From my cursory look at this last night, the US doesn't like that the definition of "harm" is so poorly defined. They either don't care about the broader concept of opting out of an algorithmic feed or aren't willing to criticise it.
I've been disappointed by the coverage because none of it has helped me understand the legal context behind why they don't like this one specific thing.
They commonly take issue with laws against hate speech in other countries. But, actually, they themselves do have limits on speech. The line in their case is issuing death threats. It's an arbitrary line, both hate speech as in suggesting people of a given class should die, and direct death threats, can lead to people being harmed.
I don't much care about the US's arbitrary opinion on where the line is. And I don't think it's really a slippery slope either. There is a very acceptable range of things that could be reasonably considered banned speech.
It's not Marxist at all, otherwise it'd be talking about the labour theory of value and wouldn't admit that profit through innovation is possible. It seems to be Georgist.
"Profit requires you to keep showing up. It goes to zero if you stop producing or innovating, and yields diminishing returns as others learn to duplicate or improve on your approach – so you have to keep learning and improving, too. Profit “belongs to the living” because it requires flow: you profit by generating value in a game with moving targets."
They didn't say the words, but they sure painted the picture (plus the usual Marxist game of moving the meaning of words around to keep the grift going).
What picture do you think is being painted here? I'm pretty sure that actual self-identified Marxists would be insulted if you accused them of believing in profit or thinking Adam Smith was correct.
No, this is redefining "profit" to mean "labor-created value". The self-identified Marxists I've met have been perfectly fine with redefining things to trick other people into thinking they agree with them.
I was under the impression that if you go back far enough to a millennium ago, peasants weren't trading for iron or having a miller grind their grain, and they were definitely spinning their own yarn.
There is a continuum. As iron became cheaper (even before the industrial revolution) peasants started trading for iron tools. It started with "the big man" owning a plow that everybody borrowed, but eventually the richer in the village would save up to buy their own (most families operated on a cycle of rich and poor depending on how grown up the kids where - just before they left home to seek their fortunes the farm was rich, just after the one heir had to support the aging parents, and the babies making them poor). Weather was the other factor, you could only save up if the crops did well.
A large part of this was legal ability. If only the "big man" could own a plow there was no point in trying to save up for one. This ability to have your own increased the farms productivity, in turn allowing the family to buy more (but often they would split the farm so two kids could inherit) While you could grind your own grain, often "the big man" wouldn't allow it.
Speech writers and shadow writers in general are writing on behalf of other people, but they're not writing the same thing. They can't! Usually they're writing something better, with the proper voice and authentic to the views of the person, but still not the same as what they would have written.
Depends on the individual. It’s usually a highly collaborative process. But in general, you’re correct that you’d expect a good writer to write better than the person who hired them.
Seems like you're thinking of "extra care" as some sort of life extension, while the GP thinks it means things like help showering and cooking, and the GGP is ambiguous and could believe anything.
The inevitability of death is a philosophical question. I read the GP and maybe the GGP as talking about the more practical question of whether it's moral to let broke old people die from bedsores and starvation or whether we pay for nurses.
That study measured a drop from 83% to 17% in severe autism, and one behaviour typical of severe autism is slamming one's head into the wall, among other things.
I think it's overly dismissive to summarise a drop in these behaviours as just "less obvious and disruptive to non-autistics". I can't imagine slamming your head into stuff is pleasant regardless of whether you have autism.
The study chose 18 participants such that 83% of them were just above the cut-off for severe autism according to the CARS rating scale, 16 of whom were boys, for a non-blinded, non-randomized, non-placebo-controlled trial with no control group, with symptoms assessed by evaluators who weren't blinded to previous assessments of each participant, and explicitly used those assessments to "calibrate" all future results without further elaboration, and with most of the subjects having changed other treatments and diets during the observation period.
No, but per my earlier reply, it's one behaviour typical of severe autism, among other forms of self-harm. Pretending that broader society only wants to reduce the severity of autism symptoms for their own convenience is ignoring the very real suffering that's happening.
Schizophrenia is known to have genetic factors that can increase its likelihood, but is also linked to environmental factors like cannabis use and stress. The group without the environmental factors has a lower incidence of schizophrenia, so it's generally believed that the onset of schizophrenia is triggered by them.
Male homosexuality is believed to have a small genetic component but is also linked to birth order. One theory is that in utero testosterone from older brothers can affect the sexuality of a younger brother.
I disagree that it makes no sense for environmental factors to lead to the onset of autism, on the basis that environmental factors can make someone gay or schizophrenic. That is to say, they can influence a personality and a mind in complicated ways that don't seem intuitive.
If you have 100k people who don't smoke cannabis and 100k who do, 1000 of the non-smokers and 1400 of the smokers will have schizophrenia.
How do you detect schizophrenia in the 400 people in the non-smoker category? The answer is that you can't. They don't have schizophrenia. This is what it means for something to have an environmental trigger.
I get that you're making a point about ableism and environment, but in order to do so you're confusing two things: the onset of autism (at a very early age or even before birth and triggered by who knows what), and the occurrence of any specific symptom of autism (at any age and triggered by things we generally understand).
I'm confused by this. I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school. You can apparently buy a kit to do it online for $39.99 USD.
I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.
I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.
Adding a plasmid to E.coli is absolutely routine work and you wouldn't need much fancy equipment for that. But that is very far from creating bioweapons. Plasmids are not integrated into the genome, they stay separate.
For viruses you'd need cell cultures of human cells, they're much more sensitive than E.coli. If you don't have sterile working conditions there you'll fail.
And you can't add plasmids to viruses, so you need to integrate your changes into the actual virus genome. I don't actually know how difficult that is, but it is certainly a lot more difficult than plasmids into bacteria.
The $100M lab in that Twitter thread is what they think would be needed for AI to develop new viruses. So the main argument there would be that a lot of actual experiments would be needed, not just theoretical calculations. And if AI is supposed to do them, it needs to be able to run experiments which requires automation.
If you're only looking for a generic virus for terrorist attacks, just get some Ebola. There's an outbreak right now, so it should not be too difficult. And it's plenty scary already, even if it isn't as dangerous in a first world country with proper reactions to an outbreak as a hypothetical designed bioweapon.
A description of how GFP was first extracted is at [1] and includes a custom-made "jellyfish cutting machine" capable of processing 600 rings an hour, and harvesting and processing 50,000 jellyfish to create just a single milligram of purified aequorin, with multiple milligrams needed to conduct experiments required to isolate/describe the compounds of interest. It took the scientists 5 years to reach the point where they had discovered the chemical structures and understood what they'd extracted from the goop of 50,000+ jellyfish.
A video tutorial at [2] then explains what to do next once GFP has been obtained from commercial sale and use of modern cloning, to skip the need to own a jellyfish cutting machine. E.g. need an antibiotic to extract the 1% of e.coli which will end up being modified vs. 99% of e.coli that won't be changed by presence of GFP.
To the point of the DavidRBellamy X thread, isn't the suggestion that an LLM wouldn't know whether it's worthwhile extracting some substance from the stomach of a crocodile, or from the beak of a penguin that only lives in Antarctica? And that much of the difficulty rests with hard physical work of the equivalent of cutting 600 rings an hour off jellyfish, for 50,000+ jellyfish, and conducting experiments to isolate and figure out the use of an extracted compound. Or ordering some obscure chemical compound from a supplier that is normally produced at a rate of 1mg/year and instead the LLM wants to order 1kg all of a sudden, raising eyebrows about why someone might be making the order.
The Twixxer thread seems to be arguing that an AI can't do research into novel pathogens without people, which is probably true. I haven't met anyone who is worried about that and I think it's either mistaken or a strawman.
I've mostly heard "what happens if the next ISIS or the next Jim Jones can modify ebola to be waterborne or create super-MRSA because AI simplifies the process?" which is why I ask what it would take to create a more virulent virus on a shoestring budget. Not do novel Nobel-worthy research, just copy some existing paper from ten years ago.
> then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.
A virus that makes victims die the fastest is not, in fact, an effective bioweapon, because it won't spread much. And the "spreads by itself" part is what actually makes bioweapons worthwhile, if you have to manufacture it in bulk and dump it directly on all targets, you can just use a chemical weapon instead.
> I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school.
That was a fun class! I haven't encountered anyone else outside a students who went to my one HS in Seattle during the late 90s / early 2000s who also remember doing that, interesting to hear other schools had a similar class.
In Australia I had to get into a genetics program, which happened automatically because I was the only applicant from my school, and take a four hour train ride to one of the local universities.
Definitely worth it though! We did gel electrophoresis too, and some other bits and pieces.
Why would you modify E coli for this? Use existing gut friendly bacteria and start from those. There's a wealth of material on the genetics of probiotics.
Um... E.coli is an existing gut friendly bacteria, one of the most common ones present in at least 90% of all humans' gut biome. There are only some specific strains which are pathogenous.
I've been disappointed by the coverage because none of it has helped me understand the legal context behind why they don't like this one specific thing.
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