a4isms (u/a4isms) - Readit News

a4isms commented on Porn censorship is going to destroy the internet mashable.com/article/age-... · Posted by u/Teever

jabedude · 9 days ago

The steel man is that the vast increase in production and availability of porn has never been higher and has created a generation of porn addicts who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex. These unhealthy ideas often manifest as anti-social behaviors which lead to loneliness and depression.

a4isms · 9 days ago

Long before modern porn, there were laws that a man could not be charged with raping his wife. Society largely looked the other way when a man beat his wife. There was a time when underage women could be trafficked by their parents into marriage against their will. There was a time when a woman who accused a man of rape would basically end up on trial herself while his lawyer dragged out every single romantic or sexual relationship she had in graphic detail so that the jury would believe "she was asking for it."

I am under the impression that "unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex" have been with us for a very, very long time. If we observe that porn addicts have such unhealthy ideas, are we confusing correlation with causation?

a4isms commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac

ryandrake · 14 days ago

Piracy offers:

1. Unrestricted access to an absolutely huge library of movies, music and TV shows, nearly unlimited. Certainly not limited by opaque "licensing deals" between various companies.

2. Highest resolution/bitrate/quality that was available at the time of the work's original release.

3. No arbitrary device/OS limitations.

4. Can watch/listen/download from any location on earth with sufficient bandwidth.

I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me. If any company came out with a service that offered those four points, I'd probably be willing to pay a lot for it. How much? Who knows, we don't know how much this is worth because nobody is even trying to offer it.

a4isms · 13 days ago

> I didn't even mention that it's free or that there are no ads, because that's pretty much the least important attribute to me.

In 2001, Joel Spolsky wrote:

Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

And in 2003, Apple started "selling" songs for 99 cents. They were incredibly successful, demonstrating that people weren't "pirating" songs to save a buck, but pirating songs to escape the deeply enshittified DRM shenanigans the industry employed, like installing rooting your PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

There is a very large market of people who want no fuss, no muss access to movies, shows, and music. I personally think that many people who "pirate" shows do not want adware of any type, especially if it surveils them, and also do not want to stream certain shows and deal with issues like region locking, the shows vanishing when the streaming service retires them, and so forth. But that is a small quibble.

History agrees with you that "piracy" is not about the price, it's actually about the shitty experience that the music, TV, and film industries impose.

a4isms commented on OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot" verification arstechnica.com/informati... · Posted by u/joak

hash872 · a month ago

It's just incredible to me that Blade Runner predicted this in literally the very first scene of the movie. The whole thing's about telling humans from robots! Albeit rather more dramatically than the stakes for any of us in front of our laptop I'd imagine

a4isms · a month ago

The fictitious Voight-Kampff test is based on a real machine based on terrible pseudo-science that was used in the 1960s to allegedly detect homosexuals working in Canadian public service so they could be purged. The line from the movie where Rachel asks if Deckard is trying to determine whether she is a replicant or a lesbian may be an allusion to the fruit machine. One of its features was measuring eye dilation, just as depicted in the movie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_machine_(homosexuality_t...

The stakes for men subjected to the test were the loss of their livelihoods, public shaming, and ostracism. So... Blade Runner was not just predicting the future, it was describing the world Philip K. Dick lived in when he wrote "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" in the late 1960s.

a4isms commented on More women than expected are genetically men (2016) novonordiskfonden.dk/en/n... · Posted by u/pavel_lishin

deadbabe · a month ago

Ask a person bound by cerebral palsy with a dream to play pro basketball what fairness is.

a4isms · a month ago

It's not a dichotomy between "unfair" and "absolutely fair." Things can be more or less fair, and it makes sense to discuss making things "more fair" or "less unfair" even if in doing so, we cannot reach "perfectly fair for everyone, all the time."

a4isms commented on I tried vibe coding in BASIC and it didn't go well goto10retro.com/p/vibe-co... · Posted by u/ibobev

pimlottc · a month ago

This is an old joke with the job titles changed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/74lb9d/engineer_vs_m...

a4isms · a month ago

A joke from the same family involves a pilot who gets lost in IMC conditions, and his radio is dead. Suddenly, looming out of the gloom is an office building with an open window. An employee spots the plane going by and waves. The pilot circles around and shouts "Where am I?"

The employee shouts back "In an airplane!" The pilot nods, sets a course, and navigates precisely 11 nautical miles NNE, and descends. Sure enough, a runway appears and he lands perfectly. Of course, he's debriefed about the incident. "How, " the investigator asks, "Did you find the airport?"

The pilot recounts the shouted conversation. "My question was answered in a way that was absolutely correct but useless for any practical purpose. I reasoned that I was talking to Microsoft Tech Support at their HQ, and I could dead reckon to Redmond Municipal Airport from there."

a4isms commented on Exploiting the IKKO Activebuds “AI powered” earbuds (2024) blog.mgdproductions.com/i... · Posted by u/ajdude

colechristensen · 2 months ago

>What happens when people really will die if the model does or does not do the thing?

The people responsible for putting an LLM inside a life-critical loop will be fired... out of a cannon into the sun. Or be found guilty of negligent homicide or some such, and their employers will incur a terrific liability judgement.

a4isms · 2 months ago

Has this consequence happened with self-driving automobiles on open roads in the US of A when people died in crashes? If not, why not?

a4isms commented on Jack Welch, the Man Who Broke Capitalism (2022) forbes.com/sites/kylewest... · Posted by u/throw0101b

exiguus · 2 months ago

I see some parallels to Curtis Yarvin and the Boys that follow his philosophy. The funny part, with all this boys is, that they do not recognise, that there utopia e.g. new society/state, does not work without the current society that sponsors them.

Basically, the same with some global corporations, which literally suck society dry (infrastructure, resources, education, labour, health system) and give almost nothing back (except for a few workers and too few taxes). I think the American dream is over. It's an empty shell that's all about making a nice life for yourself at the expense of others.

a4isms · 2 months ago

> I think the American dream is over.

“The reason they call it The American Dream is that you have to be asleep to believe it.”

—George Carlin (1937 - 2008)