Spivak

> Email cannot replicate the separation of the voter eligibility verification with the ballot counting

Yes it can, that's what I was on about with the whole "sealed" ballot thing but didn't feel like harping with the details. Once you fill out your ballot you encrypt it with your state election official's election specific public key and the attach it to the email—the digital "put it in the inner envelope." Poll worker confirms eligibility and puts just the encrypted ballot in the drop box. At this point in the process they couldn't look at the vote even if they wanted to. Then when it's time for counting they decrypt each one and count it.

Again is it practical or accessible to your grandma? No but it's exactly the same as mail in voting.

Right but mail in voting kind of disproved the need for all of this ceremony. You can cast your vote remotely and it works just fine. States even hold elections entirely by mail. It would be annoying but you could exactly replicate the mail in voting system in all aspects with email. You would for free get an even better confirmation that your vote was received because they would send you back the hash of your sealed ballot attachment and you could check it against yours. It's not exactly practical or accessible but it would be exactly as secure and hand recountable after the fact.

Okay now take the exact annoying system and replace only the sending an email with uploading your sealed ballot to a web form. Changing nothing except removing a 3rd party from the delivery mechanism—even more secure. Congrats you just invented e-voting.

> It will go to SCOTUS due to the circuit court split.

I highly doubt it, they declined the case so the circuit split will live on for now and most likely be resolved by the legislature via one of the many bills making their way through congress. They could always take it up later but they're not so subtlety signaling that congress needs to make their intent clear on this one.

It will be interesting to see if and how people who campaigned on broad "anti-datacenter" platforms actually make it happen. I imagine it's easy to take a stance but getting the real political capital together, especially as a governor who will almost surely need their legislature, when it means turning down jobs—few as the ongoing ones might be—and real economic development. I hope it works because it potentially sets a precedent and maybe a legal framework for a state to actually say "we don't want this kind of business here" for things that aren't just data centers.

Even as a developer I'm all for it, go even harder. We may eventually reach the promised land where the user agent defines so much of the final appearance things like "pixel perfect design" or beating standard controls into within an inch of their lives to fit some design system are a thing of the past.

This seems to be the inherent trade-off with smaller models. They can be just as "bright" as their larger contemporaries but they necessarily can't encode as much knowledge.

I think over time we'll realize this is the way forward, you want the smartest model with the least amount of embedded knowledge and you provide the knowledge externally or merge it into the weights for the domain you're interested in. Then you don't have to train a ginormous model every 6 months to pull in new information.

> you are going to tell ME what I can name MY OWN child?!! and also probably a net positive

Never a more succinct description of why it's hard to make things better.

I mean it's great that you have a long and idealistic wishlist that interestingly implies that journalists ought to be allowed to break into buildings and offices but you do realize that this law changes nothing on your list, right? The reason stealth residential proxies are even a thing is because companies already do literally everything you wish in that list they wouldn't.

It's bananas that for some reason sketchy "vpn" apps that let even sketchier people bypass bans is the hill you want to die on. This hole was always going to get plugged the minute it attracted any kind of significant notice and entitled AI companies run by libertarian nutjobs hammering sites ruined it for everyone. The bill you want is one of non-discrimination and I think we both know the powers that be will never let that pass—we still don't even have net neutrality.

I want to live in your world, especially the bit where journalists are sanctioned super spies, but this isn't the road. To use your idealism people shouldn't have to use a weird proxy system to access websites in the manner they please.

We're so comically not that it's impossible to take this as anything other than just being contrarian for its own sake, having never actually experienced a low-trust environment, or getting swept up in the 24 hour everything is doomed news cycle.

Random refugees coming into the country "takin my jerb" isn't happening. Large companies importing skilled labor for specific positions to either drive down sector wages or acquire workers who are more willing to put up with bad working conditions (this is nursing right now) is a different beast.

This is such a weird take because the US is a high-trust society precisely because of effective policing and the justice system. You're right that it's not the moment to moment gun to your head as for why it works because you won't always have a cop looking at you, but it's not because men are angels—it's because the long arm of the law which deters bad actors even without the gun because they'll get caught eventually.

From my reading we're in agreement basically. The only real difference is that I think AGI is destined to ultimately describe ship's computer but not Data based on current trajectory—largely because trillions of dollars really want to slap that term on a product.

And I don't really think it's entirely unreasonable because there does actually seem to be a real gap in terminology. Even Star Trek didn't really imagine a computer system that's general but exists without consciousness, the whole message of the Exocomp story is exactly that—it's a huge breakthrough that they invented a general system and it turns out to be conscious. And the show makes a point that while the computers they have are incredibly advanced it's ultimately the product of human programming. We seem to just have assumed that any general system would be conscious and the term AGI was born of that assumption.

There's no should, only what economics incentivize. Right now we're not paying for the upfront training costs-it's great, the Millennial subsidy continues. But if, and big if right now, the infinite money font dries up and they have to recoup training investment direct from customers then that looks to be a huge price increase on the ground which makes cheap to train and good enough even more attractive than it already is.

I mean I'm happy for better but it might start grounding the industry where 1.6% better on some benchmarks doesn't justify hundred million investments.

Well they're for sure going to result in something a desperate marketing team is going to call AGI and through persistence through all the laughter will result in a new term being coined like ActualAGI so people can refer to it as separate from "AGI Class Models."

I'm somewhat inclined to give it to them at this point, I mean it's artificial, general in the sense that it can complete tasks it wasn't programmed for, and intelligent enough I guess. I mean if there was a planet with creatures at the level of LLMs we'd probably call it intelligent life—used in that way we're not really implying the creatures are particularly smart. It's as much simulated disembodied intelligence as you could reasonably hope for. I wouldn't at all expect that simulated intelligence: the computer algorithm would have any relation to actual intelligence except at the minimum superficial level needed to complete tasks. With AGI out of the way we would at least have to be more specific on what the sci-fi dream actually entails. The computer from Star Trek is certainly intelligent but you would never say it has a brain or anything close to it.

> normal people can avoid needing to care about the distinction by endeavoring to not kill anyone to begin with

It's the same thing here, a normal person will never run afoul of this law. It is entirely industry professionals who will be affected and they have legal departments who will figure out where the line is to the millimeter. Sure translating to legalese is hard and I expect this kind of legislation will be mostly common law after a bunch of lawsuits but the giveaway that it will be fine is that assigning "bot/not bot" to a given situation is something we all agree on in the industry. There isn't really that much borderline here. You can't accidentally build a web scraper operating off a residential proxy network and it's pretty obvious when you decide to disguise your traffic because you don't have the consent of site you're scraping.

Even the horribly contrived borderline examples boil down to "but I should have the right to actively deceive and circumvent security measures designed specifically to keep me out" which is a pretty tough sell.

Well yes but once you're in the US someone owns the machine you're getting hit by and you can make them take it down. People won't just throw their hands up "well the operator isn't in the US nothing can be done", they'll just make DigitalOcean block them.

Because you can make it not without much difficulty. There's plenty of sites that operate entirely within the US and it's trivial to hard block everyone else. It's not perfect but assuming the law actually works (which isn't a given) inside US borders we now get the advantages of a high-trust system.

At absolute minimum it should mean that US ranges could see fewer captchas because bad actors can be whacked by the legal system instead of degrading user experience.

Sure but this probably wouldn't happen like that, what would happen is that when journalists make that petition it creates a real special case in the law available to everyone.

It's a human level distinction that doesn't have technical distinction—the law handles these kinds of things just fine. The flesh doesn't know the difference between manslaughter and murder but we humans can figure it out well enough.

The world you envision where we decide that the law can't assess intent is certainly an interesting one but I don't think it would be the most functional.

I'm not going to even try and say the venv stuff isn't clunkier and less flexible than what came after but people seem to have a hate bonner for it but not node_modules which is the same concept with better tooling. Python might even get its own direct equivalent so things "just work." And folks love Bundler in Ruby which behaves in even stranger ways than venvs.

Nobody is going to tell you that Python 2->3 wasn't excruciatingly painful but it's hard to argue with the result. Sometimes you have to rip the bandaid off. Python 3 is by far the better language.

You're right the "commercial" timeline of Python would have supported Python 2 forever because big paying clients demand it but I think that would have led to a worse outcome for the OSS community.

In 20 years we'll have finally reached the logical conclusion to all of this that there shouldn't be separate os components you link against and your "OS" will just be manager of lightweight VMs.

Now you can just ship the user your machine and software can theoretically be immortal.

I really want to believe you and that I've just missed the magic support forums but trying to find answers to problems on Windows is just a million forums of the same essentially "turn it off and on again" advice

Linux forums might be obtuse but at least they'll have actual technical details about the problem. Almost without fail any "fix" they propose won't work on your system because it's for a different distro that was EoL 5 years ago but they'll at least give you something to work with.

This. 1 Million billion times this. Your story exactly mirrors mine and good heavens I would never loose weight via the suffering route ever again. Losing weight normally I'm in constant pain and literally can't think of anything else-it's all consuming. I do not say this as exaggeration I would rather go through chemo again. At least that you can make the suffering go away sometimes with meds.

Motorola is launching a GrapheneOS phone direct to consumers next year. Getting picked up by a major OEM is about as taken seriously as you can get.

Well yeah, because running an exit node in the US is "probably legal but there's precedent for still getting arrested and having your stuff seized." I can't imagine very many normal people are willing to paint a target on their backs like this.

Trivial for a human to use while being able to independently arbitrarily scale the difficulty for a wide class of LLMs does I think say something about a possible inherent limitation in what they can do.

The fact that you can make something obtuse and difficult to use for everyone is less interesting than what is displayed here.

AI has really laid bare how little software is valued as a craft—it's been true for time immortal but some SWEs really buy into the idea. And occasionally we're able to trick leadership into believing it too with terms like "tech debt." But now that the business has for the first time literally any other option and can trade quality for speed they're starting to skip dev entirely the way they skipped QA before.

Sure I do, the only difference between the two is which society considers normal. Your argument basically boils down to how dare these spoiled kids operate outside of the Overton Window of acceptable externalizable labor I was raised to consider normal. It wouldn't even be two generations ago where someone could write this exact rant about sewing. And today it is relegated to a quaint hobby. The same thing happened with car maintenance and food preservation within living memory.

Don't get me wrong, I partake in the group hazing ritual of guys who can't cook—it's good fun. But on the tiniest bit of introspection it's pretty obvious it's well on the way to becoming a hobby. We're already 90% of the way there with the hallowing out of the 'middle' between glorified warming prepared foods and enthusiast home cooks. The class divide isn't really cooks/non-cooks anymore it's DoorDash vs grocery store freezer section. Sad but not unexpected.