What are the Top 10 Elements of the Authoritarian Playbook?
1. Divide and rule: Foment mistrust and fear in the population.
2. Spread lies and conspiracies: Undermine the public’s belief in truth.
3. Destroy checks and balances: Quietly use legal or pseudo-legal rationales to gut institutions, weaken opposition, and/or declare national emergencies to seize unconstitutional powers.
4. Demonize opponents and independent media: Undermine the public’s trust in those actors and institutions that hold the state accountable.
5. Undermine civil and political rights for the unaligned: Actively suppress free speech, the right to assembly and protest and the rights of women and minority groups.
6. Blame minorities, immigrants, and “outsiders” for a country’s problems: Exploit national humiliation while promising to restore national glory.
7. Reward loyalists and punish defectors: Make in-group members fearful to voice dissension.
8. Encourage or condone violence to advance political goals: Dehumanize opposition and/or out-groups to justify violence against them.
9. Organize mass rallies to keep supporters mobilized against made-up threats: Use fearmongering and hate speech to consolidate in-group identity and solidarity.
10. Make people feel like they are powerless to change things: Solutions will only come from the top.
The rubicon has already been crossed. If you asked some of the framers of the US constitution - beyond all other factors, unelected powers etc - what was the one defining trait of the government structure they wished to avoid; they'd have replied with arbitrary imprisonment and the suspension of due process.
Please don't take my word for it, hear it from the Prosecutor's Prosecutor. The SCOTUS justice, former AG and former USSG who led the American prosecution against the Nazis at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson,
No society is free where government makes one person's liberty depend upon the arbitrary will of another. Dictatorships have done this since time immemorial. They do now. Russian laws of 1934 authorized the People's Commissariat to imprison, banish and exile Russian citizens as well as "foreign subjects who are socially dangerous."' Hitler's secret police were given like powers. German courts were forbidden to make any inquiry whatever as to the information on which the police acted. Our Bill of Rights was written to prevent such oppressive practices. Under it this Nation has fostered and protected individual freedom.
The Founders abhorred arbitrary one-man imprisonments. Their belief was--our constitutional principles are-that no person of any faith, rich or poor, high or low, native or foreigner, white or colored, can have his life, liberty or property taken "without due process of law." This means to me that neither the federal police nor federal prosecutors nor any other governmental official, whatever his title, can put or keep people in prison without accountability to courts of justice. It means that individual liberty is too highly prized in this country to allow executive officials to imprison and hold people on the basis of information kept secret from courts. It means that Mezei should not be deprived of his liberty indefinitely except as the result of a fair open court hearing in which evidence is appraised by the court, not by the prosecutor
There is a reason why citizenship was not a requirement for receiving due process under the law. Citizenships are bestowed by the government. They can be taken away by the government. The framers held certain rights to be unalienable from human beings - something that no government can take away, and that was the right to not be unjustly detained for your beliefs, your behavior, your dress, your religion or composure.
Suspending due process for anyone is fundamentally un-American. But we have crossed that threshold. What comes next is fairly inevitable - if the process isn't stopped now.
I’m sick to death of everything being described as “opinions that challenge one’s worldview”. There are opinions and there are opinions. There are also philosophical differences of opinion vs things that blatantly factually untrue. Remember “alternative facts”? from the last US election? That was a thing that someone legitimately said in response to specific tangible factually incorrect statements being made about the nature of election fraud. Not wanting to be exposed to content from a news organisation that so aggressively promotes this “worldview” is not the same thing as being a thin-skinned snowflake that only wants to consume content that doesn’t challenge them.
The notion that I’m meant to ingest some unfiltered firehose of utter garbage because of some incorrect notion of “all opinions are equally valid” is complete and utter bullshit.
Public domain / communal property is also part of copyright, so it's not as if this is some forgotten concept that needs to be restored to the discourse.
Georgism is underconsidered, though.
> By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling
The legal implications are human implications and as much a part of culture as anything else. They have to do with what's fair and how rewards for effort are recognized and distributed. Formalizing this is less important in cultures that aren't oriented around market economies, which seems to be what much of this "rich tapestry of folklore" discourse wants to evoke and have us hearken back to, but that doesn't describe any society that's figuring out how to handle AI.
> we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.
What's bonkers is the life in the literally backwards idea copyright is (or should be) mooted or outdated by novel reproduction capabilities.
Copyright became compelling because of novel reproduction capabilities.
The specific capabilities at the time were industrialized printing. People apparently much smarter than the typical software professional realized that meant some badly aligned incentives between (a) those holding these new reproduction capabilities and (b) those who created the works on which the value of those new reproduction capabilities relied. The heart of the copyright bargain is in aligning those incentives.
Specific novel reproduction techniques can change the details of what's prohibited or restricted or remitted and how and on what basis and powers/limits of enforcement, etc etc. But the they don't change the wisdom in the bargain. The only thing that would change that is a better way of organizing and rewarding the productive capacity of society.
> I know I won't get a lot of love for this, but Sam is a really good person. I don't know him well, but I've known him since long before OpenAI.
"Good" is too blurry of a description, and I don't know Sam, but one thing I've learned (the hard way) is that you don't truly know someone unless you've had conflicts of interest with them and found mutually satisfying resolutions to them. If all you've had is mutually beneficial interactions, then of course everyone's going to be nice - it's in everyone's interests. You need to see how they act on nontrivial conflicts (either handling present ones, or mitigating/averting future ones) to really know if someone is a genuinely good person or not.
While this could hypothetically happen within an hour of meeting someone, it's more likely to take years or even decades... or might never even happen.
Ah yes—as the saying goes: “keep your friends at the Bayes-optimal distance corresponding to your level of confidence in their out-of-distribution behavior, and your enemies closer”
They download them from the public internet. The issue is that digital artists are basically required to maintain a public portfolio to get work. Them doing that is not implicit permission to use that work for whatever the fuck you want, as at says at the bottom of every image on Google images.
I find the whole comparison "it´s just like a person learning" to be a tiring trope. It's demonstrably not.
Like I said to another poster - you've probably seen a Picasso. Can you make me a copy?
Because a Diffusion model can. But you can't. Why not?
Your denial that there is a demonstrable difference between human and machine attention is part of the core obfuscation these companies are using to win this battle, so I reject it entirely. That difference creates the whole issue. If you don't recognise it, then answer me - Why can't you paint me a Picasso? You're saying the Machine is just like a human, yet a simple question of reproduction tells you it's not like a human in any way. It's a machine, and it produces machine reproductions. It learns faster and more accurately than any human, and its purpose is to produce derivative works. If the machine didn't need human data to do this, this discussion would be academic. But it does.
So the whole future of the Arts will be decided by investigating what the machine actually does, not the simplistic idea of it´s just like a human.
You have to evaluate the machine's abilities and impact onto the world. And that's the tough part. But just saying "hihih it's just a person" while it produces superhuman output is not a solution, it's just a lie that was invented by the people profiting from these models.
>Is your argument that this AI would be legally prohibited from viewing any images it doesn't have a specific license for?
- I do major.minor.yy-mm-dd versioning, so this handles that automatically
- shell is for dropping you into a prompt with your present directory mapped to the working directory. I find this super helpful for debugging and testing containers
- run is for testing your CMD and entrypoint scripts
I use Makefiles extensively for Docker, all sorts of individual projects (it's much easier to "make serve" than remember the specific invocation for getting a dev server up when you use multiple programming languages) and, of late, for Azure infrastructure deployments:
> People are writing articles like this saying how AI is useless (also, the sarcasm is so spicy), yet I feel this underlying sense of fear towards this. Can they please make up their mind?
I don't see a contradiction here. "LLMs produce low-quality content at extremely low prices" is something that can reasonably inspire both fear and ridicule simultaneously. (A good word for it might be "dystopian".)
> Are they fighting for the right to produce low quality content?
Paying writers is a great way to produce higher-quality content. But even producing low-quality content is better than being a Walmart greeter.
> I was not old enough when internet was coming up, but I wonder if there was a similar tone towards internet when it came along.
I was, and I do not remember such a tone. (There certainly were moral panics over things like children getting access to porn, though.) The difference (to my mind) is that in the early days of the internet, new technology made clear and dramatic improvements in human well-being. Things like email, mapping software, and online shopping let people do things that were difficult, expensive, or impossible before. (Search for "long tail" to find discussion of the latter.) If anything, there was too much derision in the other direction -- the phrase "buggy whip manufacturers" was thrown around quite a bit if you want to hunt down examples.
Over the last 10-15 years, the big new internet-related tech has been much less beneficial. Instead, we've gotten things like the "gig economy", cryptocurrencies, walled-garden app stores, and algorithmic social media feeds. In terms of human well-being, these changes range from ambiguous to terrible. And the whole time, tech companies and VCs have continued crowing about how they're advancing humanity toward the future, with (apparently) very little introspection about failures like "creating a giant get-rich-quick scam that boosts carbon emissions" or "accidentally funneling millions of young men toward white supremacist propaganda", alongside lesser failures like "SEO winning the arms race against search engines" or "creating user-tracking systems that rival the East German secret police for the purpose of ad sales".
Given that context, a new technology that seems like it's designed to drive writers into unemployment while flooding the rest of us with spam is going to get a fair bit of skepticism.
Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? Both are generative softwares which when generate a piece verbatim only means over fitting / over training on that particular example.
The tone on one of these tools is hypocritical. When it comes to digital art general sentiment is that it's inevitable and artists need to up their game. This sentiment is not being repeated for code generators.
We can of course also judge the track record on this kind of techno-optimist rhetoric. People expressed all the same lofty ideals about social media, almost all of which have been outweighed by what we really got: anger-driven addiction, micro-targeted propaganda, turn-key state surveillance, and teenagers attempting suicide at all time highs.
When I was a young person, I used to deride writings like 1984 on the grounds that the scenarios and stories presented to carry the message were too far-fetched.
Reading your comment has set off an epiphany, I think I get it now, there probably exists some higher-up person who is thinking along these lines: we must always be in a state of war, for if we are, the populace will want to be ready and willing to fund the instruments of war. And we always want to be ready for war, because if ever we are not, we lose our capability to win a potential future war. For our very survival we must contribute our efforts to build these instruments of war. War is constant. War is peace.
The OP was asking a different question with a different answer -- OP wanted to know if novel ChatGPT output is copyrightable, not whether existing copyrights might cover ChatGPT outputs. That said...
> The compression ratio of the source corpus versus the model demonstrates it doesn't have all the source material, ipso facto, results are not infringement.
What?! This is not at all how copyright law works and that's also not at all how LLMs or compression work! You're wrong about both the law and the technology!
Just because the model can't losslessly reproduce the entire training dataset doesn't mean that the model can't losslessly reproduce copyrightable fragments of the training dataset.
And the law truly doesn't give a damn that a verbatim copy of a piece of code or sequence of paragraphs came out of a model instead of a copy/paste from github. If it's the same basket of bits, or close enough in certain cases, it's covered by copyright, full stop.
> As an easy to understand analog, if you grab a Shutterstock photo, change it from 100% quality to 5% quality, the file size drops to 100th of the original and on display, none of the pixels are the same. While it may be the same general concept depicted badly, it is certainly not the original and clearly isn't copyrightable.
As an easier to understand analog, if you grab a BITMAP of a Shutterstock photo and convert the file type to a reasonable JPEG (lossy compression!!!), tht's very clearly still covered by the copyright on the .bmp.
Here are some selected scripts folks might find interesting.
Here's my backup script that I use to encrypt my data at rest before shipping it off to s3. Runs every night and is idempotent. I use s3 lifecycle rules to keep data around for 6 months after it's deleted. That way, if my script goofs, I can recover: https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/2f58eedf3b7f7dae...
A wrapper around 'gh' (previously: 'hub') that lets you run 'hub-rollup pr-number' and it will automatically rebase that PR into your current branch. This is useful for creating one big "rollup" branch of a bunch of PRs. It is idempotent. https://github.com/BurntSushi/dotfiles/blob/2f58eedf3b7f7dae...
Pasta and sauce are not meant to be separate. Once you cook the pasta, drain it, and immediately toss with the sauce. This is part of the reason it was meant to be al dente, to absorb and deliver the flavor of the sauce better. Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce; it expands when freshly cooked but not when cool.
Also most sauce recipes are probably overcomplicated. Most need less than 5 ingredients. You probably don't need all that onion and garlic, but one of them. Definitely not two tablespoons of dried oregano.
The way you cut onions and garlic changes the flavor a lot too. Finely minced garlic, from a food processor or garlic press can be overpowering yet not deliver the flavor. One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor. Half an onion can work really well in a sauce you cooking for half an hour.
The how-to is buried pretty deep for those like me who are unfamiliar with cyclic sighing (aka psychological sighing or double inhale)
> Participants were informed they should sit down in a chair or, if they prefer, to lie down, and to set a timer for 5 min. Then they were told to inhale slowly, and that once their lungs were expanded, to inhale again once more to maximally fill their lungs -- even if the second inhale was shorter in duration and smaller in volume than the first, and then to slowly and fully exhale all their breath. They were told to repeat this pattern of breathing for 5 min. They were also informed that ideally, both inhales would be performed via their nose and the exhale would be performed via their mouth, but that if they preferred, they were welcome to do the breathing entirely through their nose. They were also informed that it is normal for the second inhale to be briefer than the first.
Note that it does accept wildcards so you can do rules for *.mycompany.com
You can also use placeholders for keys, so for example I have a ssh config like:
Host *.mycompany.com
# Employer specific yubikey stuff
Host *.mydomain.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/keys/id_primary
Host *
IdentitiesOnly yes
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/keys/%r@%h # uses ~/.ssh/keys/git@github.com for github for example
I originally started doing this because I would have so many keys that servers would reject me for too many authentication attempts, but it also helps make it easy to use distinct keys for distinct purposes and avoiding fingerprinting like this*
> It's like they're TRYING to get people with ADHD to kill themselves.
You're raging against the wrong machine.
By rights, ADHD should not exist. The amount of task-switching humans are expected to do in demonstrating mastery of the domains of entire departments is inhuman and unsustainable to begin with. We're pumping the population so full of amphetamines to keep up that we've literally run out of them.
Medicine can't fix the fact that nobody can survive as a fisherman anymore-- he has to be a full-stack scuba diver, boat captain, marine biologist and have a whale-hunting side hustle going on. Actually catching fish is what you do on the weekends.
Personally, I dislike having labels on myself that describe behavior whether it be pseudo-science or science-science because I find myself "role-playing" those labels and semi-consciously using them to guide actions. Even for medically diagnosed disorders I'll end up unconsciously thinking "Well of course, I'm going to do X because I have disorder Y/personality type Z".
This is a powerful piece that resonates with my own experience. I went through a period of severe burnout that took me a couple years to recover from. One of my later insights was that burnout doesn't merely entail working too much (although that's certainly part of it); burnout often involves pouring too much of your heart and soul into something that does not love you back. I describe burnout now as a kind of "unrequited love."
So many of us go above and beyond for our companies/projects/teams/whatever. The author here describes overcommitting at work. We might have the best of intentions, but at some point, we don't see the returns we yearned for and start to question what all this self-sacrificial giving is for. That is when burnout really sets in. I've had friends burn out while working for hostile or indifferent managers, startups that are trending the wrong direction, companies that engage in illegal or unethical behavior, etc.
A second insight was that burnout can play a positive role in our lives. It's like a circuit breaker that trips to protect us from a damaging situation. When we feel burnout coming on, it's a warning to pay attention to an important misalignment in our lives.
It sounds reasonable, but I think a key requirement of operating like this would be to have solid leaders that will guide the organization in the correct way.
This is similar to the best blog post I've ever read on organizations by coda hale [1]. His perspective of viewing an organization like a distributed computing system is enlightening and highly pragmatic.
Scaling organizations is hard. To scale well, you need to avoid contention on shared resources and continually work on force multiplier type projects.
Life in the FOBs in Afghanistan was a time capsule of red-blooded ‘Merica, like hanging out between scenes of a 90s action movie. The gym was 24 hours, everybody was huge, and the music was hardcore 80/90s. Sort of like my high school football team. There were guns in every social situation, which was shocking at first until you realized that it meant that this was the first place on earth where you had nothing to fear from strangers. Everybody knew everything about the people around them. If you had something you were insecure about, you’d get tortured about it until you weren’t. I never fit in, but these people were willing to die for me, and I found ways to earn respect. It was basically the neighborhood I grew up in, or maybe a sports team, or maybe a prison. It didn’t really matter. Food was simple, served every 6 hours on a tray line, and you got everything you needed without thinking about it. On the bigger FOBs, the jet engines ran constantly in idle, and the fighter pilots pretty much did WTF they wanted. There were no cell phones nor internet in most places, which was tremendously liberating. I made the most of every moment there. There was always something important to do, and not much in the way. Most of the time I didn’t worry about my job. We worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week, everybody together in one place. You’re never alone on a deliverable; it’s everybody’s responsibility, everybody’s credit, and everybody’s lives on the line.
It felt like focus. I came back to chaos. Jobs where you have no idea what to do or why, but huge pressure to make your boss happy, just some random person that you don’t really know anything about, but they have the power to ruin your career, and you’re all on your own. Shopping. Cooking. Cleaning. Family. Facebook. Cell phones. Internet dating. Interviews. Leases. License. Registration. Insurance. Doctors. Lawyers. Bills. Taxes. Spam. Scams. Outrage politics. These things are not optional. It’s your entire life consumed by other people’s rackets. It all existed before, but every year away, it seems like it’s been put on overdrive when I get back. People have a tendency to infantilize vets by claiming we’re the victims of PTSD or something, but no, seriously, there are some things that really are getting worse in normal American life, and especially politics of the homefront military. Maybe it’s to be expected; a lot of us went forward to get away from that.
The best advice I was given (when I was a new hire, by my manager) was something along the lines of "You're smart, and you aren't burdened by tradition or seniority. If you see something that looks weird or confusing, ask about it! No one will hold it against you, and your point of view may keep us from committing to something more complex than it needs to be."
I've tried to keep that level of intentional naïveté.
https://commonslibrary.org/authoritarianism-how-you-know-it-...
What are the Top 10 Elements of the Authoritarian Playbook?
1. Divide and rule: Foment mistrust and fear in the population.
2. Spread lies and conspiracies: Undermine the public’s belief in truth.
3. Destroy checks and balances: Quietly use legal or pseudo-legal rationales to gut institutions, weaken opposition, and/or declare national emergencies to seize unconstitutional powers.
4. Demonize opponents and independent media: Undermine the public’s trust in those actors and institutions that hold the state accountable.
5. Undermine civil and political rights for the unaligned: Actively suppress free speech, the right to assembly and protest and the rights of women and minority groups.
6. Blame minorities, immigrants, and “outsiders” for a country’s problems: Exploit national humiliation while promising to restore national glory.
7. Reward loyalists and punish defectors: Make in-group members fearful to voice dissension.
8. Encourage or condone violence to advance political goals: Dehumanize opposition and/or out-groups to justify violence against them.
9. Organize mass rallies to keep supporters mobilized against made-up threats: Use fearmongering and hate speech to consolidate in-group identity and solidarity.
10. Make people feel like they are powerless to change things: Solutions will only come from the top.