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Yup, here's a higher resolution image in case anyone wants one that's more readable.

True, as is the case with almost any messaging service. But the benefits of RCS do include:

• Not having a government/telecom company be capable of snooping on your messages
• Branded messages that clearly distinguish real companies from fake ones, which can prevent an untold number of scams as it becomes more commonplace
• Uses more modern protocols instead of still being capable of sending over old, insecure ones like 2G.

It's purely an improvement over SMS in terms of security and privacy, and personally, I don't think users should be defaulted into having their phone downgrade to insecure protocols. It should always be an opt-in decision they have to make. (although they could definitely make it clearer that someone could enable it if their messages are failing to send with RCS)

True, but personally I'd judge someone who painted right over the entire doorknob more than someone with dirt on their floor 😭

which makes no sense from user perspective

I'd say it does have some merit from a security perspective though.

I agree it should be something that's at least more clear for users to enable/disable on setup, but I personally don't think having it enabled by default is ideal, considering how insecure SMS is.

Does it though?

I'd say so, yeah, but it does depend on your social circumstance, and of course broader cultures have different norms and linguistic styles too, so that can definitely impact it somewhat.

For example, if you're referring to someone, you pretty much have to use their pronouns. That's just how our language works, and it's not exactly something you can easily avoid.

The broader argument around gender abolition typically doesn't focus on the fact that society has to use the assorted gendered terms and traits though, I just thought it would be interesting to point out.

Generally speaking, it boils down to the second part of my previous point, which was that gender isn't inherently that special compared to many of the other ways we interpret and express our own identities, and the category can theoretically expand to levels so broad that it simply doesn't create much of a practical utility around consistently creating, using, and assigning sub-labels and further slicing up what we consider to be distinct categories into smaller and smaller pieces.

Additionally, gender abolitionists tend to just believe that by creating categories, you end up restricting what people are comfortable doing, and impose assumptions that could otherwise be more freeing to simply not have.

Anyone who currently uses any label, big or small, could still express themselves in a society that doesn't choose to use labels, but anyone feeling restricted by the labels we use today would no longer have that pressure facing them, and could thus develop more independently and freely as themselves, rather than what any societal categories impose on them.

This is actually something I think is becoming more and more pertinent as the acceptance of trans individuals grows, because as I'm sure you've probably seen, a lot of trans people feel that they have to meet certain goals to simply be accepted as who they are, to the point that they can feel pressured by society into doing things like buying certain clothes they otherwise may not have picked, spending more time worrying about the way their face looks, etc, just to be accepted.

And with sub-labels, you end up running into the same problem, but at a different scale, where small communities, or even sole individuals, can end up locking themselves into choices about their looks/mannerisms/activities/etc because after defining something, it becomes easier to conform to it even if you change over time outside of that label.

Obviously I don't speak for everyone here, and this is just my opinion, but I personally believe that a world with no labels, and much less limited avenues for free expression by every individual would be preferable to a world where it's expected that you label yourself and put yourself in a box, a category that people can define you as, that may not fully represent you as a person.

While true, it doesn't keep you safe from sleeper agent attacks.

These can essentially allow the creator of your model to inject (seamlessly, undetectably until the desired response is triggered) behaviors into a model that will only trigger when given a specific prompt, or when a certain condition is met. (such as a date in time having passed)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05566

It's obviously not as likely as a company simply tweaking their models when they feel like it, and it prevents them from changing anything on the fly after the training is complete and the model is distributed, (although I could see a model designed to pull from the internet being given a vulnerability where it queries a specific URL on the company's servers that can then be updated with any given additional payload) but I personally think we'll see vulnerabilities like this become evident over time, as I have no doubts it will become a target, especially for nation state actors, to simply slip some faulty data into training datasets or fine-tuning processes that get picked up by many models.

I think the broader argument tends to boil down to the fact that unlike music, which people can simply not engage in describing on a regular basis, gender expression is something that requires much more active participation by all members of a society, and that gender is not inherently separate from the rest of the human experience.

It's already hard enough for some people to remember names, now imagine having to remember which of any number of thousands of neopronouns each individual person you know uses, for example.

Contrast that with their "we'll all just be people" stance, which seems to just be a different wording of gender abolition, and you have a world where people simply express themselves as they are without having to increasingly sublabel.

It's like how while people can have long hair and short hair, wear dark clothes and light clothes, have blue/brown/green/gray/etc eyes, be introverted or extroverted, have a large or small social battery, or experience and display any number of different characteristics, while not having to actually label those characteristics in general conversation or identification.

They're simply traits within the human experience, but not traits that we have to outwardly label and display on a very frequent basis, unlike the way we usually talk about gender. This is especially important considering how every single human being experiences things even a little differently from one another, thus meaning that the number of sublabels is theoretically as large, if not larger than the current population of the earth.

I don't deny that the labels can still exist, and be useful to people, but I think gender is often treated as if it has to be some sort of mythical separate part of the brain, independent from all the other variations in human experience, and thus it must have a separate label at all times, even while we don't particularly care to label and identify with other characteristics that are also within the human experience, some of which have historically flowed between being considered very gendered or less/not gendered, such as assorted personality traits, length of hair, preferred social activities and groups, certain clothing, etc.

"Suggesting that the Holocaust did not happen will become a punishable offence"

Nothing here about literally anything other than "did this historical event happen?"

What a ridiculous article, let alone entire news site.

1. Cherry pick every time someone who did a crime who also happens to be trans
2. Act as though the fact they were trans was the primary motivator
3. ???
4. Profit

Seriously, to anyone else reading, if you're just scrolling by and wondering what the heck this site is, just take a cursory look at the articles they post, and you'll see it's literally only any time any trans person did a crime, then tossing in a ton of spicy sounding language to make it seem more crazy than it actually is, then imply that the reason that crime took place was because they were trans.

Anyways, I'm going to block this whole instance. I truly hope you can dig yourself out of this ridiculous echo chamber obsession some day, tahira.

you could just do it yourself.

Personally, I think that wholly depends on the context.

For example, if someone's having part of their email rewritten because they feel the tone was a bit off, they're usually doing that because their own attempts to do so weren't working for them, and they wanted a secondary... not exactly opinion, since it's a machine obviously, but at least an attempt that's outside whatever their brain might currently be locked into trying to do.

I know I've gotten stuck for way too long wondering why my writing felt so off, only to have someone give me a quick suggestion that cleared it all up, so I can see how this would be helpful, while also not always being something they can easily or quickly do themselves.

Also, there are legitimately just many use cases for applications using LLMs to parse small pieces of data on behalf of an application better than simple regex equations, for instance.

For example, Linkwarden, a popular open source link management software, (on an opt-in basis) uses LLMs to just automatically tag your links based on the contents of the page. When I'm importing thousands of bookmarks for the first time, even though each individual task is short to do, in terms of just looking at the link and assigning the proper tags, and is not something that takes significant mental effort on its own, I don't want to do that thousands of times if the LLM will get it done much faster with accuracy that's good enough for my use case.

I can definitely agree with you in a broader sense though, since at this point I've seen people write 2 sentence emails and short comments using AI before, using prompts even longer than the output, and that I can 100% agree is entirely pointless.

I definitely agree.

However, I think there's certainly a point at which the usage of a given tool is too small to meaningfully impact your actual retention of a skill, and I do think that when these people are just, say, occasionally firing off an email and they feel like the tone is a bit off, having it partially rewrite it could possibly even help them then do better in the future at changing their tone on their own, so personally I think it's a bit of a mixed bag.

But of course, when I look at all the people foregoing things like learning programming languages to ask ChatGPT to just vibe code everything for them, then talk about how they're gonna get a job in tech... yeah, that's 100% past the point of skills atrophying in my opinion.

See, when I have 4-6 sentences to summarize, I don’t see the value-add of a machine doing the summarizing for me.

Oh I completely understand, I don't often see it as useful either. I'm just saying that a lot of people I see using LLMs occasionally are usually just shortening their own replies to things, converting a text based list of steps to a numbered list for readability, or just rewording a concept because the original writer didn't word it in a way their brain could process well, etc.

Things that don't necessarily require a huge amount of effort on their part, but still save them a little bit of time, which in my conversations with them, seems to prove valuable to them, even if it's in a small way.