IIRC it spammed websites with traffic, didn’t conceal your IP at all, and some people got arrested for using it to make some websites go down for a very brief period. Basically a way to use people who didn’t know what they were doing as cannon fodder

Could you elaborate? Does HOA mean something different in other countries?

Home owner’s association; when you buy a house and it is part of a HOA, you have to sign a contract to join the HOA as a requirement of buying, which means you have to pay dues and abide by the rules of the organization, and you have to require the next buyer to also join in order to sell your house.

I doubt the school administrators who would be buying this thing or the people trying to make money off it have really thought that far ahead or care whether or not it does that, but it would definitely be one of its main effects.

The pair said it was a major relief that the calamity came after version 4.0 of Godot was released in March of 2023. That version, they felt, was most ready for a sudden rush of new developers.

Sounds like they saw it coming for a long time and successfully prepared for it

I’ve never used one, why don’t they just like, have a camera to scan a qr code of your crypto wallet on your phone, and send it to that address directly? Anyway I don’t think it can be worse than having to take a picture that includes your face, handwritten message, id, and have to retake it 20 times because the exchange won’t accept it if it is slightly blurry, plus linking a bank account etc., needing to copy a private key and send another transaction seems like it would be way less annoying and creepy, even if the tradeoff of crazy high fees makes it not worth it for most people.

It’s kind of a pain to go through the process of signing up for a crypto exchange, so for some people it’s probably a more convenient and less intrusive way to acquire it.

IMO for some people arguing is a form of intimacy

Can’t track mouse movements on mobile though

Obligatory LLMs see tokens not letters

it may be moral in some extreme examples

Are they extreme? Is bad censorship genuinely rare?

but there are means of doing that completely removed from the scope of microblogging on a corporate behemoth’s web platform. For example, there is an international organization who’s sole purpose is perusing human rights violations.

I think it’s relevant that tech platforms, and software more generally, has a sort of reach and influence that international organizations do not, especially when it comes to the flow of information. What is the limit you’re suggesting here on what may be done to oppose harmful censorship? That it be legitimized by some official consensus? That a “right to censor” exist and be enforced but be subject to some form of formalized regulation? That would exempt any tyranny of the most influential states.

I’m going to challenge your assertion that you’re not talking about

You can interpret my words how you want and I can’t stop you willfully misinterpreting me, but I am telling you explicitly about what I am saying and what I am not saying because I have something specific I want to communicate. When you argue that

I believe each country should get to have a say in what is permissible, and content deemed unacceptable should be blockable by region

In the given context, you are asserting that states have an apparently unconditional moral right to censor, and that this right means third parties have a duty to go along with it and not interfere. I think this is wrong as a general principle, independent of the specific example of Twitter vs Brazil. If the censorship is wrong, then it is ok to fight it.

Now you can argue that some censorship may be harmful because of its impact on society, such as the removal of books from school hampering fair and complete education or banning research texts that expose inconvenient truths.

Ok, but the question is, what can be done about it? Say a country is doing that. A web service defies that government by providing downloads of those books to its citizens. Are they morally bound to not do that? Should international regulations prevent what they are doing? I think no, it is ok and good to do, if the censorship is harmful.

Since my argument isn’t about what should be censored, I’m intentionally leaving the boundaries of “harmful censorship” open to interpretation, save the assertion that it exists and is widely practiced.

I also think that any service (twitter) refusing to abide by the laws of a country (Brazil) has no place in that country.

That could be true in a literal sense (the country successfully bans the use of the service), or not (the country isn’t willing or able to prevent its use). Morally though, I’d say you have a place wherever people need your help, whether or not their government wants them to be helped.

If a government is imposing harmful censorship I think supporting resistance of that censorship is the right thing to do. A company that isn’t located in that country, ethically shouldn’t be complying with such orders. Make them burn political capital taking extreme and implausible measures.

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

The output for a given input cannot be independently calculated as far as I know, particularly when random seeds are part of the input.

The system gives a probability distribution for the next word based on the prompt, which will always be the same for a given input. That meets the definition of deterministic. You might choose to add non-deterministic rng to the input or output, but that would be a choice and not something inherent to how LLMs work. Random ‘seeds’ are normally used as part of deterministically repeatable rng. I’m not sure what you mean by “independently” calculated, you can calculate the output if you have the model weights, you likely can’t if you don’t, but that doesn’t affect how deterministic it is.

The so what means trying to prevent certain outputs based on moral judgements isn’t possible. It wouldn’t really be possible if you could get in there with code and change things unless you could write code for morality, but it’s doubly impossible given you can’t.

The impossibility of defining morality in precise terms, or even coming to an agreement on what correct moral judgment even is, obviously doesn’t preclude all potentially useful efforts to apply it. For instance since there is a general consensus that people being electrocuted is bad, electrical cables normally are made with their conductive parts encased in non-conductive material, a practice that is successful in reducing how often people get electrocuted. Why would that sort of thing be uniquely impossible for LLMs? Just because they are logic processing systems that are more grown than engineered? Because they are sort of anthropomorphic but aren’t really people? The reasoning doesn’t follow. What people are complaining about here is that AI companies are not making these efforts a priority, and it’s a valid complaint because it isn’t the case that these systems are going to be the same amount of dangerous no matter how they are made or used.

They are deterministic though, in a literal sense. Rather their behavior is undefined. And yes, a LLM is not a person and it’s not quite accurate to talk about them knowing or understanding things. So what though? Why would that be any sort of evidence that research efforts into AI safety are futile? This is at least as much of an engineering problem as a philosophy problem.

It’s important though because if that’s the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.

This one can do that stuff: https://github.com/huchenlei/ComfyUI-layerdiffuse?tab=readme-ov-file

Seems broken

We’re unable to submit your comments to congress because of a problem on our end. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.