It’s not hypocritical if you believe that theft is wrong because it hurts another person, rather than wrong because you don’t deserve the thing or that it offers you an unfair advantage. Your argument leans heavily on the latter but mine the former.

That’s not quite true, though, is it?

$50 earned is yours to spend on anything. A $50 discount is offered by a vendor to entice you to spend enough of your money on them to make the discount worthwhile.

Pirates don’t pirate because they’re trying to save money on something they would have bought otherwise… typically they pirate because the amount they consume would bankrupt them if they purchased it through legitimate means, so they would never have been a paying customer in the first place.

So, if they wouldn’t have bought it anyway, and they’re not reselling it, did they really harm the vendor? Whether they pirated it or not, it wouldn’t affect the vendor either way.

That’s not really the same thing, in my opinion.

If you were able to pay for everything handily but pirated anyway, or if you resold pirated content, then yeah you have something similar to theft going on. But that’s not really the norm; those people are doing something bad irrespective of the piracy itself, aren’t they?

I’m not the above poster, but I really appreciate your argument. I think many people overcorrect in their minds about whether or not these models learn the way we do, and they miss the fact that they do behave very similarly to parts of our own systems. I’ve generally found that that overcorrection leads to bad arguments about copyright violation and ethical concerns.

However, your point is very interesting (and it is thankfully independent of that overcorrection). We’ve never had to worry about nonhuman personhood in any amount of seriousness in the past, so it’s strangely not obvious despite how obvious it should be: it’s okay to treat real people as special, even in the face of the arguable personhood of a sufficiently advanced machine. One good reason the machine can be treated differently is because we made it for us, like everything else we make.

I think there still is one related but dangling ethical question. What about machines that are made for us but we decide for whatever reason that they are equivalent in sentience and consciousness to humans?

A human has rights and can take what they’ve learned and make works inspired by it for money, or for someone else to make money through them. They are well within their rights to do so. A machine that we’ve decided is equivalent in sentience to a human, though… can that nonhuman person go take what it’s learned and make works inspired by it so that another person can make money through them?

If they SHOULDN’T be allowed to do that, then it’s notable that this scenario is only separated from what we have now by a gap in technology.

If they SHOULD be allowed to do that (which we could make a good argument for, since we’ve agreed that it is a sentient being) then the technology gap is again notable.

I don’t think the size of the technology gap actually matters here, logically; I think you can hand-wave it away pretty easily and apply it to our current situation rather than a future one. My guess, though, is that the size of the gap is of intuitive importance to anyone thinking about it (I’m no different) and most people would answer one way or the other depending on how big they perceive the technology gap to be.

Kind of, in that embedding anything from a site you can’t trust is inherently risky, but I’d say it’s not actually that bad, for two reasons:

1. iframes are much better sandboxed than they once were, and are much safer now than their reputation suggests
2. you probably wouldn’t be embedding from any old instance; I assume you could embed from an instance you use and trust as long as the post is federated to it

You think the people you’re calling “NeoLibs” above are Reagan fans? Your criteria for neoliberal policies is “supports Ukraine and Israel at the same time” and “is aware of the current reality of Russian disinformation tactics”? Neither of those have anything to do with neoliberalism. I don’t think you know what “concern trolling” means, either.

I see, so you just use the term “NeoLib” to mean “people you disagree with” rather than “people with neoliberal political beliefs”

The fuck are you talking about

Dems controlled both houses of congress. What stopped him from pushing his public option plan then?

Manchin and Sinema, mainly, but also the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Forgot already?

then why are people worried about project 2025 and “dictator on day 1” Trump?

Because reasonable people don’t want the president to attempt authoritarian rule in order to progress his agenda. The fact that it is possible to do that is a big fucking issue and yet here we are, watching it happen with Trump. That doesn’t mean Biden should do it. It should not [and cannot be allowed to] happen at all.

Aw man. That made me switching between tearing up and laughing so many times. What a great one.

Sure, yeah, that must be it. No need to self-reflect any further.

Literally told you. Don’t have to quote. Read my comment again and use basic logic

It’s pretty clear from this thread that people are telling you you’re an asshole based on how you treat other people, directly reflected by your first couple of comments in the chain. To ignore your own earlier behavior and instead goad an argument is simply more evidence that you’re the type of person that generally sucks to work with.