I know that’s how it works in the US, but the lawsuit is in Japan, which you always hear about having stricter copyright laws. Not really sure how this one will play out though.

I doubt the school administrators who would be buying this thing or the people trying to make money off it have really thought that far ahead or care whether or not it does that, but it would definitely be one of its main effects.

why are you judging peoples countries based on your view that governments shouldn’t force people to do things?

Because that’s what this thread is for, sharing thoughts on compulsory voting.

in fact you’re judging peoples’ lived experience and opinions based entirely on your own narrow views of government

Rather I’m saying that just because people approve of something doesn’t mean it’s good. If you think governments forcing people to do things is something to be embraced in general, and your lived experience with it is positive, that’s your opinion, which is fine, but it doesn’t mean that opinion is right.

yknow what else is good? taxes, fire services, disaster response, and dare i say - public healthcare and ambulances… all things im mandated to pay for along with everyone around me in case we ever need them

Agreed, but I think you’re papering over some important nuance in the position I’m expressing here. I see this sort of compulsory taxation and what it buys as an example of something where the need outweighs the harm. It is ok because of how important these services are, and despite the lesser harm of making people slightly less free. If all taxes rather went to building golden statues of the president, they would be bad.

My argument against compulsory voting is premised on the idea that reduced freedom is a harm, and must be justified by some good that sufficiently outweighs it. I haven’t made an argument supporting that premise, but I think it’s a sufficiently intuitive and popular sentiment that I shouldn’t have to. If you disagree with that premise, I think that just means we have very different values.

There are also countries with mandatory military service for all citizens where people there have a positive impression of the program and feel national pride about it, but I don’t think that necessarily means it is a good practice. I think anything the government is forcing people to do should meet a high bar of not being able to accomplish the same thing any other way, because freedom is important, whether or not people know to value it.

There are less coercive ways to remove barriers to voting. Some US states send everyone ballots in the mail and you have a long time to fill them out, which removes the need to go to a specific place on a specific day; all you have to do is fill it out and put it back in the mailbox. I think that kind of thing is a better option. There are situations where there are strong reasons civic participation has to be mandatory, like jury duty, but if the only real problem mandatory voting is meant to solve is life circumstances leading people to not bother voting, there are a lot of other plausibly effective steps that can be taken instead and it isn’t clearly necessary to do something that invasive.

I don’t have an issue with reasonable moderation, but I object to the idea that every pattern of moderation should just be accepted and that censorship isn’t a problem worth worrying about.

Reddit doesn’t have a modlog, so most of the removed comments are lost forever and there is no accountability for them, but a few of them can be seen through Reveddit, and the ones I see are not off topic or ideological rants. For instance the first one I see is

Are they going to shoot up the wrong car with innocent ladies in it again looking for this guy? Edit: Guess they managed to take him down without hitting any civilians, I guess good job for only killing the bad guy

Obviously referring to the Chris Dorner shootings which would be very relevant here, in a very reasonable way. I think it’s fair to assume that r/news moderators simply don’t want that guy mentioned at all.

It used to be a better place for arguments

I think it’s actually a serious problem if the most prominent places for discussion are heavily censored

I remember it being especially bizarre because it basically means going through a large portion of the game with a more or less useless character soaking up xp, after which you either have a slightly less useless underlevelled character or one that’s brokenly OP depending on how you planned out the combo. And if you dual class too late you just never get to that point and it’s all drawback no benefit.

I bet you could do it with ring signatures

a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular set of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the set’s members’ keys was used to produce the signature

I agree that it’s bad that there’s a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn’t bother won’t be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.

it may be moral in some extreme examples

Are they extreme? Is bad censorship genuinely rare?

but there are means of doing that completely removed from the scope of microblogging on a corporate behemoth’s web platform. For example, there is an international organization who’s sole purpose is perusing human rights violations.

I think it’s relevant that tech platforms, and software more generally, has a sort of reach and influence that international organizations do not, especially when it comes to the flow of information. What is the limit you’re suggesting here on what may be done to oppose harmful censorship? That it be legitimized by some official consensus? That a “right to censor” exist and be enforced but be subject to some form of formalized regulation? That would exempt any tyranny of the most influential states.

I’m going to challenge your assertion that you’re not talking about

You can interpret my words how you want and I can’t stop you willfully misinterpreting me, but I am telling you explicitly about what I am saying and what I am not saying because I have something specific I want to communicate. When you argue that

I believe each country should get to have a say in what is permissible, and content deemed unacceptable should be blockable by region

In the given context, you are asserting that states have an apparently unconditional moral right to censor, and that this right means third parties have a duty to go along with it and not interfere. I think this is wrong as a general principle, independent of the specific example of Twitter vs Brazil. If the censorship is wrong, then it is ok to fight it.

Now you can argue that some censorship may be harmful because of its impact on society, such as the removal of books from school hampering fair and complete education or banning research texts that expose inconvenient truths.

Ok, but the question is, what can be done about it? Say a country is doing that. A web service defies that government by providing downloads of those books to its citizens. Are they morally bound to not do that? Should international regulations prevent what they are doing? I think no, it is ok and good to do, if the censorship is harmful.

Since my argument isn’t about what should be censored, I’m intentionally leaving the boundaries of “harmful censorship” open to interpretation, save the assertion that it exists and is widely practiced.

I also think that any service (twitter) refusing to abide by the laws of a country (Brazil) has no place in that country.

That could be true in a literal sense (the country successfully bans the use of the service), or not (the country isn’t willing or able to prevent its use). Morally though, I’d say you have a place wherever people need your help, whether or not their government wants them to be helped.

If a government is imposing harmful censorship I think supporting resistance of that censorship is the right thing to do. A company that isn’t located in that country, ethically shouldn’t be complying with such orders. Make them burn political capital taking extreme and implausible measures.

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

The output for a given input cannot be independently calculated as far as I know, particularly when random seeds are part of the input.

The system gives a probability distribution for the next word based on the prompt, which will always be the same for a given input. That meets the definition of deterministic. You might choose to add non-deterministic rng to the input or output, but that would be a choice and not something inherent to how LLMs work. Random ‘seeds’ are normally used as part of deterministically repeatable rng. I’m not sure what you mean by “independently” calculated, you can calculate the output if you have the model weights, you likely can’t if you don’t, but that doesn’t affect how deterministic it is.

The so what means trying to prevent certain outputs based on moral judgements isn’t possible. It wouldn’t really be possible if you could get in there with code and change things unless you could write code for morality, but it’s doubly impossible given you can’t.

The impossibility of defining morality in precise terms, or even coming to an agreement on what correct moral judgment even is, obviously doesn’t preclude all potentially useful efforts to apply it. For instance since there is a general consensus that people being electrocuted is bad, electrical cables normally are made with their conductive parts encased in non-conductive material, a practice that is successful in reducing how often people get electrocuted. Why would that sort of thing be uniquely impossible for LLMs? Just because they are logic processing systems that are more grown than engineered? Because they are sort of anthropomorphic but aren’t really people? The reasoning doesn’t follow. What people are complaining about here is that AI companies are not making these efforts a priority, and it’s a valid complaint because it isn’t the case that these systems are going to be the same amount of dangerous no matter how they are made or used.

They are deterministic though, in a literal sense. Rather their behavior is undefined. And yes, a LLM is not a person and it’s not quite accurate to talk about them knowing or understanding things. So what though? Why would that be any sort of evidence that research efforts into AI safety are futile? This is at least as much of an engineering problem as a philosophy problem.

It’s important though because if that’s the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.

So it is a way for Lemmy instances to let people log in with their Reddit accounts? Neat