primbin

Then why is animal abuse a crime?

If youtube is still pushing racist and alt right content on to people, then they can get fucked. Why should we let some recommender system controlled by a private corporation have this much influence American culture and politics??

What I'm saying is, we don't know what physical or computational characteristics are required for something to be sentient.

Now that I use github copilot, I can work more quickly and learn new frameworks more with less effort. Even its current form, LLMs allow programmers to work more efficiently, and thus can replace jobs. Sure, you still need developers, but fewer of them.

Why is it that these sorts of people who claim that AI is sentient are always trying to get copyright rights? If an AI was truly sentient, I feel like it'd want, like, you know, rights. Not the ability for its owner to profit off of a cool stable diffusion generation that he generated that one time.

Not to mention that you can coerce a language model to say whatever you want, with the right prompts and context. So there's not really a sense in which you can say it has any measurable will. So it's quite weird to claim to speak for one.

While I agree that LLMs probably aren't sentient, "it's just complex vector math" is not a very convincing argument. Why couldn't some complex math which emulates thought be sentient? Furthermore, not being able to change, adapt, or plan may not preclude sentience, as all that is required for sentience is the capability to percieve and feel things.

If you are just getting started, this is a good resource for learning hiragana and katakana.

Past that, I used Anki and Bunpro for learning vocab and grammar. However, an alternative to anki for vocab that's definitely worth checking out is jpdb.io, and Cure Dolly's youtube videos are good for learning grammar.

There are also some decks that people have on anki which have sentences that you can practice on, I hear those are a pretty good way to start reading so that you can work your way to reading books/manga and stuff.

Here's another website that's worth reading through if you're interested in doing immersion learning with japanese.

Personally, I find a lot of Peter Singer's arguments to be pretty questionable. As for some of the ones you've mentioned:

For one, killing humans, no matter how humanely the means, is seen by most to be an act of cruelty. I do not want to be killed in my sleep, so why is it okay to assume that animals would be okay with it? While he is a utilitarian and doesn't believe in rights, killing a sentient being seems to me to have much greater negative utility than the positive utility of the enjoyment of eating a chicken.

Also, farming animals for slaughter will always be destructive towards habitats and native species. Even if broiler chickens were kept alive for their natural lifespan of 3-7 years instead of 8 weeks to alleviate any kind of ethical issue with farming them, there is still an opportunity and environmental cost to farming chickens. We could use that land for to cultivate native species and wildlife, or for growing more nutritious and varied crops for people to eat, yet instead we continue to raze the amazon rainforest to make more land for raising farm animals and growing feed. De-densification of farms would only make the demand for farmland even greater than it already is.

Finally, the de-densification of farms would mean a significant increase in the costs of mear production. We'd be pricing lower income groups out of eating meat, while allowing middle- and upper-class folks to carry on consuming animal products as usual. We should not place the burdens of societal progress on the lower class.

I was under the impression that Starlink satellites are orbiting too low to meaningfully contribute to Kessler syndrome, since their orbital decay time is 5 years. Don't get me wrong, I don't like starlink either, I just don't know of any long term consequences

Sam Altman is a part of it too, as much as he likes to pretend he's not.

Section 3a of the bill is the part that would be used to target LGBTQ content.

Sections 4 talks about adding better parental controls which would give general statistics about what their kids are doing online, without parents being able to see/helicopter in on exaxrlt what their kids were looking at. It also would force sites to give children safe defaults when they create a profile, including the ability to disable personalized recommendations, placing limitations on dark patterns designed to manipulate children to stay on platforms for longer, making their information private by default, and limiting others' ability to find and message them without the consent of children. Notably, these settings would all be optional, but enabled by default for children/users suspected to be children.

I think the regulations described in section 4 would mostly be good things. They're the types of settings that I'd prefer to use on my online accounts, at least. However, the bad outweighs the good here, and the content in section 3a is completely unacceptable.

Funnily enough, I had to read through the bill twice, and only caught on to how bad section 3a was on my second time reading it.

I find it difficult to accept your description of a vegan lifestyle, being subsumed and made digestible by mainstream vegans who don't care much for the politics aspect. I don't believe that accounts for the majority of vegans, at least based on the surveys I've looked at. Perhaps I am wrong and many vegans just don't really care, but based on my experiences, I just find that a little hard to accept.

Also, on the topic of hunting locally sourced meat, I think it's sort of irrelevant to the discussion of veganism. Regardless of my, or another vegan's opinion of how ethical it is, hunting doesn't provide enough quantity of meat to ever fulfill every human being's current demand for meat. To be able to provide good, healthy and ethical food for everyone, the majority of it would have to be plants. The end of monoculture crops and factory farming cannot possibly happen without a significant reduction of demand for animal meat in developed countries, regardless of how the meat is sourced.

It's not that I aim to villify hunting, it's just that hunting is neither here nor there, in my opinion. It is what it is, and I'm not primarily concerned with it.