I think they should criminialize porn instead and leave the machines alone. Since that industry (conspiracy theories aside) value money above all else, massive fine and taxes on the owners of porn production is the way to go imo.
I mean, porn completely ruined my teenage years and it took me 8 years to get rid of my addiction. It warps your expectations of real-life relationships, it ruins marriages, it ruins both women and men, it's garbage poison and should be outlawed. So I would be in favor of such laws, but then again, I also know, it's not really about porn and more about the whole "we can't let the youth become radicalized by this Internet thing" stuff and just more censorship.
Mass surveillance is far more damaging. Also there are several porn block solutions on offer for parents to install on their children's devices. There is absolutely zero need for the government to be regulating mass surveillance on everyone to block porn for children. We are replacing the damage caused by porn on a small handful of people who are predisposed to get addicted and got exposed to it at a young age due to bad parenting, with damaging all of society with mass surveillance, which is not even guaranteed to stop kids from seeing porn.
But they don't fix multiple problems all at once. Most of the time they don't even fix one at a time. And often, as I think is the case here, they pretend they are fixing a problem when really they are doing something else. In this case its the usual 'save the children' wrapping on more rigid control and surveillance of peoples use of computers and the internet.
> But they don't fix multiple problems all at once.
No, they do, they do it the whole time. Those might not the problems you care about, and not all attempts might be successful, but each new or changed law/regulation is fixing something. And there are many new of them over the year.
Each new law/regulation is indeed intended to fix something, the problem is what? I'd love to have the optimism that its the problems that population are experiencing, but in most cases its the problems that the rich and powerful are experiencing. Like 'the internet is allowing people too much power to communicate with each other without state intervention', so they fix it with laws to remove that power. Or 'I am very extremely wealthy, but I want to be in more wealthy, and other people to be poorer so my great wealth has more relative power', so they pass laws to cut social programs to fund high income tax cuts. And so on,..
You seem to have a concerningly narrow view on society and it's processes, to the point where it might be harmful. Maybe start fixing this first, before you complain about something you might not understand well enough?
I could say this exact comment back to you with implication that your view is naively optimistic, whereas at me its implication is I'm defeatistly pessimistic. Maybe the answer is that society needs both of us playing these parts.
society does not want to tackle any problems - especially when it comes to kids. you need continued social discourse to win elections so no one is actually interested in solving anything
Multiple studies have shown that porn, in and of itself, is not damaging. The phenomenon of "porn addiction" appears to come entirely from people who think they shouldn't be looking at porn for various (mostly religious) reasons still looking at it, and feeling shame.
Probably not dangerous for adults. But if you combine high-speed internet, unlimited mobile data - it's basically a debilitating affair for kids aged 8-18.
The BBC did a documentary about the knowledge of porn among kids, and how 16-year-olds go to the doctor's office saying they don't have erections...
Complete clickbait. There is not even a transitory appearance of a "how". tldr; table is rebuilt at some point prior to the great cycle's end. How the table is built and just how did the Maya make the calculations? Crickets.
Here is a short video to tell you all you need to know about what sort of people are now running Iran, and just what they think of the average captive Iranian over whom they misrule, while you wait for the books.
Nothing baffling about it. Religion was used by a clerical class to marshall the lumpen masses with promises of free handouts in this world and paradise in the next. Their own thinking set (of the ruling clique) are bound by ideology - whether as matter of actual belief or means of governance - so they do not make any decisions based on national interest or reason. It is the ideology that does the 'thinking'.
(Sounds familiar? Warning bells for other locals, maybe? ..)
Most educated Iranians you know, btw, are (drum roll) in diaspora, for good reasons.
IRI's security goons operate freely in US. They are brazen about harrassing diaspora. We don't get to hear all the stories for obvious reasons but it happens a lot. Huge mistake is to assume you are safe in US and discussing the mafia regime openly on social media. They actually will show up at your door.
Interestingly enough for this morning's walk I was musing over the tension between the hypotheses that: 'LLMs can map between languages in the vector space' (thus languages are ~equivalent); and 'Language affects thoughts' (as in German is good for Philosophy and English for getting things done).
If both these thoughts are true, then it would appear that languages have topological characteristics. We can (topologically) map from one to another, 'thoughts' (that is a complex of words) form 'paths on the language manifold' and certain paths may be more 'natural' in one topological form than the other.
My take is the human brain learns concepts primarily through differentiation. To a newly born child who has no concept of door or a wall, has no reason to see the two as being different parts. Different languages form different differentiations, but one can always compound concepts, and differentiate them differently.
To extend: there will also be general alignment tendencies towards those readily mapped and expressed concepts within available language. Hard but useful concepts can get mapped to idioms. Modes of categorization will be influenced by these factors, which in turn influences many processes.
What is a word in one language is a collocated words in another, possibly context-dependent.
We can look no further than English: "man can do something," "man can do not do something" (i.e., can do but does not have to), then pretty straightforward "man can not do something" and, all of sudden, to express that man cannot decline some obligation, we say "man can not help but do."
It is not translation per se, but shows that some parts of language were evolved to tiptoe around non-customary things, in this case, double negation. And double negation is very easy in some other languages.
"'Language affects thoughts' (as in German is good for Philosophy and English for getting things done). If both these thoughts are true..." Well, the second one isn't true (I omitted the first one in this reply). It is simply not the case that German is good for philosophy and English for getting things done, and similarly for most other such claims (French is better for talking about love, Italian is better for operas, etc. etc.).
There is the platonic representation hypothesis, which speculates that as LLMs get larger and more multimodal, they all end up learning isomorphic representations of reality. Maybe for humans something like this is true as well, since ultimately language must be rich enough to capture and communicate reality.
> a giant leap in natural language processing, useful in some situations and the biggest scam of all time.
I agree with this assessment (reminds of bitcoin frankly), possibly adding that the insights this tech gave us into language (in general) via the embedding hi-dim space is a somewhat profound advance in our knowledge, besides the new superpowers in NLP (which are nothing to sniff at).
