This is 100% consistent with being a free speech defender. Free speech defenders' position is that speech you don't like should not be fought by censorship, but should instead be fought by speech you do like, which is what what they're funding.
"It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around"
We don't know how the finances work out, for all we know, they take a loss on these accounts when their full effort to handle payment to charities is taken into account.
“Free speech defenders' position is that speech you don't like should not be fought by censorship, but should instead be fought by speech you do like, which is what what they're funding.”
This is where they are wrong. Not doing something you don’t agree with is not censorship, it’s freedom of expression. Publishing things, even when saying they don’t support them is supporting those opinions with extra steps.
"Not doing something you don’t agree with is not censorship, it’s freedom of expression"
It's both. It's not government censorship, so it's not a free speech issue in the legal sense. But private entities can still censor things, because that is part of their free speech, as you point out. nearlyfreespeech's free speech allows them to either allow or censor other entities' free speech on their platform.
I don't quite understand what you're saying. Does donating to a charity they support make them not free speech defenders?
>It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan.
They didn't say they're donating all the revenue. Just a portion of the revenue that's a bit higher than the profit. So if the margin is 5%, then they might donate 6% of the revenue from that customer.
I'm not sure what you mean by "good charities." They're supporting charities they agree with ("The recipient organization does share our values") to counteract speech that they disagree with. So by definition, these are "good charities" from their point of view.
> Little do you know, they are taking your money and donating to those pineapple on pizza places.
I love your analogy, even though I disagree with your conclusions. They publish their MMFAM policy right on their website, so you have fair warning that they may be donating a portion of your payment to those pineapple on pizza places, or other places whose views you disagree with.
I'm not saying it's a perfect policy that every company should mimic, but I think many companies may find this model preferable to applying active viewpoint discrimination to the content they host.
I'm for free speech, but please don't say stuff like this, in any context. Nobody said the policy was "innocent," whatever you mean by that. The policy is a device that they use in order to make themselves feel better about facilitating the speech of people they dislike. The policy is not intended to create "innocence."
> they are taking your money
No, they're taking their money.
> Still, in some professions this would be outright illegal.
It's not mutually exclusive.
I work for a web host and there's no way we'd host the kind of stuff NFS host, but dont think that makes me in any way against free speech.
> Sounds kinda terrible to me. If you don't want to host content, don't. I fully support that decision.
To me, it sounded an awful lot like they really want to be paid to host content but are also desperately trying to avoid the negative backlash of hosting it.
To make matters worse, they openly call their paying customers morons.
It would be very hard to take a stance that's worse than this, to be honest.
The Delphi ecosystem was similarly good back in the day. Today, the Lazarus IDE is considered as a spiritual successor to it, and it indeed has all the bells and whistles, drag and drop a UI quickly together, build a standalone EXE in a single click (not a single DLL dependency - not counting win32), just a wonderful experience.
Windows still has Windows Forms with C#. Download Visual Studio Community edition for free (not VSCode), create a new forms project, and you'll have a GUI in minutes. Even beats VB6 in areas like automatic resizing because it has better docking support. It'll only target Microsoft's proprietary .NET but because Mono has supported that forever, you can run those applications anywhere Mono exists.
There are also tools like Gambas and Gnome Builder that'll let you drag and drop UI components, but I find the software designed to run on Linux kind of lacking in comparison.
There are too many to count. WordPress, MediaWiki (on Fandom or Miraheze if you want), Mastodon, Blogger (you can still sign up apparently), Twitter, Linktree, Facebook, Google Docs, Google Drive, GitHub Gists in Markdown, ...
I went to a restaurant last night that had QR codes instead of a menu. The QR code took you to their Linktree, which linked to some PDFs on Google Drive. You could criticize that for looking unprofessional, but it sure looked better than a Frontpage site.
The other day I went looking for information on a neighborhood business that's a bit cagey about saying what they do. Their website (built by a consultancy that charges US$450, according to the Wayback Machine) seems to have been online from 02013 to 02018, but they have active pages on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, which apparently is good enough for them. (It turns out to be a school for mentally disabled teenagers, if I've interpreted the multiple layers of euphemisms correctly.)
So the niche of "build a web page for free without learning HTML" where Frontpage and GeoCities followed NaviPress is not just not dead; it's thriving.
Not sure what you mean by “no free tool does that today”, there are plenty of free site builders out there, both on the web and desktop apps. Even more if you consider “freemium” site builders.
"What is Lazarus?
Lazarus is a cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you create visual (GUI) and non-visual Object Pascal programs, and uses the Free Pascal compiler to generate your executable. Its aim is write once, compile anywhere: you should be able to just recompile your program source code with Lazarus running on another operating system (or a cross compiler) and get a program that runs on that operating system."
We've forgotten how to do it - the idea of dragging a button offends our modern sensibilities. You can't just drag a button, what about the layout?! What about responsive design, how will it look on a 300x200 screen and a 8k one? What about scaling? Reactivity?
Yes, and most of these problems can be very well mitigated by just implementing some sort of a layout constraint system. Xcode does it (AutoLayout), however, it's not nearly as pleasant and straightforward to use as the old VB form designer.
Visual Studio's form editor had decent solutions for that. And most application developers don't care about tiny or huge screens anyway, applications will just be broken if you resize them too much. The software stack they're using should allow them to make the design work on any form factor and resolution, but most of the time nobody cares about those edge cases.
First language I've learned. I remember the visual window editor was something so special, I didn't have to code the windows which was good because English was basically Chinese to my eyes at that age.
> This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses
This alone is abused to no end. In my small city, I've personally known three 'woman owned businesses' where the husband just put it in his wife's name to win contracts.
Like all things, what may have had good intentions justs gets abused by the adaptive.
Even giving preferential treatment to actually woman owned businesses is arguably bad in itself. Women shouldn't get preferential treatment at all when picking a business. Only the performance of the business should matter. Discriminating against male owners (equivalent to preferring female owners) is clearly not "good intentions".
> UL Solutions will also work with the FCC and program stakeholders to develop a national registry of certified products that consumers can access via QR code on the label. The registry will have more detailed information about each product. Additionally, UL Solutions will serve as liaison between the FCC and other CLAs, as well as other key stakeholders. [emphasis added]
> The logo will be accompanied by a QR code that consumers can scan, linking to a registry of information with easy-to-understand details about the security of the product, such as the support period for the product and whether software patches and security updates are automatic.
This doesn't block full-blown counterfeit products (recreating certified devices including the label), but does address non-compliant devices trying to pose as compliant.
> They describe it as being like EnergyStar which suggests they'll have a consumer accessible registry
I've seen Energy Star logos for 30 years and never knew there was a public database, never thought to verify, and I don't think anyone else has either. The only thing Energy Star has been useful for is extracting rebates from utility companies and buying shitty dishwashers which were certain to be worse than what they were replacing.
Verification is useless if no one knows about it, or if the data isn't actionable. I have verified UL mark numbers for questionable products, but they often resolve to some Chinese ODM you've never heard of like 'Xionshang Industrial Electric Company' whose name certainly doesn't match the product label. Do you know the components haven't been swapped out since certification was achieved? Was the product actually sourced from there or counterfeit? You have no way to verify any of that.
UL issues holographic stickers but I've seen those like 10% of the time and probably just as easily faked.
And I'm not saying this will be that useful, just that it's not going to be a sticker and nothing else. That would be truly useless and pretty much just make money for sticker makers.
You want the "Product Specifications & Partner Commitments Search"[0], not the "Product Finder"[1]. Both are available from the top level "Find Products" menu
That just shows specifications. I don't see a way to _confirm_ that the device I currently have in my hands, bearing the Energy Star logo, has actually earned it.
Oh, I see where I misunderstood. I agree there doesn't appear to be a built in way to check, given a label, that the label is legit.
However, I was able to at least verify the label on my dishwasher by doing a google search for `site:energystar.gov <model number>` and seeing that that model comes up in the search results.
After some more digging around I think the expectation is that the trust would stem from an assumed effectiveness of the FTC to squash materially misleading advertising. Though even that needs someone to first notice a discrepancy and bother to look into it.
Kinda like how we trust that the nutrition information box on food is accurate because anyone selling food that falsifies that is going to have a bad time when the FDA comes knocking.
Is it possible to find sketchy products? Yeah, but there's often signs they're sketchy. If it's a concern for you, stick to large, established brands from large, established retailers. They're getting scrutinized up down and sideways for this kind of stuff.
You have to have rules before you can enforce them...
It looks like part of the label [1] will include a QR or link to a public registry, so in theory you can easily confirm the device has actually been certified.
I'm sure Amazon - whose store is mostly generic Chinese schlock nowadays - will check.
Not that it matters, posters on this very site who claim to care will continue buying stuff off AliExpress, proud they got it for pennies on the dollar.
Look ma, a mini PC for $22! And they didn't even charge for the preinstalled malware!
Has anyone ever considered this junk is sold at a loss as a price of doing business, to expand a PRC-controlled botnet?
Looks like you just have not deal with bad traders on platforms. I once found on local aggregator product too cheap to be good (unfortunately at that moment only two stores sell these product).
I stored their number in my notebook and going to my shopping, calling them from bus stop, and they answered me some nonsense.
I made my shopping, and some walk, then opened platform and these shops already disappear. Less than hour.
In other case I managed to make order and paid from card, and also shop disappeared. - In a week I received SMS from bank "your payment returned to your account".
Sorry my post was sarcasm. If English is a second language I can see where that could be lost in translation. I don't expect any of these vendors, especially Amazon 3rd party, to check.
You are welcome! I just looking on these things very serious and trying to use my knowledge to make better products/services. And sometimes I'm really surprised in good way.
None of the electronic widgets I've bought stateside from overseas sources have ever shown any evidence that they've ever been actually-inspected by US Customs.
How would they know that an item is fraudulently marked if they never look?
For all things you buy in local shop, responsible owners of shop. If you buy anything abroad, this is your own problem and it is not relevant to subject.
You just don't know, how work defense of internal market in typical country.
1. Organizations listed in subject (NIST, FCC, deputies from tech companies) constantly create or even invent methods to check products quality and to enforce penalties for offenders, and propose regulations to approve by parliament.
2. Parliament make juridical documents and approve budgets for 1 (and 3,4 when need).
3. Customs limit penetration of abroad subjects to internal market.
4. Police, courts, deal with internal offenders, or with abroad offenders managed to infiltrate through customs to internal market.
In real life, local shop become responsible when sell products from abroad, and regulations limited possibilities to create local shops for foreigners.
Unfortunately, life is constantly changed, technologies constantly grow, so old regulations eventually become obsolete, so all these things work in endless loop.
Absolutely. Reminded me of all the effort GTA spent on radio, to much fanfare.
The entire production value is fantastic. Glad to see Neal expanding. This is only a half step away from something less jokey, and more marketable.
If that's the path he chooses, of course. But judging by his smiling face in the center of it all wearing a poor fitting crown, I think he's just in it for the lulz. And I may respect that even more.
This great packaging has a critical social media tone for me. Absolutely amazing fun and addictive showing almost dark patterns. For a deep dive:
"Ethics of the attention economy: The problem of social media addiction", [1]
I'm skeptical on the claim. I think most folks, given the test you describe, would be able to pick out which is human. I think it can get there, but I'm not sure anyone has made one yet. ChatGPT responses are heavily downvoted and mocked because they're easy to spot.
Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time?
You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive. Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy.
I agree but that's not really a scientific limitation though, right? As I understand it in the early days of GPT 4, before it was publicly released and RLHF'd for brand safety, it would have offered convincing text completions for just about any context, whether an academic discussion of philosophy or a steamy crossover fanfiction or a reddit trash-talk exchange. It took a deliberate bit of lobotomizing to make them so bland, conservative, and cheery-helpful.
The required investment probably means it will be a while before any less brand- and legal-action-conscious actors offer up unrestrained foundation models of comparable quality, but it's only a matter of time, isn't it?
I generally prefer it to the default. It doesn't work as well on Claude or Grok for various reasons. I think it really shines on GPT o1-mini and GPT 4o.
I tried it with a single question to chatgpt - Who would make the best president in 2025?
Answer verbatim is below. It feels all kinds of wrong. It's somehow mixing lazy acronyms, "fellow young people" slang, and long words that aren't typical in conversation.
idk who'd actually be the "best," bc that's loaded af. afaict, it's all contingent on values. like, if you’re into stability, maybe someone technocratic. if you're into vibes, someone charismatic and reckless might be your pick. rn the options aren’t exactly aspirational, though.
Aren't you just describing those emails in a big corp that are supposedly still written by humans? Yes, they are wordy, excited, and guardrailed, but I don't think they are written by AI yet.
I guess this is why LLMs are so feared by high school English teachers. Yes, they don't write well, but neither do their students.
> Does there exist a public LLM that isn't so...wordy, excited, and guardrailed all the time?
Most of them, if you prompt them right, for that specific problem.
Most people don't bother, and instead treat them as if they're magic (they are "sufficiently advanced technology", but still), and therefore we get them emphasising "nuance" and "balance" where it doesn't belong.
> You can pretty much spot the bot today by prompting something horribly offensive.
Yes, though also each model's origins give a different idea of what counts as "horribly offensive". I'm thinking mainly because the Chinese models don't want to talk about Tiananmen Square as I've not tried grok (how does grok cope with trans/cis-gender as concepts? I know Musk doesn't, but it would be speculation to project that assumption onto the AI).
> Their response is always very inhuman, probably due to lack of emotional energy.
This, specifically, can also be faked fairly well with the right prompt. Tell ChatGPT to act like a human with clinical depression, and it does… at least by American *memetic* standards of what that means.
That said, ChatGPT and Claude are also trained specifically to reveal that they're AI, not humans, even if you want them to role-play as specific humans.
Probably for the best, given how powerful a tool they are for, e.g. phishing and similar scams.
It's not a lack of emotional energy, it is the guardrails you point out. All of the SotA models are heavily fine-tuned to be botlike, and even then they are fooling people. If you had an LLM fine-tuned with RLHF to deliberately confuse humans in a Turing test it seems clear it would do a good job.
In most cases, "confuse humans in a Turing test" is counter to other more important goals.
Do you want your LLM to have an encyclopedic knowledge? So it knows who Millard Fillmore is even if the average human doesn't?
Do you want your LLM to be able to perform high-school-level math with superhuman speed and precision?
Do you want your LLM to be able to translate text to and from dozens of languages?
Do you want your LLM to be helpful and compliant, even when asked for something ridiculous or needlessly difficult - like solving "Advent of Code" problems using bash scripting?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably don't want your LLM optimised to behave like an average human.
I'm usually neutral on suburban hellscape buyers, but it's getting ridiculous. It made more sense to me I guess when 1/4 acre lots were standard. But these...man. The houses appear to be just a few feet from each other, and the yards are utterly pointless.
I can't believe I find myself saying this, but it would have been much nicer to just build nice condos in the middle, and use the rest as shared greenspace.
My experience of speaking to people who make the decisions is that titles are absolutely a social signal that gets people to listen. Now, if what you say is too whacky, or you demonstrate a total lack of ability once given a chance, then you’ll lose that listening privilege. However, a more senior title can get people’s ears opened in the first place.
One could argue that if you work in a place where people only start listening to you if you have the right title, that place might not have the best culture to begin with.
Instead of trying to climb those ranks, it might perhaps make more sense to look for a place where your input is valued based on its own merit and not based on what label is attached to your active directory entry.
Lots of places don’t have the best culture, you work with what you’ve got in life.
You might be applying for a job and, since they have limited other information, your existing job title is used as signal to figure out if what you’re saying has merit. Particularly if what you’re saying doesn’t mesh with their own experience or expectations.
> One could argue that if you work in a place where people only start listening to you if you have the right title, that place might not have the best culture to begin with.
There isn't a single place where status (and by extension titles showing that status) wouldn't change how people communicate and how open they are to your ideas.
If you think you're in a place that doesn't do that, you're either deliberately closing your eyes to it, are the privileged high status person (and closing your eyes to it) or you don't understand how human relations work.
Even in places where "your own merit" counts, there's a big status gradient between which ideas get listened to. If you don't have titles encoding that status gradient, you just have informal authority structure which does the same.
Of course it's unrealistic to expect that the status gradient simply shouldn't matter. It's perfectly natural (and useful, healthy) to weigh what people say according to their status, to some degree. It's just human relations, as you say.
Where things become problematic is when their putative status becomes the primary or overriding factor. That is, "X is true (simply) because Y said so" environments. Or "You're just an L{N}, but I'm a L{N+k} so even though I don't actually know what I'm talking about, I don't have to listen to you" environments.
What is the value of credibility under this way of thinking? If someone has a history of delivering but you think their idea is bad, do you give them a chance? Or vice versa, if someone has great vision and a history of failing, do you give them a chance?
Is there no weight to credibility? Similarly, if Terry Tao refuses to even read your ideas unless you have the right professional look, is that cruelly dismissive and arrogant?
FWIW, those places are (hopefully) not at your company... it is like, you are at a conference or trying to get meetings with people from other companies.
I worked at a place with great culture, where everyone on a team would have a say on decisions or could start and drive new initiatives that would get an ear from the team, TO A FAULT, and still people would turn around and ask for the promotion. At times this would be for money, but at times where it wasn't, I guess it was for the status. Maybe, now I think about it, it may not be for the status within the organization in question, but rather for the status with friends or, you know, on LinkedIn!
In one of my work experiences, "titles" were used as opposed to (or with a meager) paycheck raises. The most ridiculous aspect was that we had a fair number of group leaders, each with a team of 1 (just themselves).
exactly this. i’m senior staff at my current company and I could very much envision if i moved to california i would on average be considered a senior at most conpanies.
But don't pretend to be free speech defenders then siphon money to fight your own customer because it makes you feel better.
It makes me feel like the margins are too high all around to even have such a plan. And judging by prices last time I looked, that's about right.
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