I'm not sure if there's been talk about it but it does make you wonder, would this AI generated CSAM 'saite' the abuser's needs and/or would it spread the idea that it isn't bad and possibly create more abusers who then go on to abuse physical children. Would those individuals have done it without the AI. I believe there's still debate over whether abuse is a result of nature or nurture but that starts to get into theoretical and philosophy. To answer your question about who the victim is I would say the children who those images are based off of. As well as any future children that are harmed due to exposure of these images or due to the abusers possibly seeking real content. I think for the most part AI generated porn hurts everyone involved.
There's definitely at least some people who will be influenced by being repeatedly exposed to images. We know that usual conditioning ideas work. (Like presence of some type of images mixed in with other sexual content) On the other hand, I remember someone on HN claiming their own images are out there in CSAM collections and they'd prefer someone using those if it stops anyone from hurting others.
The need to fight CSAM also provides a pretext for broader censorship. Look at all the people in this thread salivating over the prospect of using Grok generations to take down Musk, whom they hate for allowing people to express wrongthink on X. If they ever regain broad censorship powers over AI or people, they definitely won't stop at blocking CSAM.
Lots of research has been done on this topic. You say "let some science happen", and then two paragraphs later say "according to the research": so has or hasn't research taken place? (Last time I looked into this, I came away with the impression that most people considered pædophiles are not exclusively attracted to children: I reject your claim that the "no choice" claim is evidenced, and encourage you to show us the research you claim to have.)
I don't think you're engaging with this topic in good faith.
> Whether it is exclusive or not is not really relevant to the point.
Whether it's exclusive or not is very relevant to the point, because sexual fetishes and paraphilias are largely mutable. In much the same way that a bi woman can swear off men after a few bad experiences, or a monogamous person in a committed relationship can avoid lusting after other people they'd otherwise find attractive, someone with non-child sexual interests can avoid centring children in their sexuality, and thereby avoid developing further sexual interests related to children. (Note that operant conditioning, sometimes called "conversion therapy" in this context, does not achieve these outcomes.) I imagine it's not quite so easy for people exclusively sexually-attracted to children (though note that one's belief about their sexuality is not necessarily the same as one's actual sexuality – to the extent that "actual sexuality" is a meaningful notion).
> Can you link me to research on how AI generated CSAM consumption affects offending rates?
No, because "AI-generated" hasn't been a thing for long enough that I'd expect good research on the topic. However, there's no particular reason to believe it'd be different to consumption of similar material of other provenance.
It's a while since I researched this, but I've found you a student paper on this subject: https://openjournals.maastrichtuniversity.nl/Marble/article/.... This student has put more work into performing a literature review for their coursework than I'm willing to do for a HN comment. However, skimming the citations, I recognise some of these names as cranks (e.g. Ray Blanchard), and some papers seem to describe research based on the pseudoscientific theories of Sigmund Freud (another crank). Take this all with a large pinch of salt.
> For instance, virtual child pornography can cause a general decline in sexual child abuse, but the possibility still remains that in some cases it could lead to practicing behavior.
I remember reading research about the circumstances under which there is a positive relationship, which obviously didn't turn up in this student's literature review. My recent searches have been using the same sorts of keywords as this student, so I don't expect to find that research again any time soon.
None of the services dealing with actual research papers discovery/distribution block this. Don't expect AI to make up answers, start digging through https://www.connectedpapers.com/ or something similar.
I've heard good things about XCP-ng as well and tried it out at home and proxmox seems much easier to use out of the box. Not saying XCP-ng is bad just that it wasn't as intuitive to me as proxmox was when we were moving away from vmware
Yeah, I understand but it but I wasn't referring to performance only, mostly to "living room PC gaming" in a convenient package, almost like a home appliance. I really hope Steam can pull this off.
A GPU cluster would work better but if you're only testing things out using CUDA and want 200GB networking and somewhat low power all in one this would be the device for you
I'm not sure if the density plays into this too much. Gravity would probably play a bigger role as the gravity is only 38% of Earth's so it would need less wind to move
Wind forces in the 17 mbar tests (mentioned in the article) are roughly twice as strong as those on Mars, but still about 60x weaker than on Earth at full atmospheric pressure (1013 hPa (= 1013 mbar)).
The lower gravity might compensate for the pressure in the test being about twice as high.
The force caused by the wind acting on the rovers are 50% of Mars, if you are correct, so I'd expect twice the "sail" force pushing the CG of the rover versus its current contact "point" on Mars as in the experiment. 2/0.38 = 2.5x the moving force. When the CG is pushed forward, the whole thing rotates, and the rover advances to a new contact point.
Of course, we're talking about things like wind velocity and surface texture as "constants" here, but yeah: the thing should move.
The phys.org article mentions it: "[...] the team carried out static and dynamic tests in a wind tunnel with a variety of wind speeds and ground surfaces under a low atmospheric pressure of 17 millibars.
Results showed that wind speeds of 9–10 meters per second were sufficient to set the rover in motion over a range of Mars-like terrains, including smooth and rough surfaces, sand, pebbles and boulder field."
Ah, thanks, I missed that. It's weird how that information is in the phys.org article but not in the linked abstract. I guess that's because it's just an abstract -- they must have given more details during the presentation.
It's a mixture of both 2 and 3. The chips are getting hotter because they're compacting more stuff in a small space and throwing more power into them. At the same time, powering all those fans that cool the computers takes a lot of power (when you have racks and racks those small fans add up quickly) and that heat is then blown into hot isles that need to then circulate the heat to A/C units. With liquid cooling they're able to save costs due to lower electricity usage and having direct liquid to liquid cool as apposed to chip->air->AC->liquid. ServeTheHome did a write up on it last year, https://www.servethehome.com/estimating-the-power-consumptio...
I've never done DC ops, but I bet fan failure is a factor too— basically there'd be a benefit to centralizing all the cooling for N racks in 2-3 large redundant pumps rather than having each node bringing its own battalion of fans that are all going to individually fail in a bell curve centered on 30k hours of operation, with each failure knocking out the system and requiring hands-on maintenance.
A cool (ha ha!) solution was the old Cray XT3/4 supercomputers, which were air cooled. But instead of a battalion of tiny fans, each cabinet had a single huge fan at the bottom, blowing air vertically through the cabinet (the boards were mounted vertically). No redundancy, sure, but AFAIU it was reliable enough to not be a problem in practice.
It's less about raising taxes on people making less than 250,000 a year and more on getting people who make over 1,000,000 pay taxes at all. Sure there's plenty of people who aren't rich that commit tax fraud but the IRS is pretty good at getting them. Getting the millionaires who can throw lawyers at them to waste time makes it not worth it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.
You didn't even cover GP's main point about getting the top to even pay taxes; the top 1%, per your own source, only pays 26%, while the top 50% pays 16%.
> When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.
And this isn't even considering the wealth distribution disparity, which is even greater than the income distribution disparity. A lot of that is held in the form physical assets (property) and government debt.
Financially, the wealthy own the government. In a way, a lot of the taxes they pay go back to them in the form of interest paid on government debt.
Argue for higher tax rates and more enforcement all you want, but the fact is that the current setup results in a situation where the bulk of actual taxes collected come from the rich.
This situation has persisted for as many decades as I've been able to find data for.
Here's a quote from my source: "The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total AGI and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes.
In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined."
And we haven't even talked about the avalanche of payroll and sales taxes generated by the businesses they run.
> Argue for higher tax rates and more enforcement all you want, but the fact is that the current setup results in a situation where the bulk of actual taxes collected come from the rich.
As they should, because the rich are paid multiples or orders of magnitude more than the middle/working class and poor. That's possible because they make money by:
- Owning capital and taking a share of the resulting productivity passively (the wealthiest of the wealthy)
- Working at a level of abstraction in the hierarchy where their skills allow them to scale their income via technology or by directing the labor of lower skilled workers.
- Working in elite supply-limited professions (i.e highly specialized doctors and lawyers, r&d in high speculation industries like AI).
It takes significant financial, social, or education capital to be able to participate in the economy in either of those modes.
As the income and wealth inequality trends have become more extreme, it makes sense that the wealthy should be paying an ever increasing portion of the tax burden, not a lower portion. Otherwise you end up with feudalism.
> The top 5% of taxpayers in the USA pay 61% of the taxes.
Only if you ignore the payroll tax.
For the median US worker, they pay ~15% in payroll tax, and significantly less in income tax. The median US worker makes $40k year, paying like $6k in payroll tax and like $2.8k in federal income tax.
So yes, if you ignore the majority of tax that the average worker pays, then the top 5% pay the majority of tax.
The useful statistic is not "what percentage of the taxes do each quintile/decile/etc pay?"
It's "What percentage of their disposable income (ie, net of housing, food, health care, and other necessary expenses) do each quintile/decile/etc pay in taxes?"
And the answer is going to be that the middle and working classes pay a huge percentage—close to 100% for many—while for the wealthy it's effectively nothing.
....Right. Which is why what I described would ensure that the people who feel the least pain from funding the state are asked to pay the greatest share.
If you make having neighbors painful don't be surprised when "the rich" stop collaborating and instead work to eliminate them like you're seeing everywhere in the post millennial US now.
I'm not sure what this subthread has to do with having neighbors?
But regardless, "if you try to make the rich actually participate in and contribute to society, don't be surprised if they try to destroy society instead" is exactly the kind of threat that supports the idea that we should, instead, make it impossible to be rich enough to carry that threat out.
Having a functioning and mutually beneficial society is much, much more important than letting outlandishly rich selfish people stay rich.
Their tax rates have been reduced every time a Republican President has been in office in the last 25 years, and not, to the best of my knowledge, increased enough to counteract that when a Democrat has been in office.
The top marginal tax rates during the right's supposed "golden age" after WWII were much, much higher than they are now.
We're running a deficit because huge promises were made to entire generations of people when we had a pyramid-shaped demographics, but now we have a population candle.
If you tax rich people even more than now, you risk simply slowing down the economy long-term and making the whole situation much worse.
If you raise taxes on people with a lower marginal propensity to spend and transfer it to people with a higher marginal propensity to spend you'll have a stronger economy.
We were running surpluses at numerous times across the past 100 years. Each of those surpluses ends with a reduction in the top tax rate.
I’ve heard this statistic before and it always strikes me as basically a non-sequitor. You’re writing down two percentages as if they are meaningful with respect to one another, but they arent.
If we as a society agree that some sort of progressive tax system is good (based on the fact that the mere act of survival comes with fixed costs, that naturally impact low-wealth holders over high-wealth holders) then we presumably expect higher wealth people to shoulder a larger burden of the cost of maintaining society, relative to that wealth.
The top 1% hold >30% of all wealth in the US, which, by the logic I described above, makes your 40% figure sound not just not exorbitant, but possibly too low.
People making one million dollars a year are people like doctors and lawyers and are most certainly paying taxes. One million dollars today was ~$680k in 2008.
reply