If AI ever does cause serious direct harm to humanity it will be because of logic like this.

So you're willing to burn the world to let them control an entire global supply of water and energy and political change and climate destruction, and won't even entertain the idea of "huh, maybe this is good enough to actually help people in aggregate already."

What a terrible way to twist my words. You're willing to pretend that millions aren't going to die because of the excesses of one person, but not to pretend what it would be like to see Robin Hood win in a digital experiment chamber.

No wonder people hate technology in 2026.

edit: what makes me more sad is seeing your credentials in technology and science. You look at the stars, read voraciously, share your science discoveries, and somehow you call my logic of "I wonder what the models say about what might work" genocidal? If you can't separate "I am want to control a populous to do what I want because I can convince them what's good for me is good for them" and "this machine is able to compute potentials that humans can't that may or may not lead to at least some version of a better world," I have no idea what hope I have.

Nothing else has ever helped with the things you're bewailing.

If you work for Google, for Apple, for Amazon - if you derive a payment from The Whale and in turn the whale continues to thrive in some way because of your work, you are complicit. Whether or not you or society is ok with it is the problem to discuss.

While we may say the cowardly bystander has less moral character than the one who would risk their life to attempt to stop the murder, surely you cannot mean the witness is as guilty of judgement as the murderer? You cannot mean they deserve the same sentence.

I will, for the sake of my own sanity, assume you mean that the witness is a coward. You are indicting their moral character. There is a degree of self-sacrifice that you might personally find more or less agreeable in a man. Fine.

But merely witnessing the murder is not complicity, just as merely working at Google is not complicity. Whether society is "ok" with the cowardly bystander not preventing murder is not, in my eyes, what this discussion is about.

What next? Will we compel all men to live to our standard?

> complicit /kəm-plĭs′ĭt/

adjective Associated with or participating in an activity, especially one of a questionable nature.

--

A witness is not participating in a murder and by only a stretch of the word is associated with it by means of them recording a version of the events in their brain.

I have to say you clearly write effectively, but surely you see that you're the one "sneaking in" philosophy here?

Pretending that slow, oppressive, plodding, calculated, rising control of a population of workers by means of wage control, obfuscation of responsibility, and simple lying to a public about goods or services is somehow murder is completely intellectually dishonest.

It is possible and necessary to recognize that there is more than one category of crime, and that each category of crime deserves its own social understanding and justice.

If I worked for a "defense" company a year or two before while they sold a gun toting robot dog, I would be complicit in its usage to kill people; if I stay there, I continue to be. I did not have to touch a single human being to be morally judged that I participated or was associated with a questionable activity.

If I worked for Facebook while they actively experimented on teenagers and children and adults to influence their minds and choices to determine their levels of suicidal tendencies without regard to their safety, I would be complicit in their actions.

I take no pleasure in saying this, because I don't know who you are, where you come from, or what you do or don't believe. What I can point as is you have tried to take a word "complicit" as a perfectly accurate word, stretch it to an invalid comparison, and then from that comparison, create a meaningless argument unrelated to my point.

That is the type of action, thinking, and wordplay I do not trust.

Yes. Working for Google is complicity in all their affairs. Witnessing a murder is not complicity in its timeline. Association by external sensory intake is not the same thing as association by direct participation, and direct participation or association with a murder is very obviously something we can morally judge.

For the sake of my own sanity, I'll assume you're simply not understanding the word choice of complicity, or are assuming that being complicit is somehow a binary judgement of quantitative punitive punishment.

I think the point is that posts like this are becoming a sour taste for a greater ratio of humans because of the increase ratio of disparity in global wealth/success.

I don't begrudge someone their enjoyment and livelihoods and I'm a fan of DDR and lan parties like every good nerd.

But please don't pretend or be ignorant of the idea that there are many more people in the world now that can both see this and likely never attain it despite "hard work" or "good investments".

Of course - I am one of them - but I can still appreciate the project.

Edit: To add, I would probably refer to this purely as hard work, good investments AND lots of good luck and timing, as opposed to privilege.

I too would love to have been a part of building this, or of course "having" something like this; aspiration to bigger things is sometimes legitimately what brings drives someone an extra step further than they thought they could.

They both came from wealthy families. Of course they worked hard and applied themselves fully, without ever having money worries to distract them. But let's not perpetuate that cliché that it's purely down to "hard work", like the trope from rich people's self-marketing autobiographies. "It's all down to my hard work, nothing to do with my rich family, really, nobody works as hard as me"! People all over the world work very very hard, some much harder than these people, and don't have the privilege of wealthy families to fall back on.

To clarify: correcting and clarifying isn't begrudging or complaining. Same for those of us who know we won't attain it because we don't have that privilege. They enjoy it, good luck to them.

I am quite joyous that the things I like to build and play with are also something aspirational and "exist" in bigger, cooler variants out there in the world. Seeing Space, so to speak, stirs the imagination and drives people in amazing ways sometimes.

It's the unfortunate mechanisms of the world and society and politics and business that partition this in uneven ways that hurts much more. I've met a lot of those very hard working people you describe I think, many times more over than myself in ways I sometimes find hard to admit. But that's what makes it emotionally poignant for me: we're both working hard, have visions, and neither have enough gas to get to the end of the road.

To wit: I can't afford to pay a professional team to design a product around my technology toys, and that likely precludes me in this particular decade from ever making it into something that would "make money" or "become useful" to more than myself. I'd need the "privilege" of living in a city or state where technologically capable people could spend their time talking about software tools and problems with me, and not living between jobs and family demands where that spare time simple can't be afforded. The trap of poverty, as insidious as it is. Someone with disposable income the size of my salary can toss that at a team for a month or two and end up with a shape that quickly evolves into their idea without a second thought.

My struggle - evident in my responses - is not feeling personally affronted when I know it's a nature of the world right now, and that doing what I think as "the right thing" sometimes means being pointed or unyielding in my beliefs. I'm still working on directing that into meaningful discourse.

Per the dictionary, perhaps. But when people use it online they rarely mean it as a neutral statement about someone’s level of wealth. It’s typically meant to imply unfairness or that the wealth was obtained through unearned advantage.

I also keep coming back to this, and I find it harder and harder a fact to live with. It's not a conspiracy theory, we're not crazy for pointing it out, and worse, there are people here I read about constantly what-abouting and number gaming and "well what would you have done?"ing like somehow the destruction of the concept of equal justice isn't just happening, but happening inside the bloody industry that feeds them, clothes them, gives them bonuses and retirements and the ability to even think a future, going off the grid, "retiring early from a smart exit" whatever.

I am finding this community is sadly making me hate my industry specialization more and more and it's because of this.

My magic wand would be waving it at those humans to force them to suddenly and powerfully experience their version of an overview effect in their lives so they would simply STOP working for FAANGYWANGY companies and just say, honestly and humbly and painfully: "I am contributing to the downfall of society by complicity feeding a malicious herd of whales."

I gave up a number of big jobs and stocks and money because the people I met were wretched. I am a massively imperfect person, but by all that I can, I refuse to build the torment nexus.

I have met too many people that want to work for the company that does, and those people put these hyperscalers, as you call them, into positions where they can influence an entire planet of humans on a whim.

I literally dream of a world sometimes where Elon wakes up and finds out no one takes his call, no one reads his tweets, no one even hands him a cup of coffee at a shop. I imagine this for a lot of people in the world.

That sounds like a world trying to rid itself of parasites and evolve toward a brighter future. I want to be in it.

Anyway.

Science and stuff I guess.

I've daydreamed about this too. I want to sit them down in an interview and try and dissect their thought process/morals. I doubt it's possible to succeed.

I have a barely substantiated hypothesis that a lot of what fails us as humans in communication is language, intent, and the inability to visualize the same thing with the same words. I have things I've tried to build around this, and the science has been around for many decades and beyond, but I have to try something. I can lie to myself in this and say that at least I'm trying to help people understand each other.

But linguistics is hard and my science is not strong and I am one person trying to convince my local peer groups my ideas about language isn't just goofy and worth a pat on the head. That's less a rant and more a point that I think we're on the same page in some ways: being able to dissect someone's thoughts and morals starts with knowing what tools to do it with, and the only tools I'm really good with are software and language. So, that's what I'm trying to do.

Yes. It's not proportional to the crime. You are either deliberately or accidentally, and I'm too frustrated hearing this too often not to be biased it's the former, equating what is a large sum of money relative to your wallet and bank accounts and loan access and portfolios and whatever collection of financial impositions you can make to that of a company that has one person flying around the world influencing the future of billions of people on one planet over dinner and jokes.

Yes. $3000 is peanuts. People that own islands would use that to pay someone's bonus for a year if they liked their service, as a gift. A throwaway.

Fix your relative understanding of power and influence.

I'm not, but you are. Especially as you continue:

> Yes. $3000 is peanuts. People that own islands would use that to pay someone's bonus for a year if they liked their service, as a gift. A throwaway.

The penalty (well, settlement) for the (civil offence, not crime) isn't $3000 total, it's $1.5 billion total. (Previous poster wrote ">$1bn", true but implicitly rounding down the total).

The settlement *per book* is $3000. There were a lot of books, reportedly half a million distinct works, so the total was $1.5 billion.

You're looking at $3000 as if it's the penalty for all of it, not the penalty per book.

$3000 per book is entirely on-par with the per-infringement penalties when an individual does it, too.

Three things to note. 1. As you said, copyright infringement is generally treated for each instance. This one-time payment would include a single use. Each training would be a separate infringement. And it could be argued that each use by a user of the model could be considered a separate infringement. 2. Generally copyright fines are increased if the persons doing the infringing action know what they are doing. Aka, ‘willful infringement.’ It’s hard to imagine companies like OpenAI were unaware of the possibility of their actions being considered infringement. 3. Often restitution of infringement includes money made by the infringer. So not simply, “your book is worth $3000.” But rather? “Your book is worth $3000 AND this company has derived an additional $50,000 of revenue from it.”

False. Training was found to be a legitimate use. The liability was specifically, solely, for copyright infringement specifically due to getting the works in the first place, not training on those works.

> And it could be argued that each use by a user of the model could be considered a separate infringement.

No, it could not.

If this standard was applied to copyright infringement on BitTorrent, someone who helped share one file to 100 other users would get hit with 100 copyright infringement instances, not one.

> Generally copyright fines are increased if the persons doing the infringing action know what they are doing. Aka, ‘willful infringement.’ It’s hard to imagine companies like OpenAI were unaware of the possibility of their actions being considered infringement.

That's already accounted for when I said this was in the normal range for liability per copyright violation.

> Often restitution of infringement includes money made by the infringer. So not simply, “your book is worth $3000.” But rather? “Your book is worth $3000 AND this company has derived an additional $50,000 of revenue from it.”

Depends on the details; however, as previously noted, the judge *explicitly noted* that training was not itself an offence, only the piracy to get the training data was. Any revenue derived from the offence had to be shown to be in the period between the offence and when they bought the same works, because they were found to be allowed to use those works in this manner.

If doing the bad thing is just a fine for one person and a life altering consequence for someone else, it is not a fair and equally distributed form of justice and is a gameable function needing to be fixed.

The caps don't help, and I don't care, unfortunately.

I don't even know what point you're trying to make. That it's fine they paid a billion dollars? So if they do it again, it's another billion? Oh well, guess I'm just not allowed to pirate things until I'm super wealthy. Or is it maybe the justice is being played out like it's supposed to? Oh, well, guess I better hope the system of governance that's being actively manipulated by the people that are breaking the same rules I am bound to suddenly and miraculously changes.

Like, I don't even detect a mote of "what they did is not ok."

Maybe you do think that and it's closer to you just trying to be careful about the letter of the law and you would also see to the justice system being fixed. I'd like that.

But you spending any time in your life to make this argument at all in their case is just goofy.

On that we agree.

> So if they do it again, it's another billion?

Judges don't like repeat offenders; the settlement was separate to the court case, but if it came to a court case, a judge would likely pick a bigger number. Especially as they earn a lot more now.

> Oh, well, guess I better hope the system of governance that's being actively manipulated by the people that are breaking the same rules I am bound to suddenly and miraculously changes.

While a generally useful concern, not particularly pertinent to a negotiated settlement.

> Like, I don't even detect a mote of "what they did is not ok."

One point five billion dollars is a strange idea for a lack of mote.

I mean, brother, if that's the mote in your eye, I'd hate to find out what the beam is.

> Maybe you do think that and it's closer to you just trying to be careful about the letter of the law and you would also see to the justice system being fixed. I'd like that.

The closer I look at it, the more I think the entirety of what we call "civilisation", legal system included, is a terrifyingly bodged together nightmare of duct tape and gremlins, codified in weird rituals and a smattering of latin and robes, where we only just about manage to not burn everything down by the collective will of enough people in the system wanting to be around for the next paycheque.

However, untangling a few millennia of spaghetti code written without the benefit of any automated checks, is beyond even governments who actively campaign on that as a platform, so what good would it do me or you to whinge about one specific case where it seemed to have actually gone approximately correctly for once?

> But you spending any time in your life to make this argument at all in their case is just goofy.

Read the actual court case please, it's not too challenging and I'm not even a lawyer: https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

$3000 because I stole a book and did something bad ruins my life, and could put me in a room where my personal freedoms are infringed. It is designed to disincentivize me from doing the bad thing.

What you (first responder) are defending is that if you just steal enough of them all at once, and then make enough money from it, you are able to pay the fee and not have your freedoms taken away to do it again, and profit again. This means objectively, there is no disincentive, so that "rule" does completely different things for completely different contexts, and the point is muddied by pretending that "well I paid the fee!" Is the point.

The point is to tell the thing doing the bad thing not to do the bad thing.

This is why I get so frustrated. People are so flipping blinding by dollars and whatabouts that it's just.. like I said, I have to believe for many people it's an inherent unacknowledged miss on what the point of a justice system and a law is, or it's a veiled defense for themselves knowing that, maybe, they would do the same if they could. I have met those people, and I do not want them in positions of power, or leadership.

Repeat after me: One point five billion is more than three thousand.

> you are able to pay the fee and not have your freedoms taken away to do it again

You too are able to pay as many fees as you want. Three thousand varies from life-changing to a slap on the wrist, even for non-unicorn-corps.

That this is a bad thing, that personal judgements should scale with personal means rather than be statutory, is a broad problem with the politics of lawmakers and the legal system: it also applies to speeding and littering.

> The point is to tell the thing doing the bad thing not to do the bad thing.

Then you will be pleased to read what the judge wrote:

  This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies.

  We will have a trial on the pirated copies used to create Anthropic’s central library and the resulting damages, actual or statutory (including for willfulness). That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft but it may affect the extent of statutory damages. Nothing is foreclosed as to any other copies flowing from library copies for uses other than for training LLMs.

  Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it

I mean come on.

"They decided to not break the law by breaking the law and then getting worried so they tried to unbreak it."

... seriously?

"I decided to speed but realized that was bad and I didn't get caught yet so I slowed down. Oh look a cop, guess I dodged a bullet! I guess I can speed buy just be careful."

"I decided to steal a cookie but I was worried so I baked a new cookie and put it back. That means stealing is ok if I eventually put it back! Why even bother with asking for permission in the first place?"

I do not think you are willfully missing this, and I'm glad you also saw the note about "the extent of statutory damages".

Like, you probably like Star Trek TNG. Remember the episode, alien kills all the Uthnocks to cherish a woman in self penance, Picard looks at the alien and says, "we have no law for your crime"?

The point was to paint an exaggerated picture of what happens when to disproportionately empowered groups meet a moral system where one is clearly in the wrong but cannot be held accountable because the system of justice just hasn't written down enough words to explain that - indeed - one should not kill all the Uthnocks.

I'm angry at your argument and I'm angry at the way it is often repeated, and I do not want to make personal attacks and I apologize that my language points that way.

You are also pointing language at me that is telling me that I cannot trust your system of justice that you envision because, somewhere, there is difference in how and I see what justice is supposed to do when at different scales, and I do not know of a human way to resolve it but discuss is with the fervor that it deserves.

Edit: I won't delve deeper into this discussion because neither you nor I can change it right now. I hope you reading what I wrote changes some way you see this, and I hope that I can see something in what you're saying. This is a forum for discussing technology, business of it, and its effect locally and globally and not getting mad at each other. I did not frame my anger toward the argument and framed it at the people making the argument, and that was my mistake.

I did not say that. Try harder. I don't care to read the rest when you open with such an incorrect reading of my words.

The TLDR I've been given is that it's civil when the prosecution is a non-government entity (private person or company), and when the penalty is an injunction or a fine, and when the standard is "preponderance of the evidence".

Conversely, it's criminal when the prosecution is a government/when the sought penalty is imprisonment, and when the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".

Check them support messages, especially day 1 / week 1! =)

That's the kinda thing we should be building and supporting together.

I may start using it, even if that's a highly marketed phrase just because it's so much better than, "CLICK HERE TO LIKE AND SHOW PEOPLE HOW MUCH GOOD YOU ARE AND HERE ARE POINTS YOU CAN MEASURE AND NOW WE OWN YOUR WHOLE LIFE HISTORY ALSO GIVE US MONEY AND HERE'S AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR YOU KTHXBYE".

And yes, that's exactly what I hear in my head when I hear someone works for Facebook or Google or the socials out there that aren't decentralized or at least trying to be some form of humane. Sorry, I don't know you, but you choose to work there. That's the image you're siding up to.

/rant

Those , and other factors are more influential than facebook. If anything, facebook helped remote friendships stay connected ( better than phone, letters).

That seems implausible to me. I think at best you could claim that cause and effect are quite tangled here.

That's what I mean about reversing cause and effect. There are larger causes (see my other comment below) that Facebook was innovative to take advantage of.

I have a Notes.app record listing my coworkers and the important things I want to remember about them. I wish I could remember all these things without writing it down, but I can't, even when it's important to me and something I'm genuinely interested in. Something like Monica to keep track of all those social details in an organized, completely private and self-hosted way, would be a godsend for me.

And there are events less personably important to me that matter to others, like “tell your son happy anniversary!” I barely know their kid, but it makes the person hearing it happy that someone thought of a nice happening in their life. Now their day is slightly brighter. Darned if I’d ever remember that without something to nudge me.

It feels like people put more value on memorizing facts than writing them down, as if it’s somehow more noble to remember something about someone, but if you write it down to not forget it, it’s suddenly not as valuable a gesture.

I never understood that.

I had a problem (bad memory), I cared enough to find, and create a solution, and consistently use and maintain it, it’s way more work that I’m putting in to make sure I remember things about the people I care about vs just having it memorized better than another person by the virtue of my genetics.

This is not a criticism or a shot at smugglerFlynn here though, they already said they’re not the target audience. It’s just my personal experience and this looked like a good starting thread to post it under.

Turns out most people are not even trying to juggle all these facts. Interestingly, just removing this pressure helped to remember more about the people I care about.

Not saying this will work for you (everyone is different), just sharing my 2c.

> This means treating relationships as first-class concepts and letting people decide what information matters to them.

Uh? This is a CRM, even a personal one. How do you get to v3 and "the relationship you have with the person you are capturing hasn't been a priority"?

In the article's words:

> Relationships are a good example. Storing that Monica is Ross's sister doesn't seem particularly complicated. But if Monica is Ross's sister, Ross is also Monica's brother. A parent relationship implies a child relationship. Some relationships have a direction while others don't. Real families include divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, half-siblings, adoption and all sorts of structures that don't fit nicely into a predefined list. Different cultures also describe family relationships differently.

> I've spent a lot of time thinking about this for the new version, and I now see relationships as their own domain rather than an attribute attached to a contact. It seems obvious to me now. It wasn't obvious when we designed the first versions of Monica.

Huh. Those sound like the sorts of things that sound trivial until you actually try to build them, and that they're re-engineering the model to correctly handle all the unusual edge cases.

(often Romanticism) a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.

Literally, we're saying, "humans interacting with humans and being subjective is what brings joy and creativity to people."

That sounds pretty dead on to me. Automating it to a process is the exact opposite so.. I think you're asking the wrong question. If you're trying to ask "why would people want to do this" I don't have an answer for you that isn't a study in the humanities.