldn't necessarily make him sound creepy. The part where he managed to make it all the way up to the executive level at a company like Google and still be dumb enough to have those kinds of relationships with employees is the part that deserves attention.
As others have already pointed out, any relationship with an employee in that kind of environment is exploitative by nature.
Are you familiar with "the art of unix programming" by ESR? It's in the same vein as what you describe. It even has an appendix with buddhist-like dialogues!
While there are some nice tidbits, end-user software tends to have a different profile of needs than infrastructure software or middle-ware. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd focus more on end-user software in such a book.
That's not necessarily the same as UI design, but for example, less about generic API design to be used by a million other developers, and more about in-shop API or stack design for say 20 developers.
It will vary by country. In a lot of Europe and the US the content will still be illegal. In Japan it won’t be. At some point the issue is going to come down to what you want to spend manpower and money fighting, people who actually endanger and harm children, or people who use computers to emulate it. It might not be a very clear cut thing though, because I frankly wouldn’t be shocked to find out that the overlap between people who want pornography of real and simulated children is significant.
Where it might be a little more clear cut is feeding the market that clearly exists for “teen” porn, which is currently filled by 18+ actresses. I suspect a non-trivial percentage of the non-child-abusing population would consume simulated 16 year old porn without ever considering the real thing. In that case you might see some changes.
Reply edit It’s already outlawed. In the US for example pornographic drawings of children are outlawed. In the same way it’s illegal to try and sell cocaine stimulants, it’s illegal to try and sell child pornography simulations. I doubt the A.I. itself would be illegal, just its output.
> Reply edit It’s already outlawed. In the US for example pornographic drawings of children are outlawed. In the same way it’s illegal to try and sell cocaine stimulants, it’s illegal to try and sell child pornography simulations.
But how would you outlaw it? A neural network is simply a set of coefficients, would certain coefficient combinations be illegal? It's an interesting question.
PS: I am obviously against child pornography, I'm just curious about the implications of being able to generate illegal content and how governments would deal with it.
I think this question is simply a variation of points that have been made clear already in the past - no one legislates against "a set of 1s and 0s", "a set of letters", "a set of ink dots" nor, in this case, "a set of coefficients". Instead, legislation is created/updated for specific end results, and you're done.
For law enforcement purposes, I think it would be similar to a printing press: owning one is not a problem, but inserting printing rolls that look like dollar bills most definitely is.
This reminds me of posts in alt.sex.stories having disclaimers like "Note: All characters in this story live on a planet where one year = 100 Earth years".
An even cheekier way to drive the point home would be for a sex-stories website to have a slider in the footer to update all age values across the site.
That's pushing it too far. An image might be represented as 1s and 0s but what it represents is a "real world event" which actually happened. If it was stored on magnetic tape instead of on a hard drive it would still represent the same thing. It's what the event represents (child abuse) which is illegal.
However, a neural network represents a mathematical model, not a specific "real world event". Although I suppose you might argue that since the dataset required to generate it would be illegal, it is illegal?
In most Western countries, the content can be illegal independent of the real-world event being legal or not, or even if there's no real-world event at all (i.e. fictional depictions). It's not illegal for a teenager to pose in the nude, but it might be considered illegal for them to take a photo of themselves and post it on the internet.
I think linking illegal depictions to illegal events would be saner, but that's not how it currently works.
Interesting. Yeah I agree that it would make sense for the link to be clear.
Come to think of it, a couple of years ago there was this app called FaceApp which came out which used neural networks to modify selfies in funny ways (like making you older/younger/of the opposite sex).
I wonder if anyone has ever run a pornographic image with the "younger" filter in the app. Would that be illegal?
Under some jurisdictions, I imagine so, since even purely computer-generated images are illegal, and there are other laws which criminalise purely drawn material. It may hit a gray spot in the law, but I doubt a judge would have trouble interpreting the existing law. This is in reference to English and Welsh law, by the way. The exact wording of the law concerns a depiction of someone who "conveys the predominant impression of a child".
