Evidence please.

For adults, check out the studies referenced in this analysis, for example. A few figures from there are "never employed: 74%", "Living independently: 15%", "No friends with shared interests: 47%", and institutionalization rates varying from 30% to 50% depending on how you define it. The analysis notes that the two studies which had notably better results were on samples with relatively high intelligence. As for outcomes in children, there's this one about physical aggression, and this meta-analysis giving a figure of 42% self-injurious behavior without a significant age dependence.

You’re also arguing that it both is and is not a disease. It can’t be both.

It's a matter of definitions - if you have a condition which has small chance of making you slightly better at some kinds of intellectual work, high chance of making you have too much sensory and other issues to be unable to work or live independently, and a medium chance for those issues to be so bad as to require you to be institutionalized, is it a "disease"? I'd say yes, since the overwhelming majority of outcomes are negative, but one could techically argue that the rare positive-ish outcomes disqualify it.

But more importantly, I don't think it matters whether something "is a disease" or not (I probably shouldn't have mentioned that word at all). It causes suffering on net, so no matter what you call it, it's moral to research a way to prevent people from getting the condition.

And you still haven’t explained why people want to be “cured.” Homosexuality used to be considered a disease that can be cured too, by the way. And there are still parents who force their kids into those “cures.” That is what you are advocating here, except for autism. As if people with autism have no agency.

I think you're still treating this as a more complicated moral issue than it actually is. Forget for a second all the people with high-functioning autism, and consider a clearer case. Let's say there's an autistic child with severe sensory issues that make them distressed by random sounds to the point of screaming, which distresses them more until they start self-harming by hitting their head against a wall and trying to bite their fingers off. They are mentally disabled and non-verbal, and hence can't tell you their opinion on medicine. And let's say you have, in this hypothetical, a cure that can fix all of that. Is it moral to give it to them, even though you can't possibly get informed consent? For me, it's pretty clear that it is. Do you agree with me on this?

If yes, it seems to me that's sufficient to argue that a cure for autism is very important to make. It's not about the mild cases which go on to live fairly normal lives, and write newspaper articles with titles like "I don't want to cure my autism, I want to own it". It's for all the severe cases for whom a normal life has never been an option.

1. The definition I mentioned is from wikipedia, I didn't just make it up.
2. Your argument doesn't actually follow - your definition mentions "failure of health", which is so vague as to cover anything, yet for some reason you argue that it matters that it's not infectious. Hereditary diseases are called that despite not being infectious, so clearly it's not as clear-cut as this.
3. But actually, fair enough - I don't think it matters whether something "is a disease", so I shouldn't have mentioned it - my argument doesn't rely on it in any way.

A "disease" is a condition that affects one adversely. Some people with the autism diagnosis are not obviously affected adversely and do not consider themselves to be (and I am not suggesting that they are wrong), but most are. The worse-off autism cases look more like "constantly keeps trying to self-harm to deal with distress caused by crippling sensory issues; needs to be institutionalized". I think not very controversial to say that those people are affected adversely and would want to not have those problems.

I think when you see me talking about autism, you think only of the first group of people - and I agree that if that's what all autism was like, it'd be strange to consider it a disease (and I also agree with what you said earlier, that in the context of anti-vaxxing, a lot of weird parents seem to unjustifiedly think the mild autism of their children is as bad as death). But it's not, and hence it causes quite a lot of suffering and it'd be morally right to find a way to prevent children from getting it.

Are some autistic people severely intellectually disabled? Sure. Plenty of non-autistic people are too.

The incidence of intellectual disability among autistic people is notably higher than among non-autistic people, and similarly for the incidence of many other comorbidities.

That said, I'm not sure what you're trying to argue for, here. If you're trying to say that we should be more accepting of neuroatypical people, like those with autism, I agree; it has improved quite a lot in the last decade but it's still not great. If you're trying to say autism shouldn't be considered a disease and there shouldn't be efforts to find a cure for it, I don't agree.

I'm not sure why antivaxxers focus so much on specifically autism as a supposed vaccine sideffect. I think it might be historical reasons (it dates all the way back to Fudenberg and maybe even older), plus the fact that it's a mental problem rather than physical and hence trivial to motivatedly "self-diagnose" (it's much easier to claim that after you vaccinated your child you immediately noticed "clear autism symptoms", than to claim their leg abruptly fell off).

Not a good example. "Defending X" is a much stronger requirement than just "pointing out that a specific argument against X is invalid"; the latter is done by everyone who likes seeing good arguments rather than bad arguments, and isn't a sign of liking X.

(The most pro-russian (as in, supporting the russian-ukraine war) stuff I've seen was various memes from lemmy.ml and lemmygrad that ended up in popular. I'm having trouble finding a better example than that; in particular, because Lemmy's search is bad and doesn't seem to allow for searching recent comments from a specific instance, and also refuses to give me more than a few pages of results.)

This meme is from 2035

There might be a universe in which magic exists. However, there is no universe in which I exist and magic exists. That’s because I was born into a mundane version of the universe, so there are infinite possibilities, but because my existence in a magical universe is 0

That doesn't really follow. Specifically, you're putting way too much credit (infinity times as much credit as you should, in fact) on your ability to know exactly how your universe works. You're saying there are zero hypothetical worlds in which you are the person you are now and also magic exists. I'm sure you can see how this is not true; for all you know magic is very obvious in your world and you just got mind-controlled, a minute ago, to your current state of mind. Or maybe you just never noticed it and hence grew up thinking you are in a mundane universe, which is very unlikely but not probability-0. Or one of many many other explanations, which are all unlikely (nothing involving a universe with magic in it is going to be likely), but very much not probability-0.

It very nearly did, but there's, like, 2 working instances with heavy ratelimits.

...we're talking about a ban of links to Twitter on a gaming subreddit. Those links would be to, like, game news. That's not "fascist content".

Oh, that's really cool. I hope there's more linkage between the twitter-like and reddit-like islands of the fediverse in the future; I'm somewhat interested in reading the former but it seems to be complicated to actually get federation with it.

I think it's way worse to keep information from someone who wants to see it, than to let it be seen by someone who would prefer not to see it but isn't motivated enough to do something about it. Sort of by construction, actually - if the latter category really didn't want to see Twitter links, they would have done it themselves.

It's a Lemmy feature. Every instance can have a list of slurs that's automatically removed from all messages. You can see the instance's slur regex in the /site api endpoint, key slur_filter_regex. Lemmy.ca's filter bans the word "retarded" among some other things.

I've looked at a few other instances and they're all interestingly different. Someone should do data science on this. E.g., I've yet to find an instance that uses it to automatically censor ideologically opposing sites, which is better than I expected, but it's almost certain that some instances do.

It's not totally insane reasoning but, like, people can just downvote links to Twitter if they want to, and/or use an extension to automatically redirect to a Nitter instance. The only people actually affected by censoring Twitter community-wide is those who would want to look at the context.

Sure, in Firefox itself it wasn't a severe vulnerability. It's way worse on standalone PDF readers, though:

In applications that embed PDF.js, the impact is potentially even worse. If no mitigations are in place (see below), this essentially gives an attacker an XSS primitive on the domain which includes the PDF viewer. Depending on the application this can lead to data leaks, malicious actions being performed in the name of a victim, or even a full account take-over. On Electron apps that do not properly sandbox JavaScript code, this vulnerability even leads to native code execution (!). We found this to be the case for at least one popular Electron app.

Huh? What do you mean "if"? Such a PDF vulnerability literally did happen a few months ago; fixed in Firefox v.126: https://codeanlabs.com/blog/research/cve-2024-4367-arbitrary-js-execution-in-pdf-js/.

There’s no real need for pirate ai when better free alternatives exist.

There's plenty of open-source models, but they very much aren't better, I'm afraid to say. Even if you have a powerful workstation GPU and can afford to run the serious 70B opensource models at low quantization, you'll still get results significantly worse than the cutting-edge cloud models. Both because the most advanced models are proprietary, and because they are big and would require hundreds of gigabytes of VRAM to run, which you can trivially rent from a cloud service but can't easily get in your own PC.

The same goes for image generation - compare results from proprietary services like midjourney to the ones you can get with local models like SD3.5. I've seen some clever hacks in image generation workflows - for example, using image segmentation to detect a generated image's face and hands and then a secondary model to do a second pass over these regions to make sure they are fine. But AFAIK, these are hacks that modern proprietary models don't need, because they have gotten over those problems and just do faces and hands correctly the first time.

This isn't to say that running transformers locally is always a bad idea; you can get great results this way - but people saying it's better than the nonfree ones is mostly cope.

Incredibly weird that this thread was up for two days without anyone posting a link to the actual answer to OP's question, which is g4f.

Difficulty is hardly the point of the post.

I haven't, actually, since I normally use an adblocker (and also don't use that tracker). Looks like they're all VPN advertisements right now, which is at least a somewhat non-mainstream ad segment.

There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.

That seems obviously false, unless you're proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don't actually do anything. I guess you could argue that as you throw money into saving lives, the low-hanging fruits get picked and the cost rises, so you can never saturate all the charities - but this is a very weak argument, since saving 99.99% of all the people in the world from hunger or poverty would be about as good as 100%. Just because there's diminishing returns doesn't mean it's a doomed cause.