I think you confuse keeping secrets with censorship. The people who knew the details of D-Day or of the breaking of Enignma absolutely agreed to keep those secrets prior to learning the details. There is nothing tyrannical about criminal penalties against people who consent to keep classified secrets knowing there is such a penalty.

Your comment applies to yourself more than parent comment. It's hard to think of any systemic oppression that wasn't enabled by censorship.

You can tell leaders are lying about how much they care about CSAM by how they reacted to the Jeffery Epstein scandal. They look the other way even when named specific individuals with strong evidence show up. Stop trusting the oppressors.

A license that forbids use in a commercial use is no license at all for use cases that matter. This is disclosed source, not open source. It maybe helps some researchers, but even for them, I'd prefer they work with solely open source, since my tax dollars fund them, so I want to benefit directly from their output, which means giving me code that I can use without restriction.

Rather than see grading end, I'd prefer to see this nonsense end. It's just an obvious attack on the concept of merit based achievement. They arrived at this conclusion by working backwards from their equality of outcomes axiom. Sorry, that axiom is false. It's from the same people who want kids to stop keeping score in sports. Everyone should be paid millions to be a professional baller, right. If we are all equal, then I should be tied with LeBron for all time scoring, along with everyone else.

The purpose of grades is to make most students work harder. Measurement is actually the secondary purpose to motivation. You learn more by setting and then meeting a self-imposed standard for your understanding that you reasonably expect to align with the grading scale. When I ran out of classes to take in graduate school, I had developed this skill of setting self-expectations during learning to the level that grades were no longer necessary. That was really hard to achieve and it's the most valuable thing I got out of graduate school, actually (learning how to learn on my own) but it could NOT have been achieved without a couple reality checks that happened when I went into tests thinking I had mastered the material, when I hadn't and the grading scale is what revealed this.

Being able to learning without grades what a masters degree represents. It's fiction to pretend that's what a bachelors represents and to say it's what a high school diploma represents is beyond stupid, more on the willful deceit level. The higher education system in the US has traditionally been a source of competitive advantage for the US, but it's failing harder and harder in both directions: it's offering less and costing more and both are trending in very bad directions. We need disruptive change in education now or we will lose this national advantage.

Yeah, this automobile thing isn't very innovative either. Sure you get around a little faster than horse and buggy, but not much and there's so much more infrastructure that's needed.

In all seriousness, smart chatbots are clearly a major breakthough. It's not clear if chatGPT has an exclusive quality. I expect to see a whole industry of smart chatbots that can tailor to different domains. What's not clear is if chatGPT specifically will be around in 5 years, but something in the space will be.

The real question is what the societal effects of the chatbot genre will be. I think this is yet another major diminishment in the value of many college degrees.

It's good to talk about global risks to humanity, true. I just don't like the choices for what they consider the biggest threats. Ignoring the risk of malevalent AI and demographic/fertility collapse are major oversights. Putting covid and climate change on now (as opposed to years ago) is kind of absurd. In 2023, I'd argue the long term view of each is substantially better than it was in say 2020.

There is no scientific basis for the claim that climate change or covid are existential threats to humanity. Climate change will certainly cause economic upheaval and extinction for many non-human species, but the fusion, fission, and green energy progress of late should easily take the worst case scenarios off the table long term. The worst case never threaten human existence in any reasonable way.

The covid alarm is just absurdly late, and in 2023 the prognostics are that we've turned the corner for the positive. The pandemic is over. Covid just another disease now. Policy wise, we clearly overreacted and need big improvement on how to have real time policy making as biological science of new diseases evolve. Too many policies were adopted without clear guidance for how to end them. Stupid policies caused a loss of credibility and trust that ultimately caused significant harm. For example, the disruptions to the fertilizer supply chain caused by covid policies could easily cause widespread famines this year and next year that will kill more people than died of the actual disease.

The first amendment constrains the government, not corporations, so tech censorship can never violate the first amendment. However, Texas passed this law, which regulates a commercial activity in the social media space. The first amendment issue here is whether the companies can claim this law violates their first amendment protection. I read the 5th circuit opinion and I found their argument pretty persuasive that the typical social media company does not participate in the content creation process enough to qualify for first amendment protect.

The social media companies aren't the ones creating user content, so it's a question of whether they act as a publisher exercising "editorial control". The 5th circuit found the typical social media company does no editing of content at all. This requires they revise and modify content prior to its publication. Responding, after the fact, to user complaints means they have already published the work without editing it and so the censoring simply controls the duration of an unedited publication. The 5th circuit also found that media companies are not accountable on either the reputation or legal liability fronts for the content. That this is true, in part, due to section 230, means Congress recognized social media companies aren't responsible for editing content. Shouldering accountability for content is the foundation for why editorial control is part of protected speech. Since social media moderation doesn't create or edit the underlying content, it is fair game for legislative regulation from states.

So if there is a pandemic that kills a lot of people, life expectancy goes down!? Who could have guessed?

No, but they do sell back your guns.

I have an unregistered car. There's nothing wrong with that at all. I just can't drive it on the public roads, which I don't.

A law which said you could only conceal carry a registered weapon on public property, might be legal. But concealed carry holders have lower arrest rates than the police themselves, so I don't see the point.

Powell don't view it that way, but people hearing it should. The Fed is doing a lousy job over the past few years of regulating the money supply. So how about you get your primary mission under control before looking to expand.

Yes, Defi needs some regulation to avoid scams and rug pulls and assure accountability. I'd like to see the industry propose its own regs first, before we take the risk that heavy handed government regs will hamstring it.

Mars is small, cold, and has very low gravity and atmosphere. The thing about Venus is that we could build floating cities. A breathable nitrogen/oxygen 1ATM gas would actually be buoyant in the CO2 based atmosphere of Venus, comparable to helium in earth's surface atmosphere. From a safety viewpoint this is huge, because a leak in the hull is not an explosive pressurization danger. The gravity of Venus is about 90% of earths, compared to 38% on Mars. This means it's much more likely that Venus gravity causes no long term effects. By going high enough in the atmosphere, you can balance temperature and pressure to something close to normal human experience. Venus is also net closer to earth.

Love this 5th circuit decision as it dismantles the "Companies can censor because its their free speech". If they are actually speaking, yes. Social media companies are not.

The speech on social media sites is user speech, not the companies. There is no "compelled speech" when you merely transmit another's speech. Sometimes a publisher exercises "editorial discretion" over what content they choose to publish. So is this what a social media company is doing if they ban a post? No. The court found social media platforms "exercise virtually no editorial control or judgment."

The 5th Circuit found two problems with the editorial discretion argument. "First, an entity that exercises 'editorial discretion' accepts reputational and legal responsibility for the content it edits." Social media companies do no such thing. "Second, editorial discretion involves 'selection and presentation' of content before that content is hosted, published, or disseminated." Social media companies generally publish first and censor in response to user reports. This might be different in smalll forums with active moderators, but the large sites make no such effort. So if you want to be treated as having free speech by virtue of editorial discretion, you have to actually do work, like say editing, that changes the content up front. Both points come with many caselaw legal citations from Supreme Court precedents that seemed pretty rock solid to me.

States have the authority to define rules when companies are more like "common carriers" than editors, according to the 5th circuit.

It's a transparency law... sort of like "wear your star of David if you don't worship properly " law was a transparency law.

Ultimately, Fauci for me represents the face of what I call authoritarian science, which is an oxymoron doomed to failure. Some of what he said was right, some of what he said was wrong. This is inevitable given a rapidly emerging threat like a pandemic and I don't fault him for occasionally being wrong or changing his views. What I fault him for is trying to ignore being wrong sometimes is inevitable and pressing a "I speak for science" authoritarian mandate approach, rather that taking the "this is what I believe, this is what we recommend, and here's why" approach.

Ultimately, I think people will rebel when they are asked to make sacrifices they don't understand and agree with and this rebellion is worse than giving them the choice and accepting many won't comply right away.