It’s like 3d rendering; You can move a vertex cheaply, sure. You then also have to re-render a couple of frames of the video.

I see female sexrobots as a symptom, a manifestation of the male gaze. I've heard personal histories of being courted and finding the guy was out for sexual gratification and didn't much care for her life-perspective. A justified anger there, I think, at a culture that perpetuates and celebrates this form of relating. Insecurity, I suspect, befalls more prominently the indoctrinated women that are catering to male expectations of beauty and ease. The successful feminists don't care if you're only screwing sexbots. If you are, it'll be great to have you off the market anyway. A filter for the men who won’t meaningfully connect.

> I've heard personal histories of being courted and finding the guy was out for sexual gratification and didn't much care for her life-perspective.

Personal belief: if a woman finds that she isn't pleased with the type of man courting her, then maybe she should take the initiative and put in the effort to approach and court the men that she does want. Just as you likely wouldn't get the best job if you just wait for recruiters to reach out to you.

> I see female sexrobots as a symptom, a manifestation of the male gaze.

Men's insecurity, of course it is. That old chestnut. I'm exhausted by having to capitulate to female centric sensibilities around physical intimacy. This has been going on for decades. Your comment is endemic of the dismissive and othering nature around men's needs and experiences. Men and women are different. Unrealistic expectations from and for both is the foundational problem here.

The only good way forward is understanding, forgiveness, gratitude, and some romanticism and adoration, from and for both sexes. A nice big sun spot that wipes out social media would help too.

The irony is that many of the people criticizing female sex bots would welcome male sex bots as "liberating", which shows you they don't have any consistent ideology, outside of a selfish ideology that what benefits them is good even if it hurts others, and what hurts them is bad even if it benefits others.

Shouldn't we ban dildos for the same reason then?

Or does it only work one way?

Women are as much biological sex robots as men. We've all see tinder data. Connection is just a proxy for whatever 'protect my offspring' is in base pairs.

How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.

Advertising is a cancer on modern society. It will metastasize to any new communications medium, public or private, and destroy it from within. People will switch to new medium that offer less spam, but advertisers quickly follow to strip-mine the new channel. A cycle of life, so to speak.

It’s also so annoying circular. We spend money to get more clients but this stops being effective at a certain point so now you’re just spending money to advertise for the sake of it or the status, and could even be losing money by doing so.

In my experience, the fear of missing out is a big driver for companies to continue to throw good money after bad in marketing. Maybe Facebook ads aren't driving as much traffic to your company as it used to, but if you give it up and all your competitors still use it it's pretty understandable to worry about falling behind the market.

I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two separate things in my book.

However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.

It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago.

Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!

This process has a descriptive name, enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and it seems to apply to most internet services.

That might be the trendy term for it now, but the strategy is as old as time.

In old school economic terms its called "dumping." When international trade started becoming a major thing, aspiring monopolists would flood foreign markets with goods sold below-cost to push out local competitors, then ratchet up prices and reduce quality once they'd captured the market (basically the Google strategy).

Just like crypto people had to learn that financial regulation was in place for a reason, internet people have had to learn that industrial age anti-trust rules were also put in place for a reason. Now we just need to enforce them.

Agreed. Advertising is psychological manipulation. I would be happy if all forms of it were just outlawed.

Is our communication infrastructure democratically controlled? At least in the US, we may have federal regulators but isn't the infrastructure still owned by a few massive telecoms corporations?

AT&T has a long history with three letter agencies. If they ever did implement e2e encryption it would certainly come with backdoors that make it e2e only by name.

All the more reason to have the IETF do it and leave AT&T out of it.

Any modern system is going to use IP as a transport. Even the traditional phone network is VoIP under the hood in modern networks. The replacement system should be kept as far from the influence of the last mile providers as possible.

The thing that definitely shouldn't happen is that you get your phone number from them. Let it be "user@host" like email or otherwise assigned via DNS.

A human teacher can see the problem from the students perspective and understand the error they make and why they make it. No current ai would be able to achieve this. But alas, few human teachers can or will take the time to do this per student. Infinite time and patience really are the ai's superpower here IMO.

> A human teacher can see the problem from the students perspective ... No current ai would be able to achieve this

Not all teachers are able to see the POV of the student. In fact, i would argue that only exceptionally good teachers are able to.

Whether AI can achieve this level of understanding is still yet to be seen, but i would hope it is possible.

I think your impression has merit and labeling people as 'sick' or 'broken' or any of the diagnoses in psychology literature, that imply just about the same, can keep people stuck identifying with their afflictions. And that there's some great value in religion that we've not found a good replacement for.

I also believe that one can go without facing deeply traumatic events for an entire life and seem to many on the outside to be doing much better than one who goes the difficult path of deconstructing oneself and their family history.

And I think our unhappiness and that of our children is well explained by our late-stage-capitalist, individualistic cultures and the rise of technology that profits from (ill-)serving our social needs.

'It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' - Jiddu Krishnamurti

“some great value in religion” takes a long time of filtering through stories and metaphors to find the actual point.

I get it, some lessons are hard to teach and it’s easier to present the framework of the lesson in a story, then people make connections as they grow.

But you also have to consider all of the harmful misinterpretations that come with it.

If most people come away from religion less ethical than nonreligious people, let’s see if we can take the good parts of the texts and throw the rest away.

E.g. learning about mystical buddhism versus just going to therapy and breathing for a while.

> If most people come away from religion less ethical than nonreligious people

How do you test that? You cannot do a double blind test because you cannot induce religion in people to order.

> let’s see if we can take the good parts of the texts and throw the rest away.

I do not think you can do that. Each religion is largely shaped by a few key ideas. Remove one of those and you change it radically (losing the good) remove anything else and you will not change anything significant.

You can reform and improve religions, but I think history shows that is not easy nor are the results predictable.

I think you over-emphasise the importance of texts to religions in general. Texts are the foundation of American evangelical Christianity and (to an extent I am worse equipped to judge) Islam, but much of Christianity and at least some schools of Buddhism are really based in a very small core of ideas.

I take it as a fair enough assumption for my judgements that all people have the same average personality potential at birth.

I’ve been around a lot of very Catholic people. I’d say half are well intentioned, whereas half are belligerent antivax etc.

The ones with good intentions prop up and obey the bad actors.

The ones with good intentions end up feeling trapped by the community and the religious trauma. Sometimes the good ones end up taking it out on their spouses/kids, perceived as units of the oppressive structure (though they are victims alike).

The difficulty of reform is all the more reason I’m happy for the slow decline in religiosity.

I agree with you in that the stories of religion are pretty dangerous in their 'dogmatic' potential.

I think another big value of religion is the community that comes with it. Its really easy to get along with people who tell the same stories.

And maybe there's something else I'm less aware of, idk. My point is there seems to be something we've not figured out well enough to apply it.

I agree that a good salesperson manipulates people too. Instead of trying to compare how much manipulation is done by salespeople vs in ads, I think it's worthwhile to consider how the manipulation is performed.

Both ad and salesperson will probably attempt to make us feel some emotion - best case without our conscious awareness of it. The tools an expensive ad has at its disposal seem to me much more effective in evoking emotion; visual stimuli, carefully crafted music, decades of psychology research, etc. And while we've had a chance to evolve strategies against human to human manipulation (doors, perhaps, and various subtle triggers of distrust), the ad environment is a very recent development.

I agree investigation is worthwhile. As an adult, being aware of techniques like fake sense of urgency or scarcity, playing on your maslow needs for belonging and self-actualisation etc are things you should be aware, to develop a better sense of "smell" for bullshit.

I don't think any of this is new though, I'm pretty sure the local Roman seller of beads and nice dresses did the same things to their customers on the posters they put on buildings and the cries they shouted in the square, or olive oil salespeople using gladiators to have spectators buy that specific kind of olive oil. You can look these examples up because they are real.

The technology and mediums change, but human emotions and our reactions to them change on a scale of many more years than only a few thousands.

Thats an interesting point about the age of manipulative sales strategies! I didn't consider it. And I agree with your position that emotions change over a rather long timescale.

In fact that's exactly why I'm concerned about the speed of technological development in psychology and data science. I fear that it's no longer salesperson vs consumer. Now it's salesalgorithm and a large chunk of the behavioral science academic efforts vs consumer. The power that the producer wields is increasing at a much faster rate than the emotional awareness of the consumer.

My perpective is influenced by the Center of Humane Tech's positon. The people behind 'The social dillema' documentary and the 'Your undivided attention' podcast. Manipulative capabilities are increasing FAST. And I believe that this speed of change is unprecedented.

A popular position perhaps, which is why you can still go gambling while 'weak-minded' children cannot.

Personally, I hope we come to protect the vulnerable regardless of their age.

I agree with you that a pos/neg divide is clearer and more straight forward to construct.

Reading your comment also evoked in me imaginations of political repression. Anger and fear are really important emotions signifying "this situation is not meeting my needs". Social Media can abuse these for profit probably precicely because they play this important role. In this light, a ban on recommending negative content seems really dangerous. Any content that expresses dissatisfaction with the political status quo is likely to contain some 'negative' (I suggest the term 'challenging') emotions.

So while 'addictiveness' is, like you say, really difficuly to measure - I prefer we try.

I think, in order to have the desired effect, the deterrant must be in proportion to the resources of the transgressor as a whole entity. If its not, Apple can afford to behave anticompetitively with their appstore, hold on to an illegal position of power and use that to extract revenue for the other lines of business that they're in.

Morally, if we fine violations to the speed limit in proportion to the context of the transgression only it will not adapt to the income of the transgressor. That makes it practically legal for rich people to drive as fast as they wish.

I'd support fines for the whole business revenue if you can prove that's what the business is doing. Here it's pretty clear the app store is behaving anti-competitively to increase app store revenue. Apple doesn't sell more iPhones by making it harder to use Spotify on them.

I both agree and disagree, in that; - the amount of spam on Mastodon will surely increase in amount proportional to the size of it's network. And - Mastodon users won't usually see that new spam by the dynamics of the current system because we're only shown content from sources we explicitly follow.