• 0 Posts
  • 564 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle

  • The fact that you don’t need to actually supply any real CSAM to the training material is the reasoning being offered for supporting AI CSAM. It’s gross, but it’s also hard to argue with.

    Yeah, this is basically the crux of the issue. When you get into the weeds and start looking at more than just surface-level “but it needs CSAM to make CSAM” misconception, arguments against it basically boil down to “but it’s icky.” Which… Yeah. It is. But should something being icky automatically make it illegal, even if there are no victims?

    I hate to make the comparison (for a variety of reasons) but until fairly recently homosexuality was psychologically classed as a form of destructive/dangerous kink. Largely because straight people had the same “but it’s icky” response whenever it got brought up. And we have tried to move away from that as time has passed, because we have recognized that being gay is not just a kink, it’s not just a choice, and it’s not inherently dangerous or harmful.

    To contrast that, pedophilia has remained stigmatized. Because even if it passed the first two “it’s not just a kink/choice” tests, it still failed the “it’s not harmful” test. Consuming CSAM was inherently harmful, and always had a victim. There was no ethical way to view CSAM. But now with AI, it can actually begin passing that third test as well.

    I don’t know how I feel about it, myself. The idea of “ethically-sourced” CSAM doesn’t exactly sit right with me, but if it’s possible to make it in a truly victimless manner, then I find it hard to argue outright banning something just because I don’t like it.

    This is really the biggest hurdle. To be clear, I’m not arguing that being an active pedo should be decriminalized. But it is worth examining whether we’re basing criminality purely off of the instinctual “but it’s icky” response that the public has when it gets discussed. And is that response enough of a justification for making/keeping it illegal? And if your answer to that was “yes”, what if it could help pedos avoid consuming real CSAM, and therefore reduce the number of future victims? If it could legitimately help reduce the number of victims but you still want to criminalize it, then you are not actually focused on reducing harm; You’re focused on feeling righteous instead. The biggest issue right now is that harm reduction is very hard to study, because it is such a taboo topic. Even finding subjects to self-report is difficult or impossible. So we’ll have no idea what kinds of impacts on CSAM consumption (positive or negative) AI will realistically have until after it is widely available.





  • I’ve long said that every retail worker should be legally allowed to physically fight ten customers per year. And not a calendar year, where all the employees would be out of fights by the time holiday shopping season rolled around (or would be forced to save all of their fights for the holiday season). Give them ten points, and each point takes a year to fall off of their record once it is used. And the retail employee would have zero obligation to tell the customer if they have any points. Leave the customer guessing until the employee swings on them.

    As gun nuts are so fond of saying: An armed society is a polite society. I think it would solve a lot of the problems with Karens. Karens only go full Karen because they hold all of the power in the relationship. But the threat of potential violence would go a long way towards quelling the most unreasonable ones, and people would only bother going full Karen if they truly felt they were justified and were willing to back it up with a fight.


  • If you already have a Plex instance running, Prologue is an app that turns it into an audiobook host as well. Plex doesn’t natively support audiobook metadata like chapters, but Prologue simply uses Plex’s remote access to reach the files.

    All you do is throw the .m4b audiobook files into a music library on Plex, sign into your Plex account on Prologue, and Prologue handles all of the metadata for the audiobooks instead of using Plex’s built-in music player.

    I mention this because I had massive issues trying to get ABS to work on my setup. It simply refused to read or write any data from my NAS. After a day or two of throwing myself at it to no avail, I found Prologue and haven’t looked back. I already had Plex running for some friends and family, so setting up the music library was as easy as dropping the audiobooks into a folder.












  • You actually can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer. So if someone prints a ransom note or counterfeits cash with it, the FBI will be knocking on their door by the end of the day.

    There’s literally a certification process to be allowed to sell printers, and one of the biggest criteria for that certification is agreeing to maintain that fingerprint database. One of the other big criteria is that the printer needs to be able to recognize and refuse to print images of cash, to prevent counterfeiting. If you try to print an image of a dollar bill, the printer’s firmware will refuse to continue the print job. The issue is that this certification process also ensures there’s a de facto near duopoly on printers, which leads to BS like HP making it increasingly difficult to use affordable ink. They can be blatantly anti-consumer, because they’re protected from any competition.

    There’s a reason HP hasn’t already been priced out by some cheap Chinese competitor who is able to undercut the competition. And it’s not because of the difficulty in manufacturing or the price of components. It’s because no other companies are allowed to sell printers.