catreadingabook

I’m against forced birth, but have to point out that there is the argument, whether realistic or not, that the parent can always give the baby to the foster care system once it’s born, so their obligation would be limited to 9 months total.

Personally what I take issue with is the inconsistency of forced-birth laws in the absence of comparable forced-labor laws. In a world of ideal policy, maybe we as a society might agree that a person should be obligated to sacrifice their time and health for the sake of preserving or creating human life. But then it shouldn’t be applied only to adult women who had consensual sex. Why shouldn’t non-pregnant people be forced to tend a farm for 9 months to produce food for those who are starving, or to spend 9 months working 80-hour weeks at an emergency call center with no pay?

I suspect the answer is that the rights themselves are not the issue here, but rather the motivation to punish women who have consensual sex.

In the academic sense of the term, negative rights include the right to not have things done to you (e.g., to not be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law).

Positive rights include the right for you to do something, generally as against others (e.g., the right to have food, healthcare, or education be provided to you by other people).

I’m not sure it is useful to try to categorize abortion rights, for similar reasons why it would be difficult to categorize the right to try and grab the only parachute on a crashing plane. Even if it causes injury or death to others, our general tendency is to treat positive acts of genuine self-preservation as a negative right, if only in the sense that we would never enforce a rule that prohibits the person from trying.

A funky brain teaser on the topic might be whose right of life prevails when a perfectly healthy person turns out to be the only match for 5 patients with failing organs, one needing a new heart, another needing a new intact liver, etc., who are each about to die if we don’t kill the healthy person and harvest their organs for transplant. And would the answer change if this wouldn’t kill the healthy person, but severely decrease their quality of life - such as involuntarily taking one of their lungs and one of their kidneys?

I hate to talk like a law student but that’s sort of the system we already have. When a person certifies that they have read a contract (such as terms and conditions), it does actually mean something. No one would want to do business if anyone could be released from a contract just because they were lying about whether they agreed to be bound by it.

You might be able to think of it like the safety presentation that happens before takeoff on every commercial flight in the US. If you look around at that time, very few people are ever paying attention to the video or flight attendant. Why is that, if everyone is supposed to be concerned about their own safety? Maybe they think this presentation will be the same as all the others, so they can safely ignore it. Does that make it the airline’s fault if a person doesn’t know where the emergency exits are when something does happen? No, the typical intuition - and a relatively necessary assumption on the airline’s part - is that each person is responsible for knowing the information given to them in that presentation.

Similarly, it does not necessarily change much if a person has to check off multiple boxes instead of just one, or if they have to wait a few minutes before they can sign off, etc. People will tune out whatever they want to tune out, but we can’t have a workable system if that’s what absolves them of responsibility.

--That being said, US contract law does take this to some extremes that should be carved out as unacceptable exceptions to the rule. The case of Carnival Cruise Lines, Inc. v. Shute comes to mind where passengers were bound by terms printed on the back of a cruise ticket that they only received after they already paid for it.

I’d imagine it’s the things that still kinda make it as headlines today, but don’t get much coverage anymore because everyone is used to it by now.

“By the way, this weekend’s mass shootings led to 10 deaths and 29 injuries total, a little more than last week. Parents, remember to bundle up your kids this fall semester with the latest BulletBlocker Youth Jacket, 10% off if you order today! Now back to the news you actually wanted to hear about: the former U.S. President allegedly commits even more crimes…”

🎶 oh, I can so just sit here and cry 🎶

but fr what worked well for me was blocking, deleting, getting rid of (or stuffing into a rarely used closet) anything that reminded me of them, then distracting myself 24/7 long enough to later process my emotions with a little bit of distance from the event itself - not to block out the feelings but to just avoid ruminating on them.

Mostly the point was buying time to provide my monkey brain with hard proof that I can survive without that person, that way it stops shooting me up with the Bad Chemicals every time I think of them.

I think it has to be somewhere in between. This ‘real deal’ theory doesn’t explain the popularity of hentai, but at the same time, OnlyFans shows that some people reaaallly care about the personal element. I would bet niche kinks (especially those ‘illegal to make but legal to watch’?) will lean heavily on AI for content, but the rest will probably change based on our culture’s attitude toward AI in general.

Most people in first world countries will probably understand ‘L’ and ‘R’ anyway. But hypothetically, the problem could probably be solved by adding another letter, the same way we know that ‘T’ is for ‘Tuesday’ and ‘Th’ is for ‘Thursday.’

Advice against phishing emails can be reduced to, “1: Never click on a link, call a phone number, download an attachment, or follow instructions you found in an email unless you were already expecting this exact email from this exact sender. 2: If you really want to do those things, search up the organization’s website directly and use the contact info they provide there instead.”

imo it’s the ad-hungry articles stretching everything into 10+ pages that’s making advice so inaccessible to people. Super annoying because it dilutes the real, simple message that’s already there, it’s just locked behind an adwall.

P2W games are like, “You got 2 free skips! Let’s try using one now on this 5-minute timer.” & You know I’m waiting the full 5 minutes because after the tutorial every cooldown is like 8+ hours.

As with most social media, I think the voting system makes it worse. There is always an element of “playing to the audience,” in that the easiest way to get validation (votes, boosts, replies) is to make sure everyone thinks you’re morally or intellectually superior over the person you’re talking to, whereas an actual normal conversation would be focused on the exchange of new ideas and perspectives.

Stronger moderation could help, and filtering the less civil communities could help, but I suspect it’s just a natural consequence of having a built-in validation system that applies to every post and comment everywhere. As engagement in the fediverse grows overall, I could see it getting worse mainly because of more ‘vote-seeking’ behavior.

It isn’t commercial labor when an adult does their own chores (I think), as it’s more related to the people in a household maintaining their own home. It likely wouldn’t be labor for a child for the same reasons, though I’m not sure.

But it could start to look like labor when it’s something that produces commercial value, for example, it’s more like a ‘chore’ to water the vegetable garden in the backyard, but it’s more like ‘labor’ to tend to 20 acres of farmland.

Excessive chores, though, could be prevented under child abuse law rather than child labor law, depending on how it’s enforced. Doing all the household work voluntarily for no reason other than it’s fun? Almost certainly legal. No video games until you clean the dishes? Probably legal. No food until you sweep, mop, dust, and shine every surface in the house? Probably abuse.

Ok, let me be more specific so that it’s not open to uncharitable interpretation.

What happens when it becomes easy to make something as reliable and complete as, e.g., ChatGPT-4 without the hardware costs and other costs currently associated with it?

That’s true, but thinking about AI that is made to generate speech, processing power is still expensive enough that developers are careful with it. But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

For example, what happens when a developer decides to train a LLM extensively on scam emails, and spammers love to buy copies of it - but the developer markets it as just “a helpful generative AI”? Or, what if a person trains their LLM on an extremist forum full of hate speech and disinformation, then offers it to a suicide prevention center as a 24/7 alternative to human labor? (Treating these as hypotheticals, where we assume the difference isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps they also used some legitimate training data, so that most outputs seem innocent enough.)

To me it sounds more involved than selling just a word processor with autocorrect, but less involved than selling an instruction manual for committing crimes.

No way they don’t force you to agree to some “terms and conditions” along the lines of, “You accept full responsibility of all risk and if we get sued, you agree to pay on our behalf. And because we know you won’t read this, here’s all the risks so we can say you gave informed consent: …”

Completely speculating, because I don’t know many courts that have been willing to decide either way, but maybe:

If it causes harm in a way that was reasonably foreseeable, the person who turned it on and/or the person “operating” it might be generally liable on a theory of negligence (but not always).

If the harm was unpredictable, it might be on the manufacturer and the retailer under a theory of products liability (but not always).

Or it could be treated as “ferae naturae,” where owners are liable for their ‘dangerous animal’ pets because they knew the pets were dangerous and still decided to keep them (but not always).

If it’s an AI not associated with a physical device, maybe the programmer who “authored” the lines of code could be criminally liable for criminal “speech” (writing an AI) that incites and enables crime, even as a conspirator – that’s reeeaaally doubtful on Due Process grounds, but it would definitely light a fire under every developer’s chair to make sure their algorithms are explicitly trained against criminal behavior. (but still not always.)

Dreams are at least somewhat influenced by your recent thoughts and experiences. For example, many studies found that people dreamed more about disease and confinement during the pandemic (here’s a medical journal article about it). You probably have a higher chance of influencing the subject of your dreams if you focus on the desired subject enough during the day.

Interesting, so what happens when an AI creates art that would infringe on a human’s copyright? Would AI art of Mickey Mouse be public domain, meaning AI could be the end of Disney’s insane licensing fee?

Edit: Nevermind, turns out this article is just editorialized. It isn’t public domain, it just isn’t eligible for the AI’s creator to copyright it if it’s fully autonomous.

I’m confused maybe. I’ve heard of gas stoves, but how does a gas oven work?

afaik Amazon tries to offload the work of vetting its vendors by requiring them to have a registered trademark. This led to all the sketchy sellers making tons of fake companies with random strings of letters as names, knowing the USPTO is going to approve “AEGIJDU Clothing” because nobody is ever going to contest that name.

That’s why you see a ton of identical products listed with supposedly different, super random brand names, in case Amazon tries to take down one of the “vendors” (aka, one of the real vendor’s many fronts).

When a console game finally releases a PC port and the title screen still says “Press Start,” you know the keys are going to be completely unhinged like, “I” to open your inventory. “C” is yes, and “V” is no, except in the escape menu, where “Enter” is yes and “Backspace” is extra-yes. Left-click to either attack or walk forward, depending on how your character is feeling.