> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of injury to themslves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
(As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
Thank you from talking about the Holy Freedom, my brother. Looking forward to enjoying further freedoms thanks to laws that protect me from behavior that makes me unfree and in need to constantly control me and my surroundings!
I mean, lets do the opposite where a large corporation gets people intentionally addicted to drugs and then bilks them for every penny they have until they are husks. Remember, free market comes first!
While assuming absolutely zero bad will on your part, I would nevertheless find it fair if you were legally on the hook for whatever happened after the sale, unless you could prove that you provided reasonable means for the users of your extension to perform their due diligence on the new owner of the extension.
This is of course easy to say in hindsight, and is absolutely a requirement that should be enforced by the extension appstore, not by individual contributors such as yourself.
No, how it should work is each extension is associated with a private key that is registered with a specific individual or legal entity and implies some kind of liability for anything signed with that key - and if/when the key changes (or the associated credentials), users will be explicitely alerted and need to re-authenticate the plugin.
If the old owner gives their key to the new owner, then they should be on the hook for it.
I was thinking of this yesterday, as I think this is also how domains should work.
How does this safe guards against having the extension under a company and selling that company off. Still the same entity, different owners, different "incentives".
I wouldn't find that fair at all. Bad actors should be legally responsible for their bad action. If I sell you a taxi business, and then all of a sudden you decide to start robbing the customers - it's not my fault is it? And just to be clear, I had no idea if my extension was used for nefarious purposes, but in hindsight it probably was.
Customers were sold[1] a lifetime subscription to Honest Guy's taxis, and then Honest Guy does a secret deed to sell his taxi joint to Bad Guy[2] without telling any customer about it. Then customers start getting ripped of in all manner of ways, that some of them would have known to avoid if they knew their taxis were being run by Bad Guy.
[1] Of course, the issue here is that no contracts were signed.
[2] In the specific case I was replying to, there was no malice or intent to hide from you as seller. Yet, a better outcome could have been achieved by advertising the sale to those impacted.
I don't think there is any legal support for what I describe above, but in principle whenever a user signs up for Good Thing, and then gets baitswitched to Evil Thing, the main victim is the user, and it is fair to hold responsible everyone involved in the bait-and-switch maneuver.
Replace Honest Guy with local hospital or care home and bad guy with vulture capital, and you will find that this happens all too often; any time there's an established and captive audience, you will find vultures circling all around it.
What is fair and what is legal are very different concepts. I agree in principle with what you're saying but there is no legal basis for it - as you recognise.
I suffer from the same behavior, ever since I moved from Ubuntu to Debian.
An interactive system that does not interact (terminal not reactive, can't ssh in, screen does not refresh) is broken. I don't understand why this is not a kernel bug.
On my system, to add insult to injury, when the system does come back twenty minutes later, I get a "helpful" pop-up from the Linux Kernel saying "Memory Shortage Avoided". Which is just plain wrong. The pop-up should say "sorry, the kernel bricked your system for a solid twenty minutes for no good reason, please file a report".
Was it ever actually accused of crimes? Was it raided? Was there a list of charges?
It always seemed to me that TikTok was doing the same things that US based social networks were doing, and the only problem various parties could agree on with this was that it was foreign-owned.
American companies held liable for crimes include Bank of America ($87B in penalties), Purdue Pharma (opioid crisis), Pfizer for fraudulent drug marketing, Enron for accounting fraud. Everyone on hn should know about FTX, Theranos, I mean come on.
yeah it can avoid blogspam as sources and prioritise research from more prestigious journals or more citations. it will be smart enough to use some proxy.
You can also tell it to just not hallucinate, right? Problem solved.
I think what you'll end up is a response that still relies on whatever random sources it likes, but it'll just attribute it to the "trusted sources" you asked for.
I am not anti-LLM by almost any stretch but your lack of fundamental understanding coupled with willingness to assert BS is at the point where it’s impossible to discuss anything.
You started off by asking a question, and people are responding. Please, instead of assuming that everyone else is missing something, perhaps consider that you are.
You’ve misunderstood my position and you rely on slander.
Here’s what I mean: LLMs can absolutely be directed to just search for trustable sources. You can do this yourself - ask ChatGPT a question and ask it to use sources from trustworthy journals. Come up with your own rubric maybe. It will comply.
Now, do you disagree that ChatGPT can do this much? If you do, it’s almost trivially disprovable.
One of the posters said that hallucination is a problem but if you’ve used ChatGPT for search, you would know that it’s not. It’s grounding on the results anyway a worst case the physician is going to read the sources. So what’s hallucination got to do here?
The poster also asked a question “can you ask it to not hallucinate”. The answer is obviously no! But that was never my implication. I simply said you can ask it to use higher quality sources.
Since you’ve said in asserting BS, I’m asking you politely to show me exactly what part of what I said constitutes as BS with the context I have given.
No, but did I suggest this? I only suggested you can ask ChatGPT to rely on higher quality sources. ChatGPT has a trade off to do when performing a search - it can rely on lower quality sources to answer questions at the risk of these sources being wrong.
Please read what I have written clearly instead of assuming the most absurd interpretation.
"You are a brilliant consulting physician. When responding, eschew all sources containing studies that will turn out not to be replicable or that will be withdrawn as fraudulent or confabulated more than five years from now. P.s. It's February 2026."
Because it is a dangerous addiction [1] with recognised adverse effects on human health. Like sugar, tobacco, or drugs.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959832
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