151–160 of 208 posts
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You tell me where the consumption of dairy products must result in harm to the cow. I grew up around small-scale, subsistence-level dairy farming, it doesn’t inherently require any more suffering than either egg-harvesting or apple-growing inherently do. A Jain doesn’t have to purchase milk from a factory farmer. And AFAIK even the most stringent vegans don’t brush insects from their path with every step, or avoid on…
If we are really into an ethics discussion, enslaving a species to drink milk meant for their newborns would be an issue.
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Yes. Because it’s a simulation of a living thing. It’s still electrons moving around silicon. It deserves the respect your MacBook does. Which is not nothing. But certainly not what’s due to a life.
A lot of people believe that this reality, in which we're conversing on HN, is also a simulation (thus making the fruit fly a simulation within a simulation).
Related (fictional): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain. It is a snapshot of the living brain of neurology graduate Miguel Acevedo Álvarez (2010–2073), taken by researchers at the Uplift Laboratory at the University of New Mexico on August 1, 2031
> What's modeled vs. measured > Honesty section: I wouldn’t mind an human written README
The other day the system prompts for Claude (chat not code) hit the frontpage and they included a bit that something along the lines of "Claude should avoid saying honestly, because Claude is always honest". So how come that these Claudisms still are so frequent in LLM output? Do the system prompts just not work? Don't the postprocess the output to deal with such policy violations?
Something somewhere in the training pipe has perturbed the LLM in a way that makes it say "honestly" all the time. It's a weasel word. It's a habit. It's an addiction. It's borderline involuntary. Even changing the system prompt only makes it 30% less common - like trying, and failing, to break a habit with sheer willpower.
They'll probably change the training pipeline at some point in the future, to banish this habit, but honestly? It's such a low priority that they might take a while getting to it.
It's weird to write MacOS specific software in this era.
You've curiously left out which platform it's not weird to write software for. Is there only one platform that's not weird, or is MacOS the only weird platform? Some of the best platforms and software are weird. Get over it.
It's weird to write MacOS specific software in this era.
do you mean they should've spent more time writing for other platforms or do you insinuate that they should've shipped a chromium browser instead of writing native software?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we are really into an ethics discussion, enslaving a species to drink milk meant for their newborns would be an issue.
A well-nourished, well-protected, comfortable cow will produce much more milk than is required by its normal complement of newborns, and it will (and loudly) want rid of it. In my experience not milking a dairy cow of the excess would be considerably more cruel than milking it, even if you kept the milk exclusively for the newborns, and I’m pretty sure the cows I’ve seen milked in rural Nepal would agree.
I am not sure any species are going to appreciate being enslaved. And since we can't actually ask the cows, we can only assume based on how we feel about it.
In any case we are talking about ethics here, and cows definitely cannot consent being born and bred in captivity. So even if we are doing this out of kindness (which is of course not), it is still non-consensual.
> In my experience not milking a dairy cow of the excess would be considerably more cruel than milking it, even if you kept the milk exclusively for the newborns
Why don't we then help other mammals? Why do we help out only cows? It is obvious that we like the milk and we are trying to justify enslaving a whole species for it.
I see this kind of argument in many discussions. It basically boils down to what is your comfort zone of empathy. Jains have drawn it at killing and suffering but not enslavement. Vegans have included enslavement in their ethical framework but not plants and so on.