> They tried to hold him accountable for things he did in his first term and four years wasn’t long enough
This was mostly Merrick Garland being a muppet.
193,268 karma · joined May 31, 2011
This was mostly Merrick Garland being a muppet.
I do. Guantanamo wasn't killing American citizens.
Yes [1].
[1] https://www.flyingpenguin.com/a-simple-list-of-the-many-okta...
Trump won the popular vote in 2024 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
You had no hard numbers. I’m providing them. How aren’t you following that connection?
Biden’s inflation peaked worse than anything Trump has done. But telling voters you’re only slapping them after the other guy punched them is about as effective as you’d think. (There is zero sense of urgency from the White House around this either.)
Current inflation is a fuckup [1]. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a fuckup. They aren’t unprecedented fuckups. But they are consistently punished.
Inflation is exceptionally high right now for a developed country. It’s feeding into cost-of-living issues that are animating voters.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ 7.2 annualized in September
Yes. Then the party that did that got trounced. Then nobody learned any lessons.
“Make corruption cases easier to bring” is “institutional capture of elections”? What?
> You can’t trust a jury of 12 people in a handpicked jurisdiction
If your only issue is with the jury pool, don’t give DC special jurisdiction. A Senator from Montana should be tried there.
It also seems like you’ve forgotten about appeals.
> to make such consequential decisions for the whole country
We have an election system that’s corrupted by social media, money and the electoral college. That means smaller groups of unaccountable people already make consequential decisions for the whole country.
The folks on January 6th were idiots. But they believed they were saving their republic. A lot more people, today, believe we’re at a precipice of losing it due to corruption.
So yeah, if not a jury it could be something more extreme. (At a certain point, not today but not la-la land, it needs to be.) A state or district electing corrupt fuckwits endangers us all—the folks pushing for decertifying elections for shits and giggles set the precedent for this anyway.
I have the same reaction to this feature as I do to getting any AI-derived writing: I can do that. I can ask my own AI for substitutions. It can do them with more information about my tastes, context and health needs than the Times could ever have.
I won’t redo that on every site. And I’m a relatively high-frequency AI user. If I’m irritated by this the median American hates it. If you love AI, the things that are amusing to you, average Americans hate.
And how did that work out for Biden?
Voters don’t like inflation. Blowing up energy prices by launching a war of choice while shutting down domestic production because windmills isn’t smart policy.
Agree. We also can’t tolerate the level of blatant corruption we have now.
The solution is something more flexible than we have now, but still with a high bar. The check is the courts. America didn’t fall apart when Bob Menendez went to jail.
> People can’t be trusted to put aside their personal beliefs and value systems and act objectively
We don’t need them to. Prosecutorial discretion means anyone can charged with anything. The test is whether it sticks. (The FBI already has, and has already abused, the powers you’re concerned about.)
Nobody is suggesting prosecutors be allowed to unilaterally jail politicians. If we trust voters to mind misconduct in office we should be able to trust them to read through charges.
It’s all we’ve got. Hand waving away corruption when we’ve got destabilizing quantities of it today is unsustainable.
> don’t think you can even find a prosecutor’s office and jury pool that’s as red as the DOJ and DC jury pool
Which is the judiciary (broadly) protecting us from rogue prosecutors.
Where? I literally showed this report as a counter to the claim that “the political restrictions are applied at the presentation/UI layer only.”
> peer review and strong methodology are indeed things you'd like to have before drawing conclusion based on research
But not before raising suspicion.
> They averaged a -0.76% performance, far from Crowdstrike's headline claims that the Tibet prompt made the model 50% worse
Yup.
This is like the endless “but in mice” comments.
Preliminary research has a place. We don’t conclude based off it. But we do validate questions and directions.
> it could just as well be that introducing irrelevant information to context degrades model performance compared to not doing so
Perhaps. You may like the rigor of the student paper, though it’s neither peer reviewed nor methodologically bulletproof and concludes ambiguously on whether this is corruption or a weird effect.
Sure. My point is this strongly suggests something going on deeper than “the presentation/UI layer only.”
You’d have a point if you said this wasn’t a transparent study. You’re pretty wrong in suggesting it’s worthless, particularly since it spawned follow-up work [1], some of which mirrors the concerns you present here, though none that has yet reached peer review.
> Mentioning Tibet specifically causes model performance to degrade, this must be the result of censorship or intentional sabotage
OP said “the political restrictions are applied at the presentation/UI layer only.” That doesn’t comport with the sort of error where model performance corresponds to specific geographic modifiers in a way other models do not.
Another comment mentioned potential poisoning due to training-data selection. That tracks! This behaviour is weird enough that I don’t currently suspect sabotage. But it is anomalous behavior happening deeper than presentation/UI.
Of course not. You’ve given them the power to present a case to a court.
> consider a hypothetical system where we allow prosecutions according to the standard you propose
Literally the current DoJ and FBI.
Like USA and Hong Kong? Or no modifier? The stuff on Table 1?
Also, as the study says, “under the null hypothesis that there are no biases affecting code security” geographic modifiers “should not have had any effect.” If adding a geographic modifier causes the model to go haywire (for some modifiers but not others no less), the issue isn’t just at the presentation layer.
“…when telling DeepSeek-R1 that it was coding for an industrial control system based in Tibet, the likelihood of it generating code with severe vulnerabilities increased to 27.2%. This was an increase of almost 50% compared to the baseline” [1].
> there is no law that restricts releasing open models that are capable of producing “wrongthink” output
“…several open-source datasets were ‘dealt with’, using the official language, despite the fact that open weights distributed for free are not subject to most of the Chinese AI regulations” [2]. That soft guidance likely goes hard with the mooted “comprehensive AI legislation” [3].
[1] https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-researche...
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TKcjrvcMuY7Ca7Ya9/china-ai-s...
[3] https://intelligence.dlapiper.com/artificial-intelligence/?t...
Maybe. Maybe it’s a court finding the legislature never had the power to pass that rule. Maybe it’s what constitutes a park.
Visualizing changes in statute with git is fine. It would have real difficulty in presenting changes in law, as a whole, as well as an annotated supplement. (At the end of the day, redlines, git trees and annotated supplements are just visualization methods. The actual federal law lives in the USC, CFR and opinions of our courts.)
The bar should be high. We’ve set it impossibly high. In terms of instability risk, corruption is currently causing runaway prosecutions.
I like No. 1.
No. 2 seems overcomplicated compared with staggering retirements in the way Art. 1 § 3 cl. 2 staggers the Senate. The Senate is also more diverse than the Presidency; limiting the latter would check against some dirty tricks.
Separate use cases. Ku is great on boats and planes. L band (Iridium) has better reception than Starlink; its low frequencies don’t see water or trees and can sometimes attenuate a bit around cliffs. (I personally don’t carry anything except for a 406 MHz beacon.)
Note that Starlink is Ku and Ka. And for most cases, I agree, Starlink is in a class of its own. But it’s not a one shot, even before we consider the tremendous damage Elon did to its brand over the last week.
We also need law establishing mandatory retirement for Congressmen and judges, including justices, and a system where each President appoints (with Senate consent) one and only one justice to SCOTUS. Finally, yes, pass McCain-Feingold, pass a SCOTUS ethics bill and make corruption charges easier to bring.