That's why laws against drugs are so terrible, it forces law-abiding businesses to leave money on the table. Repeal the laws and I'm sure there will be tons of startups to profit off of drug addiction.
There are many companies making money off alcohol addiction, video game addiction, porn addiction, food addiction, etc. Should we outlaw all these things? Should we regulate them and try to make them safe? If we can do that for them, can't we do it for AI sex chat?
The world isn’t black and white. Should we outlaw video games? No, I don’t think so. Should we outlaw specific addictive features, such as loot boxes, which are purposefully designed to trigger addiction in people and knowingly cause societal harm in the name of increasing profits for private companies? Probably.
> There are many companies making money off alcohol addiction, video game addiction, porn addiction, food addiction, etc. Should we outlaw all these things?
There are also gangs making money off human trafficking? Does that make it OK for a corporation to make money off human trafficking as well? And there are companies making money off wars?
When you argue with whataboutism, you can just point to whatever you like, and somehow that is an argument in your favor.
They aren't doing whataboutism. They are comparing prohibition/criminalization of a harmful industry to regulation, and the effects of both. Gambling isn't exactly good, but there is definitely a difference between a mafia bookies and regulated sports betting services and the second/third order effects from both. Treating drug use as a criminal act, as opposed to a healthcare problem, has very different societal effects.
Whataboutism is more like "Side A did bad thing", "oh yeah, what about side B and the bad things they have done". It is more just deflection. While using similar/related issues to inform and contextualize the issue at hand can also be overused or abused, but it is not the same as whataboutism, which is rarely productive.
I was using whataboutism to demonstrate how bad of an argument whataboutism is. My arguments were exactly as bad as my parent’s, and that was the point.
Pointing out an inconsistency isn't always whataboutism (and I don't think it was in this case). An implied argument was made that we should regulate LLMs for the same reason that we regulate drugs (presumably addiction, original commenter wasn't entirely clear). It is entirely reasonable to wonder how that might extrapolate to other addictive activities. In fact we currently regulate those quite differently than drugs, including the part where alcohol isn't considered to be a drug for some strange reason.
The point being made then is that clearly there's far more to the picture than just "it's addictive" or "it results in various social ills".
Contrast that with your human trafficking example (definitely qualifies as whataboutism). We have clear reasons to want to outlaw human trafficking. Sometimes we fail to successfully enforce the existing regulations. That (obviously) isn't an argument that we should repeal them.
I don't object to alcohol being tolerated. But I do think that distinguishing it from other drugs is odd. Particularly when the primary reason given for regulating other drugs is their addictiveness which alcohol shares.
We tolerate a recreational drug. Lots of people regularly consume a recreational drug and yet somehow society doesn't split at the seams. We should just acknowledge the reality. I think people would if not for all the "war on drugs" brainwashing. I think what we see is easily explained as it being easier to bury one's head in the sand than it is to give serious thought to ideas that challenge one's worldview or the law.
> I don't object to alcohol being tolerated. But I do think that distinguishing it from other drugs is odd.
The point I was making is that it's not odd, unless you're thinking about human culture wrong (e.g. like its somehow weird that broad rules have exceptions).
> Particularly when the primary reason given for regulating other drugs is their addictiveness which alcohol shares.
One, not all addictive drugs are equally addictive. Two, it appears you have a weird waterfall-like idea how culture develops, like there's some kind identification of a problematic characteristic (addictiveness), then there's a comprehensive research program to find all things with that characteristic (all addictive substances), and finally consistent rules are set so that they're all treated exactly the same when looked at myopically (allow all or deny all). Human culture is much more organic than that, and it won't look like math or well-architected software. There's a lot more give and take.
I mean here are some obvious complexities that will lead to disparate treatment of different substances:
1. Shared cultural knowledge about how to manage the substance, including rituals for use (this is the big one).
2. Degree of addictiveness and other problematic behavior.
No? I don't never said (and don't believe) any of that. I don't think the legislative inconsistency is odd. As you rightly point out it's perfectly normal for rules to be inconsistent due to (among other things) shared culture. The former exists to serve the latter after all, not the other way around.
What I said I find odd is the way people refuse to plainly call alcohol what it is. You can refer to it as a drug yet still support it being legal. The cognitive inconsistency (ie the refusal to admit that it is a drug) is what I find odd.
I also find it odd that we treat substances that the data clearly indicates are less harmful than alcohol as though they were worse. We have alcohol staring us in the face as a counterexample to the claim that such laws are necessary. I think that avoidance of this observation can largely explain the apparent widespread unwillingness to refer to alcohol as a drug.
> One, not all addictive drugs are equally addictive.
Indeed. Alcohol happens to be more addictive than most substances that are regulated on the basis of being addictive. Not all, but most. Interesting, isn't it?
> What I said I find odd is the way people refuse to plainly call alcohol what it is. You can refer to it as a drug yet still support it being legal. The cognitive inconsistency (ie the refusal to admit that it is a drug) is what I find odd.
Maybe the confusion is yours? You think the category is "drug" but it's really more like "taboo drug."
> I also find it odd that we treat substances that the data clearly indicates are less harmful than alcohol as though they were worse. We have alcohol staring us in the face as a counterexample to the claim that such laws are necessary. I think that avoidance of this observation can largely explain the apparent widespread unwillingness to refer to alcohol as a drug.
I think you missed a pretty key point: "shared cultural knowledge about how to manage the substance, including rituals for use (this is the big one)." In the West, that exists for alcohol, but not really for anything else. People know how it works and what it does, can recognize its use, have practices for its safe use that work for (most) people (e.g. drink in certain social settings), and are at least somewhat familiar with usage failure modes. A "less harmful" thing that you don't know how to use safely can be more harmful than a "more harmful" thing you know how to use safely. None of this is "data driven," nor should it be.
> It is entirely reasonable to wonder how that might extrapolate to other addictive activities.
I presume my GP would have no objections to regulating these things their commenter whatabouted. The inconsistency is with the legislator, not in GPs arguments.
Obviously I also think the commenter would support that - I said as much in GP. In context, the reply is suggesting (implicitly) that it is an absurd stance to take. That it means being largely against the way our society is currently organized. That is not a whataboutism.
Like if someone were to say "man we should really outlaw bikes, you can get seriously injured while using one" a reasonable response would be to point out all the things that are more dangerous than bikes that the vast majority of people clearly do not want to outlaw. That is not whataboutism. The point of such an argument might be to illustrate that the proposal (as opposed to any logical deduction) is dead on arrival due to lack of popular support. Alternatively, the point could be to illustrate that a small amount of personal danger is not the basis on which we tend to outlaw such things. Or it could be something else. As long as there's a valid relationship it isn't whataboutism.
That's categorically different than saying "we shouldn't do X because we don't do Y" where X and Y don't actually have any bearing on one another. "Country X shouldn't persecute group Y. But what about country A that persecutes group B?" That's a whataboutism. (Unless the groups are somehow related in a substantial manner or some other edge case. Hopefully you can see what I'm getting at though.)
> a reasonable response would be to point out all the things that are more dangerous than bikes that the vast majority of people clearly do not want to outlaw.
I disagree. It is in fact not a reasonable argument, it is not even a good argument. It is still whataboutism. There are way better arguments out there, for example:
Bicycles are in fact regulated, and if anything these regulations are too lax, as most legislators are categorizing unambiguous electric motorcycles as bicycles, allowing e-motorcycle makers to market them to kids and teenagers that should not be riding them.
Now as for the whatabout cars argument: If you compare car injuries to bicycle injuries, the former are of a completely different nature, by far most bicycle injuries will heal, that is not true of car injuries (especially car injuries involving a victim on a bicycle). So talking about other things that are more dangerous is playing into your opponents arguments, when there is in fact no reason to do that.
I believe you have a categorical misunderstanding of what "whataboutism" actually means.
If the point being made is "people don't generally agree with that position" it is by definition not whataboutism. To be whataboutism the point being made is _required_ to be nil. That is, the two things are not permitted to be related in a manner that is relevant to the issue being discussed.
Now you might well disagree with the point being made or the things being extrapolated from it. The key here is merely whether or not such a point exists to begin with. Observing that things are not usually done a certain way can be valid and relevant even if you yourself do not find the line of reasoning convincing in the end.
Contrast with my example about countries persecuting groups of people. In that case there is no relevant relation between the acts or the groups. That is whataboutism.
So too your earlier example involving human trafficking. The fact that enforcement is not always successful has no bearing (at least in and of itself) on whether or not we as a society wish to permit it.
BTW when I referred to danger there it wasn't about cars. I had in mind other recreational activities such as roller blading, skateboarding, etc. Anything done for sport that carries a non-negligible risk of serious injury when things go wrong. I agree that it's not a good argument. It was never meant to be.
The majority of illegal drugs aren't addictive, and people are already addicted to the addictive ones. Drug laws are a "social issue" (Moral Majority-influenced), not intended to help people or prevent harm.
Drug laws are the confluence of many factors. Moral Majority types want everything they disapprove of banned. People whose lives are harmed by drug abuse want "something" to be done. Politicians want issues that arouse considerably more passion on one side of the argument than the other. Companies selling already legal drugs want to restrict competition. Private prisons want inmates. And so on.
> Repeal the laws and I'm sure there will be tons of startups to profit off of drug addiction.
Worked for gambling.
(Not saying this as a message of support. I think legalizing/normalizing easy app-based gambling was a huge mistake and is going to have an increasingly disastrous social impact).
Because it's still relatively new. Gambling's been around forever, and so has addiction. What hasn't been around is gambling your life away on the same device(s) you do everything else in today's modern society on. If you had an unlimited supply of whatever monkey is on your back, right at your fingertips, you'd be dead before the week is out from an overdose. It's the normalization of this level of access to gambling which gives me great fear for the future. Giving drugs to minors is a bigger crime than to adults for a reason. Without regulation and strong cultural push back, it's gonna get way worse, unless we make huge leaps in addiction treatment (which I am hopeful for. GLP-1s aren't yet scientifically proven to help with that, but there's a large body of anecdotal evidence to suggest it does.
There's a conservation of excitement for each human. If someone's life was exciting but then it got boring, unless they do a shit ton of work on themselves, they're gonna have to find that excitement somehow. We see this with Hollywood actresses who shoplift when they have more than enough money to buy the things they stole.
US prohibition on alcohol and to the large extent performative "war on drugs" showed what criminalization does (empowers, finances and radicalises the criminals).
Portugal's decriminalisation, partial legalisation of weed in the Netherlands, legalisation in some American states and Canada prove legal businesses will better and safer provide the same services to the society, and the lesser societal and health cost.
And then there's the opioid addiction scandal in the US. Don't tell me it's the result of legalisation.
Legalisation of some classes of the drugs (like LSD, mushrooms, etc) would do much more good than bad.
Conversely, unrestricted LLMs are avaliable to everyone already. And prompting SOTA models to generate the most hardcore smut you can imagine is also possible today.
> Portugal's decriminalisation, partial legalisation of weed in the Netherlands, legalisation in some American states and Canada prove legal businesses will better and safer provide the same services to the society, and the lesser societal and health cost.
You’re stretching it big time. The situation in the Netherlands caused the rise of drug tourism, which isn’t exactly great for locals, nor does it stop crime or contamination.
As for Portugal, decriminalisation does not mean legalisation. Drugs are still illegal, it‘s just that possession is no longer a crime and there are places where you can safely shoot up harder drugs, but the goal is still for people to leave them.
>Portugal's decriminalisation, (..) prove legal businesses will better and safer provide the same services to the society, and the lesser societal and health cost.
Portugal's success regarding drugs wasn't about the free market. It was about treating addicts like victims or patients rather than criminals, it actually took a larger investment from the state and the benefits of that framework dissolved once budgets were cut.
It's not just chat. Remember image and video generation are on the table. There are already a huge category of adult video 'games' of this nature. I think they use combos of pre-rendered and dynamic content. But really not hard to imagine a near future that interactive and completely personalized AI porn in full 4kHDR or VR is constantly and near-instantly available. I have no idea the broader social implications of all that, but the tech itself feels inevitable and nearly here.
What if it knows you and knows how often you spend kinds of time on it? People would lie to it for excuses of why they need more and can't wait any longer?
At some point there will be robots with LLMs and actual real biological skin with blood vessels and some fat over a humanoid robot shell. At that point we won’t need real human relationships anymore.
Yeah, we had one near us, close to the metro exit, and it was genuinely great when you needed to grab something for dinner on the way home. Once you knew where things were, you could be in and out in 20 seconds. That said, it never seemed busy compared to other grocery shops in the area, so I think a lot of people were put off by it feeling "weird" to shop without checking-out.
You can use the Apple Store app to purchase physical items at Apple retail locations (smaller items like cables or cases). I've used it a couple of times, and I feel very awkward using it, so much so that I'll walk out kinda waving the receipt/acknowledgement screen around so that staff/security can hopefully see I'm not nicking something.
IIRC the Fresh near my old job required you to have a Prime membership, otherwise it was just a normal grocery store. I only went in there a few times, but I don't have a Prime membership, so there wasn't much of a point.
To be fair to Wright, there were a bunch of big budget movies in 2025 that flopped: Thunderbolts, Tron Ares, Snow White, etc. There’s definitely a wider phenomenon at work of cinema struggling in general. But I agree, Wright’s big-budget career is likely over.
I like to think that if he managed to produce another smash hit maybe studios will take another chance. Studios know he is respected by the fans. Hes just got to show that he can bring in the dough and that Baby Driver wasn't just a fluke. Running Man seemed very sloppy and not what we have come to expect from him and I heard on the grapevine that the studio pushed down a lot of executive decisions. If true, that could explain some things but still surprising given his past history with Ant-Man.
It's also an submission to UC hastings law journal, as it also says right before that?
The automated tagging with a BUSL ID is just how BUSL's system for papers of any sort works.
For reference: I did my first year of law school at BUSL so i'm very familiar with how it all works there :)
This is also very common elsewhere - everything that IBM used to release got tagged with a technical report number too, for example, whether it was or not.
In any case - it is clearly a piece meant to be persuasive writing, rather than deep research.
Law journals contain a mix of essentially op-eds and deeper research papers or factual expositories/kind of thing. They are mostly not like scientific journals. Though some exist that are basically all op-ed or zero op-ed.
Which is a piece in UC law journal meant as an informative piece cataloguing how california courts adjudicate false advertising law. It does not really take a position.
Which is a piece in UC hastings law journal meant as, essentially an op ed, arguing that dog sniff tests are bullshit.
I picked both of these at random from stuff in UC hastings law journal that had been cited by the Supreme Court of California. There are things that are even more factual/take zero positions, and things that are even more persuasive writing/less researchy, than either of these, but they are reasonable representatives, i think
So RWE, the German multinational that won the largest share of this auction, with a yearly revenue of €29bn and an existing 153.2 TWh of power generation, is going to need a bailout from the British government, in the next four years, over a project to supply 7GW?
Revenue isn't profits. Their free cash flow has been negative billions for the last few years. A major capital project like this can only result in a bailout.
If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.
Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?
Listening to someone talking is how humanity transmitted culture and stories for tens of thousands of years. The fact that "we" cannot tolerate it anymore, is a sign of how badly our brains are being reshaped (or maybe damaged) by screens.
Oral transmission of complex culture is one of the things that separates us from "the state of nature". As we lose it, we move further away from the beasts that conquered the planet and closer to the squirrel.
Transmission of complex culture is what separates us (and enables this complex culture in the first place); oral medium is merely one way to do it. Being the first one, it's probably not the best.
We had tried video in the car for our teens, but found that audio books worked a lot better - shared experience, nobody has a bad angle/line of sight, can still see the scenery and engage in the travel, less looking down prompting motion sickness, etc.
Though now that everybody has a device, we have to intentionally opt for a shared experience, rather than 1:1 devices.
And if you keep reading (at whatever speed), you get to the actual point of the article:
>So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.
Audiobook are mouth speed but have no pause. When reading slowly, I often want to pause a few seconds and think about what I just read before moving on to the next sentence.
I pause audiobooks all the time by squeezing the base of my earbud, or pressing the big pause button on my Bluetooth speaker. Works great. As well as the triple-tap to go back 15 seconds to hear something again.
Not the OP, but to me audio generally x2 slower than I read, so I’m content with the speed, anything slower than that would be weird pace for many stuff.
Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks
First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
That to me, feels opposite the the article's advice.
And I too, often watch youtube at 1.5x or 2x speed, and dislike audiobooks because I read so much faster that I can possibly listen to them, and there's always an ever growing list/pile of books I want to read after this one. I wonder if that's why a certain type of movie works so well for me - I think of them as "movies made from short stories, not novels", and now I'm wondering if it's something similar to the OP's idea - and that spending 2 hours watching a short story I'd expect to read in 15/20mins is what I'm enjoying, in a different way to, say, the new Dune movies - which so far have been 4-5 hours watching a couple of big novel's worth of story that'd take me a week or so to read? Just writing that out now, I realised theres a two orders of magnitude difference in speed there going from 1/10th of reading speed to 10x reading speed - from a 15 minute read to 2 hour watch, to a week long read to 4-5 hour watch. Hardly surprising they hit my brain differently.
Audiobooks are awesome because I can listen to them while doing other things like walking or biking or lifting weights. And the best narrators actually improve the books like The Hail Mary Project and Blood Meridian.
That's the exact opposite of what the article is about. The desire to time optimize, to rush it cause "this is sooo sloooow, booooring" is what creates only an illusion of time efficiency but you might discover that if you actually give it the time, there is a whole world to discover. That's what the article is about.
It isn't just how fast or slow it is. Reading at a slow pace gives you time to think in a way that is flexible from sentence to sentence.
To borrow the same analogy from the article, image trying to savor a meal where someone else was deciding when you take each bite. Even at a slow pace, the rigidness of the pace and your lack of fine control would still pose a problem with giving each bite it's rightful consideration.
That being said I love audio books and think I would struggle to apply this article's advice in my own life. Slowing down your audiobook is still a step in that direction, though I sometimes find that slowing it down can cause my mind to wander and my comprehension goes down and not up.
I think this often sounds unsettling (like the reader is drunk or otherwise impaired), and anyway the listener doesn't need more time to recognise each individual word -- they want time to take in sentences and paragraphs.
Get a text to speech app and change the lengths between sentences while keeping the actual read aloud speed the same, I recall using something like that before.
I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.
For me, "overindulgent and annoying" is way too harsh. But they feel _sooooo_ slow and I kind of resent "missing out" on the other books I could have read while the audiobook plods along (even at chipmunk 2x babble speed).
for lotr in particular my last reread was slower paced because I kept this map[0] open and paused frequently to refer to it and see where everyone was. it was super enjoyable, I have literally read the book dozens of times before that and have never gotten so good a sense of the world's geography and the difficulty of various journeys.
"Ban all plastics" is a strawman that will not happen and no mainstream opinion is suggesting. But there is a wide spectrum of possibilities between "ban all plastics" and "do nothing".
A principal concern is ingestion of microplastics via food packaging, utensils, cookware, etc. There are non-plastic substitutions available for many of these items, and a precautionary approach would be to regulate to require them, where it is economically feasible, until such time as the effects of microplastic ingestion are better understood.
But isn't that a limitation of the AI, not necessarily how the AI is integrated into the software?
Personally, I don't want AI running around changing things without me asking to do so. I think chat is absolutely the right interface, but I don't like that most companies are adding separate "AI" buttons to use it. Instead, it should be integrated into the existing chat collaboration features. So, in Figma for example, you should just be able to add a comment to a design, tag @figma, and ask it to make changes like you would with a human designer. And the AI should be good enough and have sufficient context to get it right.
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