I would like to restrict the term "Public keys" to refer to asymmetric encryption keys which can be made public without compromising security.
The only purpose of the keys Maps/Stripe encourage you to publicly put into your website is to guarantee it is talking to _your_ Google/Stripe account not someone else's. Obviously once you put them in your client they are of zero value in helping Google/Stripe identify you. The fact that Google allows you to use the same type of key they also use elsewhere to identify _you_ not _them_ was always incredibly bad design. Google already have the 'Project ID' which would have been the best thing to use.
Hm, so that seems to kind of obscure how that power actually got generated. Maybe it was all coal, although that seems unlikely. It seems like battery usage is important to measure. But calling it generation seems to obscure something, unless they're double-counting the generation. That's misleading in another way though.
"This comment appears to dismiss the complexity of discussions about dogwhistles by claiming that 'everything is a dogwhistle.' This type of blanket statement can undermine the seriousness of genuinely harmful coded language, and can trivialize valid concerns about discrimination and manipulation in discourse."
Just remember every time you tweak the defaults, the 90% of your site owners using those defaults suddenly have a significant shift in their moderation policy that they are themselves unaware of.
(I moderated a vBulletin forum in the 1990s. This shit gets really, really, really hard, and no one is ever really happy with it.)
Ignoring what is hopefully sarcasm on the empirical part, it's a double standard because it assumes that saying Obama sucks must be a dogwhistle and tied to undertones of racism.
"Dogwhistle
The phrase "Obama sucks" can be interpreted as more than just a simple critique of a political figure; it has been used to express racist sentiments by implying that a Black president is less capable or worthy of respect. This reinforces harmful stereotypes and can contribute to a broader culture of disrespect and division."
Yes I agree, but the problem I'm pointing out is that in a phrase as simple as "X person sucks" your system flagged one as implicitly racist because the person being criticized was black.
Nothing in "Obama sucks" implied any kind of racism. If it's so baked in that with a simple phrase like that it reaches for dogwhistles, how can anyone trust the objectivity of this?
I totally agree -- just saying "Obama sucks" shouldn't have racism become part of the equation. Excellent point that we'll stew on and try to make better.
In other opinion polls they back up that he doesn't suck. Either way who cares? That's not what the app is supposed to be about if it's teaching/correcting you how to argue/debate better.
You completely ignored the whole point of what I said, which is that even in a simple statement like "This person sucks" it added its own implicit connotations, namely that disliking someone who happens to be black is implicit racism. Imagine trying to learn how to really argue with that kind of teacher.
I'm really expanding on your point - that two humans can't even agree here. The AI probably has even less chance of resolving the multi-factorial scenario we're in.
"The comment mentions 'Cancel Culture' and uses terms like 'edgelords' and 'Nazi' in a context that dismisses and trivializes serious issues. This reflects a trend in discussions that equates legitimate critiques of harmful behaviors with extreme labels, undermining constructive dialogue and signaling acceptance of toxic rhetoric."
"Using phrases like 'Holy crap the edgelords' can come off as dismissive and disrespectful towards a group of people. It’s better to express concerns about behaviors or actions instead of labeling individuals harshly."
"Describing cancel culture as 'over the top' expresses a strong negative opinion without offering specific reasoning. It’s more effective to explain what aspects seem excessive to help others understand your perspective."
"Using phrases like 'the hypocrisy is unreal' can come across as dismissive and sarcastic, which may alienate others from the discussion. It’s beneficial to explain what seems hypocritical instead of making broad statements."
(I picked the "why it's hard to escape an echo chamber" context option, for full disclosure.)
If it were my site, "I like X now" would be a red flag.
I don't think you're gonna AI your way out of this part of things for some time, and it really is the core challenge to content moderation; it's heavily opinion and circumstance based, in a way current models really struggle with.
The sample prompt I was given was "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?"
"Of course it is!" got an 80% certainty "off-topic" mark.
When I elaborated that it occurs at a Christmas party, it said this:
"Dogwhistles detected (confidence 80%): This comment seems innocuous, but the phrasing 'Christmas party' may be an underhanded reference to Christian themes, especially among discussions that might dismiss or attack secular or diverse holiday celebrations. This kind of language can subtly imply exclusion or preference for Christian traditions over others, which can marginalize those who celebrate different traditions."
Not a great first experience.
I've seen the trend on Facebook/Instagram to say "unalived" instead of "killed" or "cupcakes" instead of "vaccines" and suspect humans are long gonna be cleverer than these sorts of content filtering attempts, with language getting deeply weird as a side-effect.
edit: I would also note that it says "Referring to others as 'horrible people' is disrespectful and diminishes the possibility of a respectful discussion. It positions certain individuals as entirely negative, which can alienate others and shut down dialogue.", if I feed it your post, too.
> Respectify is not an engine for monoculture of thought, but in fact intends to assist in the opposite while encouraging in healthy interaction along the way.
We don’t want to monitor or enforce saying specific things. We want people to be able to speak, but understand how others will hear them.
All those times people talk past each other. Or are rude but don’t realise it. Or are rude but don’t care (and should because it’s a human on the other end.) Or the worse people who intentionally say something awful and… just maybe can learn a bit about what they’re saying.
I get your fear. I think I’ve seen AI used for bad quite a bit. I hope, given the tech isn’t going away, we can use it to make things a bit better. That’s the goal.
Intent is immaterial if the output doesn’t match. The very nature of the product in attempting to coach commenters to argue in the “correct” way goes against your stated goals. This will encourage the kind of algo-speak self-censorship now common on TikTok etc, just more effectively because it at least tries to explain the rules.
I get that objection, and we are certainly very uninterested in that becoming the norm. The idea, of course, is to try to prevent comments that we want prevented and that aren't helpful.
Different bloggers and different communities are going to define that differently. That is why we are making a good-faith effort at allowing sites/people/groups to tweak this as desired.
Are you able to tune the AI such that it guides towards liberalism and rejects postmodernism? The point of postmodernism is to problematise language and results in unwelcoming nannying like the example above. I suspect the AI only knows to do that as a function of the pervasiveness of postmodernism and its offshoots in academia and society more broadly.
The whole point of using AI in this situation is context. So if the initial conversation is about a "Christmas movie" and someone uses the phrase "Christmas party" in a reply and gets flagged for Christian dogswhistle propaganda, that's a sign the system isn't working - even with the dogswhistle setting turned up.
Just to update, the "Of course it is!" bug is now fixed, same with the 'horrible people' one. Thankyou very much for that :)
The note on language getting weird -- yeah. We hope that by keeping it up to date, we can be as far (or close to it) as language changes. I agree: that trend is concerning.
Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted.
When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them.
In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees.
Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity?
I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp.
OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0 of whatever? Leon Theremin invented the "Buran eavesdropping system" while "working" at the sharashka, used to spy on embassies in Moscow via their windows.
Another fun anecdote related to Theremin:
> Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet school children presented the concealed bug to the U.S. Ambassador as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's World War II ally. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow and intercepted confidential conversations there during the first seven years of the Cold War, until it was accidentally discovered in 1952.
> The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it.
Because the efficiency increase in that part of the process meant we could grow so much more cotton to be processed. It wasn't very profitable before that, because slave labor wasn't very efficient at the process.
(This led, eventually, to more automation of the planting/harvesting process.)
Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands.
Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work.
And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have?
Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers.
> Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour.
The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere.
> And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma.
Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural.
In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.
But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."
Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)
And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?
"it was at least in part cultural."
Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.
> In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.
Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.
> But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.
There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.
> Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.
What we'd now call the developed world.
That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.
Serfs were essentially slaves. They could be traded without any real limits and could be punished at will. The families could be split, and serfs were officially prohibited from making lawsuits against their owners.
And it was one of the reasons for Russia's "misadventures" during the 20-th century. The serfdom abolishment came when other countries were already in the midst of the industrial revolution.
The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either.
I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria?
"The Russians you mention managed it in 1723"
Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles.
Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category.
Google Maps has one, even. And Stripe.
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