No faith left. None. They turn everything into a quagmire.

Oh for sure, I'm not disagreeing with the principle being discussed, I'm saying in our current social moment this feels like saying the floor trim on the bridge of the Titanic needs some paint.

The president has been convicted of 39 felonies and is (trying to?) sell advance access to his stock market manipulating tweets for a subscription.

Parity at this point feels like a joke. I'd settle for literally any consequences at all for someone in power right now.

We don't need a citizen surveillance network, we already know what they're doing, perhaps not all of it but far more than enough to justify mass civil unrest. They just figured out all they had to do was get us exhausted, overwhelmed and of course fighting each other enough to make certain we wouldn't. The globe is various kinds of prison for the majority of humanity, in degrees of horror, and a theme park for the 1%.

It's absolutely devastating to team morale. We never feel like we're contributing.

"You know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine." - Tim Minchin

Social proof. Everyone has taste and everyone's taste in a given space is influenced and informed by the taste of others. It's mostly a consensus model. Newer members of a given community arise into said community and learn from it what "good" means, which can sound authoritarian but is really just... voluntary. If you like, for example, mens formal wear you will follow publications and noted figures in the mens formal wear space, you will learn what "good" means to them, and will emulate it out of a desire to fit in with them. As you get more knowledgeable in that space, you will develop your taste, enhanced by them, and ideally eventually contribute your own ideas to that mix. Some will be accepted, some will be rejected, again by group consensus.

It's a lot like language. If you want to speak a language you have to learn it first. If you go to France and simply blurt out French words at people, even with perfect annunciation, you will be incomprehensible to them. You learn structure, sentences, how to communicate ideas, how to inflect tone. How to tell the difference between telling someone to fuck off when they cut you off in traffic versus telling them to fuck off when they make a horrific pun. And, as people speak that language and use it daily, it will reliably change. The meanings of so many words in every language today are wildly different than they were even a hundred years ago.

Fine them, and incentivize change for them and all other businesses in the space. Fines just clearly, demonstrably don't do that. Jail time for executives would, IMO.

You've clearly never baked before. Baking is a chemical science. You have to adjust temperatures for your freaking elevation relative to sea level. Granted some recipes are pretty forgiving, sure, but far from all, and some are downright merciless in terms of complexity and effort required.

Even people who do it constantly have items that just don't turn out because it's legitimately hard shit.

I'm happy this fine happened. I hope it gets enforced, though in the current political climate I too have severe doubts it will be. Even so though, and even if this lawsuit is followed by many others in many jurisdictions that are all equally successful- the dream- the people behind these decisions still leave without a hitch.

As long as sociopaths can sit atop corporate entities, do horrendous shit, and then simply leave wildly rich and free, even with the corporate entity in flames, that is not justice and we'll continue getting exactly what we've gotten: an endless stream of the aforementioned sociopaths harming people at scale, for money.

Not trying to be a doomer. Just trying to say when the sum total of personal consequences for these people is a lot of bad press and billions of dollars, it's an easy choice for too many.

> You can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.

And, really, I don't think it's that their water usage is uniquely terrible, I think it's far more that their water usage feels unnecessary which goes back to the AI not doing much for regular people issue. Most people see AI features as intrusive nuisances, and even in the best of circumstances, a huge AI DC is going to need a lot of water, both directly for cooling, and indirectly via it's demand to the power grid. Virtually every method aside of solar we use to generate power requires pretty substantial amounts of water, if for nothing else than to boil it.

That doesn't mean that data center is using a huge, unbelievable amount of water, it's that whatever water it is using, which we know is at least substantial, is water that could be better used for other things. Nobody bats an eye at the amount of water used to make concrete or grow food or raise livestock, because we have to get around and build things, and we have to eat. But if you have this tech which is seemingly a lightning rod for nonsense that needs it's own special data centers that use tons of the stuff... people are gonna say something.

It takes so long to build trust. It takes seconds to obliterate it. And big tech as a whole has been obliterating it's trust for like... a decade now.

You can't just isolate AI data centers, or even this potentially not-AI one, from everything else and be like "well opposition to this normal thing is ridiculous." Yes, it might well be. However there has been a pattern of abusive behavior on the part of AI DCs ranging from:

* Getting zoning approval seemingly against the will of a preponderance of local citizenry

* Taking water, or in vastly more quantities anyway, without permission

* Tapping water sources they weren't permitted for

* The above two of which, I'm pretty sure were only found out when water pressure started dropping in people's homes

* Similar to the above, energy demands causing residents to be told to turn down their air conditioning, during a heatwave no less

* Resulting in large scale change to the places people live, irrespective of benefits, that they didn't ask for, had no say in, and especially given it's for AI, likely have strong feelings about

* The general vibe lately that big tech is above the law, not just zoning laws but seemingly any laws they believe "stifle innovation"

Like, you can disagree with all of these points, and give rational, logical arguments to them. And most of them I would agree with you! But just because YOU don't think there's a problem, doesn't mean people don't think there's a problem, and most importantly: you cannot decide there isn't a problem for them.

And you can take this even further, expanding beyond just AI into things like the ongoing scandals with Flock cameras, Big Tech's involvement with Israel and it's war, the ongoing scourge that is social media, alongside the old classics: products are broken all the time, services are shut down with little warning, the price of every piece of tech and software seems to constantly be rising, many of which have become more or less essential to life, and at the top of all of these companies are, reliably, the richest people on the damn planet, who seemingly are only getting richer, all the time. TWO of them have their own SPACE programs for goodness sakes.

Like I'm sure the majority of people here especially see these things as progress, even aspirational, or at worst, a cost of doing business. What a lot of the public sees is a massive cohort of bullies and oligarchs, seemingly accountable to no one, who are so rich that they can simply ignore laws they deem beneath their ambitions with the pleased signoff of their government. That's not a good situation and simply saying "well they're just dumb luddites" is not a solution.

This shit is unstable.

People don't see tech as a benefit anymore, not remotely the way they used to anyway. It feels more and more like any time these companies make their presence known in your life, it's a threat to you, or things you care about. And if these companies don't start taking that seriously and try to mend some bridges, I think we're about to see the temperature really start to rise.

Make that the policy, and I'd bet my life savings that Facebook, miraculously, will figure out how to detect this shit with bulletproof accuracy.

I would never say a platform has to be responsible for what a user posts, and to be clear, I mean either a user of the platform, or a user of the platform's ad tooling, or anything else. Anything that arrives via an upload button of some sort. However: If you as a platform then distribute what has been posted, yes, you are responsible for it. Your service is now broadcasting that content. If that content is harmful, you should be held responsible.

Who else conceivably could be? And if the response to this is "well we have way too much stuff coming in to moderate it" okay, then restrict how much stuff comes in. Require approval on individual posts or on accounts.

Like, this is such basic shit. If a newspaper printed CSAM on the front page, they would be arrested within the day. But because Facebook is real super big they just don't have to take care of their house? Ridiculous.

Again, and again, and again, these technologies have proven ineffective to moderate content. User posted and otherwise. Until we have a legal mechanism in place to hold these companies meaningfully liable for this, it will not stop.

Every single one of these has the same damn list of excuses about cost of hiring human moderators, but I promise everyone reading this if you make the executives of a social network legally liable for distributing CSAM on their platforms, they will find all kinds of money to get human moderators really fucking quick.

I mean you're rather boldly skipping over the part where the former is a proven phenomenon (though I would say it's more nuanced than true or false but there's too much to unpack there) versus something that, as yet, I have not experienced.

> You can still want human music for the human reason, but you won't be able to tell them apart.

I will pepsi challenge any media you like, from the most powerful models you like, happily.

And I'm only willing to even entertain images in terms of said challenge. The music and video are so fucking obvious, just absolutely glaringly AI when they are that I don't feel the need to even dignify it with a test. As yet, I've seen some images that certainly get close, but there are always tells in my experience.

It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.

The kids are alright.