They use monero because what they are doing (copyright infringement) will get you in to big trouble anywhere in the western world. Without cryptocurrencies much of the modern large scale archival efforts wouldn't be possible, or at the very least would significantly increase risks for the people participating in it. For me this alone is a good enough reason to admit that there are valid reasons for existence of privacy coins.
The harm they may cause in the short term via tax avoidance or being used to buy drugs is minimal, but the possibility that because of them archivists are able to fund servers for data that future historians wouldn't have otherwise been able to get their hands on? Priceless.
Assuming the person is a passive consumer with no messages / money exchanged with anyone, it is very hard to prove social harm or damage. Sentences should be proportional to the crime. Treating possession of cp as equivalent of literally raping a child just seems absurd to me. IMO, just for the legal protection of the average citizen, a simple possession should never warrant jail time.
Way to dismiss a solid argument based on an anecdote. I wouldn't be so quick to conclude that porn has nothing to do with seeking out real life sex, especially given how it has been widely studied that the amount of sex young adults are having has been steadily going down since the end of 90's.
I saw a twitter thread about the "WormGPT" a few days ago and was annoyed to see how much engagement it seemed to get given how obvious nothing burger it was. The few examples of its code output were laughably bad.
Hackforums has been the place where skiddies sell overhyped shit to other skiddies for well over a decade, I can guarantee that absolutely no one there is training their own AI. Everything that the article mentions, GPT3 turbo or GPT4 can already do and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it turned out most of the stuff being sold at HF turned out to be just glorified frontends for gpt3 turbo or some open source LLM.
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