The document-centric model of desktop applications largely originates from the early Mac. How do you open a document in a desktop OS? You double-click on the document, and the OS finds the correct application to open it with. That was a Mac thing. On most other systems of the mid-1980s, you run your application program (from the command line) and then tell the program to load a file.

Applications as “bundles” of code and data was a Mac thing too, starting with the resource/code division in the classic Mac System. Rather than an application coming with a mess of directories of libraries and data files, it’s all bundled up into a single application file that can contain structured data (“resources”) for the GUI elements. On a classic Mac, you could load an application program up in ResEdit and modify the menus, add keyboard shortcuts, and so on, without recompiling anything.

The Apple Newton had data persistence of a sort that we now expect on cloud applications like Google Docs. Rather than “saving” and “loading” files, every change was automatically committed to storage. If you turn the device off (or it runs out of battery power), you don’t lose your work.

Last I checked, Christianity includes several strong injunctions against lying and betraying, so he’s doing kinda shitty at Christianity too.

That’d be a confession to treason, then.

It doesn’t have to have a copy of all copyrighted works it trained from in order to violate copyright law, just a single one.

Sure, which would create liability to that one work’s copyright owner; not to every author. Each violation has to be independently shown: it’s not enough to say “well, it recited Harry Potter so therefore it knows Star Wars too;” it has to be separately shown to recite Star Wars.

It’s not surprising that some works can be recited; just as it’s not surprising for a person to remember the full text of some poem they read in school. However, it would be very surprising if all works from the training data can be recited this way, just as it’s surprising if someone remembers every poem they ever read.

We take Visa, Mastercarp, a meow it can express, this cover, Babel, …

“You will personally be assessed a fee of $50 million on November 17, 2024.”

Here’s the actual blog post.

The article about the blog post adds nothing.

Here’s the actual blog post.

The article about the blog post adds nothing.

Taking something away from the woke journalists & tech activists and giving it to the Nazis? Yeah, if that wasn’t the entire point, it certainly was a “nice to have” for Elon.

I’m talking about the necessities of moderation policy.

The things you think it’s “suspect” I’m not saying? Those are things I think are obviously true and don’t need to be restated. Yes, child abuse is very bad. We know that. I don’t need to say it over again, because everyone already knows it. I’m talking specifically about the needs for moderation here.

I’m pointing at the necessary distinction between “you personally morally object to that material” and “that material will cause the law to come down on you and your users and anyone who peers with you”.

You should have the ability to keep both of those off your server, but the latter is way more critical.

“White knighting”? Delete your account.

You’d be surprised by how much of the Internet was built by furries, BDSM folk, and other people whose porn a lot of folks think is weird and icky.

Also, you seem to have misunderstood the gist of my comment, or I wasn’t clear enough. The tools to deal with CSAM will of necessity be a lot stronger than content moderation that’s driven by users’ preferences of what they’d like not to see.

They could go set up email lists on Google Groups and nobody will ever know.

questionable pictures

We need to keep distinguishing “actual, real-life child-abuse material” from “weird/icky porn”. Fediverse services have been used to distribute both, but they represent really different classes of problem.

Real-life CSAM is illegal to possess. If someone posts it on an instance you own, you have a legal problem. It is an actual real-life threat to your freedom and the freedom of your other users.

Weird/icky porn is not typically illegal, but it’s something many people don’t want to support or be associated with. Instance owners have a right to say “I don’t want my instance used to host weird/icky porn.” Other instance owners can say “I quite like the porn that you find weird/icky, please post it over here!”

Real-life CSAM is not just extremely weird/icky porn. It is a whole different level of problem, because it is a live threat to anyone who gets it on their computer.

Twitter has always encouraged gawking at horrible behavior, and its culture has norms like “ratio” which promote “bad examples” so that they can be publicly shamed.

Let’s not be like Twitter.

By definition, some are early adopters and some are late adopters.

Sociologists even have a term “moral entrepreneur” which means a person or group that leads the adoption of a new moral norm in society.

Most advertisers don’t really want their ads to be shown alongside Nazi content. One thing users can do is to send the advertisers’ PR contacts a screenshot of their ad beside someone calling for racial holy war. “Hey, I’m not buying your beans any more because you advertise on Nazi shit” is a pretty clear message.

email spam is the original spam

While it’s true that there was occasional commercial misuse of email in the ARPANET days (when commercial use was against the rules of the military-funded research network), it wasn’t called “spam” then.

Until the mid-1990s, “spamming” typically meant sending repetitious messages rather than inappropriate commercial messages. It wasn’t about what you said, but about how many times you said it. The transition from one meaning to the other mostly happened on Usenet, as commercial abusers took advantage of typically-lax moderation policies to repeatedly post unsolicited advertisements. Major commercial email spam was a branch off of Usenet spam operations.

• 1985: “spamming” on MUDs meant sending junk messages to disrupt a roleplaying session, originally from a player doing this with the text of the Monty Python “Spam” sketch.
• 1991: When a Usenet modbot had a bug that caused it to repeatedly post the same message, a Usenet admin who was also a MUD player referred to this as “spamming” Usenet. The term caught on to mean “excessive multiple posting”, regardless of content; most early Usenet spams were religious proselytization or political kookery.
• 1994: Lawyers Canter & Siegel post the first major commercial Usenet spam. They go on to write a book promoting Usenet and email spamming as a business tactic. At this point, “spamming” starts to be used to refer to inappropriate commercial posting, regardless of volume.

“Shit, if everyone knows that I play girl characters online, they’ll think I’m a trans.”

Yup. And Pennsylvania was founded at a safe enough distance from Massachusetts that the Puritans wouldn’t come down and try to hang the Quakers.

The expression “separation of church and state” in American politics is from Jefferson’s response to the Danbury Baptist Association (of Connecticut), in which he reassured them that the First Amendment meant that other larger religious groups would not be permitted to use the power of the federal government to oppress Baptists.

Religious persecution had been a live issue in New England, where the Congregationalist Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had earlier expelled Baptists, Quakers, and other religious nonconformists from the colony.

You can read the full text of the Danbury Baptists’ letter to Jefferson, and Jefferson’s response, here on Wikipedia.

To summarize greatly, the Baptists say “We believe in religious liberty, but we’ve seen persecution before; and we worry that the federal government will be used to impose someone else’s religious views on us. We want a government that only punishes people for harming others, and can’t be pressured into imposing religious laws.”

And Jefferson says “Yes, that’s why we put this First Amendment thing in; to build a wall of separation between church and state.”