I assume it’s ultimately serious (they want to drop the pretense that it’s about the value of the life of a fetus) but a use of irony poisoning on some level. Some real zero self awareness assholes regardless.

Supposedly it was coined by some right wing influencer and went viral

stfu

I’ll just say again that for the original comment that this is about, leaving aside anything I wrote, that demand is not justified, and I don’t regret pushing back on it.

There are conversations where it’s better to just leave it, but I don’t see this as one of them.

which is about how women have to deal with this bullshit all the time online

The point has been made. If you have more to say about it, go ahead.

You don’t need to participate, if this isn’t the subject that you want to talk about.

The unspoken thing I guess being that I shouldn’t participate if that isn’t something I have anything to say about. It sounds like something you want is for discussions that can be considered to be about women’s issues to be narrowly framed as such, and think there’s something wrong with engaging with the discussion in a way that doesn’t do this. I think this is much less reasonable than anything the comic itself is saying. There is a big difference between talking about the same issue but in a broader way, and remarking something overtly irrelevant and hostile like “what about circumcision”. That isn’t to say that spaces exclusively for narrowly framed discussion about women’s issues shouldn’t exist, but I don’t see a reason this comment thread has to be one, or why not considering it to be one should be regarded as offensive.

The men replying are almost never showing support, they’re minimizing the issue, or they’re trying to co-opt the thread.

To me, the comment in question didn’t seem to be doing that. The point I’m trying to make is to object to the idea that it is categorically doing that, given the context. It seems like a divisive way of deciding what is bad behavior, to condemn any statement made in response to discussion about problems faced by one group that is not specifically about the struggles of that group, regardless of anything else about the statement.

This is a specific complaint about how any time women try to talk about women’s issues in a forum that may contain men, those men engage in disingenuous whataboutism.

If you would rather expand on how that goes or the ways in which this is predominantly a women’s issue, feel free to take this opportunity instead of responding to what else I’m saying.

The comic is about how when people speak online online about women’s issues, dudes keep trying to make it about dudes.

This is a legitimate complaint in the situations where the topic is uniquely a women’s issue, and people are trying to redirect the conversation to something that really isn’t the same thing and is a separate issue so talking about that means you aren’t talking about the first thing anymore. But the meta issue of someone trying to talk about one group’s problems and getting hit by whataboutism, seems arguably more universal and might not be specifically a women’s issue, so saying something along the lines of “yeah this happens to us too it sucks”, could be supportive and not about shutting up discussion of the original topic.

The comic is about the meta issue so it’s not quite the same imo

that is not the … available outcome.

It demonstrably is already though. Paste a document in, then ask questions about its contents; the answer will typically take what’s written there into account. Ask about something you know is in a Wikipedia article that would have been part of its training data, same deal. If you think it can’t do this sort of thing, you can just try it yourself.

Obviously it can handle simple sums, this is an illustrative example

I am well aware that LLMs can struggle especially with reasoning tasks, and have a bad habit of making up answers in some situations. That’s not the same as being unable to correlate and recall information, which is the relevant task here. Search engines also use machine learning technology and have been able to do that to some extent for years. But with a search engine, even if it’s smart enough to figure out what you wanted and give you the correct link, that’s useless if the content behind the link is only available to institutions that pay thousands a year for the privilege.

Think about these three things in terms of what information they contain and their capacity to convey it:

• A search engine

• Dataset of pirated contents from behind academic paywalls

• A LLM model file that has been trained on said pirated data

The latter two each have their pros and cons and would likely work better in combination with each other, but they both have an advantage over the search engine: they can tell you about the locked up data, and they can be used to combine the locked up data in novel ways.

Ok, but I would say that these concerns are all small potatoes compared to the potential for the general public gaining the ability to query a system with synthesized expert knowledge obtained from scraping all academically relevant documents. If you’re wondering about something and don’t know what you don’t know, or have any idea where to start looking to learn what you want to know, a LLM is an incredible resource even with caveats and limitations.

Of course, it would be better if it could also directly reference and provide the copyrighted/paywalled sources it draws its information from at runtime, in the interest of verifiably accurate information. Fortunately, local models are becoming increasingly powerful and lower barrier of entry to work with, so the legal barriers to such a thing existing might not be able to stop it for long in practice.

The OP tweet seems to be leaning pretty hard on the “AI bad” sentiment. If LLMs make academic knowledge more accessible to people that’s a good thing for the same reason what Aaron Swartz was doing was a good thing.

thepiratebay still exists but is regarded as untrustworthy and infested with malware. I’d say knowing you’re getting something from a trustworthy source is harder than it used to be.

That doesn’t sound like something you get arrested for though

I’d be skeptical that’s even real, outside of a select few countries with especially strict copyright enforcement

people being arrested for using pirate streaming services

What circumstances does that even happen in? Like a bar that plays a pirated sports stream?

Ellipse head seems like someone who uses Twitter too much

I thought this article had some interesting insight into how living in Israel can distort someone’s perspective on these issues.

Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.

Ok but that’s different than free will as in, the premise of a society in which a person is able to choose their path in life

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.

Here’s what the US copyright office says about when AI art is or isn’t copyrightable:

In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or instead of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.” 24 The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.25 This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry.

So if an image looks like AI and you decide to just take it, legally that could be a risky proposition if you don’t know the artist’s workflow and the situation doesn’t exactly match up with settled case law. Afaik most of the market is for custom images, so in practice most of the time it’s not going to be a situation of just putting in a prompt and handing over the result but rather a multi step process and a hybrid of different techniques, which could weigh more towards generated content or more towards traditional drawing or image manipulation. The reason to pay someone for that instead of just using AI yourself would be the same as the reason for paying for non-AI art; they have the skills to get better results than you easily can on your own. The reason an artist might use AI is that it improves quality and/or reduces the amount of work.