Isn't this just inherent to any system that takes some time to update? E.g. if a country moves its capital to a different city, then textbooks, maps, etc. are going to contain incorrect information for a while until updated editions are published.

A lot of the complaints about AI are really about the drawbacks of information systems more generally, and the failure modes pointed out are rarely novel. The "Cognitive Inbreeding" effect attributed to AI would also have occurred with Google search would it not? Lots of people type the same question into google and read the top results, instead of searching a more diverse set of information sources. It's interesting that the author mentions web search as a way to ameliorate this, when it seems to me that web search is just as capable of causing cognitive inbreeding.

I think the difference is that LLMs are a very complex mix of information and concepts, which can be combined in higher orders. So an underlying wrong fact could be undisclosed and contribute to faulty reasoning. A hard fact like a wrong city name would blow up quickly. A wrong assumption about political dynamics is probably harder to detect, as it is a complex mix of information.

"Is it safe to travel to the US as an EU citizen of arab descend?"

GPT: Yes it's safe. GEMINI: Yes but... [gave a few legitimate warnings]

I wouldn't give that recommendation to an arab fellow citizen right now. Thought I am cautious in such matters and I hate to travel anyway. So I am biased. But general concerns aren't totally ungrounded.

Neither of the LLMs pointed out the general tension around ICE activity.

Is this is an example of AI actually supplying incorrect information, or an example of AI not supplying a response that fits the user's preconceived views?

The international travel into the US has also declined. A clear statement from potential visitors, partly attributed to political climate and safety.

This is an nuanced sentiment of people, derived from a complex, dynamic situation.

In fact, the LLMs carry preconceived views. That is the whole point of the post.

AI is just current scapegoat.

I'm really struggling to see the parallel between being filmed in public and committing revenge murder.

Especially with mass-surveillance, which affects everyone. It's not possible to mass-surveil only people who would commit crimes, you need to surveil all innocent people too.

Right and you used murder as an example. Do you think murder is even remotely comparable to putting up a security camera in a public space?

Yes, a victim might want some sort of response that is socially unacceptable, sure. But if you want to make a convincing argument you have to explain why the proposed response is unacceptable. Not some different, extreme, response of your own invention.

I'm really not sure how "committing vigilante murder is wrong" is supposed to be a good argument against putting up security cameras in a public space.

This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)

But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.

> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?

The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.

Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.

If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?

Games released without DRM are less of an inconvenience to legitimate purchasers. They don't get negative sentiment from past customers complaining about the DRM causing problems for people who actually paid for it and thereby deter others from buying it.

This can even cause the effect you're seeing: The game comes out with onerous DRM, people buy it initially having not realized this yet. The DRM being more onerous to legitimate purchasers makes it both more likely to be cracked (people spend more effort to crack it so they can play the game without the DRM causing problems) and more likely to have sales decline as DRM problems for legitimate purchasers become known and sour customers on buying it, so you get a correlation between how fast the game gets cracked and how fast sales fall off.

In general it assumes there is no existing correlation between how quickly a game gets cracked and the rate at which would sales decline regardless, e.g. it assumes that more anticipated games don't both get cracked sooner and have more front-loaded sales, but relationships like that are pretty plausible.

In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

You also unconditionally lose 100% of the sales to people who simply never buy games with DRM.

Losing X% of sales to pissing off customers with DRM in order to avoid losing Y% of sales to pirates is only worth it if X is less than Y, but they're only even attempting to measure Y, and probably overestimating it.

But releasing a game without DRM means it's impossible to measure the value of Y, since a crack is immediately available. This is why this is sort of a nonsensical complaint.

> In addition to that, once the crack is available, you're stuck with DRM if you pay but not if you use the cracked version, so then the cracked version is better. It outcompetes paying not just on price but also on utility, whereas if the paying got you no DRM to begin with then the cracked version would have only one advantage instead of two.

Many (most?) publishers release versions of games without DRM ounces cracks are available. What you describe here is not necessarily the case.

If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes. If there is such a population of would-be buyers that are turned off by DRM, they are evidently smaller than the pool of buyers who would have chosen to pirate if given the opportunity.

Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

If you're trying to determine Z, which is X - Y, and then you get some indication that Y might be 20 under a specific set of assumptions, you still don't know anything about Z because X could still be 0 or 20 or 40. Measuring Y by itself is useless. It's looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that's where the light is even though you know that's not where you lost them.

> If there really were a pool of buyers who would purchase legal versions of games absent DRM, the we should see a bump in sales once DRM-free versions are released. But no such bump in sales materializes.

That's assuming the removal of the DRM is well-publicized like the initial release. Otherwise people hear about the initial release, don't buy it because it has DRM and then most of them forget the game even exists. And negative reviews from when the game had bad DRM are still there even after it's removed.

It could still be net positive to remove the DRM after it's cracked but the benefit is naturally going to be a lot smaller than if it had no DRM when people were paying more attention to it.

Also, has anyone actually studied that? Most of the resources to do studies on these things are from DRM purveyors who want to make their product look better than it is. They don't have the incentive to find results that make them look bad.

> Is it really that hard to believe that if given the choice to pay or receive a product for free more people choose the latter than if there is no free option?

You're still focused on measuring only Y.

If there's Y amount of people who buy if there's no crack available and pirate if there is, and X amount of people and who refuse to buy the game with DRM but do purchase it after DRM is removed. The net shift in sales is the difference in sales is X-Y.

We're not measuring Y, we're measuring Z. And since Z is negative, we can conclude that the group of people who just want free games is larger than the group of people who buy after DRM is removed. We know that Y is larger than X.

Now you're assuming that all games immediately remove DRM after they're cracked, which is definitely false. In a statistical study it would need to be all of them or any that don't would be skewing the average.

And again, removing the DRM doesn't fully undo the hit from having it to begin with. Existing negative reviews or forum posts panning the game don't disappear the instant you address the thing they were complaining about. The network effect and word of mouth in subcultures that don't buy games with DRM is already reduced.

You've constructed an unfalsifiable claim here.

A game can have DRM restrictions or not when published. I am referring to games that never had DRM restrictions but which you obtained illegally (eg. you copied it from a friend or downloaded it from internet).

The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.

For counter-evidence, GOG exists after all, the platform would not be viable if everyone just wanted free stuff.

The real question is whether GOG would sell more if they one day flipped on the DRM switch. I think that's too complicated a question to predict though - GOG has a lot of smaller games, while Denuvos data is skewed by the high-profile releases that had a ton of attention before release (and thus people wanting to pirate them)

Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.

I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.

But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.

Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.

But they are fringe, an anomaly. Most people will happily pay for stuff if it's confortable enough. Don't focus on the tail end of the human behavior distribution. Steam makes a lot of money, the devs publishing there, too. Spotify makes a lot of money. Netflix makes a lot of money...

Piracy is easily reduced to anecdotical as soon as you don't offer absolute shit service for a lot of money, as LaLiga does.

Good service is still hard to compete with zero cost.

Seattle apparently tripled likelihood of perpetrators being identified.

- Why didn't SPD commission an independent study?

- What kinds of crimes were studied? Is this catching jaywalkers or homicides?

- Only mentions arrests. What about convictions? How are victims receiving justice?

- Where's the data and the reproducible methodology?

- How many people were tracked who didn't commit any crime at all?

There's so much wrong with that article that it's hard to come to any verifiable conclusions about the efficacy of the program. And again, doesn't answer any of the original questions.

It might come as a shock, but there's nothing guaranteeing private movement in public in the US. It is totally legal for people to whip out their phone and start filming you in public. People can set up cameras on their property and film the road outside their house.

In fact, many of the municipalities that have "ditched" still have loads of flock cameras that they cant remove because they're on private property owned by the property owners.

https://law.stanford.edu/2018/06/22/supreme-court-defends-pr...

> The Court decided that a person has a “legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements.”

and

> "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere."

In my view, the individual right to document anything one may observe in public is significantly different from tax dollars being spent to record everything that's visible in public, analyze it with AI, and then cross-reference it across an extended period to track the movements of law abiding Americans.

It's unreasonable to think you won't appear in someone's camera lens at any given moment while out in public. It's not at all unreasonable to assume your patterns of life won't be tagged and cataloged for weeks on end, for whatever reason, by a private or public entity.

You're right there's not enough precedent here yet, but we shouldn't let the current precedent of there being almost no regulation on this stuff remain.

But the justification, if the liberation actually transpires, is sound. An order of magnitude more French and Dutch died at the hands of Allied bombing and shelling in 1944. I think most agree the the upside of being liberated from Germany makes the Allied landings a net positive, though.

But to reiterate, I really doubt the revolutionary guard is going to lose control of Iran.

The French and Dutch were members of the Allies, with Charles de Gaulle as leader of the Free-French forces and Queen Wilhelmina the head of the Dutch government-in-exile, both in London. Both wanted the allies to get the Germans out of their countries.

There is no government-in-exile calling for the bombing of Iran as a method for liberation.

Just as Laos did not call for the US to drop some 2 million tons on that country - more than were dropped on Japan, Germany and Britain during World War II - resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people, as part of the US's ineffective attempt to "liberate" North Vietnam.

If killing those kids was instrumental in a greater good, only then is it worth being philosophical about. From what I've seen, they were too eager with the bang bang boom boom to actually double check that it was a valid target.

They fed ancient intelligence into an AI which spit out a target list that nobody seems to have checked, period.

Because the ones abroad don't have a lot to lose and much to gain. The ones in Iran have a lot to lose as well.

If you can’t alter your reasoning to include outcomes then you will make poorer decisions.

You are very naive if you think the IRGC truly killed 10's of thousands of it's own people. Israel openly talks about Mossad organizing and supporting the coup, and good old Donny has admitted they have given weapons to organized resistance.

I estimate that many of the death numbers come from armed resistance being killed by the IRGC, not ordinary peaceful protestors. I also think armed resistance killed many Irani citizens. There is obviously fog of war here. The thousands of deaths were likely inflated and obfuscated.

Look at the coups we have backed in the middle east (including formerly in Iran which is what originally led to the Islamic revolution) -- and you will see a pattern. Both US and Israel provide material support to groups like ISIS or actors like Bin Laden. An Al-Qaeda fighter is literally the head of Syria now thanks to Israel.

I don't love Hamas, IRGC or Hezbollah, I don't like their ideology. But it is myopic to think they exist in a vaccum.

It's even less likely to work because Trump has already claimed, publicly, to arming the protestors. That already makes any regime change illegitimate. They're all foreign backed agitators.

I bring it up because this shit is messy.

This is the view outside of Fairchild AFB, which runs the training course in question.

Wikipedia reports that Spokane has a Mediterranean climate, as does Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province where this F-15 is reported to have been shot down.