Yeah, good point! How did I get dragged into talking about private lawsuits?

However, can you be sued right now in London for something you say on philosophy forum?

Or northern Scotland or anywhere in the UK if someone feels you've harmed them directly or indirectly through this philosophy forum? — boethius

Yep!

Again, most regular people don't go cause harm far from where they live.

So a private individual who says something online in Northern Scotland, that someone in London takes issue with, will need to appear in London court?

The offence has occurred in Northern Scotland or in London? — boethius

As I said, the offence happens where the harm is suffered. So yes, the case can be brought in London because that's where the harm occurred, but in reality the defendant would usually appear remotely by video.

Right now philosophy forum is your private property that you don't provide a service through. So it's like inviting us to your private house: you can invite us to come in and you can tell us to go.

Once you're a company, you are by definition providing a service. — boethius

No, legally I'm already providing a service. Users already have the same rights they'll have when a company operates it. OSA, GDPR, and probably other laws apply because it's open to the public.

What I'm providing is a framework to analyze liability and business decisions. — boethius

Thank you for your efforts and for your interesting contributions, but I remain confident in the path I have mapped out.

My recommendation would be to aim to make a structure that is financially sustainable and can handle all the kinds of events that are likely to happen — boethius

:up:

You're saying you could live in Norther Scotland and be forced to appear in a London court by a plaintiff without the case having any connection to London (except maybe the plaintiff lives there)? — boethius

The plaintiff's location is the connection. It's about where the harm has occurred. The upshot is if the alleged harm happened in London, a plaintiff will/can sue in London, even if the defendant lives in Scotland. Apparently that's normal procedure for online publication and is not considered unusual.

You have more experience with all the people you've banned than I do, are you confident none of them would bring you to court when they suddenly have consumer rights vis-a-vis The Philosophy Forum Ldt.? — boethius

Why do you think consumer rights magically appear just because a company exists? They don't. Anyone who could hypothetically sue The Philosophy Forum Ltd could already do the same against me personally today. The company just limits my personal exposure if someone ever did try something.

Are you confident no one participating or reading the forum would ever interpret anything on the forum as something from the naughty list of no-no's, and be motivated to have their day in court about that? — boethius

The actual legal risk is the same whether I operate TPF as a company or as a sole trader, and we're addressing it through clear policies, risk assessment, etc. etc. etc, as described above.

Are you confident the UK government will never take particular interest in what's said here on their own account for whatever reason? — boethius

Same answer really. The government doesn't care if I'm just me or a company. Anyway, TPF is a super-low-risk service from the OSA's point of view.

Again, I have no idea what is going on in your legal system but in UK law, pretty much everything you say in that post is false, and perhaps based on some very peculiar circumstances that you know about from your own life.

In particular I want to shut down this particular untruth:

To sue someone personally you need to go to the district where they live, so the issue of physically getting to court is at least solved. — boethius

This is simply not true in UK law.

I mean it's probably safer in the US, but not worth the hassle for that added safety. It strikes me as overkill to make us bulletproof. It feels like you might be catastrophizing and overburdening.

In other words, if we do our best to be above board, we'll be fine in the UK. — Hanover

:up:

But the basic gist of what I'm trying to say is that "following the rules" is not anyways a way to avoid court and the expenses of even going to court.

Someone can just say you're breaking the law, take things out of context, even fabricate evidence that never happened or make wild claims about what did happen. Who's to say you're in the right and did nothing wrong?

A lengthy and expensive court process. — boethius

Rather than an argument against forming a UK company, this seems to be an argument against existing at all.

Such an actor could make a company to make a company to make a company to, all in different countries, just to sue Jamal. — boethius

Remind me again why you think it's better if I get sued personally rather than The Philosophy Forum Ltd.

:up:

My main argument is against the UK jurisdiction, mainly due to all the speech laws that have been created, or suddenly enforced in new ways. — boethius

The Online Safety Act is precisely the legislation I am setting up the new site to comply with. By the time we launch we'll have compliance nailed down in place: risk assessment, policies, reporting tools, moderation processes, documentation thereof. UK jurisdiction isn't a liability but rather the legal context we're deliberately addressing.

With all this talk of "speech laws," it might be an idea to put things in perspective. The OSA targets:

• Terrorism content: material that encourages, glorifies, or provides instruction for terrorism, or originates from a proscribed terrorist organisation
• Child sexual exploitation & abuse
• Content that depicts or promotes child sexual abuse
• Incitement to violence or hatred
• Criminal threats, harassment, or stalking
• Revenge porn / intimate image abuse
• Fraud, scams, or facilitation of financial crime

Even though we are low-risk with respect to these things, we are going to have a system that can deal with them and that can be seen to be serious about them.

A UK limited company is very simple. In contrast, a non-profit or charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) or similar would mean a lot of bureaucracy, at least in the UK. And I don't know about where you are but as a non-profit we would likely have more legal exposure.

A big headache, and would achieve nothing, so no, we're not going down that route.

Second, I'm not sure about UK law, but usually micro businesses are personal liability businesses, just adding a business name and various business codes to your personal identity. — boethius

To have limited liability you need a limited liability business, what ltd. means, and that requires shareholders and a board of directors and it is first of all the shareholders that are not personally liable for the debts of the business and second the board of directors but only if they satisfy certain conditions, referred to as "due care" for short. — boethius

No, a micro-entity is a type of limited company. I have run limited companies before. I had one on my own when I was a contract programmer. It was not difficult.

With this specific issue as with all others you bring up, your worries are entirely misplaced.

It's not a casual thing making a business structure, you're then liable as a business and anyone can sue you for any amount. The protections you have as a private individual do not extend to a business you happen to own. If you lose a lawsuit the business will be taken to settle the damages. — boethius

I don't get this. If TPF is going to be sued I'd rather it was run as a company, since otherwise I'd be personally liable. I mean, that's the whole point.

Whether it's really necessary or not is debatable though, I agree.

Honestly the idea of making a business to manage small donated sums seems to me extremely foolish.

However, if there's commitment to that, then 100% the only reasonable implementation is that Benkei takes care of the administration aspects. Small errors in paperwork can lead to audits and fines and endless bureaucracy. Just filing the taxes properly will likely cost more than this 100 Euros a month. — boethius

Note that since the company will be a micro-entity, accounts and administration will not be costly and burdensome at all. You are vastly overstating it.

The UK Online Safety Act 2023 applies to sites that can be accessed and joined by UK users, regardless of where the servers are actually located. TPF has a significant number of UK members, so OSA compliance is a requirement whether the company is registered in the UK or not.

As for hosting, putting the site on servers outside of the UK doesn't make us any safer under the OSA. The law targets the operator, not the server location, so our obligations remain the same whether the servers are in the UK or elsewhere.

In any case, the new site will not be hosted on UK servers. If you are concerned about these matters it might be worth pointing out that the current platform, Plush Forums, is a UK company, but our soon-to-be platform, Discourse, is an American one.

I don't think registering the company outside the UK would reduce legal obligations, and it would massively complicate things for me. Since I'll be continuing to run the forum, forming a UK company under my own control is the best way to keep TPF running and legally compliant.

I am a UK citizen. But since I'll be continuing as the forum's administrator, this is simply a fact of the situation that won't change.

And let's be realistic. I don't want to minimize our (mainly my) responsibilities—technically TPF probably does fall under the OSA—but the law is aimed at high-risk platforms where illegal or harmful content can spread quickly to large audiences, e.g., social media, video-sharing, live-streaming, and messaging apps used by children. A deliberately compliant and heavily and accountably moderated philosophy forum like TPF, with mostly text-based discussion, clear rules, policies specifically addressing the OSA's concerns, and reporting tools for all posts and even private messages, is very low risk.

Requires just one UK national to complain to UK authorities that their feelings have been hurt and the site could be easily shutdown. — boethius

That's not how it works. The OSA doesn't allow the authorities to shut down a site just because someone's feelings are hurt. It goes after sites and apps that neglect to take steps to prevent and remove illegal content. By implementing special policies, reporting mechanisms, and moderation of everything, TPF will be able to fully comply with the OSA.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/802351

Although I did say...

I happen not to agree with this either, because we can usually set aside or ignore any concerns about the definition of these dependencies, relying on shared meaning. — Jamal

Jamal and I have disagreed about this in the past. This thread provides good evidence that you need to put your money down on specific definitions or you’ll never be able to discuss beyond just the surface of metaphysics. If we come back in a month and have the same discussion, the same arguments will just get recycled over and over without ever having a resolution. If you want to go deeper, you have to commit. — T Clark

@Clarendon yesterday produced a very good post in another thread which covers the issue of definitions in metaphysics:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1026833

Highly recommendended. He or she puts it much better than I ever did.

Aside from that, I thought you and I had reached a compromise agreement some time ago, which is that you don't begin a philosophical discussion with the definition of the concept you centrally want to discuss, but it can help, for the sake of argument, to define any supporting concepts.

Yeah, but I have a feeling he was one of those reincarnated members, who had been banned on the first site. Don't quote me on that.

I'm closing this because it's low-quality and has run its course.

Will all the previously banned members get a second chance? Lol

But seriously — Mikie

I'd like to see the return of @Streetlight to be honest.

Seriously, I think we gave banned members a second chance when we moved in 2015, and one or two members were reincarnated.

Some were materialists, some were not. Democritus, Leucippus and Epicurus believed the soul was material (made of atoms, specifically), along with everything else.

But it seems to be basically negative dialectics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, and the question that raises is in what sense negative dialectics is metaphysics. I imagine his answer will parallel his attitude to philosophical system.

I'm curious: as someone who is more familiar with Aristotle than me, how would you evaluate Adorno's interpretations?

I may look back on this moment and think, "how could I have let this happen?"

I've got all the messages, I think, so yeah, I'm pretty sure I can send you an export of your conversations.

made it through the majority of the lectures. There is very good background material here. He develops the concept of mediation, which he claims is derived from Aristotle. Aristotle he claims has a metaphysics of mediation. Matter has priority in the sense of its proximity to the individual subject, but form has priority in the temporal sense. Adorno sees each, matter and form, as mediated by the other. — Metaphysician Undercover

Wow, good work!

After this, he goes on to discuss the need for contemporary metaphysics. The temporal conditions, dictate metaphysical needs, so the metaphysics of today needs to be completely different from the historic. This is the part I am reading now. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is also how he ends ND so there will be similarities. If I'm not mistaken, the idea is that traditional metaphysics has been shown to be ridiculous and entirely unjustified, with the degeneration of one of the most enlightened and philosophical parts of the world into a genocidal war machine. The very idea that everything fits together harmoniously has to be thrown out.

What I'm not quite clear about is what he thinks a contemporary metaphysics should be like.

Done: categories can now be selected on the search page. Plus you can run a search without entering a search term to get all the discussions in a category. If it doesn't work maybe you need to clear your cached files.

(Unless of course the "dump" or rawest form of database storage you can access has some field or notation for category, in which case it'd be even easier!) — Outlander

Yep. I've done it already. :up:

(not live yet)

The one big improvement I could make to the archive is to include the categories. For some reason Plush gave me an export without categories so I just went ahead and built the archive without them. Now I've got them so I could potentially incorporate them somehow. Maybe just in the search and your-posts pages.

I'm not migrating any posts to the new site, so the current compromise is fine. As far as I recall it's only me and @hypericin who ever cared anyway.

OK, I'll leave them. I've found a decent compromise, which is that they won't be indexed by search engines but anyone can visit those pages, given the URLs (or find them from the archive's search page or whatever).

The above issue alerted me to another one: the possibility of SEO penalization for duplicate content. So I've now blocked crawlers with meta tags, a robots.txt file, and also in the web server config, thus preventing search engines from indexing any more pages on tpfarchive.com. I'll remove those blocks when we close the Plush site.

Google has already begun to index tpfarchive.com, no doubt because we've linked to it here.

I forgot to remove the short stories. On the one hand they should be archived, on the other hand some of us (like me and @hypericin) don't want our stories to be publicly available, i.e., published, on the web.

Approach, I said.

New topic if you like.

All very interesting but we've gone too far off-topic. Since this is an important topic I'd like to keep it pure.

Next, we preprocessed the posts by generating embeddings. Using the MiniLM-L6-v2 model, each post was converted into a 384-dimensional numerical vector capturing its semantic meaning. These vectors were stored locally as embeddings.npy . To enable fast similarity search, we built a FAISS index from the embeddings, allowing the bot to retrieve only the most relevant posts for a user query rather than scanning all 29,918 posts each time.

We then integrated the BannoBot script, which takes a user’s question, converts it into an embedding, searches the FAISS index for top-k relevant posts, and constructs a prompt including these excerpts. This prompt is passed to a local LLM (Orca-Mini), which generates a natural-language answer in the style and content of your posts. All processing—embedding, search, and LLM inference—occurs on your laptop, ensuring privacy and avoiding cloud APIs.

Cool. I wonder though...

I'll tempt you to do something like this with the entire data file... a master philosophy forum bot... — Banno

Like an amalgam of everyone on TPF? Tempting though it is, my instinct is that the wider the range of data, the more it would approach a regular LLM like ChatGPT and lose its own point of view.

In my present immoral state, I'll tempt you to do something like this with the entire data file... a master philosophy forum bot... — Banno

I vaguely recall we were warned about this around 1818. Something to do with an unconventional Swiss scientist.

Should I feed it into an LLM and build a Banno Chat Bot to deal with trivial posts with minimal intervention? — Banno

I notice you didn't wait for an answer and just went ahead and did it. So preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop for more than a moment to think if you should (to paraphrase Michael Crichton).

As it stands it is only using the top 4 posts. I'll have a play and see if it can do more without being too slow. — Banno

So it's reading all your posts before it comes up with an answer each time? I guess the next step is to build your own LLM model that incorporates the words of Banno in its training data.