I don’t understand how regex comes into it? Sounds tricky though!

I asked an LLM to write a jq scriptlet for me today. It wasn’t even complicated, it just beat working it out/trying to craft the write string to search Stackoverflow for.

It’s a shame that you’re so quick to express skepticism but so reluctant to do any research of your own, because the facts are a bit embarrassing with the exact same trend in the USA as in the UK.

Driver safety peaks in the 60s, and only moderately worsens after then. The large increase in fatal accidents, by the way, is clearly a result of older drivers being more vulnerable in a crash - because the chart at the bottom doesn’t show any such large increase for passengers and others.

I’m interested to know if this changes your mind.

It predates the Victorians by some centuries, in fact!

You can just say “a group of X called a Y” about anything and people on the internet will believe it.

That doesn’t affect the ability of older drivers, only the number of them.

In fact, since one reason very old drivers might get more accident prone is because they stop driving as much and lose some of the skills, you would expect that, if older Americans really persist in driving more as they get older (you haven’t provided any evidence that they do) they would retain those skills and be less accident prone, not more, so would be safer, and less at need of re-tests, than their UK counterparts.

Focusing on the driving safety of the elderly is a classic example of Saliency Bias. A 20-year old kid wrecking his car is nothing unusual so you don’t remember it when thinking about safety. An 80 year old who can’t even remember which way to turn the wheel getting in a wreck is unusual and extreme, so it’s more salient. Getting stuck behind an elderly driver gives you the impression that they’re a bad and hence unsafe driver, which contributes to this.

The Israeli government has declared this comment anti-semitic and offensive.

Unfortunately they weren’t able to show how it was false.

The problem with “self-driving” tech punting you into the oncoming lane is that you may have no time to react. Reaction times are non-zero, also when reacting to your own car doing something unexpected.

Fact is that if you want to spend some money, time or political capital on improving road safety, targeting older drivers is not where you should focus your efforts. The fact that it frequently is, is due to ageism.

In the absence of forthcoming data (hint hint), what factors do you think differ between the UK and USA which affect the ability of very old/very young drivers?

This is your regular reminder that it’s generally not older people who are high-risk drivers: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/628ce5c7e90e071f68b19dfa/02-image-2.svg

Drivers get safer until about 70, and only get less safe than your average young driver when over 86.

There is a perception that older drivers are an absolute liability on the roads, which I can only assume stems from impatient people who get frustrated when stuck behind an older driver going more slowly than they’d like.

Really, you can’t think of any reason to be upset that you’re required to take an exam that you then pass?

So they established that language patterns measured by word frequency changed between 2022 and 2024. But did they also analyse frequencies across other 2-year time periods? How much difference is there for a typical word? It looks like they have a per-frequency significance threshold but then analysed all words at once, meaning that random noise would turn up a bunch of “significant” results. Maybe this is addressed in the original paper which is not linked.

They are both harmful, should both be discouraged, and one results in the creation of non-consentual porn of the victim which is provable and should be illegal.

OK, so you only stop short of making a thought crime because you can’t prove it. That’s… consistent but extremely concerning. You have no business policing what people think about. Freedom of thought is a fundamental right and what goes on inside other people’s heads is no-one’s business but their own unless they choose otherwise.

This ought to be the trigger to realise that you’ve got something wrong in this worldview. Even if not, it’s my trigger to know that I’m not going to get anywhere, so this will be my last reply. If someone thinks that the only issue with thought crimes is in gathering evidence, our views on morality and the limits of authority are diametrically opposed and there is no point trying, but at least I understand. If it’s the thought you really want to control, then you wouldn’t have any issue with the person who makes something harmful by accident.

Pedophiles should be forcefully institutionalized

Disturbing that you can’t recognise how disturbing this language is. But sure: threaten people with being locked up for unchangeable yet not harmful aspects of their selves, just to make sure that they never seek help to keep from causing harm. Morality aside this can’t have any negative consequences.

Everything I have read suggests that paedophiles have no control over their attraction, only over their actions. Here’s a thought experiment which I doubt you’ll bother trying: could you decide to be attracted to children? I couldn’t. It seems to be exactly like a sexual orientation in that respect.

Pedophiles should be forcefully institutionalized

can genuinely think of no other reason why you would be so incapable of empathizing with the victims in this situation.

Your inability to engage with points of view different from your own is problematic. The victims in your narratives are always female, the perpetrators always male. Those who disagree with you are always evil perpetrators. I only say this now that I’m disengaging because there’s no point in being drawn on provocative nonsense while trying to sustain a conversation.

Is there a mature filter that you’ve got turned off? I have never seen anything lewd on All!

Disabling JS worked

Your thought experiment is moot as these are real people.

That doesn’t make sense at all. That real people are affected means it is important to get this right, which means it is necessary to think carefully about it. We don’t disagree that real people are getting hurt but it seems to me that you take that to mean we should immediately jump to the first solution without regard for getting it right.

The difference between fantasy and porn is that porn is media content, it is a real image or video and not an imagination in someone’s mind.

You have again not taken the opportunity to say how that translates to differing harm and hence the necessity of a differing approach, even though when you talk about the harms you always talk about things that are the same between the two things.

You are in a very very very small minority of people if you disagree.

Yeah I know. I think the world is extremely backwards about paedophilia because the abhorrence of the crime of child sexual abuse gives them a blind-spot and makes them unable to separate the abhorrent act from the thought. I would have to guess that this is also what’s going on here (but this is less extreme). That is, I think, confirmed by your rejection of making thought experiments due to the situation involving “real people”, as if it is therefore impossible to think clearly about - maybe for you it is.

I can only hope that people learn to do so, because the current situation causes abuse (in the case of paedophiles) and is likely to lead down the road of wrongly punishing people for things done in private without external repercussions (in other cases).

And youre still trying to equate imagination with physical tangible media. And to be clear, if several of my friends said they were collectively beating off to the idea of me naked, I would be horrified and disgusted […]

So the fundamental reality is that imagination and physical tangible media are very similar in this regard. That’s what you just said.

a whole group of boys, some who i might not even know, were sharing AI generated porn with my face

And if they were just talking about a shared fantasy - with your face? You still have the “ring” aspect, the stranger aspect, the dehumanising aspect, etc.

This is why there’s the connection that I keep getting at: there are many similarities, and you even say you’d feel similarly in both circumstances. So, the question is: do we go down the route of thought crime and criminalise the similar act? Or do we use this similarity to realise that it is not the act that is the problem, but the effects it can have on the victim?

If I was a teenager it would probably fuck me up pretty bad to know that someone who I thought was my friend just saw me as a collection of sexual body parts with a face attached.

Why do you think doing either thing (imagined or with pictures) means that someone just sees the person as a “collection of sexual body parts with a face attached”? Why can’t someone see you as an ordinary human being? While you might not believe that either thing is normal, I can assure you it is prevalent. I’m sure that you and I have both been the subject of masturbatory fantasies without our knowledge. I don’t say that to make you feel uncomfortable (and am sorry if it does) but to get you to think about how those acts have affected you, or not.

You talk again about how an image can be shared - but so can a fantasy (by talking about it). You talk again about how it’s created without consent - but so is a fantasy.

Another thought experiment: someone on the other side of the world draws an erotic image, and it happens by pure chance to resemble a real person. Has that person been victimised, and abused? Does that image need to be destroyed by the authorities? If not, why not? The circumstances of the image are the same as if it were created as fake porn. If it reached that person’s real circle of acquaintances, it could very well have the same effects - being shared, causing them shame, ridicule, abuse. It’s another example that shows how the problematic part is not the creation of an image, but the use of that image to abuse someone.

But pedophilic thoughts are still wrong and are not something we tolerate people expressing.

It’s my view that paedophilia, un-acted upon, is not wrong, as it harms no-one. A culture in which people are shamed, dehumanised and abused for the way their mind works is one in which those people won’t seek help before they act on those thoughts.

Having thoughts like that is absolutely a sign of some obsessive tendencies and already forming devaluation of women and girls

It’s kind of shocking to see you again erase male victims of (child) sexual abuse. For child abuse specifically, rates of victimisation are much closer than for adults.

You all say youre feminists until someone comes after your fucked up sexualities and your porn addictions. Always the same.

Luckily I know you’re not representative of all of any group of people.

Do you believe that finding out that, there is an entire group of people who you thought were your friends but are in actuality taking pictures of your head and masturbating to the idea of you performing sex acts for them using alorthimically derived likenesses of your naked body, has no psychological consequences for you whatsoever?

Do you think the consequences of finding out are significantly different than finding out they’re doing it in their imagination? If so, why?

Youre essentially saying that men and boys can’t be expected to treat girls and women as actual people and instead must be allowed to turn their friends and peers into fetishized media content they can share amongst each other.

And, just to be clear, by this you mean the stuff with pictures, not talking or thinking about them? Because, again, the words “media content” just don’t seem to be key to any harm being done.

Your approach is consistently to say that “this is harmful, this is disgusting”, but not to say why. Likewise you say that the “metaphors are not at all applicable” but you don’t say at all what the important difference is between “people who you thought were your friends but are in actuality taking pictures of your head and masturbating to the idea of you performing sex acts for them using alorthimically derived likenesses of your naked body” and “people who you thought were your friends but are in actuality imagining your head and masturbating to the idea of you performing sex acts for them using imagined likenesses of your naked body”. Both acts are sexualisation, both are done without consent, both could cause poor treatment by the people doing it.

I see two possiblities - either you see this as so obviously and fundamentally wrong you don’t have a way of describing way, or you know that the two scenarios are fundamentally similar but know that the idea of thought-crime is unsustainable.

Finally it’s necessary to address the gendered way you’re talking about this. While obviously there is a huge discrepancy in male perpetrators and female victims of sexual abuse and crimes, it makes it sound like you think this is only a problem because, or when, it affects women and girls. You should probably think about that, because for years we’ve been making deserved progress at making things gender-neutral and I doubt you’d accept this kind of thing in other areas.

Hey, it’s OK to say you just don’t have any counter-argument instead of making blatantly false characterisations.