Europeans need to just stall for may be 1 or 2 years. The current admin is honestly going to collapse when the rather ill president won't be able to govern anymore, which given recent reporting, is rather soon.
>My fear for improving AI has nothing to do with malicious AI or humans being optimized away, it's something that might be possible today, and if not, then probably tomorrow or whenever everyone gets to use GPT4: using these programs to generate highly effective propaganda, and propaganda distribution strategies, to convince people that the accumulation of power is good, or at least, to tell people whatever it is they need to be told to optimize for those in power to stay and accumulate more power.
So, this is potentially a crackpot theory, but hear me out. I've noticed that a lot of the hype runners, posts claiming their businesses are optimizing this with chatgpt, or they've replaced most of their coding with chatgpt outputs have been generally accounts here that were created in 2021 or later. While before the last couple of months, you should generally assume good faith on HN and elsewhere, the fact is mass astroturfing now is very much possible on HN and elsewhere with chatGPT, and why wouldn't OpenAI want to hype their product and get as many users on board? They certainly could and would not be noticeable. You don't need nefarious political goals if you're just trying to sell something. You just need to create enough hype and illusion to grow your product. SV companies have done it before, and now it's automated, to a degree.
One explanation (beyond basic confirmation bias) is that a lot of people joined the crypto wave and knew the orange site was the place where tech people hung out, and a lot of those types ditched crypto and are riding the AI wave, but I really cannot be sure anymore.
The teen birth rate has been dropping, and things usually attributed to youthful indiscretion like drugs and alcohol just aren't as popular anymore. The entire Hollywood set of tropes popular in 00's teen movies aren't really true anymore.
My point is that social mores in the US are moving faster than current laws. I'm also not really sure whether teenage sexuality is a hard biological reality as, well, social pressures have an ability to change minds. Years ago, 13 year olds were expected to take up work on the farm. Today, 13 year olds are children most definitely. Perhaps there are limits to how much social conditions can condition individuals but at the very least, the whole changing definitions of childhood (or what was called "adolescence" for teens being pushed into the early 20's) is happening and whether it's conditioning or not.
I'll go ahead and say the quiet part loud. There is a changing definition of what is a child in the US. People generally under 24 are considered children, and I can recount a few people facing critique over dating people in their early twenties (<25) from dating men (mostly men) who are older. I've read an article that questions whether 16 year olds can be sexually active at all, that is, with teens their own age (other 16 yr olds), not with older people so nothing like pedophilia or an age difference at all. Another example is a thread I read on reddit questioning whether it was okay for a 17 year old musician making music with sexually explicit lyrics, presumably concerning sexual relations with others their own age.
A lot of the Epstein drama seems to be driven by two pieces, political connections to Trump and Clinton (so it touches "both" sides if you will) and the reaction of this changing definition of childhood to the exploitation of these teens at the hand of Epstein and the perspectives of people either older or from countries with different ideas of the propriety of the sexuality of teenagers. The changing range of who is a child is why what rms said so digusting, because it is considered in kind with say, rape of a toddler or a preteen in the popular mind as the social definitions are shifting.
The problem of course is this is very US centric, and there are of course people just living in different cultures and attitudes elsewhere. I have friends abroad were actually confused about the Epstein drama when they first read about it because to them, it was salacious but not as creepy as Americans think it is.
This seems like a very common sentiment regarding anime especially among white people in America. I think the reason for that is partly stylistic choices of anime but if we are really honest, Japanese people if not many Asian peoples appear as children to white people. This of course seems mostly visual/aesthetically based, a similar but opposite disposition towards black people exists in America[0]. Japanese animators draw characters that emulate characteristics they find familiar, which makes sense, and thus they appear "childish" to Americans.
I could bring up old racial stereotypes regarding Asian people to further bolster this point but I think most people are aware of this.
That start-class wiki article explains a lot of Korean dramas right there.
Joking aside, today I learned what a "culture-bound syndrome" is. That right there is quite substantial evidence that culture is a very real thing, and just because it might be socially constructed doesn't make it any less real (in fact, it might make it more real because it is so widely experienced).