talk about getting the band together the music in heaven must be amazing.
@bmaz It's a great piece! But we face a fundamental problem in that Congress, as currently constituted, abdicates its role. It has the power of the purse, but simultaneously says you must and mustn't spend this amount. I agree full-throatedly with your unitary executive comments! But we cannot not have a unitary executive, and a court for parliament, while Congress is unable to function or provided self-contradictory commands.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite that we are! it's a crime that we didn't lift the debt ceiling to 10 quadrillion or something during the last Congress. Blame Sinemanchin I suppose, although to be fair, they are all too scared of getting demagogued on the issue.
@failedLyndonLaRouchite what's that?
@enmodo I think you want to avoid reasonable accusations of tyranny. A two percent wealth tax on people with at least $50M is tyranny to very few people. Putting the people the public elected, however fucked up they may be, into jail might seem and be pretty tyrannical. 1/
@enmodo Re constitutionality: From 14th Amendment "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned." /fin
@bmaz Probably I did but it's been a while! (I'd read it again if I found it!)
It just seems like there is political hardball to be played in return for political hardball. Too much of the discussion is legalistic or technocratic, too little to find opportunity in an adversary's absurdity.
So, when the debt ceiling binds, every conventional choice involves some sort of unconstitutionality. It's unconstitutional for the govt not to pay its obligations, it's unconstitutional to defy Congress by increasing the debt to fulfill them. There's a third unconsitutional option: the executive cld enforce a tax to balance the budget, say a wealth tax, until the limit is raised. Sure, it's illegal, but so r the alternatives. A wealth tax is good policy, and gets the political incentives right!
Find the cost of freedom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ycj-bQXWRrQ
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender None of the meaningful content is generated by WordPress. LLMs are quite different, in that they produce meaningful content, and that's what commercial users will engage them for. I agree that it's the providers of the LLM, not the LLM itself, that may vie for liability. Like a monkey, there's no way to hold the LLM per se accountable, for a credit of copyright or defamatory damages. I do worry liability might just disappear, as for anonymous speech.
@LouisIngenthron (I edited to append a note that I mistakenly got that one backwards, with a Thx to you for pointing it out!)
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Yeah. I don't think either solution is very satisfactory. In general, I think 230 has been harmful by taking a realm of law that needs a great deal of context and providing too broad a shield, making (non)liability too independent of the facts of cases. But, whatever you and I think shld be, I don't think it's at all clear cut what will be. I can certainly see LLMs provided by third parties deemed "information content provider", regardless of how they are prompted.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender That's definitely the view enshrined in Section 230, whatever I think about it. (Offline, you'd have to be careful about the manner in which you pass it along. If you are very careful to report factually the third party's defamation, maybe you are immunized. But there's no blanket shield, your role in causing any damages might well be litigated.) 1/
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender But you'd extend this duty of care to anything ChatGPT produced from your prompt. If I prompt "Tell me about Louis!" and ChatGPT bullshits, and I pass the whole convo along to a friend, and she forwards it, and what ChatGPT said was not accurate, I am solely responsible. Not OpenAI, not the forwarder. I gotta treat ChatGPT sessions like I authored all the bullshit that it says. /fin
@LouisIngenthron Thanks. Yes, you are right, I wrote that backwards! I meant to say that the forwarder is protected but the originator is liable (which strikes me as wrong when the originator communicates much more privately than the forwarder).
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender I think it's pretty dumb that a person who forwards an e-mail to a big list would be immune, while a person who expected it would be a private correspondence becomes liable. (I don't see where you think I have something backwards. The link took me to the very top of the thread?)
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender No, that's exactly what I said. ChatGPT produces something. You privately forward it to me. I forward it to a big list. Under your theory, you then become liable for ChatGPT's speech. I, the forwarder, am not.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Note also that the plain statutory language of CDA 230 doesn't contain any requirement for a responsible first party. I am immunized for "any information provided by another information content provider", which ChatGPT might reasonably be deemed to be.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Having been around at the time, I'm just going to say I don't think e-mail spam filtering was a meaningful impetus for CDA 230. It may have been on someone's radar, who knows, but e-mail spam wasn't the huge issue it soon became, and it's not meaningfully what provoked the law. Arguing about this doesn't seem like a great use of our time, though, if you want to disagree.
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender Oh shoot. It looks like I didn't actually send this to you. https://fosstodon.org/@interfluidity/109718299288430416
I am sad about David Crosby. The man was tweeting through the day yesterday.
The leak of private information part comes from a text message case, where a private but forwarded defamatory text triggered liability. I could look for the particular case, but here's the gist from a lawyer: "If someone sends a false statement of fact to a) a text message group or b) an individual, who then tells others about the text, the message could be defamatory." 1/
The Section-230-protects-you-as-forwarder from EFF. It's in the plain language of the statute, by virtue of the word "user": "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Here's EFF https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 They play up the "you can safely forward e-mail" stuff, because they are pro-230 and want to make the case it doesn't just shield big tech platforms. /fin
@LouisIngenthron @emilymbender I won't argue with your impressions of close enough, that's for you, but spam was not the problem it would soon become in 1996, provider-based spam filtering didn't exist, and "censors in their own households" had a pretty clear meaning in the context of the Communications Decency Act and the particular cases that gave rise to it. (Prodigy was punished for moderating objectionable content, Compuserve was immune because it didn't.)