> Treating people under 18 is a politically losing issue.
Treating people as 'a politically losing issue' is weird to me. There are certainly some nuances to <18 transgender care, but that statement doesn't address any of them and just suggests we embrace political cowardice.
> When policies around it changed, that tipped the scales from the public ignoring trans women or seeing them as victims, towards many members of the public seeing them as monsters who are out to get their children.
This is worse. It wasn't because politics around it changed, it was because republicans (upset that they could no longer target gay people), reused the same crappy arguments against trans people, and then wrapped it in a pedophilic flag.
The change in policy is just effective propaganda making people concerned that random doctors are allowing their children to get sex change operations without consent, when that isn't how ANY of this works. Children <18 can socially transition, get puberty blockers, and MAYBE get hormone treatment. WITH parent consent.
The fact that the media and comments like yours continues to pretend its a reasonable 'discussion' perpetuates the nonsense.
We? Political cowardice? Have you considered that trans people might just want to live their lives, and not be force-teamed into your war? Trans has been a thing since the 1950s and that whole time flew under society's radar, happy minding their own business and not be noticed, until around 2020 when your war started.
Trans has been a thing since a whole lot longer than that.
Discussions like this often end up at WW2 and that's not what I'm saying here, but Germany in the 1920s was essentially the Gay/Trans hub of the world until it wasn't: https://www.netflix.com/title/81331646.
But even that's not the beginning of 'trans'.
The reason trans isn't 'flying under the radar', isn't because trans people got too proud. Its because one political party decided to shine the magnifying glass to turn trans into a political issue.
Have you considered that trans people just want to live their lives? As we all know, transitioning, social, hormonal, reduces incidence of suicide. This also applies to under 18 individuals. Should such options and approaches suddenly be revoked and discontinued, it will naturally follow that some will die who otherwise would not have.
How many do consider reasonable to sacrifice in the name of political expedience?
Back in the days when there were gatekeepers, doctors would actually refuse to treat you for gender dysphoria if you were suicidal. Because suicidal people aren't thinking clearly enough to be making such an important choice, and their actions could be seen as abusing the treatment as a means of self-harm. I think people also make that argument because they feel they need to be manipulative so that others will let them do what they want to do. If the world were more enlightened, we wouldn't have such issues.
Trans women until VERY recently were forced to go into prostitution and were excluded by the wider society. Trans people were not force teamed into any war, or rather, this is partially right, they were forcefully forced to pick a team by the side that aims to take away their bodily rights, protections, and mark them as undesirables again.
As a person born in a country on the very same trajectory Trump is pushing US into now, let me share some insights written in our blood with you. In my country, there were people who thought like you, thinking you can give them an inch and that they will be satisfied by it. But the truth is they always need more to keep the fire of hate going. First, they will take the <18 care because it was the point with weakest support. Next, when that is done, the weakest point becomes your legal identity. Then, your legal care at all. Then other lgbtqi+ groups. There is this poem about "first they came for _", this is a great illustration of it in action. It ends with transgender people pushed into conversion therapy or exile, like in my country. You should really look into how life for us was like in "1950s" and up to now, because if you don't fight for this happy life you want to live they will just take it without asking you, like they did throughout the history. The only answer to authoritarianism is to make sure there are no weak points to attack, stand united and you have a path to win. You can learn from our mistakes, or you can learn from yours. The choice is up to you.
Based on my perception of where US is now in terms of government, where its going and how seriously people are taking what is happening, I don't plan on going anywhere near it today or in the ~10 years to come. That is an optimistic timeline where trumpism is eventually stomped, btw. If you think it matters what individual states legislate when the entire country's government is being transformed into authoritarianism before your eyes, you are well on your way into pessimist timeline.
Odd that the idea of a child making permanent life changing decisions about their body hasn't been mentioned, you're so convinced you're right about all this.
The specs on this look identical to the Orin Nano 8GB. Elsewhere Nvidia says the software updates are available to all Orin owners [1], so is this just a special edition released alongside the new JetPack release?
Is this just fiber distance between each datacenter? The coloring makes it seem significant, but from the distances it kinda just looked like ever < _km (100ms) was green, everything between _km(100ms) and _km(200ms) was orange, and everything over was red.
I'm not sure what you're wondering here. Of course physical distance is going to be a dominating factor, but this is measuring packet transit times. The speed of light over half a great-circle is only 67ms or so, ot maybe 100ms considering velocity factor in fiber, so clearly there's more to it than just distance. We can talk about what those other things are, but we both know they exist, right?
I don't know of true reasons inside Google but the quality of the work alone would've justified termination for a high-ranking position.
If you read the famous "Stochastic Parrots" it's not a scientific work at all, it's a piece of journalism that just throws together as many unrelated AI-scares as the author could find. A good article for Vogue or Medium but unworthy of someone who claims to be a scientist.
She was mainly fired for not withdrawing a paper when it was requested by a leader in research (the leader who asked for this had no research background and asked for a retraction, which doesn't make sense because the paper hadn't been published yet). But there were other important factors; for example, she attacked other googlers (prominent ones working on LLMs) on internally public mailing lists (about woke things). Realistically, the world would have been better off if she hadn't been hired in the first place because she was always going to eventually have a conflict with leadership over publishing works like this. I think she would have done much better to become a professor at some liberal university where she would be free to publish her work.
I kind of wish the stochastic parrots paper had focused entirely on stochastic parrots, and not on energy consumption. In my opinion, Google has actually been a responsible steward of energy usage (way ahead of everybody else for at least a decade), and ML isn't really the source of most of the energy consumption in computing anyway.
Complaints about historically inaccurate racial makeups seem weird to me. I guess people really do want AI to perfectly supplant image creation or something, but to me the tradeoff seems clear:
* Prioritize diversity in image creation by adding guardrails so the AI doesn't become a tool of a minority hate spewing population
* Historical accuracy that can be prompted to provide prejudiced imagery
To be clear, we aren't talking about a camera that swaps people's race for 'diversity'. We're talking about an image generation algorithm that adds a layer of diversity on top to prevent misuse. Yeah, of course this results in weird behavior sometimes... That's kinda literally the point?
Who is honestly confused by this? Is it necessary for an AI image generation algo to spit out historically accurate images of Gettysburg when prejudiced misuse is the far more likely outcome of that accuracy?
And importantly, when a company makes that value judgement, to prefer prejudice defense over historical accuracy, that's seen as pretending history changed rather than what it actually is, which is a defense against a mechanism of abuse?
It just seems like an absurd and disingenuous over-reaction and lack of pragmatism. Yeah. This is a tragedy of the commons. Make prejudice less acceptable and you can have the AI gen you want.
Note: Obviously, it's kinda moot as anyone who seriously wants to generate hate speech/imagery will just move to something that allows that, but its still perfectly acceptable for a company to draw a line and say "not on our software".
> Electrically, chemically, experiments must always consider their environment and account for confounding factors
Implying that that’s in any way similar to what Google et al. are doing us rather bizarre. Even if your initial point was valid they have no way non-biased way to measure these biases.
So they just end up increasing the total “amount” of bias not the other way around.
What's wrong with an AI model that correctly models the current state of society we live it? It's called "model" for a reason.
You suggest to aim for a model that follows some "true reality" which is not possible. Not even science can achieve this because our chase for the true reality never ends, we can only get closer (and often even the opposite happens).
> Electrically, chemically, experiments must always consider their environment and account for confounding factors.
Sounds legit. "This experiment data doesn't look diverse enough, please apply a bunch of biases to it. Make sure to follow the biases I like and avoid the ones I dislike. Don't mention any of this in the paper and don't publish the raw data".
It isn't the current state of society. It's the current state of the training corpus + prompt. Those implicitly include bias.
It sounds like that's acceptable to you because you think current state of training corpus == current state of society. And you view any bias in prompt as bias.
The truth is most of this ML happens in corpus selection + prompt selection. There literally ISN'T a way to avoid bias. So the problem becomes what bias do you select.
And in that scenario choosing abuse decreasing measures seems like the most pragmatic (to me).
> We're talking about an image generation algorithm that adds a layer of diversity on top to prevent misuse
So if LLMs did the same (i.e. purposefully distorted facts and historical events due arbitrary and political reasons) it would also be acceptable?
> historically accurate images of Gettysburg when prejudiced misuse is the far more likely outcome of that accuracy?
This is pure conjecture. But the answer is no, the only acceptable behavior in these circumstances would be for the model to refuse to generate the image and explicitly explain why this type of censorship is necessary.
> It just seems like an absurd and disingenuous over-reaction and lack of pragmatism.
That does sound explicitly Orwellian..
> but its still perfectly acceptable for a company to draw a line and say "not on our software".
Yes, it’s even more acceptable for for anyone to criticize that company for its decisions, make fun of its work culture and to mock its CEO.
>So if LLMs did the same (i.e. purposefully distorted facts and historical events due arbitrary and political reasons) it would also be acceptable?
You're talking as if there is a way to get an 'unbiased' AI. There isn't. It is inherently biased by its training, it hallucinates, and it is further biased by its prompt.
The whole endeavor is to bias it.
I'd prefer that AI be labelled on the tin for what it's biases are attempting to do, and promote diversity and deter abuse seems like a perfectly reasonable metric to use.
If that's not good for you fine, but you can't pretend that you're utterly baffled why they would make that choice over any other.
There literally ISN'T a way to not have a biasing prompt.
> You're talking as if there is a way to get an 'unbiased' AI. There isn't. It is inherently biased by its training, it hallucinates, and it is further biased by its prompt.
Certainly. Doesn’t mean that we still shouldn’t prioritize accuracy and integrity instead of purposefully increasing the amount of bias even further.
> you're utterly baffled why they would make that choice over any other.
I’m not. I’m baffled that there are people defending that choice (especially in such a way)
> and promote diversity
Why? I mean why do you think this is the right way to do it? Surely going out of your way to make sure that your model does its best to doctor the images it creates to conform to some political agenda (whatever that might be) would achieve the opposite because it actually legitimizes the things the other side is constantly saying? (and due to the potentially severe backlash from more moderate fraction of the society)
> Who is honestly confused by this? Is it necessary for an AI image generation algo to spit out historically accurate images of Gettysburg when prejudiced misuse is the far more likely outcome of that accuracy?
If I wanted a black female Nazi officer, or a pregnant female pope, I would ask for it. I don't need my input query secretly rewritten for me.
That said, I think all of these give too much credit to the Twitter<>X transition. It wasn't because Elon thought about Twitter and conjured 'X'. It's a reuse of something old he had. Seems like there was 0 Twitter specific related thoughts.
Treating people as 'a politically losing issue' is weird to me. There are certainly some nuances to <18 transgender care, but that statement doesn't address any of them and just suggests we embrace political cowardice.
> When policies around it changed, that tipped the scales from the public ignoring trans women or seeing them as victims, towards many members of the public seeing them as monsters who are out to get their children.
This is worse. It wasn't because politics around it changed, it was because republicans (upset that they could no longer target gay people), reused the same crappy arguments against trans people, and then wrapped it in a pedophilic flag.
The change in policy is just effective propaganda making people concerned that random doctors are allowing their children to get sex change operations without consent, when that isn't how ANY of this works. Children <18 can socially transition, get puberty blockers, and MAYBE get hormone treatment. WITH parent consent.
The fact that the media and comments like yours continues to pretend its a reasonable 'discussion' perpetuates the nonsense.