You misunderstand, I am not saying “make sure he spends it responsibly”. Nobody has has “made” him do this at all, and I didn’t advocate for a policy of doing so. What I’m saying is that I don’t think this particular use is worthy of condemnation the way his other actions are, because in the long run I think that this specific thing will end up benefiting people other than him no matter if he intends for that to happen or not (even if the American healthcare system prevents access, which I’m not confident it will do completely, not every country has that system, and it’s statistically improbable that the US will have it forever, and research results are both durable and cross borders). That sentiment isn’t saying that it excuses his wealth, just that I think people are seeing only the negatives in this merely because of the association with Altman’s name and ignoring the potential benefits out of cynicism. The concept is just as valid with him funding it as it would be had he been condemning it instead.

The response to something beneficial being only available to the rich shouldn’t be to avoid developing that thing, it should be to make it available to everyone. The failures of the US healthcare and economic systems don’t suddenly make developing new medical techniques a bad thing. Human augmentation is another issue from curing genetic disease, though I’d personally argue that wouldn’t be a bad cause either, with the same caveat about it availability. It at least has more potential to improve somebody’s life somewhere down the line than just buying a yacht with his ill gotten gains or some other useless rich person toy would.

I’m not sure I get the universal negativity to this. Like sure, Altman sucks as a person, and an individual having enough money to significantly bankroll research like this is a sign of an economic failure, but surely curing or preventing genetic disease is just about the most uncontroversial use human genetic modification could have?

Microbes are still made of chemicals, it’s just different chemicals

The moral justification for upending people’s lives or worse based on the circumstances of their birth and what paperwork they’ve been able to complete?

and not to mention, the tools required to create it (maybe not the best examples, but still) are already in the possession of virtually everybody.

Is the tower of London still an option?

Were it really true that letting people move between countries unrestricted causes some kind of serious problem, one might expect a similar kind of issue to arise from internal migration within a particularly large country like the US, and yet, one can freely move between states without it causing some kind of government failure. I don’t really believe modern society actually is different in a manner that makes larger populations disadvantageous, since demand for goods and services increases with population size, having more people in an economy should organically increase the number of jobs required to meet their needs, it’s not like we dig jobs out of the ground like oil such that a given place has a fixed number.

I do get that unrestricted immigration isn’t as popular with, say, the democrats or such, as anti-immigrant people like to claim. However, I am in favor of unrestricted immigration. For me to say that I want ICE abolished isn’t to misrepresent my stance on that matter; I can only truly speak for myself and whenever I say that I desire that organization dismantled, I mean it entirely literally.

I could see customs, but immigration? Honestly the more I think about it the more I conclude that the entire concept of immigration enforcement and a distinction between citizens and noncitizens is unethical

How exactly do you extinguish a cult with reason and fact? They’ll just ignore you or use your public debunk as a way to gain publicly with members of your audience that had never heard of them.

I don’t imagine that would be enough time for someone to even process the various stimuli enough to realize that what just happened was a gunshot, tbh, let alone consider the implications of that.

Assuming the time wasn’t an exaggeration that is, I’m fairly squeamish so I don’t think I’ll be watching that video to see how long it really was.

I think that the general idea of artificial intelligence in education hold some promise, in the sense that if you could construct a machine that can do much of the work of a teacher, it should enable kids to be taught in an individual way currently only possible for those rich enough to afford a private tutor, and such a machine would be labeled as an AI of some kind. The trouble is, like with so many other things AI, that our AI technology just doesn’t seem to be up to the task, and probably just won’t be without some new approach. We have AI just smart enough for people to try to do all the things that one could use an AI for, but not smart enough for the AI to actually do the job well.

60 cents? You may have confused “billion” for “million” somewhere, unless I’m misunderstanding you, in which case we’d be talking closer to $600

Tbf one if the use cases for display technologies with high pixel density is vr headsets.

I dont know the economic stats on what percentage of companies have unions, but theyre not exactly non-existent, I know people that work unionized jobs, a place I used to work for had one (not that I saw it do much, but I wasnt there that long), and the business I work for has them for some of the countries it operates in (mainly ones in Europe I think). They might not exactly be the norm in the US right now, but they’re not some fantasy either. And I would imagine most companies with one have the resources to deploy something like this if they have a use case where it would actually make any sense to. Maybe not train a leading AI model from scratch given the expense numbers I keep seeing reported on that, but that doesnt sound like what this kind of application requires.

I know that. My point wasn’t that automation will make companies behave differently, but that the maximum demand that can be forced upon a business by things like unions is increased if the pool of money they can demand from before the business can’t operate anymore is larger. What I said is applicable for economic systems beyond capitalism, for that matter, since it’s just a more specific way of saying that the average person can theoretically have more things when the average number of things made per person increases.

You misunderstand my point then. There are ways to force a corporation to pay people more (unionization, minimum wage laws, sufficiently bad labor shortages etc). There is a maximum amount of wage that these things can extract out of a company, because if the labor costs grow enough to make a business unprofitable and they’re unable to either raise prices or cut things enough to compensate, then that business will shut down instead. Increasing the amount of revenue per employee raises this theoretical ceiling on what can be paid. The method to actually get them to pay that wage is beyond the scope of my point, just that whatever method one might prefer has a higher maximum on what it can get when productivity is higher.

Literally how. I brought up that a corportation wont just pay people more just because more money per person is available, and it isnt exactly a novel concept that a given amount of money split fewer ways results in a higher number after the split.

If anything, having fewer employees to produce a given amount of revenue theoretically allows for the employees that remain to be paid a better wage. Not saying that they will be, since, you know, corporation, but any pressure that can later be placed on them to raise wages will go further if the available revenue per employee is higher.

Something I do wonder about these laws: could a person self-hosting a private fedi instance that only they have an account on, argue that they meet age verification requirements by virtue of personally knowing the age of the only user? Or at that point would the whole network of federated servers count as the “platform” rather than the instance?