My guess is that they're drawing a distinction between reporting that says:
1. People in general who have opinions that might happen to align with a foreign power's stance.
2. People who are literally "agents" of a foreign power as defined under laws like the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 [0], which often involves being directed/hired/paid.
That'd be a significantly different legal standard. (The constitutionality of FARA-type laws being a separate question.)
There's not any question about it: the president already said in no uncertain terms (and probably all caps) that anybody opposing datacenters is a foreign agent working against the usa.
Only a truly naïve person would not have seen this next logical step coming when the previous one received virtually no opposition.
> If the article is true, then there were 1,000 targets hit in the first 24 hours. If the majority of the legwork and selection was done by AI, how many schools, or equivalents, would one expect to be wrongly hit if all the targeting work were done by humans only?
An interesting thought exercise: given unlimited time (the usa was not on a deadline to initiate a first strike against iran), can a human tell a school building from a military building?
The answer is almost certainly "yes": watch the building for 1 day, and if children come out or go in, you do not bomb it.
The people sticking their head in the sand to avoid hard emotions are the ones writing the people-killing software.
Those who are aware of it, and choose not to, are the ones who have reckoned with those emotions and chosen not to participate in the killing of innocents.
Likewise, we shouldn't be surprised when someone who puts profits over other's lives gets ventillated by one of those lives in downtown New York. And what do you know, nobody was.
Your claims that these specific features provide no harm are belied by our knowledge that they do.
If "recommender" algorithms were the same as "just show me what my friends posted in chronological order", then there would not be such resistance to implementing the latter.
If endless scrolling were the same as pagination, then apps optimized for addictiveness would show a roughly equal distribution of both. But they do not.
Recommender algorithms as defined aren’t just the recommender algorithms you’re thinking about. It’s merely this idea that precise definition matter, nothing more. I’m not arguing that it was a bad idea to restrict some crappy patterns, or anything like that. Just that lawmakers defined that poorly.
And endless scrolling is pagination with a page size of one and a gesture (scroll down or swipe) for the next page. And trust me, “next page” can be helluva addictive. Endless pagination is an aesthetic preference. It may make it more slicker, frictionless, more visually appealing to get addicted, sure, but it doesn’t change a thing about the core element of the addiction. Same endless feed can be easily made counter-adductive by degrading relevance past some threshold, which clearly tells me the issue is elsewhere.
About the infinite scroll: I just found not just a hypothetical counterexample, but an actual experiment that suggests that infinite scroll is not addictive on its own. Not the ideal experiment, but it proves the key part of my point. So now I have not just logical inference, but also a real-world empirical confirmation.
Excuse me… what? You must've misunderstood what I argued about. Yes, they’re not the same!
I'm going to reiterate for the third time, to break it down even further in a hope it clicks.
We have:
1. Predatory/addictive algorithms (A_bad). We don’t like those.
2. Old good user preferences-based algorithms (A_good). Those are fine.
3. Probably some other algorithms but let’s go with just two alternatives for simplicity’s sake, as extra (A_more) won’t affect the argument here.
Definition from the law (A_law) covers both (A_bad)+(A_good). As I already said twice, it’s overbroad.
You said “if (A_law) wouldn’t be bad there wouldn’t be an issue”. That is obviously true, because (A_law) contains (A_bad). What you said is true, and it doesn’t contradict what I said - that (A_law) containing (A_good) in addition to (A_bad) isn’t great and lawmakers should’ve done better.
Just so we’re clear, I’m not arguing that A_law = A_good (that’s not true, they’re not the same! but neither A_law = A_bad either, it's the fact that it's A+bad+A_good[+A_more] is the issue), or that A_bad isn’t bad, or that A_bad isn’t covered by the law, or anything like that. Your knowledge that A_bad is bad, is my knowledge too.
As for the second point, I provided a counterexample of how endless scroll can be a non-issue. If endless scroll can be a problem (no argument against that from me - yes, there are clear examples we all have seen) and endless scroll can be non-problematic too (my counterexample design), that, says endless scroll is not what’s problematic per se. That’s just simple propositional logic.
Endless scrolling can be a proxy/substitute for the actual issue if nothing better could be named, but I think a better target can be identified and pointed out.
In other words, all I’m unhappy about is that laws are poorly worded and loosely defined so they can potentially cause unnecessary collateral damage. All I’m saying is that lawmakers are missing the point and just vibe-legislate in the vicinity. They’re banning the thing they (and you, and I) see, but the way they do it kinda like how Plato defined what a man is. And I’m just plucking a chicken here.
If you see a logical flaw - please do point it out for me. I don’t see any.
The United States could retreat from the world for any reason at any time. Could be because Australia refused to be annexed, could be because the white house fridge ran out of diet coke that morning. Then donald could change his mind the next day.
Given that there's no rhyme, reason, or consistency to it, best to ignore nonsensical, provocative statements, keep calm, and carry on.
Actually, no. Murder is the deliberate killing of a person. If the person in your example believed the gun wouldn't go off, then it isn't murder. Negligent as hell, yes. Manslaughter, certainly. But not murder, because it doesn't meet the definition.
The entire point of the post is that it isn't credible that the person actually thought their killing machine couldn't kill: pointing a gun at someone with the intention of killing, and pulling the trigger, counts as murder, even if you thought the person would magically survive if they were innocent.
You're free to try to make a case otherwise, but it'll be an uphill battle against reason.
According to who?
If that's according to the current us administration, then "qualifies as an agent" means "disagrees with the administration".
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