The platform operators have a responsibility to remove garbage from their site. I don’t see how it’s better if adults are the recipients of these alleged harms. And I definitely don’t see how the platform operators are going to clean up their act if — rather than being penalized — they can pretend that the problem has vanished into thin air because a specific category of vulnerable users is now de jure disappeared.
The problem is, currently doing any kind of content filtering, as in making illegal stuff hard to find, and having a moderated semi walled garden, plays right into the noisy fuckers brigade.
If I were to design a TV programme which is aimed at 11-16 year olds, where I just play soft porn every 15 seconds, offer guides on how to do financial scams, and encourage the children to hide away from their parents as they watch. it would be banned instantly, regardless of how much "good" content I put in there.
People would say it's irresponsible to expose kids of that age to such things.
Yet, here we have social media doing just the same.
The reason why we make it illegal to beat kids, sell them smokes, drugs, booze and generally treat them like shit, is because we want well rounded functioning kids who are able to live a long an illustrious life as part of society.
Giving them a device that feeds them war, porn, rage bait, and huge lies, all for the profit of a few hundred people in america seems somewhat misguided.
I'm glad when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought. Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.
Things used to be more scrutinized. e.g. look at the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy and legal fallout over sexual content that existed in the game data files but could only be accessed by modding the game, at which point you could just mod the content in. Porn websites also used to generally put anything explicit behind a credit card barrier, and there was an attempt to require that that the supreme court struck down.
Pretty sure the US has had things such as age ratings for movies, which are enforced when possible, and laws around advertising to children and false advertising for quite some time.
I miss the good ol' days when you could see some cut off breasts alongside the snake oil ads in the papers. People are so stupid these days.
It's not remotely the same thing. Social media apps are highly engineered addiction serotonin-drips.
You had wrongthought because back then there was at least a chance that the material was objective. Today you have Fox News et.al. and scores of highly propagandized feeds spewing nothing but agenda-pushing propaganda.
> when I was a teenager the adults in my life were less concerned with protecting me from wrongthought
V-chip, movie ratings, music ratings, top shelf magazines, raising the age for smokes, the water shed, censorship of tv networks, chat rooms, computer in the living room, primitive walled gardens (AOL et al)
All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
> Are modern teenagers more or less credulous consumers of information than adults, I wonder.
The first example of something that you see is normally a big opinion former. If you see the local big city constantly portrayed at a lawless hell hole, its going to stick with you. As will the the race baiting, as will the utter bollocks herbal-remedy-cures-cancer 100% of the time shtick. Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
> All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
Uh, yeah - I never had to show an ID to use the internet and I could use the internet however I damn well pleased. "All for profit and power" -> No, I learned a lot from the internet, it changed my life in a positive way.
None of the things you mentioned are even remotely the same scope as requiring ID to use parts of the internet. I could still watch mature movies, v-chip was irrelevant in my life, smoking is completely different, etc. etc.
The answer to my question is that teenagers today are obviously less credulous than the adults in their lives and you can see this every time you interact with older adults.
The parts of the internet that are now banned for Australian teenagers are unlikely to change their lives in a positive way and much more likely to lead them into mental illness.
I taught myself programming, drawing, and 3d modeling on the internet. But it was on platforms like SiteDuZero and various forums. Even today, if you go on something like https://bbs.archlinux.org , it's very hard to land on something like the cesspool the homepage of YouTube and X can be.
well i’m sorry some kids (and adults) are idiots who enjoy brain rot, but i would have been pissed as a kid if the adults came for my intellectual communities because some kids are morons
>All of the "it was freer in my youth bollocks" is just that. Bollocks. But, I see that you like the idea of a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift a new lifestlye for themselves regardless of the harm it causes others. All for profit and power. Not for betterment of the world.
I remember logging on to Microsoft Networks, clicking "Adult Chatroom" and saying "Hi adults, my name is <blah> and I am 12" and getting a bunch of very positive, thoughtful replies.
>Espeically if you've not got far enough through school to develop research skills, or critical thinking skills.
Some of the people being banned include these nice kids.
Their founder is now 18, but most of their research and social media people are 14 - 16.
I feel like these kids A, have developed the necessary skills to operate the internet, and B, have a human right to access and report on the information contained within.
>a person's social/sexual education being shaped by misanthropes looking to grift
The grifting misanthropes are in my honest opinion the people trying to prevent kids from accessing information. The "grift" is that kids have political interests and rights to access information and community, especially vulnerable kids, and the grifters want to "return" to a state where parents were the only method via which kids can access information. The internet is there for among other things, censorship resistant access to other people. The cost of this bill, assuming kids don't just keep stepping over the barricade, is going to be tremendous in terms of suicide in LGBT and disabled areas.
It's not so much teenage credulity, or coddling parents. Teen suicide is the easily quantifiable tip of the iceberg when it comes to mental health outcomes. Conspicuously it started trended up after 2008, around the nascence of Facebook and smartphones:
> Following a downward trend until 2007, suicide rates significantly increased 8.2% annually from 2008 to 2022, corresponding to a significant increase in the overall rates between 2001 to 2007 and 2008 to 2022 (3.34 to 5.71 per 1 million; IRR, 1.71)
That's also when the Great Recession happened, giving young people bleak outlooks for their future, outlooks which never really recovered. Nothing was fixed, and things have only gotten worse since then.
Dead end jobs with little to no benefits, no pensions, time off, low pay and few hours count as "employment".
Their parents and grandparents had pensions and could work at one employer for the entirety of their careers with growth opportunities, and could afford homes and healthcare while doing so.
Your hypothesis might be right, but I've provided data, and you're providing opinions. I'm fine with being wrong in my claim, but I didn't earn the downvote when no-one seems to have a clearer hypothesis with better evidence. First, show me that this shift is peculiar to 2008. And then show me that this is what teenagers are killing themselves over.
In the same way it's better that adults are the recipients of the harms of smoking, drinking or gambling. It's still not desirable, but societies have settled upon thresholds for when people have some capacity to take responsibility for their choices.
Not saying those thresholds are always right and should definitely apply in this case, but it surely isn't an alien or non-obvious concept.
There is also the problem that making platforms responsible for policing user-generated content 1) gives them unwanted political power and 2) creates immense barriers to entry in the field, which is also very undesireable.
I have no idea how to define it. I also don’t know if I’m personally convinced one way or another about the harms. Just think the platforms would probably have to be made to make more substantial changes were it the case.
I don't want Mark Zuckerberg, or the government, deciding what's garbage. If they can empower the user to filter this stuff out on their own accord, that's great.
The second problem is that the medium itself is garbage. Algorithmic feeds strongly encourage clickbait and sensationalism. Removing content does nothing to change the dynamic.
Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is the right thing to do. Not everything can be improved through top-down intervention, and many things can only be made worse.
The comment you’re replying to raised the idea of empowering the users. That’s probably the way to look, but the danger is always if we do that using top down enforcement in a way that promulgates more harm, including stifling vibrant and necessary speech.
My very radical opinion is that section 230 of the CDA was our original sin. The Internet was better when it wasn’t divided into a few centrally managed private social media silos. It’s better to have a vibrant, messy, competitive, and very grass roots public square.
Ah yes, the genocides, fascists and blackmail are just delightful parts of that awesome internet that any kind of cooperative governance would simply _ruin_
The genocides would have happened with age verification or not, don't conflate the two.
Ironically, the solution to both the proliferation of genocide and social media causing harm to kids is the same, and it's a solution that helps everyone: legislate the source of the problem, the product itself and what we colloquially call "the algorithm".
Algorithmic optimization and manipulation that causes harm needs to be banned wholesale, across the board, from advertising to social media.
Instead, we get legislation that not only makes it easier to identify everyone as verifiably monetizable users to platforms, it also makes it easier to keep the proles in their place.
Narrowly focused semantics/affordances (for both LLM and users/future package managers/communities, ease of redistribution and context management:
- skills are plain files that are injected contextually whereas prompts would come w the overhead of live, running code that has to be installed just right into your particular env, to provide a whole mcp server. Tbh prompts also seem to be more about literal prompting, too
- you could have a thousand skills folders for different softwares etc but good luck with having more than a few mcp servers that are loaded into context w/o it clobbering the context
A lesson learned over and over again is that you can build amazing things with tightly coupled plugins, but once you have about three of them upgrading or changing anything gets kind of impossible - Hyrum's law. On the other hand, loosely coupled out-of-process plugins are a lot less flexible, but tend to work a lot better and more reliably, at the cost of more up-front engineering and overall investment. Assuming that what they can do is sufficient to work.
Consider that e.g. kubernetes has basically just one actual core component (the API server) and everything else is loosely-coupled plugins. Alternatively, consider any of the projects stuck for 15 years on Python 2 because that's what their plugin system was in 2009. These are two points on a spectrum.
But why can’t I then just say, actually, you need to relocate the analogy components; activations are their neural connections, the text is their environment, the weights are fixed just like our DNA is, etc.
Was a bit gob-smacked to find out that Alex Karp's PhD thesis [0] (2002 - cofounded Palantir 2003) derives from Theodor Adorno's theory of aggression. imo reading just the intro was so eye-opening for me about the origins of what is now a behemoth - that you can trace a line from critical theory to Palantir - that I think reproducing the first 3 paragraphs here is worth it; emphasis mine:
> This work began with the observation that certain expressions have a drive-releasing effect, and this effect occurs not despite but because of their apparent irrationality. Expressions that blatantly contradict their own content offer actors the opportunity to formally acknowledge the normative order of their cultural environment while simultaneously expressing forbidden desires that violate the rules of this order. This, in turn, does not trigger cultural or social sanctions. On the contrary, such expressions solidify integration processes by making integration and its psychological costs bearable. Drawing from Adorno, I refer to such expressions as "Jargon." Jargon is not just a self-deception; it is a particular form of self-deception. It not only relieves the speaker but also integrates them into the circle of those who belong. Through Jargon, the present is embellished, rendered promising for the future, and thus made acceptable.
> However, Adorno's descriptions of aggressive actions expressed in Jargon are conceptually challenging to grasp. They slip away under the scrutiny of a rigorously working scholar. The translation of such impressions into a durable conceptual model encounters the limits of various social scientific traditions and quickly runs into difficulties. As much as the advantages of transferring Adorno's critique into a different conceptual framework are apparent, there is a risk that by relinquishing Adorno's premises, their critical rigor may disappear.
> Furthermore, this raises a series of questions that need to be addressed. For example, how can the complexity of modern society be taken into account without ignoring the instinctual elements of social action? What does an aggressive action expressed in Jargon actually look like, and what cultural significance would an action have that is transmitted through Jargon? Adorno's concept of Jargon can ignite a discussion about this. However, it leaves some problems untouched that I must address from my perspective. Adorno refrains from providing answers to such questions. He can afford to do so because he relies on premises that willingly accept a de-differentiation of the social world. Similarly, he does not discuss the specific cultural framework in which the aggressive action expressed in Jargon acquires its meaning. From the perspective of this work, it takes some imagination to understand how Jargon can play a role in integrating aggressive impulses within a coherent culture. The culture-specific transformation of aggression must also be a part of such an exposition. Adorno only partially acknowledges the cultural context in which this aggression expressed in Jargon acquires any meaning, or he does so in its subliminal form. It is evident that Adorno's approach is built upon precisely such culture-specific elements of the expression of aggression.
Isn't the difference between "capital -> labor -> capital" and "capital -> AI -> capital" (which is basically just "capital -> capital -> capital") that it's about the elimination of labor through its financialization? Not just that the poor get poorer, but from the POV of the rich that they don't even exist. (Conditional of course upon AI actually really being that much more productive than people and not dependent on them.)
AI is just capital, you said it yourself. AI just adds more capital to the capital + labor = more capital equation. The more value capital brings in comparison to labor, the more value capital takes from the result compared to labor.
The issue is the increasing imbalance of capital being overvalued compared to labor, and how that has a negative impact on most individuals.
I guess pizza is saying that labor (in the sense of human labor/employment) is coming to an end. If AI + robotics just drives the economy capital self multiplies with out labor.
You should also consider that people have AI too, everyone has AI, AI makes no difference in competition. Like having Linux, or Google Search - immensely useful but not a differential. So "capital -> AI -> capital" would just be the inferior option. Like building a product with minimal coding and just putting together open source packages, that anyone could replicate in a few hours.
People don't "have" AI. People are being provided AI as a service by the corporations who invested billions into training it. If they ever make a leap where it can actually replace the workforce, it won't be provided for cheap like it is right now, and all the current open models will be obsolete.
Capitalism already replaces many citizens with consumers, leaving some behind. Citizens have a say in how money are spent, not just how much money they get. Consumers might get nominal choice in how much money they get, but the choice of how to spend is either forced (e.g. rent or healthcare) or is meaningless (e.g. which brand of car to drive instead of having public transport).
We say "good music gives you goosebumps". Very reductively, you could argue the whole point of a musician's entire career is literally just to get good at making your skin hair wiggle. What if we're overlooking the possibility that the presence of a physically-sensed reaction would make us value something more?
I think the future of communication could involve something kind of like that, for better or for worse. Optimizing communications for physical reactions. The value prop may just be too high, if the causal direction of this effect (on salience) is actually real.
I read a news article about Trump's re-election in Nov 2024, where they interviewed one of his supporters - they said something to the effect of "when I heard the news, my whole nervous system just suddenly relaxed." I wouldn't be surprised if forms of communication get more and more optimized, whether via RLHF or recsys likes or some other means, for their ability to target, for lack of a better term, "embodiment goals"
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