ConsciousCode

It's important to be aware of their opinions because they quickly become policy and rhetoric while Dems do damage control and fail to fix the underlying issues Reps exploit. In this case, having an instance where they directly contradict their own "sleepy Joe" narrative can help deconstruct the beliefs of family members who have fallen for it.

This is a sane and measured response to a terrorist attack /s Just do terrorism back 100-fold, I guess?

I think it's moreso a matter of evolution. We know humanoid bodies can do anything we can do, so we start with that and make incremental improvements from there. We already do have plenty of other body shapes for robots (6-axis arms, SPOT, drones, etc) but none of them are general-purpose. Also, the robot shown in the article is pretty clearly not fully humanoid, it has weird insect legs probably because it's easier to control and it doubles as a vertical lift.

Network effects. The "we" you're referring to could only be like 100 million at most, the vast majority of people don't have the technical know-how to switch, or to articulate exactly why they feel miserable every time they log in for their daily fix.

Considering prior authorization is predicated on the fact that if they reject enough requests inevitably some people won't fight them, meaning they don't have to pay out, I wouldn't be surprised if they use a slightly better than chance prediction as justification for denying coverage, if they even need an actual excuse to begin with.

For what it's worth I don't think they're proposing it will "solve" climate change - no single thing can. It's millions of tiny (alleged) improvements like this which eventually add up to taking pressure off of the environment. I see this kind of attitude a lot with stuff like paper straws or biodegradable packaging, as if the idea of a small but meaningful step in the right direction is laughable. It's fine to criticize them for the "improvement" actually being no better than the alternative, but I worry sometimes it comes across like any sort of improvement short of "solving" climate change isn't worthwhile.

If we had access to the original model, we could give it the same seed and prompt and get the exact image back. Or, we could mandate techniques like statistical fingerprinting. Without the model though, it's proven to be mathematically impossible the better models get in the coming years - and what do you do if they take a real image, compress it into an embedding, then reassemble it?

I respect your boldness to ask these questions, but I don't feel like I can adequately answer them. I wrote a 6 paragraph essay but using GPT-4 as a sensitivity reader, I don't think I can post it without some kind of miscommunication or unintentional hurt. Instead, I'll answer the questions directly by presenting non-authoritative alternate viewpoints.

1. No idea, maybe someone else knows
2. That makes sense to me; I would think there would be a strong pressure to present fake content as real to avoid getting caught but they're already in deep legal trouble anyway and I'm sure they get off to it too. It's hard to know for sure because it's so stigmatized that the data are both biased and sparse. Good luck getting anyone to volunteer that information
3. I consider pedophilia (ie the attraction) to be amoral but acting on it to be "evil", ala noncon, gore, necrophilia, etc. That's just from consistent application of my principles though, as I haven't humanized them enough to care that pedophilia itself is illegal. I don't think violent video games are quite comparable because humans normally abhor violence, so there's a degree of separation, whereas CP is inherently attractive to them. More research is needed, if we as a society care enough to research it.
4. I don't quite agree, rights are hard-won and easy-lost but we seem to gain them over time. Take trans rights to healthcare for example - first it wasn't available to anyone, then it was available to everyone (trans or not), now we have reactionary denials of those rights, and soon we'll get those rights for real, like what happened with gay rights. Also, I don't see what rights are lost in arguing for the status quo that pedophilia remain criminalized? If MAPs are any indication, I'm not sure we're ready for that tightrope, and there are at least a dozen marginalized groups I'd rather see get rights first. Unlike gay people for instance, being "in the closet" is a net societal good because there's no valid way to present that publicly without harming children or eroding their protections.

The legality doesn't matter, what matters is that the sites will be flooded and could be taken down if they aren't able to moderate fast enough. The only long-term viable solution is image classification, but that's a tall ask to make from scratch.

I think a sizable portion of the Republican voter base are those whose family have voted Republican for generations and they haven't thought enough about it to change their vote out of habit - or even worse, they're voting because they value group cohesion over truth and everyone else around them is Republican and speaks in their rhetoric. Why else would they vote for a party so wildly against their own best interests?

I grew up with CRTs and VCRs, hard pass. There's a certain nostalgia to it all: the bum-DOOON sound as its electron gun warmed up, the smell of ozone and tingly sensation that got exponentially stronger the closer you were, crusty visuals... But they were objectively orders of magnitude worse than what we have now, if nothing else than because they don't weigh 150 pounds or make you wonder if watching Rugrats in Paris for the 30th time on this monster is giving you cancer. Maybe it's because I'm techie, I've never really had much issue with "smart" TVs. Sure, apps will slow down or crash because of memory leaks and it's not as customizable as I'd like, but I might be satiated just knowing that if push comes to shove I can plug in a spare computer and use it like a monitor for a media system.

I'm rooting it if it starts serving me out-of-band ads, though.

This is less an issue of "smartness" and moreso because analog signals degrade gracefully whereas digital signals are all or nothing unless specific mitigations are put in place. HDMI hits kind of a weird spot because it's a digital protocol based on analog scanlines; if the signal gets disrupted for 0.02 ms, it might only affect the upper half and maybe shift the bits for the lower half. Digital is more contextual and it will resynchronize at least every frame, so this kind of degradation is also unstable.