The fact that the organization is Jewish is stated prominently in the article, but I’m not entirely sure why that’s relevant. Many charities in the US have religious affiliations.
The adult matchmaking etc, that deviates substantially from their advertising.
It's relevant because the fact that it's religious organization was an important fact in the judge's ruling. From the article:
> If Kars4Kids resumes advertising, [Judge Apkarian] wrote, its ads must contain “an express, audible disclosure of its religious affiliation and the geographic location of its primary beneficiaries and the age of the beneficiaries, specifying whether they aim for children or families, or both.”
It would depend on what the precise federal/state law regulating charities is - it sounds, to me, (I'm a Kiwi, but heard one of their ads on the radio today in an Uber in SF) like they need to be more specific about what charity they're raising money for - the after just said "for charity".
I'm sure you'd agree that if I was advertising in the name of kids to raise money for a charity, and it happened to be that the particular charity I was raising money for had determines it should give Hamas money to help those kids, that potential donors would prefer to know where exactly their money was going to.
It's not at all wild if the charity presents itself as non-discriminatory (ostensibly to deceive "outsiders" into misguided donations) while specifically benefiting the ethno-religious group of its administration.
The religious disclosure requirement feels like it may be a 1st amendment violation. Also perhaps even the rest of it as “compelled speech” (why does the judge decide how they fix their ads?) is it typical for charities to disclose exactly how they use their funds in ads? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.
I agree the ads shouldn’t be misleading of course.
Next you’ll tell me that UNICEF isn’t exclusively saving starving orphans in Africa.
> Kars4Kids primarily funds a New Jersey-based Jewish organization, Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York, the judge wrote. The only program in California that Kars4Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Kars4Kids-branded backpacks, she found.
Both "giving almost no money to kids" and that the recipients (mostly adults) it did benefit were "based on religious affiliation" seem fairly surprising to me. If I donated a car, I would feel mislead by both.
The identity and entity matters. It's not a random group who did a random thing for a random reason, it's a specific group who did a thing for a specific reason.
No one else made them behave in the way that got them called out. There is no religious persecution going on here. It's not a case of "But why does it matter he's black?". The act was specifically performd by a religious group, specifically for the benefit of that religious group only, under false pretenses of being neutral.
The people you are implying are being prejudged, are in fact the ones who commited the prejudice and discrimination.
Because it's not obvious at all from their commercials, and that's how most people come to know about this shady org.
In CharityWatch’s view, the Kars4Kids ads deceive potential donors by failing to inform them that donated cars will benefit a Jewish organization and kids of Jewish faith. Furthermore, the youth programs Kars4Kids supports promote an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, which CharityWatch believes compounds the deception perpetrated by the Kars4Kids ads
Let's assume the charity was Catholic and didn't inform people: do you think that wouldn't be mentioned? What about Muslim, Hindu, Satanic?
People have very strong feelings about their money going to religious organizations, especially if the organization doesn't state that they're religious in nature.
Let's do this: What are you implying? Because it seems that you're implying special treatment because this organization is Jewish, and that's not likely the case here in most people's eyes, but explain why you might think that is if that's what you believe.
Anthropomorphizing is likely a mistake, but Daniel Dennett’s idea that the most straightforward (possibly only practical) way to create the external appearance of consciousness is a real internal consciousness does float around in my thoughts.
I haven’t yet seen any convincing appearance of one in an LLM, but I think if skeptical people don’t keep an eye out for the signs, we may be the last to see it.
He also wrote about the idea of the intentional stance: even if you’re quite sure these systems don’t have real conscious intent, viewing them as if they did may give you access to the best part of your own reasoning to understand them.
I totally agree to your point, and want to mention that the reverse is *also* important. Using just "intention", but these apply to emotions, etc
A lot of our interaction with AI is under an intention. That's what directs the interaction, and it's interpreted according to its alignment to the intention.
Then it's important to remember that our current (publicly known) implementation of AI does not have an explicit intention mechanism. An appearance of intention can emerge out of the statistical choices, and the usual alignment creates the association of the behavior with intention, not much different from how we learn to imagine existence of a "force" that pulls things down well before we learn physics and formalize that imagination in one of the several ways.
This appearance helps reduce the cognitive load when interpreting interactions, but can be misleading as well, and I've seen people attribute intention to AI output in some situations where simple presence of some information confused the LLM into a path. Can't share the exact examples (from work), but imagine that presence of an Italian food in a story leads the LLM to assume this happens in Italy, while there are important signs for a different place. The LLM does not automatically explore both possibilities, unless asked. It chooses one (Italy in this case), and moves on. A user no familiar with "Attention" interprets based on non-existent intentions on the LLM.
I found it useful to just tell them: the LLM does not have an intention. It just throws dice, but the system is made in a way that these dice throws are likely to generate useful output.
> but Daniel Dennett’s idea that the most straightforward (possibly only practical) way to create the external appearance of consciousness is a real internal consciousness does float around in my thoughts.
Pretty sure Daniel Dennett has been adamantly opposed to any sort of theater in the mind when it comes to consciousness. He views it as biologically functional. For him, to make a conscious robot, you need to reproduce the functionality of humans and animals that are conscious, not just an appearance, such as outputting text. Although he's also suggested that consciousness might be a trick of language. In which case ... that might be an older view though. He used to argue that dreams were "seeming to come to remember" upon awakening, because again he his view is to reject any sort of homunculus inside the head.
You might be mixing up some of Dennett and David Chalmer's views. David Chalmers is a proponent of the hard problem, but he's fine with a kind of psycho-physical-functional connection for consciousness. Any informationally rich process might be conscious in some manner.
> but Daniel Dennett’s idea that the most straightforward (possibly only practical) way to create the external appearance of consciousness is a real internal consciousness does float around in my thoughts.
I would say LLMs are very strong evidence against this hypothesis.
I don't really understand the argument for these things being conscious. There's no loop or feedback cycle to it. If it's not handling a request it's inert.
The working programmer might be interested in the series on ropes on the Xi Editor website[1] as a practical application, as it motivates the concept as it goes. (Alternatively, if you’ve taken an algorithms class you have probably encountered the idea of computing things over an interval of an array by storing them in for each node of a tree that flattens to that array, such as a search tree or interval tree.)
I was also dissatisfied with existing task tracking apps, and built my own:
t-do.com
There are still many rough edges, but it’s extremely useful. One of the best features that a text file has that very few apps support is unlimited sub-task nesting, and that’s a core feature of T-Do.
I disagree. There are many operators that you’ll never use but if you memorize
(^.), (.~), and (%~), you’re pretty much set for a lot of real-world software development.
Per Kmett’s original talk/video on the subject, I can confirm my brain shifted pretty quickly to look at them like OOP field accessors. And for the three above, the mnemonics are effective:
“^.” is like an upside down “v” for view.
“.~” looks like a backwards “s” for setters.
“~%” has an tilde so it’s a type of setter and “%” has a circle over a circle, so it’s over.
I’ll also add that my experience in recent versions of PureScript things get even nicer: visible type application lets you define record accessors on the fly like:
foo ^. ln@“bar” <<< ln@“baz”
“.” Is unfortunately a restricted character and is not the composition operator like Haskell, but I alias “<<<“ with “..”
The pretty obvious question with the above is: why don’t you just write “foo.bar.baz”. In my case I use a framework that uses passed lenses for IoC, but I think “%~” is always nicer and less repetitive than the built-in alternative.
There's actually a bit of a controversy over what the original film actually looked like. There are 35mm scans out there with no colour grading at all (e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ow1KDYc9XsE). Some people claim it never had the green and it was added later for the DVDs. The sequels definitely had it but turned up to 11. Trouble is nobody can really remember what they saw in the cinema in 1999 and there's a bit of Mandela effect going on thanks to retroactive grading and sequels.
I saw an original 35mm print at Cinespia somewhat recently and it's definitely not the green tint. That was added later.
The original look was a bleach bypass film process which was very colourful with blown highlights. There should be quite a bit of info on this online I would think.
Coolest part of this whole experience is that the Cinespia venue is at the Hollywood Forever in LA - it's a giant old cemetery with a huge lawn and massive screen. During the final scenes when Neo is about to fight Agent Smith in the rain it actually starts raining in real life (obviously rare for Los Angeles). People started leaving but I thought it was pretty damn amazing.
Yep, KV is broken too. Any worker that depends on KV is throwing exceptions. I was able to get into the dash, but it's very slow. Error rates started to go up significantly around 18:00 UTC.
It's not much of a reach to go from "discussion about impact on human-verification dialogs" to 'discussion about human-verification dialog policy". This isn't an incident-management channel, it's a discussion forum - tangents are fine!
I complained in the apnews.com thread, because the apnews.com verification, which is annoying by itself, did not work at all this time. That is hardly unrelated.
The adult matchmaking etc, that deviates substantially from their advertising.