Meekro

I've gathered that the dispute is over Anthropic's two red lines: mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Is there any information (or rumors even) about what the specific request was? I can't believe the government would be escalating this hard over "we might want to do autonomous weapons in the vague, distant future" without a concrete, immediate request that Anthropic was denying.

Even if there was a desire for autonomous weapons (beyond what Anduril is already developing), I would think it would go through a standard defense procurement procedure, and the AI would be one of many components that a contractor would then try to build. It would have nothing to do with the existing contract between Anthropic and the Dept of War.

What, then, is this really about?

This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh

Banning something just for kids is an easy win for any politician, since that's one of the few groups that can't punish you in the next election. For that reason alone, I assume we'll get some law within 5-15 years mandating that Facebook ban kids. I assume the kids will trivially bypass it the block, or switch to foreign social media, and we'll go back to business as usual.

Right-- at which point, companies like Facebook will (hopefully) have to obey the law. But we're not there yet. Currently, people are moralizing at Zuck for not voluntarily killing his own products because they're "obviously harmful."

A product can be helpful to one person and harmful to another. Most products are like that. All sorts of things can be addictive to some people, from potato chips to video games.

There was a major public campaign in the 1950s to ban rock & roll music, and in the 1980s to ban heavy metal. In each case, there were legions of "experts" calling those genres "harmful", and they were taken seriously -- congressional hearings were held, etc.

Point is, "promoting a harmful product" is very much in the eye of the beholder, and doesn't work as an objective moral standard.

I don't see the problem. He's offering a completely legal product to an eager audience. If people want to propose banning social media in some capacity, that could and should be voted on-- but Zuck isn't violating any legal or moral law I've ever heard of, and he shouldn't have to guess what products will be illegal in 20 years and preemptively withdraw them.

If it's harming your mental health, stop using it. The "Delete App" button is right there.

I tried that too, and wound up unfollowing everyone except the people who never post. Then my page gets filled with "suggested" content.

The EU would have to put the US on a list of "foreign adversaries", with whatever political fallout comes from that. Not saying they shouldn't, but there will be downsides.

Since controlling these platforms is probably the best ROI for swinging public opinion, I'm sure it's a matter of time before they get seized (one way or another) and redistributed to reliable political allies.

I'm considering switching to US Mobile from Verizon-- it seems way cheaper, and you can still use the Verizon network. Any downsides I should know?

I think one of the tells might be that all major providers go down, not just one.

My wife and I are on the same Verizon family plan. One of us can be down while the other is fine, then 30 minutes later it's the opposite. It's been like that all day.

Infrastructure in general seems worse than 20 years ago. Our talent for black-bagging dictators has never been stronger, though!

From a libertarian perspective, I also thought this was a bad law. It totally abandons faith in the idea of free speech, and admits that China’s “great firewall” was the right idea. I think it’s better to document any lies that were being spread on TikTok, and counter them with truth.

If your first reaction is “but that won’t work!” then you don’t really believe in a free speech based society, and all that’s left to do is argue over which group of shadowy billionaires should get to control everyone.

The stated purpose of the law was to get TikTok out of the hands of a foreign adversary, and that was accomplished. Remember when Trump took office, and lots of people were worried he would refuse to enforce this law?

It sounds like the author would have preferred that a different group of billionaires take over.

Well, I learned something new today! I always thought that kind of thing would be illegal because it's a fire hazard -- if the driver was unconscious after an accident, the passengers could be trapped in a burning car.

You can just unlock the door and exit the car in that case-- there's no way to "lock someone in" unless you've modified the lock somehow. And if someone did that, they probably reinforced the glass too.

Just imagining firing that in a car is making my ears ring.

When you're a solo SaaS developer/company owner, the dedicated server option really shines. I get a 10x lower price and no downsides that I've ever seen.

"But are your database backups okay?" Yeah, I coded the backup.sh script and confirmed that it works. The daily job will kick up a warning if it ever fails to run.

"But don't you need to learn Linux stuff to configure it?" Yeah, but I already know that stuff, and even if I didn't, it's probably easier to learn than AWS's interfaces.

"But what if it breaks and you have to debug it?" Good luck debugging an AWS lambda job that won't run or something; your own hardware is way more transparent than someone else's cloud.

"But don't you need reproducible configurations checked into git?" I have a setup.sh script that starts with a vanilla Ubuntu LTS box, and transforms it into a fully-working setup with everything deployed. That's the reproducible config. When it's time to upgrade to the next LTS release (every 4 years or so), I just provision a new machine and run that script again. It'll probably fail on first try because some ubuntu package name changed slightly, but that's a 5-minute fix.

"But what about scaling?" One of my crazy-fast dedicated machines is equal to ~10 of your slow-ass VPSes. If my product is so successful that this isn't enough, that's a good problem to have. Maybe a second dedicated machine, plus a load balancer, would be enough? If my product gets so popular that I'm thinking about hundreds of dedicated machines, then hopefully I have a team to help me with that.

Guessing you don't follow politics much? The owner of that account is an American woman, her identity actually leaked years ago. She's sat for several in-person interviews, I think.

Worth noting that these foreign accounts are pretty small. The biggest foreign pro-MAGA account mentioned in the article is "MAGA NATION" with ~400k subs, with the others being in the 10k-100k subs range.

Contrast that with legit pro-rightwing accounts: @tuckercarlson (17M), @benshapiro (8M), @RealCandaceO (7.5M), @jordanbpeterson (6M), @catturd2 (4M), @libsoftiktok (4.5M), @seanhannity (7M).

COVID was a problem, but other systemic problems allowed the lack of math skill to go unnoticed until the kids showed up to college. This article[1] discusses how high school teachers were subject to political pressure, forcing them to give A's to students in a Calculus class who barely knew fractions. Combine that with UCSD dropping SAT requirements, and you've got a horrible mess.

If the rest of the system was functioning properly, the COVID-related problems would have been caught early when those kids started failing their high school math classes-- which would have left them with plenty of time to go back and learn what they missed. And if UCSD still required the SAT, it would have been painfully obvious that they were admitting students who don't know basic math.

[1] https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-grades-stop-meaning-an...

I think the GP post might have been downvoted because "what the math is useful for" frames it in the wrong way, making it sound like every lesson needs to be immediately applicable to your everyday life. An honest answer might be "this lesson in fractions is one step on a difficult 15-year journey that culminates in a junior developer position at OpenAI," but most 10-year-olds aren't ready for that conversation, so "just trust me, bro" might be the best we can do at that point.

I looked at the article that prompted this[1]. If I had to respond to the author of the piece, I'd say this:

The fact that you wrote this introspective essay is good-- it means you've spent some time reflecting on the kind of person you could be, and you've concluded that you're falling short of your own moral compass. It's good that you're thinking through this, and I hope that someday you'll choose to act.

You mentioned that you have a good career and some upward mobility; that tells me you are probably intelligent, well-educated, and you possess skills that are in high demand. It also sounds like you have some surplus income. All that's lacking is some courage, but that can change. Take an example from your leaders, the ones who "donate directly to bigoted causes." I'm guessing they don't limit themselves to donating 1% of their salary, but rather that they're contributing substantial amounts of time and money to things that they believe in. Now there's something you could do, too.

Or you could go further. You could figure out what kind of work would be a positive good (or at least not actively evil) in your own eyes, and then figure out what kind of path would get you there. Scary, yes, but people do this every day. Why not you?

Personally, I don't like your ethical framework; not at all. Your critique of your leadership's donations reminds me of Brendan Eich, a man who was punished and humiliated by his coworkers for donating his own money to a cause his coworkers disliked. But that doesn't matter-- this isn't about me, and I hope you'll complement your no-doubt considerable skillset with some courage and start making good changes.

Also, to tell you the truth, I understand why lobste.rs didn't want to run your essay. Pieces like this don't bring out the best in us nerds; all we do is repeat the same flamewar for the umpteenth time, producing output so predictable that those AI data centers you helped grow could probably re-create the whole conversation with a simple prompt.

Good luck!

[1] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-compa...

UCSD (and many other universities) dropped SAT testing requirements, and high schools are under political pressure to graduate kids who never learned elementary school math. The universities are now shocked by the results.

You're right, that's definitely a mistake. Though to be fair, the same article gets it right if you scroll down to the Tesla section. The article on Tesla also gets it right.

This feels like biblical Pharisees putting ritual cleanliness above practical concerns. The professors see themselves as pursuing higher intellectual goals, but the reality is most of their students want programming jobs, and need to be taught skills that will be essential to those jobs (like using git).

You mean there's another kind?

The payments are not going to Trump, personally. They're probably not going to the government, either; I bet this becomes like the EB-5 investor visa, where you make certain kinds of investments within the US. I admit that the text on the website doesn't make this clear, though.

When this goes to court (and I'm sure it will), the administration's argument will probably go something like this: Congress has authorized the administration to issue visas to people of "exceptional ability in business" -- see 8 U.S.C. § 1153(b)(2), for example. However, Congress did not specify how, exactly, the executive will ascertain that ability. The Trump administration believes that making a one million dollar investment in the U.S. demonstrates evidence of business ability, and is using this as a factor for issuing and prioritizing visas.

The "extra-legally" part is not at all clear. When this goes to court (and I'm sure it will), the administration's argument will probably go something like this: Congress has authorized the administration to issue visas to people of "exceptional ability in business" -- see 8 U.S.C. § 1153(b)(2), for example. However, Congress did not specify how, exactly, the executive will ascertain that ability. The Trump administration believes that making a one million dollar investment in the U.S. demonstrates evidence of business ability, and is using this as a factor for issuing and prioritizing visas.