This is not true and a harmful generalization. There are dumb people of every type. There are probably smart people you respect that engage in CSAM and are minor-attracted. This kind of privacy invasion will only net a tiny section of that population, as most know that lack of caution is life or death.
> This is not true and a harmful generalization. There are dumb people of every type.
That's purely specious, and you say it as if I ever asserted there aren't "dumb people of every type.", which I didn't say.
Yes, there are dumb people of every "type". Are there as many intelligent people as those of low intelligence who struggle to think abstractly, struggle to read and write, have poor motor control, rely heavily on dogma for a moral compass, or have trouble with impulse control?
If you think there are as many people with a high IQ as a low IQ with those traits, I don't think you're being honest.
Are most pedophiles of low intelligence overall? It's doubtful, but there's room for more study.
Are the pedophiles that are offenders of low intelligence? Significantly more offending pedophiles are of low intelligence than the general population. Yes, the factors at play may also apply to other forms of crime. But when you factor out non-offending pedophiles, those we aren't as concerned with in regards to CSAM, the ones that are caught aren't exactly the cream of the crop.
Furthermore, I've met a handful of pedophiles, both convicted and not. Every one of them either was clearly mentally retarded or bordering on retardedness, or they had a severe personality disorder. Yes, it's a small sample size, but the ones that were caught did so doing the dumbest of shit (putting aside the horrific nature of child exploitation in the first place). This even includes a female pedophile, who was both stupid and psychopathic, and I find it funny that one of those studies questions the very existence of female pedophiles.
There are many pedophiles that are of above-average intelligence. Most may not even be considered "dumb". But to imply that there's no difference in distribution of, frankly, dumb people to smart people between different behaviors is absurd in that it ignores any sort of relation implication that intelligence has on said behaviors.
As a group, the data does not suggest that pedophiles are exceptionally intelligent, but rather the opposite.
So yes, while I believe there is a privacy concern (I said earlier I would not want such software or hardware running on my own compuer), I stand by my conclusion that CSAM detection would catch a significant number of pedophiles and probably continue to do so for some time. The point of such systems isn't to be a superweapon to catch every pedophile. The ones that it might catch happen to be the ones who are most likely to offend. If you play the stupid game of uploading CSAM to Apple iCloud, you win the stupid prize of getting convicted, and it just so happens that a ton of pedophiles are likely to do something that boneheaded.
I think your response is emotionally-charged and mixes feelings with data and anecdotes, which is unhelpful in a complex discussion of a sensitive topic, so I hesitate to engage further, but…
I’ve reviewed much of the existing data on minor-attracted persons (which is scant). The problem is that the samples are heavily biased towards including individuals who are caught or self-admit for care, which is not a very good representative sample. As a few of the studies and articles you posted mention, there was little study done until very recently. You also make the leap without supporting data that this system would catch those most likely to offend. Generally I would say the data is insufficient to conclude in any direction other than dumber people get caught doing crimes at a higher rate than smarter people.
Lastly, I have some serious doubts about your expertise in mental health and the study thereof from your use of “mentally retarded” and “retardedness”. You should know for future discussions that the clinical terminology has shifted to “intellectually disability”.
I've commented on it before, but I have to say again, the Timescale Helm charts are by far the best way I've ever seen a database run in Kubernetes, and actually from an operations, backup, and scaling perspective they are the best database management experience I've had period. Huge fan, always enjoy talking with Feike, and keep up the great work Timescale team.
I brought timescale (a postgres extension that brings time series to postgres) to my current IoT job, and it has been the biggest engineering win of my career. The tooling, community, extensions, and quality of postgres + very high performance inserts + reads has reduced costs for the business dramatically versus the previous cassandra + sql server setup. We have tens of billions of events in multiple timescale hypertables, with many thousands of inserts per second running on r5.xl nodes in k8s (4 vcpu, 30gb ram) and they don't break a sweat.
I brought Timescale to my current job, and I have to plug their Helm charts. They have made deployment, backup, scaling, and config so easy on k8s for Timescale. Probably the best postgres chart that exists, period. Great work TSDB team.
If you're referring to the WFH situation staying with us forever, it definitely will not. Things may change somewhat, but in discussing WFH with a variety of execs who employee tens of thousands of engineers collectively, there is a very strong majority of engineers who would come back to the office tomorrow if able.
Though I don't think it's perfect, languages like Go that treat errors as simply another type and you check as a return value do get closer to treating errors and success symmetrically versus an exception throwing and typing system like some other languages.
Building on that, the ADT languages with full option types here are fantastic here, because the shape of the data in each case can be taught to the compiler.
