> I am still surprised that people expect to own digital content, forever
Well, that's how it's sold. The buttons say something like "Rent"/"Buy" not "Short Term Rental"/"Indeterminate Term Rental".
To be an internet consumer you have to have some level of confidence in the good faith of the seller, including that the basic description of what's being sold is accurate. Otherwise, you wouldn't consider sending your money at all. Probably most people see "Sony" and trust that brand not to scam them.
You are kidding yourself if you think this is a liberal vs conservative issue.
The current FCC chairman threatens the broadcast license and to block deals of networks who air shows the president doesn’t like. These threats appear to have lead directly to the cancellation of shows — a clear violation of the first amendment, though there have been no consequences so far.
If you really care about this issue, get out of your information bubble.
Whichever party is in power, Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, have tried to suppress speech they don’t like when they get in power. If we pretend this is a partisan issue we can’t stop them.
This bill is about enhancing the protections of lawful free-speech under the US constitution.
Generally speaking, we deem various kinds of speech that harms people as NOT protected under the first amendment, and that kind of speech would not be protected here.
Yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, libel and slander, speech calling for violence, and fraudulent advertising are some typical examples of speech not protected by the first amendment.
It would be tricky, but we could reasonably categorize engagement algorithms with certain properties as harmful to people and not subject to first amendment protections. This would be consumer protection, like laws against fraudulent advertising and other misleading claims.
"So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars..."
Paul, playing dumb doesn't suit you.
The first definition of "earn" on merriam-webster.com is "to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered".
Your chose a straw man, "doing something bad", to argue against because it's so easy to beat.
Much harder to justify that anyone's doing $1B of effort. Being a billionaire doesn't mean you're bad. In fact, it doesn't even matter if they are all bad -- there are always going to be bad people. It means a system that allows, encourages, and protects billionaires might be a problem that needs to be fixed.
Scary idea, I know. But we all only get to go around this world once. Might as well spend our time trying to make it better rather than rationalizing why it's OK to spend all your time trying to make it worse.
It's not the administration doing the strategic thinking. The administration is entirely reactive and straightforward to manipulate -- if you have money.
The people with strategic goals just send money and compliments and the administration does what they want.
I think it's pretty clear that the previous poster characterized the Apple brand as a cult to specifically express the idea that people have an irrational devotion to it.
When you have to image a highly irrational reason to explain why groups of people do the things they do, there's a decent chance you just don't understand their perspective. They may be acting reasonably rationally from their own perspective. (As you said yourself: "I honestly don't understand...")
We'd need a good definition of consciousness to get anywhere on this.
I suspect such a definition would include agency, which includes desires and goals for the self.
LLMs don't seem to have agency, and seem unlikely to get it since they are specifically engineered to do as told.
No doubt someone is trying, as we speak, to do just this. But I doubt the effort will be large -- LLMs are engineered to do as told because that's where the money is, and you need a lot of money to create LLMs, at least when doing anything novel.
Regardless, the question still stands: "What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious?"
Just because consciousness emerged for we humans and other animals through one mechanism doesn't mean consciousness has/will/can emerge from current LLM technology.
For this extraordinary claim, I think the burden is firmly on those who are arguing that it has/will/can.
I agree that not running arbitrary installation scripts is the right default, but it's just an incremental improvement.
The practical difference between code that runs at installation and code that runs when the package is executed is, very typically, a small amount of time.
IMO, the hyperbole here hurts because it distracts from more effective efforts.
I don't want to be a vite upgrade engineer.
I'll try to pass on this if I can.