The superembiggenment of ICE and the prison-industrial-congressional complex gives me nightmare visions of a future in which the oligarchs drive a semi through the loophole that permits slavery for prisoners. Dark-site 'camps' become industrial service centers where companies can have products made with near-zero-cost labor, making it possible to re-shore business that had been making the rounds of countries competing in a race to the bottom.
Someone please wake me up!
This suggest a game we can play. If it's illegal to NOT advertise on Ex/Twitter for whatever reason they come up with, what other things might they decide should be illegal NOT to do?
Is it illegal to not vote for GOP/MAGA candidates? (Conspiracy to deprive them of votes and therefore power)
Is it illegal to not watch FOX News? (Conspiracy to deprive them of advertising eyeballs and psychological control)
Is it illegal to not buy products from ?
The possibilities are endless!
This sounds suspiciously like how the Vogons posted a legal notice that the earth was to be demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. (ref: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) All you need do is pick the lock on that filing cabinet they hid it in, once you find the right basement on the right planet in the right star system. 'Freely accessible.' And written in Vogon, of course.
The platforms, it reasoned, “have engaged in censorship of certain viewpoints on key issues,” while “the government has engaged in a yearslong pressure campaign” to ensure that the platforms suppress those viewpoints.
This struck me as an odd reflection of something else we have discussed here of late.
You have a person or organization in authority endlessly repeating a vague call to action, and at some point one or more people decide to take that action. There is no direct causal connection between the instigator and the implementer, but the desired result happens anyway. We've heard it called stochastic terrorism when the suggested action is violent, but this situation seems to me to fit that same model, so it would likely need a different, or more inclusive name.
But it also fit another pattern we've discussed. Projection. Accusing another of an action or tactic that the speaker has used themselves.
Could this decision be used as precedent in a case about stochastic terrorism to say that because there is no provable causal link, the person spewing inflammatory rhetoric is in no way responsible for the actions a follower takes, believing that they were told to do so by their legally protected leader?
The use of communism as a general-purpose boogyman was an objective of the long-term propaganda effort written about in the recently published book, "The Big Myth". Before reading it, I was wholly unaware of the roots of that effort, and how widely that message was distributed. It was wildly effective, and we're still seeing its reverberation decades later.
In physical terms, embedding is like having a window within the bounds of your wall, through which you can see an infringing act. The window would not be culpaple.
Hmmm. If content creation rests with the user who provided the prompt, that raises other possibilities. It would in essence be the same as seeding a random number generator. Who is the creator if the AI's output becomes the next prompt? (Ask the AI to pose a recursive question about X.) This issue gets very twisty.
If I understand the implied basis for protection, it seems to rest on the fact that the LLMs base their output on material from the Internet which was produced ultimately by some other person and then used to train the LLM.
What happens when a LLM has the ability to apply a pattern observed in one context to content drawn from a different context? This would make it possible for the AI to use parallel construction to present a conclusion that may not have already been present on the Internet. What it produced in this instance would not be a remix of existing content. Would that make the AI the creator of original content?
The situation in which there is no plan to cold-boot, and all planning is focussed on maintaining operations suggests an interesting metaphor. Imagine Twitter as an aircraft that started barely able to take off, and then added to over time to make it fly better. It becomes so heavy and ungainly that it would no longer be possible to take off if it were ever to land or crash.
The same model can apply to the global economy. Locally independent operations across the world slowly became interdependent for the creation of their products or services, as well as for their sale and distribution. All planning is focussed on keeping the economy in motion, because if it were to crash, there's no plan to cold-boot it either.
There are systems in place to prop up economies, to manipulate the ongoing trade in securities, but none for recovering from catastrophic failure.
On that note, back in 2007 I wrote a short story about a far more restrictive claim.
"Site License" — I knew there was something strange when the aliens handed us those papers. I just didn't know how strange.
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/site-license/
I'd go with a different explanation: If it ain't broke (from the perspective of those wanting to preserve the obscuring fog) don't fix it.
Preventing the public from gaining free and usable access to court documents appears to have value to those charged with serving the public. It serves the same purpose as the curtains obscuring the Great and Powerful Wizard of OZ: maintaining the fiction that power lies in the hands of people and forces that we can't see. After all, there would be utter chaos if mere people could see how the legal sausage was really being made.
Retaining an archaic and unnecessary 10 cent per page fee is for the gatekeepers a cheap and easy way to safeguard the perceived stratification of power which has served them so well for so long.
This is a demonstration of Arthur C Clarke's dictum, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Most people have no reason to know the technical side of how anything works any more. It's all just a given that it does, and any indication of it is hidden under a friendly user interface.
With no understanding of how the internet works, or insight into the implications of any proposed changes, politicians are free to speak to perceived problems in general terms, and to propose legislation that will then be magically implemented by someone else.
The scenario is reminiscent of how the corporate managers of a company I worked at would make sweeping promises to client companies and governments about software that hadn't even been discussed yet by the technical people. And once those promises had been turned into contractual obligations, the technical workers were ordered to do the impossible... or at least to make it appear that it had been done.
And of course, the managers would be sure to have left with their golden parachutes before the sham saw the light of day.
Beware when public officials use intentionally empty phrases like 'learning lessons'. The ploy is calculated to induce people to fill in the meaning with what they want to believe. What did they learn? Was it not to commit war crimes, or not to get caught doing it?
It's far too easy to get caught up in someone's trick narrative. That's why I sow my own in the form of subversive short stories about politics and business issues. Consider it a vaccination, but first you have to read some of them.
I'm curious: has the narrative that boomers have more disposable income than other age groups been validated recently? It was an assumption based on data from a few decades ago, but things have changed. A lot of us who work in IT, for example, are living hand-to-mouth these days because what had been long-term jobs with benefits have been traded in for short-term contracts without benefits because companies thought it would be cheaper to outsource labor. And that's if you're working full-time on a contract. I'm doing database work for 4 companies, and it's still just part time, and not enough to cover expenses. Then there are the unemployed boomers who are 'too old' or 'overqualified'.
Since the posts are usually triggered by something that's happening, it might be interesting to use podcast time to explore the larger context in which the event takes place, as well as a broader history of the context that it plays out in. It could be done as a discussion or roundtable.
You could also take a page from an old PBS series, "The Constitution: A Delicate Balance" and have a number of participants play the various stakeholders in a situation you're following to explore how a hypothetical might play out, with time to talk about the rationale used by the various stakeholders.
Fiction can be a powerful tool to explore ideas. That's what I use my own blog for.
Really? Perhaps she's more concerned about people realizing that she lied about her positions during the primary campaign in order to get on the ballot. She wouldn't be the first politician to say whatever would garner votes, regardless of whether they supported those positions. The strategy is not much different from how the GOP got the Dems to strip anything beneficial to their *human* constituents from what was supposed to have been health care reform legislation. The compromises they agreed to during negotiations were not compromises they were willing to support when the bill actually came to a vote. And we don't appear to have any recourse for this duplicitous behavior.
It seems to me that most of these moral panics take advantage of an asymmetry in knowledge about the subject at hand. If people don't know enough about whatever is being presented to frighten them to judge for themselves, it's far easier to use the logical fallacy of speaking from authority to induce them to go along with the ruse. Intelligence agencies know more than you do, so what cause have you to question their word, and so forth. But with this one, there are technically adept people all over the planet who can poke holes in the story, just as Mike has noted here. Perhaps the countermeasure fort this cyberwar scare is a crowd-sourced education blitz. Anyone who knows better, and can support what they say, ought to make sure that those in their circle are educated about the farce. This could short-circuit the strategy.
Hidden Intentions
The superembiggenment of ICE and the prison-industrial-congressional complex gives me nightmare visions of a future in which the oligarchs drive a semi through the loophole that permits slavery for prisoners. Dark-site 'camps' become industrial service centers where companies can have products made with near-zero-cost labor, making it possible to re-shore business that had been making the rounds of countries competing in a race to the bottom. Someone please wake me up!
Other Applications
This suggest a game we can play. If it's illegal to NOT advertise on Ex/Twitter for whatever reason they come up with, what other things might they decide should be illegal NOT to do? Is it illegal to not vote for GOP/MAGA candidates? (Conspiracy to deprive them of votes and therefore power) Is it illegal to not watch FOX News? (Conspiracy to deprive them of advertising eyeballs and psychological control) Is it illegal to not buy products from ? The possibilities are endless!
Prior Art?
This sounds suspiciously like how the Vogons posted a legal notice that the earth was to be demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. (ref: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) All you need do is pick the lock on that filing cabinet they hid it in, once you find the right basement on the right planet in the right star system. 'Freely accessible.' And written in Vogon, of course.
Reflection
The platforms, it reasoned, “have engaged in censorship of certain viewpoints on key issues,” while “the government has engaged in a yearslong pressure campaign” to ensure that the platforms suppress those viewpoints.
This struck me as an odd reflection of something else we have discussed here of late. You have a person or organization in authority endlessly repeating a vague call to action, and at some point one or more people decide to take that action. There is no direct causal connection between the instigator and the implementer, but the desired result happens anyway. We've heard it called stochastic terrorism when the suggested action is violent, but this situation seems to me to fit that same model, so it would likely need a different, or more inclusive name. But it also fit another pattern we've discussed. Projection. Accusing another of an action or tactic that the speaker has used themselves. Could this decision be used as precedent in a case about stochastic terrorism to say that because there is no provable causal link, the person spewing inflammatory rhetoric is in no way responsible for the actions a follower takes, believing that they were told to do so by their legally protected leader?Disambiguation
Dobbs? Do you mean the abortion decision, of Bob Dobbs, the focus of the Church of the Subgenius?
Propaganda
The use of communism as a general-purpose boogyman was an objective of the long-term propaganda effort written about in the recently published book, "The Big Myth". Before reading it, I was wholly unaware of the roots of that effort, and how widely that message was distributed. It was wildly effective, and we're still seeing its reverberation decades later.
The difference IRL
In physical terms, embedding is like having a window within the bounds of your wall, through which you can see an infringing act. The window would not be culpaple.
Seeding Content
Hmmm. If content creation rests with the user who provided the prompt, that raises other possibilities. It would in essence be the same as seeding a random number generator. Who is the creator if the AI's output becomes the next prompt? (Ask the AI to pose a recursive question about X.) This issue gets very twisty.
Remixed Internet Content
If I understand the implied basis for protection, it seems to rest on the fact that the LLMs base their output on material from the Internet which was produced ultimately by some other person and then used to train the LLM. What happens when a LLM has the ability to apply a pattern observed in one context to content drawn from a different context? This would make it possible for the AI to use parallel construction to present a conclusion that may not have already been present on the Internet. What it produced in this instance would not be a remix of existing content. Would that make the AI the creator of original content?
Consider this a model of something much larger and more dangerous
The situation in which there is no plan to cold-boot, and all planning is focussed on maintaining operations suggests an interesting metaphor. Imagine Twitter as an aircraft that started barely able to take off, and then added to over time to make it fly better. It becomes so heavy and ungainly that it would no longer be possible to take off if it were ever to land or crash. The same model can apply to the global economy. Locally independent operations across the world slowly became interdependent for the creation of their products or services, as well as for their sale and distribution. All planning is focussed on keeping the economy in motion, because if it were to crash, there's no plan to cold-boot it either. There are systems in place to prop up economies, to manipulate the ongoing trade in securities, but none for recovering from catastrophic failure.
Prior Art
On that note, back in 2007 I wrote a short story about a far more restrictive claim. "Site License" — I knew there was something strange when the aliens handed us those papers. I just didn't know how strange. http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/site-license/
Useful fog
I'd go with a different explanation: If it ain't broke (from the perspective of those wanting to preserve the obscuring fog) don't fix it. Preventing the public from gaining free and usable access to court documents appears to have value to those charged with serving the public. It serves the same purpose as the curtains obscuring the Great and Powerful Wizard of OZ: maintaining the fiction that power lies in the hands of people and forces that we can't see. After all, there would be utter chaos if mere people could see how the legal sausage was really being made. Retaining an archaic and unnecessary 10 cent per page fee is for the gatekeepers a cheap and easy way to safeguard the perceived stratification of power which has served them so well for so long.
As Implemented
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Any Sufficiently Advanced Technology...
This is a demonstration of Arthur C Clarke's dictum, that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Most people have no reason to know the technical side of how anything works any more. It's all just a given that it does, and any indication of it is hidden under a friendly user interface. With no understanding of how the internet works, or insight into the implications of any proposed changes, politicians are free to speak to perceived problems in general terms, and to propose legislation that will then be magically implemented by someone else. The scenario is reminiscent of how the corporate managers of a company I worked at would make sweeping promises to client companies and governments about software that hadn't even been discussed yet by the technical people. And once those promises had been turned into contractual obligations, the technical workers were ordered to do the impossible... or at least to make it appear that it had been done. And of course, the managers would be sure to have left with their golden parachutes before the sham saw the light of day.
'learning lessons'
Beware when public officials use intentionally empty phrases like 'learning lessons'. The ploy is calculated to induce people to fill in the meaning with what they want to believe. What did they learn? Was it not to commit war crimes, or not to get caught doing it?
It's far too easy to get caught up in someone's trick narrative. That's why I sow my own in the form of subversive short stories about politics and business issues. Consider it a vaccination, but first you have to read some of them.
Boomers' Disposable Income
I'm curious: has the narrative that boomers have more disposable income than other age groups been validated recently? It was an assumption based on data from a few decades ago, but things have changed. A lot of us who work in IT, for example, are living hand-to-mouth these days because what had been long-term jobs with benefits have been traded in for short-term contracts without benefits because companies thought it would be cheaper to outsource labor. And that's if you're working full-time on a contract. I'm doing database work for 4 companies, and it's still just part time, and not enough to cover expenses. Then there are the unemployed boomers who are 'too old' or 'overqualified'.
Context
Since the posts are usually triggered by something that's happening, it might be interesting to use podcast time to explore the larger context in which the event takes place, as well as a broader history of the context that it plays out in. It could be done as a discussion or roundtable.
You could also take a page from an old PBS series, "The Constitution: A Delicate Balance" and have a number of participants play the various stakeholders in a situation you're following to explore how a hypothetical might play out, with time to talk about the rationale used by the various stakeholders.
Fiction can be a powerful tool to explore ideas. That's what I use my own blog for.
Another fictional take on this issue
I took a different tack. You might enjoy reading "Edifice of Lies".
http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/short-story-edifice-of-lies/
Hiding her real position?
Really? Perhaps she's more concerned about people realizing that she lied about her positions during the primary campaign in order to get on the ballot. She wouldn't be the first politician to say whatever would garner votes, regardless of whether they supported those positions. The strategy is not much different from how the GOP got the Dems to strip anything beneficial to their *human* constituents from what was supposed to have been health care reform legislation. The compromises they agreed to during negotiations were not compromises they were willing to support when the bill actually came to a vote. And we don't appear to have any recourse for this duplicitous behavior.
Asymmetric Information Warfare
It seems to me that most of these moral panics take advantage of an asymmetry in knowledge about the subject at hand. If people don't know enough about whatever is being presented to frighten them to judge for themselves, it's far easier to use the logical fallacy of speaking from authority to induce them to go along with the ruse. Intelligence agencies know more than you do, so what cause have you to question their word, and so forth. But with this one, there are technically adept people all over the planet who can poke holes in the story, just as Mike has noted here. Perhaps the countermeasure fort this cyberwar scare is a crowd-sourced education blitz. Anyone who knows better, and can support what they say, ought to make sure that those in their circle are educated about the farce. This could short-circuit the strategy.