SatanicNotMessianic

Kids have been online for 30 years. AOL and BBSs were available - I think I got my first modem around 1987. That’s a generation-plus. Which is to say - we have plenty of data on the effect of being “on the internet” on kids. Most people under the age of 30 have been online for virtually all of their lives.

You can tell these laws are bullshit because they always have some vague platitude like “protecting kids,” but they never define their measurements. An actual intervention - like a government policy to solve a problem - defines what it is trying to address, how and why they expect the program to work using peer-reviewed evidence, and what they expect the result to be after some time.

Let’s say the problem you’re trying to address is teenage suicide, and you think that being exposed to talk about suicide online contributes to it. First, you’d look for studies that evaluated the problem. They’d have to show causality, because just finding a correlation might mean that kids likely to commit suicide reach out to communities online, rather than vice versa. I’m skeptical, but for the sake of argument let’s say you find there is a causal relationship.

So you develop a model that allows you to estimate that keeping kids from accessing anyone talking about suicide would cut the teen suicide rate by 30%. Removing some middle steps, the government now bans the discussion of suicide on any platform that doesn’t have a strict age verification. So, now what happens? Is there ongoing monitoring to make sure that your hypothesis is correct? If suicide rates go up because kids can’t talk it out anymore and are more isolated, does the law get removed from the books? Are there classes of kids it hurts versus helps, and what are you going to do about them?

You can say the same thing about other metrics, like sexual abuse. The point is that, like they tell you in b-school, you have to measure it if you want to improve it. They never do that, though.

At best, these kinds of things are empty platitudes that allow politicians to pretend they’re doing something to get votes. At worst - and with this bill the more likely outcome - will be that this permits states like Texas to arbitrarily define what they think “kids” should see. They’ll remove the decision from kids and their parents, and instead make the global decision of censorship according to a conservative religious agenda. That’s what we’re seeing in libraries and schools today.

The other reason you can tell it’s just culture war bullshit is that none of this is coming in response to a sudden surge in child abuse statistics. When there’s a spike in something bad, like gun violence, opioid use, or a pandemic, politicians respond with policy. This push, like the bathroom bills, legal restrictions on trans athletes, and anti-drag laws, is not responding to any current crisis. It’s just someone jingling the keys to make people look in the other direction so that they can get away with what they’re actually trying to do.

It’s the stack. The stack needs to be rewritten. The entire stack. It’s brittle, and the API makes 420 calls. He’s going to open source the blockchain AI for freedom but he’s being stopped by the Anti-Defamation League and trans people and Ukrainians.

That’s one of the older tricks, no pun intended. It used to be that you’d have a hard time getting a security clearance if you were gay, with the excuse being that you were vulnerable to blackmail. It’s less of a big deal now, but I can think of a wide class of politicians who would still be vulnerable to blackmail, and grindr is a very popular app during political conventions.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind getting a notification when my washer is done. If I’m doing too many things at once, I can forget that I had laundry going and it ends up sitting there until it gets musty and needs a re-wash.

That said, I did disconnect my smart tv from the internet when I found out it was sending data, including captured ambient audio, to the tv manufacturer. I just use an apple tv. I know that I’m still populating data for each of my streaming services, but the tv manufacturer has no need for my watching habits, much less people talking in my living room.

The one that I’ve never figured out was the refrigerator that connects to twitter.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve scrolled past this post at least half a dozen times and my brain still insists on interpreting the title as Latin at first glance. Like, I read the middle word as “doe-nah-tes.”

I get that he’s proud of the strength of his cutlery drawer but most people won’t give a fork.

I’ve dropped them from my newsfeed. If they’re just going to be writing AI summaries of what other sites have already published, and getting the facts wrong as a result, you’re literally better off reading nothing rather than read their articles, and trying to read them just encourages them because they’re still getting ad revenue.

There’s an escalating approach to the level of additional care that you can consider. I’m not sure what’s available in your country/area, but you can find in-home caregivers that can come as many times per week as you wish, either to augment what you’re doing or just to give you a break. You could probably use a hand around the house as well since more of your family’s time will be spent caring rather than cooking or cleaning.

Similarly there are care facilities which are better equipped, and those also have a number of different levels of care available. They range from independent living to full time care.

Socialization is really important and it should be considered. If your great grandfather has friends or a support network outside of family, he should be encouraged to keep in touch with them. If he’s in a state of decline where that’s not feasible, then you might want to start considering a facility because that’s getting into the border of what someone can take care of on their own.

Also, just as an observation, “great grandfather” staying with you seems to be skipping multiple levels of care unless you already live in a multigenerational household.

That makes sense. When I think “football,” the anatomical part that first comes to mind is “torso.”

Maybe all of the good representations of feet and balls were already taken.

That is exactly how LLMs work. LOMs embed semantic concepts in metric spaces. That is what we’re talking about.

I think you have a mental model and that it is analogous to the model created in an LLM in that it is representable by a semantic graph/n-dimensional matrix relating concepts that are realized via terms.

You have never in your life encountered a dodo. You know what a dodo is (using the present these because I’m talking about a concept). It is a bird, so it relates evolutionarily and ecologically to “bird.” It’s flightless, so it relates to “patriarch” and “emu.” It is extinct, so it relates to all of the species extinction ideas you have. Humans perhaps contributed to the extinction, so it links to human-caused ecological change, which in turn links to human-caused climate change. Human-introduced invasive species are are causing ecological change in Australia, and that may have been a major factor in driving the dodo to extinction. People ate them, so maybe in your head it has a relation to wild turkeys. And so on. That’s how minds work. That’s how the human cognitive model of the world works. That’s how LLMs work.

Visualize an n-dimensional space in which these semantic topics are embedded. The interpretation of the dimensions don’t matter. Instead, we’re just worried about the distances between concepts. Dodo is closer to turkey than it is to snake. Dodo is closer to snake than it is to rock. Dodo is closer to rock than it is to the feeling of melancholy I get when listening to Tori Amos. We can grasp this intuitively. We can mathematize it by formally placing the various concepts in a metric space.

There’s a lot more to unpack, from neural correlates of consciousness to cognitive linguistics and embodied learning using metaphorical reasoning, but that’s kind of the gist of it boiled down to an overly long post.

I have absolutely no idea what your model is for how humans understand, relate, and communicate concepts.