I mean, do you expect a blender to come with instructions on how to replace the engine?
> I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage.
This is an extremely broad requirement to place on any and all manufacturers. I agree companies shouldn't intentionally restrict what you can do with your stuff, but on the other hand, if you're trying to rebuild your lawn mower into a motorbike, you can't really be mad that the company didn't provide you with a specification the exact dimensions of the exhaust, can you?
Libel/defamation laws vary wildly across different countries. Sometimes true statements can be considered defamation, sometimes not. The same goes for intent.
Not exactly false answers. As far as I gather this is the same issue that prevents customers from making negative reviews about businesses. The business can just threaten a defamation suit and then the platform (Google Maps, Trustpilot, etc.) are pretty much required to remove the review [0].
So the only thing happening here is they consider Google to be the author of the AI answers and apply a similar sort of anti-defamation law. Perhaps it's a good consequence but the law that allows for this seems to be quite broken.
> analyzing large amounts of texts, drawing conclusions and writing other texts based on that and nothing more
The same could be said about programming. Or if you want to be even more reductive, looking at a screen and pressing buttons to make the correct lights light up https://xkcd.com/722/
Incredibly privileged take to claim that using Windows is somehow beneath your "dignity". Do you have any idea at all of the kinds of jobs people are doing in the real world?
Imagine the daycare worker taking care of your kids or the truck driver bringing your food saying "getting frustrated creates stress, that's unhealthy and makes for a hostile work environment".
i live in a developing country. from my perspective, anyone who has access to a computer is privileged.
Imagine the daycare worker taking care of your kids or the truck driver bringing your food saying "getting frustrated creates stress, that's unhealthy and makes for a hostile work environment".
what's your point? if you get frustrated with my kids then you are in the wrong profession or you need more training. as a parent i am not allowed to get frustrated with my kids either. if you get frustrated with my delivery, then i am sorry, and if i was the cause, i apologize. tell me what went wrong and i'll do better next time. if it was something else, you have my sympathies. i'll do my best to not make it any worse.
working in a stress free environment is not a privilege, it's a human right. nobody deserves to be mistreated at work, or be stressed by other peoples expectations (which is a form of mistreatment, or, dare i say, abuse).
Taking care of kids or driving in heavy traffic is 10x more stressful than using windows. If you claim you never get frustrated by your kids or traffic, then you must be the perfect person, good job.
> working in a stress free environment is not a privilege, it's a human right. nobody deserves to be mistreated at work, or be stressed by other peoples expectations (which is a form of mistreatment, or, dare i say, abuse)
Seriously? Having expectations is abuse? Since students get stressed by exams and deadlines, education is nothing but abuse then?
And having a stress free environment is a human right? It'd be nice if the world worked that way, but it's as absurd as saying "never stubbing your toe is a human right".
Taking care of kids or driving in heavy traffic is 10x more stressful than using windows.
i don't know about driving because i don't drive, but i disagree that taking care of children is stressful. i am a stay at home dad. i have taken care of my kids from birth, and we frequently have kids of relatives and friends in our house.
i never once felt stressed by kids. stress is something that for me is only caused by expectations of others. kids behavior is natural, there is no reason to get stressed.
now of course everyone is different, and perhaps i am simply more resilient and i don't get easily stressed, but that's also why i can demand a stress free environment, because actually what is stress free for me, may be very stressful for you, meaning that my expectations of a stress free environment may be a lot lower than they would be for you.
Having expectations is abuse?
causing stress is abuse.
students get stressed by exams and deadlines
i don't. not by the exam or the deadlines themselves. i only get stressed by people's reactions on how i perform. and that is an important distinction. because regardless of how i perform you can decide to accept my performance or be disappointed. only that disappointment and how you express it causes stress for me. but your reaction is under your control, so it is possible for you to react in a way that it does not cause me any stress. you could for example be encouraging to do better next time instead of being disappointed. and that is all i am asking for.
another way to look at it, stress is caused by things that are not under my control. and that is mostly other peoples behavior. or, to get back to the original topic, by the unpredictable behavior of LLMs.
There's nothing wrong with Taylor Swift taking a private jet instead of a 20 minute drive, she just has "standards".
No, obviously if everybody had those same unreasonable standards the world wouldn't work at all. So all of the privileged elites should probably be grateful that us plebs with "lower standards" exist.
what is a reasonable standard and what is dignified and what isn't is really the question. taking a private jet is clearly an unreasonable standard. living healthy (stress is a health hazard) should not be unreasonable.
I didn't see them say anything about dignity. They said using Windows makes them angry, which is understandable. That speaks to a poor user experience design. Framing it as a privilege issue is blaming the victim.
actually, i did, and i stand by it. working with a system that makes you angry is undignified.
it's a reference to a quote that i can't find the source for which roughly goes like this: *why i use linux and not windows? i could also rob banks and ..., but you have to keep a certain amount of dignity". the original of that quote was in german.
you have no idea. as a software developer the job market is already very bad, so your wish is already reality.
but i don't see any undignified jobs as alternative here either. what should that be?
taxi/bus driver? food delivery? sweeping streets? work as a plumber (apparently they are in demand in western countries)? i can't see anything undignified about that. even cleaning toilets isn't undignified. it has to be done.
maybe it can be argued that working as a prostitute is undignified. at least if it is not done voluntary. and of course bad working conditions are undignified.
but again, all of these jobs can be structured such that they don't cause stress and that they can be done with dignity.
so what really is an undignified job?
there is only one more category of undignified work that just came to mind: jobs where i am contributing to the exploitation of others. i once worked in a software company that had a customer that was running a sportsbetting website. in itself the work was not undignified, we used linux, and all the good software practices, but contributing to a gambling website just felt wrong.
people also consider the exploitation of users done by meta/facebook, google etc, as undignified. but those jobs have the same problem with dignity that using windows has, so i don't think they are what you have in mind.
"The victim" of using a certain operating system? Please.
Being lucky enough to work in a comfortable air-conditioned office, AND having the luxury of declining jobs sorely because the operating system makes you angry, is the height of privilege.
Stop feeling sorry for yourselves and realize how good you have it.
> I didn't see them say anything about dignity.
The word dignity was used twice in the comment I replied to...
I wouldn’t put it in terms of dignity or victimhood, but Windows definitely feels weird and foreign if you are dumped into it after using Macs and Linux and bash for 20 years. I had to help someone do a little maintenance on a Windows system the other day and I realized that I had basically forgotten how to do anything on it. I couldn’t even remember how to delete a directory tree. Online tutorials recommended to do some things in “Powershell” whatever the hell that is, and that was even more bizarre. I’ve never felt more useless in front of a computer than I did just trying to remove and install some software from the Windows command line.
> "The victim" of using a certain operating system? Please.
Perhaps "victim" in the sense of not having much choice/agency? Neither in the choice of operating system (due to sparsely restrained anticompetitive behaviour of incumbents over decades) nor in how they're treated (entrapped) by the operating systems. The OSes are really POS (point of sale) terminals for media and cloud services.
Thus consider most operating system users aren't really users. They're "usees", they're being used. One could surmise that the Microsoft/Apple/Google shareholders are the real users of the operating systems.
If you'd left the commercial OS world in the Win2K/OSX 10.4 era for, say, Gentoo Linux, and would come back now to look over someone's shoulder while they're using (or rather, being used by) their operating systems, you could be forgiven for coming away with the impression that some kind of authority inversion has taken place in the meantime.
Nobody works by choice so I suppose that makes us all "victims" of the system. I'd put using certain software below many worse kinds of suffering however
not true. anybody working as a volunteer works by choice. i work by choice, because i could instead live in germany on unemployment support and welfare, because i am to old to find a job (germany has a big problem with age discrimination) and the government can't force me to work as a selfemployed freelancer. so i choose to work because i want to. not because i have to.
at least in germany i can't think of anyone being forced to work in a job that would cause them suffering. well, except working with windows, and hence from that perspective a worse kind of suffering is quite unlikely.
that aside, almost all suffering comes from how people are treated at work. the days of people suffering in coalmines or other seriously unhealthy work conditions with out any alternative are over. anyone there still suffering at work today is being actively exploited by abusive business owners. yes, the people working there may not have a choice, but we as a society do have the choice to not tolerate such working conditions, and therefore making such demands is not privileged.
Wow. Well it's a very gracious choice of you to not mooch off the welfare system.
> at least in germany i can't think of anyone being forced to work in a job that would cause them suffering. well, except working with windows
You must be actually trolling. You'd honestly choose stocking shelves in a supermarket over being a windows sysadmin? Have you ever heard of RSI? Or actually ever worked a day of physical labor in your life?
we were talking about suffering and dignity. i see nothing undignified about stocking shelves. they don't make me angry, for one. but also suffering, the moment stocking shelves causes any sort of pain you are no longer able to do the job. noone is forced to suffer at work. at least not in germany.
physical labor? not to the point of suffering. the point is, in germany, jobs that make you suffer through physical labor do not exist, because they are illegal. grey areas exist of course, and cases that are not discovered because the victims (and in that case they are victims) don't speak up.
but this is completely besides the point because what i am talking about is what is more difficult to cover by law, and that is mental suffering.
your argument essentially appears to be that because physical suffering exists, we should ignore mental suffering, and anyone complaining about mental suffering should stop whining because others have it worse. 1st world problems or whatever.
so i should also tolerate my boss yelling at me, my coworkers bullying me, being verbally abused, how about discrimination, sexism, etc? surely any of that is more tolerable than the physical pain i'd get from stocking shelves.
just because something worse is possible that does not dismiss the stress and frustration i have to experience when working with windows, or with LLMs.
> You accept that, and issue a manual override for when that edge case pops up. Then you add that edge case to your training sets. Then the issue never comes up again.
This mindset seems a bit dubious when you're dealing with moving vehicles. Sure flooding is pretty harmless, but how are you going to add a "manual override" for the car failing to stop for something unexpected when driving at highway speeds? Or a bunch of other plausible scenarios, who knows what the developers have thought of or not in their quest for "not chasing perfection". That the issue never comes up again seems like a pretty weak consolation for the guy that got hit.
You’re right. I should’ve done better and apologise. I have lightly edited the post above to keep the core point while removing the swipes.
I disagree with the irony point on the basis that none of us here (I assume) is a despot or in a position of power high enough to lie to the point of discrediting entire institutions to the masses. We can be victims of it, but not perpetrators. Also, nowhere have I accused anyone in particular of being a liar. Still, given that my ill chosen words will have no doubt clouded your understanding of the point—which is on me—I won’t hold that against you, I take responsibility.
The biggest issue might be the false belief that it’s superior to others or that the USA is somehow “more free” than other democracies. That’s propaganda, and has precipitated the erosion of freedoms in the USA.
As just one example of the failures of “america-style free speech”: Defending that corporations making large donations to political candidates is free speech. Talk about an incentive to corruption.
Done? I'm having a hard time seeing how not jailing people for objectionable tweets led to the election of Trump (which I'm assuming you're referring to). USA has many deep problems in their politics and if you haven't noticed, have been waging unjust wars for almost their entire history. The recent events are nothing more than a continuation of how it's always been going. If you want to attribute that to free speech, sure, but I'm not seeing the causation honestly.
This is where the propaganda surrounding American-style free speech clashes with reality. Many people assume it protects all speech unless it's incitement to imminent lawless action, "fighting words", etc. But that is simply not the case. This is in large part due to how American law doesn't do what it says. Read their First Amendment, actually read it: it's a limitation on Congress. It's become much, much more than that because their Supreme Court is a de facto legislative body.
This is how you get the Red Scare; that money is speech (Buckley v. Valeo); that legal entities are people with free speech and thus campaign donations cannot be restricted (Citizens United v. FEC); that retaliatory arrests for speech are fine so long as there's probable cause for something else (Nieves v. Bartlett); that therapists have a right to convert their underage gay clients (Chiles v. Salazar); etc. Did you not hear about Mahmoud Khalil? Or Alex Pretti? Ect?
The whole "objectionable tweets" thing is so overplayed too. British pundits like to wax poetic about the apparent persecution of people for political speech, and the "political speech" is, for example, Lucy Connolly calling for the burning down of a hotel building housing asylum seekers.
The biggest sufferers under UK speech restrictions are not tweeters, it's protesters, and yet the examples are always tweeters. Isn't that interesting?
Not really, you're just naming a shopping list of examples of what I mentioned earlier: "USA has many deep problems in their politics", with a very tenuous connection to the laws on speech.
> Did you not hear about Mahmoud Khalil? Or Alex Pretti? Ect?
I did hear about that, why are you assuming I didn't? Can you explain the connection to the issue at hand though, because I'm not seeing it.
I chose the tweets example because it's one of the more ridiculous examples, but I could just as well have named Palestine Action or numerous other examples from other european countries. What's "interesting" about it?
Isn't it "interesting" how you're trying very hard to paint a certain picture of the discussion?
Okay, so let me make the question plain: what would American-style freedom of speech fix for the UK that isn't also a problem in the US despite having said freedom of speech.
If you read my original comment ("actually read it") you'll see I was simply stating that, in my opinion, it is better to not have ridiculous archaic laws on speech than to have them. What problem does having the restrictions on speech that are currently in place in the UK solve?
Are you claiming the problems in the USA that you mentioned are because of or despite having freedom of speech? You earlier seemed to claim that e.g. the jailing of activists was because of the free speech laws (the "this is how you get" line). So which one is it?
LOL. At least I'm intellectually honest about my "mere ideological preference" for not restricting speech, instead of trying to somehow construe that free speech is the cause of all the evils in the world.
I just think it's incredibly funny how you assert you're being intellectually honest and then in the same breath do something incredibly intellectually dishonest. But whatever floats your boat, I guess.
But the US does jail people for posting objectionable content, the FBI surveil people posting extreme and objectionable stuff on social platforms and it's led to jail time in at least some cases, one that comes to mind is Lucas Nevcherlian
Are those things because of speech? Or would they be worse if America did not have free speech?
Imagine if Trump could outright ban criticism of him or his policies, or if protests against unjust wars could be banned, or if we had UK style libel laws how would the Epstein thing have come out? Everyone who talked about it would have been shut down by lawsuits.
The reason why it would be worse is not because American-style free speech is good actually, but because you fundamentally lack the tools to hold your politicians accountable. Not only do US federal districts contain ~10x more people than UK constituencies (thus your voice is 10x smaller), but the US is suffering extreme jerrymandering, which the Supreme Court has conveniently made unconstitutional to prevent. It's also extraordinarily difficult to remove Presidents.
As for the Epstein point, I cannot say I'm aware of the full saga given that it's been a multiple-decade scandal at this point. But the files were released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Translate this to the UK and Parliament passing a law mandating their release would be unquestionable. No lawsuit would survive the briefest scrutiny once Parliament willed it. I also think it's worth mentioning that Prince Andrew, our most prominent associate with Epstein, began facing repercussions for that association in 2019, years before the files were released.
> Imagine if Trump could outright ban criticism of him or his policies
Ummmmmm. He is.
That is to say, anybody _in power_ or any in any position of authority is significantly curtailing their criticism of Trump. If you haven't noticed this by now, then I despair. Frankly it's unimportant what the little guy says about Trump. The little guys speech is 'free', but the moment the little guy is in a position of power, watch the US administration silence him.
EDIT: For the uninitiated, being 'silenced' doesn't mean being carted off to prison. It means the Trump taking away your authority, reputation, career and/or livelihood. That is all that is required.
You can count on them doing it in a way that's economical for them. It's how email spam filters and ad blockers work. Sure somebody will always find a way to bypass it, and that's the arms race. A filter with zero false positives that removes 80% of slop is pretty darn good though.
> I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage.
This is an extremely broad requirement to place on any and all manufacturers. I agree companies shouldn't intentionally restrict what you can do with your stuff, but on the other hand, if you're trying to rebuild your lawn mower into a motorbike, you can't really be mad that the company didn't provide you with a specification the exact dimensions of the exhaust, can you?
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