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.

Are you OK with sexually explicit photos of children taken without their knowledge? They’re not being actively put in a sexual situation if you’re snapping photos with a hidden camera in a locker room, for example. You ok with that?

No, but the harm certainly is not the same as CSAM and it should not be treated the same.

• it normalizes pedophilia and creates a culture of trading images, leading to more abuse to meet demand for more images
• The people sharing those photos learn to treat people like objects for their sexual gratification, ignoring their consent and agency. They are more likely to mistreat people they have learned to objectify.

as far as I know there is no good evidence that this is the case and is a big controversy in the topic of fake child porn, i.e. whether it leads to more child abuse (encouraging paedophiles) or less (gives them a safe outlet) or no change.

your body should not be used for the profit or gratification of others without your consent. In my mind this includes taking or using your picture without your consent.

If someone fantasises about me without my consent I do not give a shit, and I don’t think there’s any justification for it. I would give a shit if it affected me somehow (this is your first bullet point, but for a different situation, to be clear) but that’s different.

Its not a matter of feeling ashamed, its a matter of literally feeling like your value to the world is dictated by your role in the sexualities of heterosexual boys and men. It is feeling like your own body doesnt belong to you but can be freely claimed by others. It is losing trust in all your male friends and peers, because it feels like without you knowing they’ve already decided that you’re a sexual experience for them.

Why is it these things? Why does someone doing something with something which is not your body make it feel like your body doesn’t belong to you? Why does it not instead make it feel like images of your body don’t belong to you? Several of these things could equally be used to describe the situation when someone is fantasised about without their knowledge - why is that different? In Germany there’s a legal concept called “right to one’s own image” but there isn’t in many other countries, and besides, what you’re describing goes beyond this.

My thinking behind these questions is that I cannot see anything inherent, anything necessary about the creation of fake sexual images of someone which leads to these harms, and that instead there is an aspect of our society which very explicitly punishes and shames people - woman far more so than men - for being in this situation, and that without that, we would be having a very different conversation.

Starting from the position that the harm is in the creation of the images is like starting from the position that the harm of rape is in “defiling” the person raped. Rape isn’t wrong because it makes you worthless to society - society is wrong for devaluing rape victims. Society is wrong for devaluing and shaming those who have fake images made of them.

We do know the harm of this kind of sexualization. Women and girls have been talking about it for generations. This isnt new, just a new streamlined way to spread it. It should be illegal.

Can you be more explicit about what it’s the same as?

I mean, the artifact in LotR is magical. Reading too much into the name would be a mistake.

Not convinced this really belongs in Technology; he was inciting violence and would expect to be convicted on whatever medium.

When someone makes child porn they put a child in a sexual situation - which is something that we have amassed a pile of evidence is extremely harmful to the child.

For all you have said - “without the consent” - “being sexualised” - “commodifies their existence” - you haven’t told us what the harm is. If you think those things are in and of themselves harmful then I need to know more about what you mean because:

1. if someone thinks of me sexually without my consent I am not harmed
2. if someone sexualises me in their mind I am not harmed
3. I don’t know what the “commodification of one’s existence” can actually mean - I can’t buy or sell “the existence of women” (does buying something’s existence mean the same as buying the thing, or something else?) the same I can aluminium, and I don’t see how being able to (easily) make (realistic) nude images of someone changes this in any way

It is genuinely incredible to me that you could be so unempathetic,

I am not unempathetic, but I attribute the blame for what makes me feel bad about the situation is that girls are being made to feel bad and ashamed not that a particular technology is now being used in one step of that.

If a boy fantasises sexually about a girl, is that harmful to her? If he tells his friends about it? No, this is not harmful - these actions do not affect her in any way. What affects the girl is how the boys might then treat her differently than they would do someone they don’t find sexually attractive.

The solution, in both cases, has to be to address the harmful behaviour. The only arguments for criminalising deepfakes themselves are also arguments for criminalising sexual fantasies. that is why people are talking about thought crime, because once you criminalise things that are harmless on their own, but which might down the line lead to directly harmful behaviour, there is no other distinction.

The consent of the individual has been entirely erased. Dehumanization in its most direct form.

Both of these, for example, apply just as readily to discussing a shared sexual fantasy about someone who didn’t agree to it.

No distinction, that is, other than this is new and icky. I don’t want government policy to be dictated by fear of the new and by what people find icky, though. I do lots of stuff people find icky.

It’s bullying with a sexual element. The fact that it uses AI or deepfakes is secondary, just as it was secondary when it was photoshop, just as it was secondary when it was cutting out photos. It’s always about using it bully someone.

This is different because it’s easier. It’s not really different because it (can be) more realistic, because it was never about being realistic, otherwise blatantly unrealistic images wouldn’t have been used to do it. Indeed, the fact that it can be realistic will help blunt the impact of the leaking of real nudes.

You’re welcome!

The succinct way of defining the topology (on NxN) is the product topology of the discrete topology(/ies). Maybe that’s the discreteness you’re feeling?

Axiom of Choice is not regarded as a big deal by most set theorists, but it’s interesting when it comes up. The diagonalisation proof that there are undetermined games uses choice to well-order the set of strategies, so it’s actually the other way around: without choice it is consistent (assuming consistency of some other stuff) that all games in this formulation are determined. This is called the Axiom of Determinacy.

The axioms in question are power set and replacement: to prove full Borel determinacy you need to apply the power set axiom infinitely many times (using the replacement axiom). These two axioms are what gives the ZFC axioms their power, really.

Set theorists nowadays I don’t think debate about axioms per se. Set theory nowadays is at once somewhat pluralistic and somewhat settled (paradoxically). I’ll explain a little: set theorists are basically agreed that the ZFC axioms are natural, intuitively “true” (many set theorists would not put scare-quotes there, but I would), powerful enough to do all ordinary mathematics and more, and probably consistent. They also generally agree that many large-cardinal axioms are natural and probably consistent, though there is a wide variation in whether people think they are “true”; there is not nearly so much intuition that such huge objects could exist. This is different than our intuition behind the axiom of infinity, because that axiom is actually needed to do some ordinary mathematics (though you can do without it for a lot!)

The Projective Hierarchy continues the stratification of the Borel Hierarchy even further. If you assume infinitely many woodin cardinals, then you can prove Projective Determinacy. I have heard Tony Martin being quoted as saying that “if Projective Determinacy were found to be inconsistent” (and hence infinitely many Woodin cardinals is inconsistent) “then I’d be having serious doubts about [the axiom of] Replacement.” This gives you a flavour of how people think about the relationship between these concepts.

As a field of study, it’s the study of two-player games of perfect information (so think chess, not football or poker) in which each player may make countably many moves (you can also look at uncountable-length games but it’s not common). I’ll give you more detail than I would a child :P

Each player takes turns to move. You can encode the moves they make as coming from some set - for example they might just play numbers. The rules of the game are imposed by a winning set, which is a set of countable-length sequences of moves, and we say that player I wins if the infinite sequence of her first move followed by player II’s first move followed by her second move, etc, is in the winning set. Otherwise player II wins. (There are no draws, which technically means chess falls outside the scope of this setup, but it turns out not to be a big deal)

(This allows you to encode what moves are allowed by the rules - you just say that any sequence which contains a move where that player broke a rule is a loss for that player, regardless of what comes afterwards.)

Each winning set defines a different game. The property of determinacy is a property of sets of infinite sequences which says that there is a winning strategy for either player. A strategy is just a function which takes the finite sequence of moves up to that point in the game and tells the player (the player for whom the strategy is) what to do. A winning strategy is one which, if followed, always results in a win for that player.

If we modify the rules of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) so that draws are arbitrarily decided to give a win to player I, we know that this (finite) game has a winning strategy. In fact, any finite game has a winning strategy (or, if there are draws, this means there is a non-losing strategy). The outline of the proof is that if player I does not have a strategy to get to one of the (finitely many) winning states, then we can find a strategy for player II which avoids those winning states. (Remember, winning states are winning for I).

So, which games are determined? Are all games determined? Well, it’s actually easy (through a diagonalisation argument, same as proving uncountability of the reals) that not all infinite (countable-length, that is) games played with natural numbers (as moves) are determined. But you can create a way of categorising the sets of countable sequences of natural numbers (i.e. the possible winning sets) by a kind of complexity. This is the basis of descriptive set theory. It starts with topology: you can define basic open sets in this space as those sets consist of all infinite sequences which share a common finite prefix. Closed sets are the complements of open sets, as usual. But then you can define a hierarchy of complexity where the next level are countable unions of closed sets, then the next level are countable unions of complements of countable unions of complements of open sets. (An introduction to descriptive set theory will say more about this).

It’s quite easy to prove that all open sets and all closed sets in this hierarchy of complexity are determined. It’s a little harder to prove that the second level is determined, and harder still to prove that the third level is. Eventually a guy named Tony Martin (D. A. Martin) proved that all Borel sets in this hierarchy are determined. If you know your analysis, the Borel sets are exactly what you’re thinking: they’re the sets formed by all arbitrary countable unions, intersections and complements of open sets.

The interesting thing about this proof was that it needed a huge amount of set theoretic “power”. Most ordinary mathematics like analysis doesn’t need all the axioms of set theory, but this needed a massive chunk of them. This makes it interesting to set theorists because it tells us something about the relationship between something quite concrete: complexity of sets and strategies for easily-defined games on the one hand, and something quite abstract: the axioms of set theory. This pattern continues higher up: more determinacy can be proved if you assume even stronger axioms, going beyond what is typically included in set theory.

How much sugar do you add?

How long do you boil it for? (You don’t know; you have to monitor the temperature)

How long does putting it all in jars take you? (ages)

It’s not difficult, but it is time consuming and not trivial.

Making jam is not trivial but it I think that makes it rewarding! My dad has made jam and marmalade for as long as I’ve known and it’s always an event. My parents have hundreds of jars (for some reason my dad calls them bottles? Only in a jam context though!) and every so often he cooks up a giant pot of jam with an old-fashioned sugar thermometer, testing the batch on a piece of baking paper, then bottling everything up. He often did it with my sister, who now also makes her own jam.

He labels all the jars, and we’ve opened jars that were… I dunno, a decade old I’m sure, and they were totally fine. So they will definitely keep for a long time!

I have a PhD in mathematics (set theory). It would be pretty tough to explain to a child. Specifically my PhD is in determinacy, which is way easier to explain than most branches of set theory, but you do need a decent understanding of infinity to really get anywhere.

I mean the UK has 6% of its energy over the year come from solar, and 30% from wind, and installations are only accelerating, so this amount of installed solar is far from unrealistic.

Installing storage approximately doubles the LCOE of solar energy, so this is also feasible from a cost point of view as we get rid of dispatchable gas turbines.

Basically if we solve storage, we can get rid of nuclear, but not before.

I am not saying we should get rid of nuclear. I am saying we should keep some nuclear, also once we have got less gas and more storage. Does this resolve some things in this discussion for you?

Not really enough information. I will assume that by “installed solar power” you mean peak generation when the sun is shining, and that instead of peak use, you mean 40% of average use, i.e. let’s suppose that at an average moment the country consumes 100GW and, if the sun is shining, generates 40GW from solar.

Assume further the sun is up for half the year and the sky is clear for half the year, meaning the total amount of your yearly electricity you can generate with solar is 10% assuming typical weather. Then you would be able to reliably power the country with a combination of nuclear totalling 90% of average use (90GW) and enough storage that you can ride out cloudy periods.

I would go a step further and have creative grants to people. It would work in a way similar to the BBC and similar broadcasters, where a body gets government money and then picks creative projects it thinks are worthwhile, with a remit that goes beyond the lowest common denominator. UBI ensures that this system doesn’t have a monopoly on creative output.

I don’t understand what you’re asking, sorry.