If it took Russia so long with far smaller military budget, for USA it would take an existential war, so abundance of funds is sort of a defense social contract. Things cost 5x what they could, but they get designed, produced, procured, maintained and combined into a system.

Unless there’s some political struggle where the old military industry supports one side and the other needs a new military.

I really hate the way the word “nihilist” is used in modern English.

That aside - my point is that this was expected.

And they didn’t live during 30 years war or whatever they remembered as scary. Didn’t matter.

WDYM turned out? Reading about it, seems to just be a long-running project. Still in construction, nothing to see there, such stuff.

Why not, WWI and WWII and things around them outdid all the scary stuff people were predicting just fine.

WDYM why not drugs? Strong alcohol and tobacco were a state monopoly in many countries for many years, and still are that kind of business heavily intertwined with state.

And prohibited drugs are in a similar position, just the state monopoly is unofficial. Well, officially they are prohibited. As I said. OK.

There are plenty of different kinds of drugs with different degrees of addiction, lethality, damage to the environment in production too.

Anyway, about AI - were it not profitable, it wouldn’t be rolling. It might be a bubble, but it’s, for the users of this kind of technology, a qualitative change from precise algorithms and industrial optimization to fuzzy decisions based on statistics. Basically machines following human orders as humans mean them. Well, kinda like that, except very computationally expensive and as good as your dataset, but there are tasks hard to do the old way and easy to do the new way. Hence (on Jingle Bells melody) bombing swarms, bombing swarms, bombing all the way. I suppose not all the way, but the essence is here. Also surveillance, detecting and stopping people harmful for some political end without ever alarming them or anyone or using direct visible force, predicting events.

It’s inefficient when used for the same tasks a shell script can do. It starts being efficient when used on the scale of lives and families and groups and communities, and armies and economies. Matter of scale.

In that light I’m glad I never played that, living in Moscow near an internal troops division. Doesn’t matter, though, someone has.

Plus, it’s disgusting and should be illegal anywhere that it isn’t just in general. It’s weird that you’re defending it like it’s diet coke or something.

“It’s disgusting” is not quite the right argument for making something illegal.

And that “you’re defending” presupposition should honestly be your last claim in any group of people before being shown the door.

You seem to have that “all or nothing” mindset in an argument, as if you really didn’t like someone, then they should be prosecuted as a rapist, a murderer and an arsonist at the same time. Exaggerating, of course.

Quoting myself.

I “honestly think” each case is unique. Just like with everything else.

CP is harmful due to normalizing the thing, useful due to redirecting some of the energy people with that pathology have away from, you know, real children.

Well. To hang pictures and hooks it makes sense to have wall panels with holes or whatever. And not drilling bearing walls.

Small-small price might be even fine, it’s scary how we live in a world full of wireless connectivity. Just some wire between rooms, LOL.

Just - if attaching stuff with magnets isn’t generally common (except fridge doors), then making magnetic concrete walls doesn’t seem to have potential in helping with that.

When I saw that headline, I was thinking of something like concrete magnetic floors in space, something sci-fi.

Flying concrete from Earth’s gravity well seems very expensive, though.

it’s essentially iterating on known images

No. It’s iterating on the common traits of known images compressed plus lots of randomization.

If you trained a Stable Diffusion model on only pictures of Rwandan people, and asked for an image of “a man sitting on a chair” the man will look vaguely Rwandan.

If you train a model on adult pornography and non-pornography with children and adults alike, it might be capable of generating plausible child pornography.

When you train an AI on CSAM, it produces images that are based on CSAM. Real people were victims in the base material, too. Close e-fuckin’-nough. Real people’s victimization is literally the core of how those images are made.

I’ve just told you how this is not true.

You seem to have that “all or nothing” mindset in an argument, as if you really didn’t like someone, then they should be prosecuted as a rapist, a murderer and an arsonist at the same time. Exaggerating, of course.

Point being that child pornography without real victims is something not contested here and has its own implications. You are trying to argue on something out of reach.

as much as Grok is a CSAM machine if you pay for it.

CSAM is Child Sexual Assault Media, and Grok is not providing that, it’s providing Child Pornography.

You are comparing making non-consensual material with real people to generating material with no real people (based off real media, though, but that’s an implication with everything AI-generated).