In the Texas counties I'm most familiar with, if you're arrested and they don't have a good case, they just keep resetting court dates for years instead of going ahead with the process. If you can't afford a bond, you'll be in jail that whole time (which pressures people to take plea deals), if you can secure a bond, you're out, but with limited rights and a whole lot of hassles to deal with.
I generally think if something is not causing harm to others, it shouldn't be illegal. I don't know if "generated" CSAM causes harm to others though. I looked it up and it appears the research on whether CSAM consumption increases the likelihood of a person committing child abuse is inconclusive.
I've used them as a proxy for a web app at the last place I worked. Was just hoping they'd block unwanted/malicious traffic (not sure if it was needed, and it wasn't my choice). I, personally, didn't have any problems with their service.
Now, if you take a step back, and look at the big picture, they are so big and ubiquitous that they are a threat to the WWW itself. They are probably one of the most valuable targets for malicious actors and nation states. Even if Cloudflare is able to defend against infiltration and attacks in perpetuity, they have much of the net locked-in, and will enshittify to keep profits increasing in a market they've almost completely saturated.
Likely transformers now (I think SD3 uses a ViT for text encoding, and ViTs are currently one of the best model architectures for image classification).
I mean, you can be sued for anything, but it will get thrown out. Like, I guess the MPAA could offer a movie for download, then try to sue the first hop they upload a chunk to, but that really doesn't make any sense (because they offered it for download in the first place). Furthermore, the first hop(s) aren't the people that are using the file, and they can't even read it. If people could successfully sue nodes, then ISPs and postal services could be sued for anything that passes through their networks.
I think similar, and arguably more fine-grained, things can be done with Typescript, traditional OOP (interfaces, and maybe the Facade pattern), and perhaps dependency injection.
Onion-like routing. It takes multiple hops to get to a destination. Each hop can only decrypt the next destination to send the packet to (i.e. peeling off a layer of the onion).
I thought the tuning procedures, such as RLHF, kind of messes up the probabilities, so you can't really tell how confident the model is in the output (and I'm not sure how accurate these probabilities were in the first place)?
Also, it seems, at a certain point, the more context the models are given, the less accurate the output. A few times, I asked ChatGPT something, and it used its browsing functionality to look it up, and it was still wrong even though the sources were correct. But, when I disabled "browsing" so it would just use its internal model, it was correct.
It doesn't seem there are too many expert services tied to ChatGPT (I'm just using this as an example, because that's the one I use). There's obviously some kind of guardrail system for "safety," there's a search/browsing system (it shows you when it uses this), and there's a python interpreter. Of course, OpenAI is now very closed, so they may be hiding that it's using expert services (beyond the "experts" in the MOE model their speculated to be using).
I find Kagi results a little bit better than Google's (for most things). I like that certain categories of results are put in their own sections (listicles, forums) so they're easy to ignore if you want. I like that I can prioritize, deprioritize, block, or pin results from certain domains. I like that I can quickly switch "lenses" to one of the predefined or custom lenses.
Looks like NPR was on Mastadon for a little while in 2020: https://mstdn.social/@NPR