Your great-grandpappy (and mine) ruined the world, paying for their peep shows and burlesque dances. The Great Depression, WWII, 9/11 - modern researchers cannot prove that these things would have happened had porn not been invented. Historians weep imagining what human utopias might have been had we never commodified our petty urge to reproduce.
The steel man is that the vast increase in production and availability of porn has never been higher and has created a generation of porn addicts who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex. These unhealthy ideas often manifest as anti-social behaviors which lead to loneliness and depression.
Throughout the 20th century we went from drawings of the intimate and obscene to photos, followed by video, then with sound, then delivered by mail, then down the street, and finally right in your pocket. All the while women’s right have been largely improving while actual violent crime has been decreasing.
The world population also exploded in almost every corner from hundreds of millions a to billions.
Relationships, procreation, gender views, and such also depend heavily on economic outlooks and have tracked that rather than porn in every comparison I can find.
I disagree with your assessment that porn causes those things anymore than violent video games cause violence.
As always when it comes to these ("obviously") destructive behaviors, I feel like we don't quite know for sure if the porn addiction comes from people feeling loneliness and depression, rather than the other way around. People tend to jump quickly to the latter theory, but AFAIK there really isn't any consensus that's actually so.
In this case, we actually know (from some recent studies) that "porn addiction" doesn't actually involve any more usage of porn than a control group—what it does involve is guilt around the usage of porn.
I'm not saying unfettered access to an insane amount of porn is healthy, but how does it lead to anti-social behavior. No one is chatting up a person in a cafe then trying to have unprotected anal sex right there in the cafe. I could see it creating unrealistic expectations for men and women, but what's the connection to anti-social behavior?
A lot of pornography is misogynistic. Not all, but a lot. It depicts women as objects to be used, it normalizes sexual violence and degradation, and it focuses mainly on male pleasure. You watch enough of it and you start to internalize these attitudes.
I've seen women complain about men putting their hands around their necks during sex because the men saw a man do it in porn. It's a rather upsetting trend.
No arguments from me on porn being misogynistic and aimed at men. However, it's not like men weren't creeps before porn was invented (saying this as a man). Look at history and there's endless examples of old men marrying 13 year olds, of sexual assault and harassment, etc... Perhaps I am wrong, but I don't see modern porn doing much in making that any better or worse. In fact, as porn has proliferated over the last 50 years, we have made progress in the things that people say porn degrades. Obviously correlation does not equal causation but it's worth thinking about.
Fair points, but the main difference with the state of 'modern' porn is that its accessible to young men during puberty (and earlier), via the internet.
Finding a Playboy magazine in the bushes wont radicalize a 13 year old, but watching BDSM or CNC at an age where you're beginning to form your sexual ideologies can't be healthy.
I completely agree that the intensity of porn that can be accessed at a young age is deeply concerning. I have two sons. If I found a playboy in their room at age 13 we would have a discussion but I wouldn't really care. However, if I walked in on them watching extremely hard core pornography I would be pretty concerned.
> who have unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex
Yeah, we should go back in time to when good men used to regularly beat up and rape their wife just like god wanted. Where anything not cis and hetero was not tolerated. Where relationships where based on dominance and very seldom on love.
Nope. As sad as that may be, in terms of having healthy ideas about sex, we are probably at the peak since the neolithic revolutions. Times have never been better, especially in progressive Western nations.
For porn to have ruined anything where would need to be something to ruin in the first place. Young men had unhealthy ideas about sex long before porn existed. They probably have a little bit more of a clue now.
Don't get me wrong, I am absolutely willing to entertain the idea that porn and especially over consumption of porn is problematic in many aspects. However it is not a major societal issues. And I absolutely abhor the idea of the state censoring porn to enforce personal and specifically sexual morality. There is good reason civilized countries don't do this.
Long before modern porn, there were laws that a man could not be charged with raping his wife. Society largely looked the other way when a man beat his wife. There was a time when underage women could be trafficked by their parents into marriage against their will. There was a time when a woman who accused a man of rape would basically end up on trial herself while his lawyer dragged out every single romantic or sexual relationship she had in graphic detail so that the jury would believe "she was asking for it."
I am under the impression that "unhealthy ideas about sex and the opposite sex" have been with us for a very, very long time. If we observe that porn addicts have such unhealthy ideas, are we confusing correlation with causation?
At least in the U.S. the equality of women in society (and in law) has slowly risen over the last 100 years. Over that same period the availability of pornographic images has also slowly risen (from magazines, to VHS, to the Internet, to streaming videos, to VR).
So if we're looking at correlation, doesn't the data imply that _more_ porn is associated with _more_ rights for women?
(Conversely, the vast majority of people calling for and enacting policies for more restrictions on pornography are also rolling back rights for women.)
Eh, not quite steel. "A generation of" is kind of slippery language, as is "has never been higher". How many people? How much more available is porn vs 10 years ago? You seem to imply many/most born during a certain period are porn addicts, and that they wouldn't have been 10, 15 years ago because porn wasn't as available. Not sure either is arguable.
This only seems like porn because we live in a culture founded on Judeo-Christian taboos against sex and the female form. I wouldn't assume it was in any way pornographic in its own time and context.
It's literally just an example of how long we have been horny. Your definition of porn is way more narrow and modern than what i'm talking about. Use a different word for it if you want but explicit imagery that people masterbate too is what I mean.
Sorry but if you think Christians invented objectification you are sorely mistaken.
There are 34000 years of other examples to choose from. It's an example to illustrate how long we have been into depecting explicit forms, for pleasure, for art, or otherwise.
I didn't say anything about objectification, I was referring to pornography.
Pornography as a concept in Western societies was entirely invented by Christians. The same concept does not exist elsewhere in the same form except where the influence of Western colonizing powers forced it upon native cultures, and I guarantee it did not exist 46,000 years ago when the Venus of Hohle Fels was created.
While there is a lot of things that are ugly about porn I really do not believe it is 5% of the problems recent younger generations face today.
Porn is just the new TV or video games, the scapegoat hidding the real taboo of our society: Parents are happy to believe the society, the government has to take care of their children.
In the 80s they were leaving their children in front of the TV all day long and were blaming the TV programming.
Then they bought them video game consoles and games and complained the games were too violent.
Now they buy them full HD porn streaming devices with unlimited data and access to the internet to get rid of them and blame porn or tik tok.
Correct, and it's to put the genii back in the bottle so to speak. Great video on how AI is being actively used to break the internet. Cause a problem, provide the solution.
AI will hopefully humble so of the people I work with.
The people who understand nothing about business, yet you can't talk to because they think gifted for being able to write instructions to a computer.
The people spin out new frameworks every day and make a clusterf*ck of hyped and over-engineered frameworks.
The people who took a few courses and went into programming for money..
I went into software because I enjoyed creating (coding was a means to an end), and I always thought coding was the easiest part of software development. But when I get into corporate work, I find people who preach code like religion and don't even care about what is being produced, spend thousands of hours debating syntax. What a waste of life, I knew they were stupid, and AI made sure they knew as well.
I'm probably one of the people you're talking about.
I'm feeling basically mostly fulfilled in life, and don't feel my life is being wasted.
I didn't understand the thing about "AI made sure they knew as well", or maybe I'm not actually who you're describing.
But I definitely get into language, syntax, frameworks, parsing, and blah blah blah.
Plenty of people still play chess. Plenty of people still run. Machine performance has surpassed humans long ago in both disciplines. Are those people stupid also?
Yes, for me, it is a form of narrow intelligence. Being unable to grasp the big picture.
I don't mean this offensively; it is what it is. If you are aware of who you are, then good, but if the issue is that a lot of those are not even aware of their strength or their limitations. Just like humans got humbled with chess, AI is humbling those coders.
It will be coming for me some day soon I'm sure, but I'm no more humble than I was before so far. (extremely humble!!!) I don't talk about it too much on here, as it would be useless, but I haven't gotten too many positive results out of the AI-assisted coding tools. And yes, I know I'm holding it wrong.
But again for me, the appeal for software was creativity. Our ability to shape ideas and experiences.
I never cared about proving my intelligence or arguing about syntax. If the code is maintainable, readable, and works, all good. But I corporate, I was debating over PRs, mostly subjective opinions, a form of intellectual game..
And the issue, discussion is all about convention and trivialities..
Interestingly, a lot of the engineers I know are hoping for the exact opposite. They're hoping that AI will humble the business, management, product types.
The way they see it, AI can easily shit out a hundred product concepts, market research, slide decks, sales emails, reports, etc. No need to bring on MBAs or self-proclaimed visionaries or LinkedIn gurus.
I think both camps will be disappointed. The engineers will be disappointed that they'll still need vapid business/product people to keep them pointed at projects that will actually put food on the table. The business/product people will be disappointed that they'll still need sanctimonious engineers to make anything actually work.
Yeah many have their favorite gripes with $TheOthers, and hoping that the AI will solve them. It won't - not because AI isn't good, but because the people involved will quickly adapt. Likely making new annoying behaviors, and probably many will adapt to find new things to be annoyed at also.
One is a mimic the other is actually applying the laws of physics in both cases. You are arguing based on utility and similarities with actual reasoning. But can it really reason when presented with novel complicated cases? That's the question.
> One is a mimic the other is actually applying the laws of physics in both cases. You are arguing based on utility and similarities with actual reasoning. But can it really reason when presented with novel complicated cases? That's the question.
This is a confusing reply. What's not the same as what? One is a mimic -- are we talking about fish or submarines or minds or LLMs? What are both cases? What is applying the laws of physics?
A bird and a submarine both apply the same underlying laws of physics.
Just because LLMs seems to reason does not necessarily imply that it is able to actually reason. An airplane can't fake flying, it either flys or it doesn't. With text, reasoning can be faked.
My argument here is that the discussion of LLMs reasoning is a semantic question, not a technical or scientific one. I specifically didn't use "flying" because both airplanes and birds fly, and "fly" generally means "move through the air" regardless of method.
Swim means "move through water" but with the strong connotation is "move through water in the way that living things move through water". Submarines move through water but they do not swim.
Reason means what -- something like "arrive at conclusions", but with a strong connotation of "arrive at conclusions as living things do", and a weak connotation of "use logic and step-by-step thinking to arrive at conclusions". So the question is, what aspect of "reasoning" is tied to the biological aspect of reasoning (that is, how animals reason) vs. a general sense of arriving at conclusions. Don't try to argue a definition of "reason" that is different than mine -- doing so makes it immediately apparent that we're just playing with semantics. The question is "what observable behavior does a thing that we all agree can 'reason' have that LLMs do not have?". And the related question is "to what degree does humans' ability to 'reason' reflect our ideal conception of what it means to 'reason' using logic".
Both the statements "LLMs can reason" and "LLMs cannot reason" are "not even wrong"[1]
I use LLMs daily in coding and it very clear to me (as a humble average thinking machine) that it is an approximation of reasoning and very close one. But the mistakes it makes clearly shows that this system does not really understand, it is not very different from the mistakes those who memorized text do. Humans, when they really think, they think differently. That is why, I would never expect the current architecture of LLMs to come up with a something like special relativity or any novel idea, because again it doesn't not really reasonn the same way deep thinkers, philosophers do. However, most knowledge work does not require that much depth in reasoning, hence LLMs wide adoption.
We start with a point cloud generated from the model which has color and normal and render each particle as a little hexagon with metallic and iridescent shading. Each particle is given a position and velocity in a texture. Each frame we do a physics step that writes to these textures with fragment shaders. We sum the forces into the velocity texture:
- mouse interaction force
- flow force from time varying curl noise
- spring force to return to original position
- air resistance
last we do a euler step to update position texture.
There’s masses of free parameters to control forces and materials, the animation is created by changing parameters per-particle over time
Tech: three.js, GLSL & TypeScript
Tip: Left click to push apart, right click to pull together!
You should be able to see the blob form models – perhaps there's some error when it runs on your system. It relies on floating-point textures which aren't supported everywhere
Yes with s=1?d=-4 the models are completely clear. I assume the semitransparent glittery look is intentional artistic choice."weird blob" weren't my words but I can imagine how someone could describe it that way considering that half of the time you see the transition animation during which it's much harder to recognize the object.
Judging from other comments, it seems I'm not the only one who didn't get to experience that - perhaps I just didn't wait long enough for that to show up?
In good hackernews style, I got downvoted into oblivion for just a simple question, but I guess that's to be expected these days.
