> with the singlefile extension it's pretty easy to store things you can see but the scraper gets blocked on
FWIW, at least on iOS, it's possible to inject Javascript into the web site being currently displayed by Safari as a side effect of sharing a web link to an app via the share sheet.
Several "read it later" style apps use this successfully to get around paywalls (assuming you've paid yourself) and other robot blockers. Any plans for Linkwarden to do this (or does it already)?
I'm increasingly suspecting that it would prove absolutely nothing, and I really hope we can continue developing ethics without any "empirical proof" for its necessity.
For example, growing up, my bar for "things that must obviously be conscious" included anything that can pass the Turing test, yet look where we are now...
The only reasonable conclusion to me is probably somewhere in the general neighborhood of panpsychism: Either almost everybody/everything is somewhat conscious, or nothing/nobody is at all.
I feel like the only argument you're successfully making is that you would find it inevitably evil/immoral to be a cloned consciousness. I don't see how that automatically follows for the rest of humanity.
Sure, there are astronomical ethical risks and we might be better off not doing it, but I think your arguments are losing that nuance, and I think it's important to discuss the matter accurately.
This entire HN discussion is proof that some people would not personally have a problem with being cloned, but that does not entitle them to create clones. The clone is not the same person. It will inevitably deviate from the original simply because it's impossible to expose it to exactly the same environment and experiences. The clone has the right to change its mind about the ethics of cloning.
It does indeed not, unless they can at least ensure their wellbeing and their ethical treatment, at least in my view (assuming they are indeed conscious, and we might have to just assume so, absent conclusive evidence to the contrary).
> The clone has the right to change its mind about the ethics of cloning.
Yes, but that does not retroactively make cloning automatically unethical, no? Otherwise, giving birth to a child would also be considered categorically unethical in most frameworks, given the known and not insignificant risk that they might not enjoy being alive or change their mind on the matter.
That said, I'm aware that some of the more extreme antinatalist positions are claiming this or something similar; out of curiosity, are you too?
>retroactively make cloning automatically unethical
There's nothing retroactive about it. The clone is harmed merely by being brought into existence, because it's robbed of the possibility of having its own identity. The harm occurs regardless of whether the clone actually does change its mind. The idea that somebody can be harmed without feeling harmed is not an unusual idea. E.g. we do not permit consensual murder ("dueling").
>antinatalist positions
I'm aware of the anti-natalist position, and it's not entirely without merit. I'm not 100% certain that having babies is ethical. But I already mentioned several differences between consciousness cloning and traditional reproduction in this discussion. The ethical risk is much lower.
> But I already mentioned several differences between consciousness cloning and traditional reproduction in this discussion. The ethical risk is much lower.
Yes, what you actually said leads to the conclusion that the ethical risk in consciousness cloning is much lower, at least concerning the act of cloning itself.
Then it wasn't a good attempt at making a mind clone.
I suspect this will actually be the case, which is why I oppose it, but you do actually have to start from the position that the clone is immediately divergent to get to your conclusions; to the extent that the people you're arguing with are correct (about this future tech hypothetical we're not really ready to guess about) that the clone is actually at the moment of their creation identical in all important ways to the original, then if the original was consenting the clone must also be consenting:
Because if the clone didn't start off consenting to being cloned when the original did, it's necessarily the case that the brain cloning process was not accurate.
> It will inevitably deviate from the original simply because it's impossible to expose it to exactly the same environment and experiences.
If divergence were an argument against the clone having been created, by symmetry it is also an argument against the living human having been allowed to exist beyond the creation of the clone.
The living mind may be mistreated, grow sick, die a painful death. The uploaded mind may be mistreated, experience something equivalent.
Those sufferances are valid issues, but they are not arguments for the act of cloning itself to be considered a moral issue.
Uncontrolled diffusion of such uploads may be; I could certainly believe a future in which, say, every American politician gets a thousand copies of their mind stuck in a digital hell created by individual members the other party on computers in their basements that the party leaders never know about. But then, I have read Surface Detail by Iain M Banks.
To deny that is to assert that consciousness is non-physical, i.e. a soul exists; the case in which a soul exists, brain uploads don't get them and don't get to be moral subjects.
It's the exact opposite. The original is the original because it ran on the original hardware. The copy is created inferior because it did not. Intentionally creating inferior beings of equal moral weight is wrong.
>Because if the clone didn't start off consenting to being cloned when the original did, it's necessarily the case that the brain cloning process was not accurate.
This is false. The clone is necessarily a different person, because consciousness requires a physical substrate. Its memories of consenting are not its own memories. It did not actually consent.
The premise of the position is that it's theoretically possible to create a person with memories of being another person. I obviously don't deny that or there would be no argument to have.
Your argument seems to be that it's possible to split a person into two identical persons. The only way this could work is by cloning a person twice then murdering the original. This is also unethical.
> Your argument seems to be that it's possible to split a person into two identical persons. The only way this could work is by cloning a person twice then murdering the original. This is also unethical.
False.
The entire point of the argument you're missing is that they're all treating a brain clone as if it is a way to split a person into two identical persons.
I would say this may be possible, but it is extremely unlikely that we will actually do so at first.
One has a physical basis, the other is pure spiritualism. Accepting spiritualism makes meaningful debate impossible, so I am only engaging with the former.
I'd also be interested in your moral distinction between having children and cloning consciousness (in particular in a world where the latter doesn't result in inevitable exploitation, a loss of human rights etc.) then.
If a "cloned" consciousness has no memories, and a unique personality, and no awareness of any previous activity, how is it a clone? That's going well beyond merely glitchy. In that case the main concern would be the possibility of slavery as Ar-Curunir mentioned.
That's my point exactly: I don't see what makes clones any more or less deserving of ethical consideration than any other sentient beings brought into existence consciously.
> Copying a consciousness is about the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy possible.
Who's autonomy is violated? Even if it were theoretically possible, don't most problems stem from how the clone is treated, not just from the mere fact that they exist?
> It's worse than e.g. building nuclear weapons, because there's no possible non-evil use for it.
This position seems effectively indistinguishable from antinatalism.
Copying the human brain and copying subjective consciousness/experience might well be two entirely different things, given that the correspondence between the two is the realm of metaphysics, not science.
Good ideas in principle. Too bad we have absolutely no way of enforcing them against the people running the simulation that hosts our own consciousnesses.
Many open source contributions are unsolicited, which makes a clear contribution policy and code of conduct all the more important.
And given that, I think "must not use LLM assistance" will age significantly worse than an actually useful description of desirable and undesirable behavior (which might very reasonably include things like "must not make your bot's slop our core contributor's problem").
There is a common agreement in the open source community that unsolicited contributions from humans are expected and desireable if made in good faith. Letting your agent loose on github is neither good faith nor LLM assisted programming, it's just an experiment with other people's code which we have also seen (and banned) before the age of LLMs.
I think some things are just obviously wrong and don't need to be written down. I also think having common rules for bots and people is not a good idea, because, point one, bots are not people and we shouldn't pretend they are
FWIW, at least on iOS, it's possible to inject Javascript into the web site being currently displayed by Safari as a side effect of sharing a web link to an app via the share sheet.
Several "read it later" style apps use this successfully to get around paywalls (assuming you've paid yourself) and other robot blockers. Any plans for Linkwarden to do this (or does it already)?
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