I really do think we could neuter social media’s harm by requiring them to positively identify users as actual people or own the consequences of what gets posted - like how a newspaper has the legal accountability for what it says. This “neutral platform” is not healthy for our democracy.

I’m all for freedom of speech - but I don’t think those freedom of speech laws had anticipated how wide the damage of speech can flow and how stealthily things can be spoken.

And it’s not hard to set up. The EU’s new identity network requires zero-knowledge-proofs - ie “this is a real person” is all that social media platforms would be able to verify. I’d obviously be deeply against the social media companies being able to positively identify users.

But I usually get downvoted to oblivion for making this point.

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say.

I wasn’t implying that LLMs are conscious. That’s literally how I started my comment out.

I am implying that I cannot, to myself, explain why I’m very bothered by someone pulling the legs of a fly, but not phased by torturing an LLMs.

You seem very clear on this, which is great, because then you can help me understand why. Please.

Right - I love how we are both downvoted for asking questions. I wasn’t even implying that LLMs are conscious, merely that any critical review of why I think that quickly falls short.

I agree that an LLM is not conscious.

But can I probe your argument.

It deeply unethical to capture a fly and pulling its legs off one by one. Would you agree? If so, you are not basing your argument on capability but on something else.

Now, is what is happening inside a brain metaphysical or physical? In other words, can a brain and its function be fully understood and - in some future - be fully measured? If so, you are not basing your argument on the concept of a soul, but on something else.

The distinction you seem to be making - if you’re in agreement with my first two points - is one of “the thing can replicate itself and therefore is alive”. If that’s the argument, it’s unethical to cut a tree down or to break a blade of grass.

I’m not asking to prove any point but to collectively explore why we - you and I - feel the way we do. Because I sure as shit struggle to explain why I feel uneasy about the fly torture but not as uneasy about LLM torture.

Porn has also become a lot harder and the exploitative nature of the business has become more apparent. It’s not just people’s opinions that have become more prudish (though sure, they have) it’s also that porn is now, broadly, much much harder.

People were shocked about deep throating in the 70s, for goodness sake. Today that’s light fayre.

That’s not how it is and not how they were designed. It was assumed from the beginning that they would live in “an ecosystem”, ie tied to secure storage and secure distribution by some system handled user side and indeed that is what phase 1 looked like: Google, Microsoft and Apple stored them on your device and replicated them across your devices. Phase 2 introduced a “interception” API so other providers could get involved easily - so providers like 1Password could rely less on browser hacks and also offer secure storage and secure distribution. Then finally, phase 3, now more or less locked down, described a portability system so that you can migrate to other ecosystems.

Passkeys don’t require physical storage at all. All of my passkeys are in the cloud, synced across platforms.

I know, a VPS is nothing and running wireguard in a docker container takes 3 minutes.

Fair, but costs of resets overall. This is not a factor in tech giant costs.

You think big tech did this to save… on … CPU costs of password resets?

This is actually really what you think?

Love them.

Using 1Password for sync.

Never ever failed to connect to QR code passkey request, even on weird corporate networks.

Portability has gotten so much better - there’s now a defined standard for portability that passkey providers are implementing.

Honestly I cannot understand the criticism at all.

Eventually we can reduce the human brain down to this. Is it ethical to use that blueprint for experiments? We’ve got to be better than this, I hope. And it has to start before we get there.

I find this deeply unethical.

So deeply unethical it’s unreal.

Yes it is. I’ve worked in senior leadership teams for years - it’s just not viable to think something like that would stay contained.

In sane countries the government has a neutral service, backed by laws securing anonymity of verification, for this kind of shit. Only in commercial, dystopian, kleptocracies does it seem reasonable to have a company doing this.

Even better: Your advancement is critical to ensure the American intelligence industry doesn’t fall behind.

I mean it’s OK - you’re not copying it, you’re using it to train an intelligence.

But if you’re going through the trouble of re-encoding you might as well re-encode to AVIF, no?

Looking at the article it seems AVIF is better in almost every way except progressive rendering.