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andrewla

9,968 karma · joined March 22, 2011

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andrewla··on ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program
The first and third cases were not deportations. They were bogus obstruction detentions.

"how else would a naturalized citizen have arrived in the US in the first place, except with a passport in their name?" -- part of the complexity of the case, as I note, is that he did in fact enter illegally, smuggled across the border. He did not have to enter illegally; he could have simply presented his passport at any border crossing (or, lacking a passport, an affadavit), but nonetheless he did.

The second case was minor children. Known by ICE and immigration judges to be citizens. Deported deliberately to accompany their mother. This was in conflict with the mother's expressed wish for them to remain with other relatives. At no point were the children charged with any sort of immigration crime, fake or otherwise.

I agree that American citizens are not required to carry proof of citizenship and agree that they should not be required to present papers to prove citizenship.

But you are describing a world that does not exist. No US citizens are being deported mistakenly (Garcia being the lone exception). Notably, this has not always been the case -- under previous administrations there have been numerous cases of citizens being deported, but in the Trump administrations this has not been the case (with the exception of Garcia). We are not living in a nightmarish dystopia.

andrewla··on ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program
The situation under which citizens have been detained have always been claimed to be for obstruction. I am not aware of a single case where an individual was detained for immigration charges who was not specifically targeted for enforcement, although since ICE is not public about this (and they cannot be in order to protect the accused) it is hard to say for sure.

The link recounts one case, the one I mentioned, Garcia, and the circumstances around his deportation are complex at best. No question that ICE was mistaken on the facts, but the situation was complex -- he had crossed the border into the US illegally; he did have a Mexican passport with a different spelling of his name. I am not aware of any others and the propublica does not cite any others. Please give names if you are aware of any.

My claim was that you mischaracterized the propublica article and I stand by it. You claimed that US citizens were being detained on fake immigration charges and this is not the case (Garcia was a mistake but the charges were not fake, they were just incorrect). You claimed that US citizens have been deported, and the article only provided a single example, which does not support the claim of "people", that being the plural of "person".

andrewla··on ICE Planning $100M 'Nightmare' Domestic Spy Program
Characterizing the propublica pieces as "fake immigration charges" is pretty misleading. All of their arrests of non-illegal-immigrants has been for (bogus) charges unrelated to immigration, usually some variant of "obstruction".

"Some US citizens have been deported" is also a mischaracterization. Aside from minor children of deported parents, the only case where an American citizen was deported was Brian Morales Garcia.

andrewla··on Containment and monitoring failures are to blame for AI hacking reports: experts
There are a mix of incentives here that makes it difficult to unwind. This whole article reads like an ad for the services of this guy's company: 'First, when it comes to assessing tools based on frontier lab models, “I would always get an external entity to help with that,” McGraw says.'

And I think we generally recognize that rogue AI agents are a form of backdoor bragging -- "our agents are so powerful that they hacked an outside system. Did I mention how powerful our agents are? They are quite powerful. So powerful they hacked an outside system".

But Mistral never hacked anything. Yeah, neither did my toaster.

andrewla··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
Pool together with some friends and buy an H200 or two to run unquantized open source models with abliteration/heretic transformations.

You need to be able to use these models for the real world and not for some imaginary world where everything is safe and nice and happy all the time, while at the same time intensely surveilled in the name of CYA and the latest panic about whether speech THAT ISN'T EVEN BETWEEN TWO PARTIES is considered "wrong".

I'm a free speech fan that acknowledges there are lots of boundaries of free speech (fraud, perjury, blackmail, defamation), but the one thing that all of the boundaries have in common is that a second party must be involved for them to make any sense at all.

Maybe the courts will uphold this, maybe they won't, but don't take the risk!

andrewla··on Apple Pass Designer
No, it's just that they're in Australia.
andrewla··on We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI
I disagree with the premise. The cited survey says:

    Thinking now about AI (A-I), that is artificial intelligence …
    Q28 In general, would you say… (ROTATE) +
      The benefits outweigh the risks of AI ............. 34
      The risks outweigh the benefits of AI ............. 57
      A little of both (VOL)............................. 2
      Not sure .......................................... 7
    + Results shown reflect responses among registered voter
That's all well and good, but the question is very broad.

I think when pushed, the reason people hate AI is that a lot of "AI" solutions have been rolled out before the technology was mature. Even now, for end-user facing things most applications are pretty bad, even as the models have gotten more powerful.

You're increasingly pushed to use AI by every online service, and every interaction with retail pushes AI in your face, and importantly, ALL OF THEM ARE JUST TERRIBLE. Amazon has their shopping assistant which is, astonishingly, WORSE than their regular search, which is a hell of a bar.

But people who use ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions on their own are thrilled with the technology. They'll occasionally laugh at the R's in strawberry, or try to torture the AI (this might be more of a teenager thing) but it is remarkable how well-liked it is, as opposed to Google's search-integrated AI for example.

andrewla··on Carnegie Mellon University Announces Historic $3B Gift from Ken Griffin
They're not "renaming" it -- they're "naming" it, right? The School of Computer Science is not currently named for anyone, and his $1B puts his name on the school. It's not like they're changing CMU to KGU.
andrewla··on I switched to Brave
Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage proposition that Eich donated money to support, passed with 52% of the vote.

Eich never clarified his position (nor did he retract it nor apologize) so we have literally no idea what aspect of this he supported along with 52% of the population of California.

andrewla··on I switched to Brave
If you truly find it abhorrent then I think it's fine to continue to call it out. Since this was a position also held by the majority of California voters, or, to reuse my example above, Barack Obama, I find it hard to give much credence to the idea of it being an example of "abhorrent bigotry".

I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted for this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.

andrewla··on OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity
Hate to say it but I don't think you're right on the legalities even in the children's case. In the US anyway, in most jurisdictions [1], if the child's act was not malicious, then parental responsibility is not automatic, but is contingent on the result being foreseeable [2] by the parents.

[1] Hawaii and Louisiana are strange in this regard. Some other states have a version of this but severely cap the amounts.

[2] "foreseeable" here standing in for a broad set of legal standards that roughly map to negligence/gross negligence/recklessness on the part of the parent

andrewla··on I switched to Brave
I updated the comment to say that "... he no longer advocates". In the public record, to be clear, his total contribution to the discourse was a financial disclosure of a donation. We have literally no idea if he has made further donations, either in favor of or against this or any other policy (because smaller donations are anonymous) and he has refused to speak publicly about anything related to this, except to offer general support for "inclusiveness".

But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.

But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.

andrewla··on I switched to Brave
This is a little off-topic, but the article calls it out specifically, accusing Brendan Eich of being an "absolute scumbag" Aren't we past performative displays of outrage over this?

He, like 52% of voting Californians, in 2008, opposed gay marriage. This was a different time: there were various arguments about "civil unions", concern from religious groups, worries about slippery slopes, etc., but we are passed that now -- he no longer holds this belief, and time has proven those concerns to be ill founded. Nobody should be held in indefinite contempt for political positions they once held. If we can forgive Barack Obama for opposing gay marriage, then we can forgive Brendan Eich. You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that even he no longer advocates.

andrewla··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
This is great context and I feel that this is bringing in a lot of information that I wasn't aware of.

If what you're saying is true, then there is truly no supply chain risk other than the risk of civil action against the government for violation of terms of service. That seems like a rather weak point on which to balance a "supply chain" risk though.

andrewla··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
I think I mostly agree here -- any cloud provider or frankly SaaS system carries a similar risk. The question is whether they want to explicitly make that part of their terms of service, and in addition have made public statements about their willingness to apply those terms of service.

AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).

andrewla··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
The concern, I think, in its most generous terms, is that they can't buy Anthropic's service the way the could, say, a wrench, because Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability (even transitively, through other vendors) to use their models if they determined that they do not like what the military is doing with that or if it violates their interpretation of the terms of service.

This seems like a definitional supply chain risk.

andrewla··on Coulomb's law remains tricky to test at home
This is making assumptions about the nature of charge and its relation to force that are what is under discussion! We get no guarantee from nature that the force is linear in the amount of charge; if it turned out to be sqrt(charge) then we'd still have to deal with it. We could redefine charge to the sqrt of the previous quantity, but then other aspects of linearity (like conservation of charge) would have to take a different form.

We're lucky (and maybe only in the linear domain, which is more accurately the case) that these ended up being the same.

But if it were sqrt(charge) then we'd define Culoumbs constant to have commensurate units to translate sqrt(charge) * sqrt(charge) / distance^2 to force units.

andrewla··on Coulomb's law remains tricky to test at home
Why would the universe care about dimensional analysis? Besides, the outside constant would do the unit conversion from whatever the right-hand side produces to units of force.
andrewla··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
The idea that deflation is built into Bitcoin is exactly equivalent to saying "the real value of bitcoin will always increase" which is an absurd premise.

Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.

andrewla··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would also take proportionately longer. So transactions would sit in the mempool and the currency would be mostly useless.
andrewla··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
Only if there has been an outgoing transaction from that account. If the address has only received deposits then only the hash is available.
andrewla··on A warning about 'model welfare'
I don't understand this -- are you agreeing with me that consciousness is not the basis of human rights or contesting that?

Removing the negative from your first sentence (I don't care what it is "not", I only care what it "is"), I read [Consciousness is the basis of human rights because consciousness leads you to you assume, all other humans would experience the world in essentially the same way you do]. I can't completely parse this, but as I read it I don't think this is true; my assumption of human rights is independent of whether all other humans "experience the world in essentially the same way you do".

For the second part, can you give me a concrete example of an entity that doesn't "meaningfully differ from [my]self" that isn't a human so that I can weigh this properly? My point is that as of now no such entity exists so I can't give this any creedence.

andrewla··on A warning about 'model welfare'
I am not impressed with the philosophizing here, and even less by the attempts to make factual statements that can be credibly disputed.

That said, trying to distill what is being said here, the concrete action is [stop telling the AIs] that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness]. Is that accurate?

The major premise seems to be that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness] is an untrue statement. That's the essence of the sections "Circular reasoning" and "Anthropomorphization" and "Consciousness is very likely biological" and "AIs are simulation machines".

The minor premise seems to be that [consciousness is the basis of human rights]. This is the point of "Human consciousness is the cornerstone of our legal and ethical rights frameworks"

And the conclusion of the syllogism is that this is dangerous, that "Anthropomorphization amplifies AI safety risks". Specifically "seeding doubt about the moral status of AI systems into their own training may significantly elevate the alignment and containment risks of those systems."

I find all the arguments in the major premise section to be poor arguments but I accept the conclusion for sure that they are not conscious, and I can provisionally accept the idea that they are not on a path to consciousness.

I completely reject the notion that consciousness is the basis of human rights. The premise itself is absurd. We only have one unambiguous example of a class of conscious entities, and that it humans. If a human loses consciousness do they lose rights? If an entity gains consciousness does it get human rights? The former is a clear "no" and the latter is a "insufficient data for a meaningful answer".

andrewla··on How big are factorials?
This brings to mind the analysis in Bender & Orszag; they approach this through difference equations (a bit of a lost art in formal mathematics; very 19th-century feel) rather than integration.

Instead of introducing the gamma function, they instead start from the observation that log(F_n) - log(F_n-1) = log(n), so treating this difference as analogous to integration, it says that F_n ~= nlogn + n as the leading asymptotic behavior. This is clear just by substitution and algebra; no calculus necessary (though it helps to "know the answer beforehand").

From there you can treat the error term in this as F_n = n^n * e^n * E_n and plug that into the same relationship (F_n = n * F_n-1) to derive what that error term looks like asymptotically, and end up in the same place that the integration on the OP leads to.

andrewla··on 25 years of mass surveillance is enough
I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce and more draconian enforcement of the laws that remain.

Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.

andrewla··on Truncated SVD (2023)
Some classic HN discussion from the same era: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695478
andrewla··on Claude is a Contrarian
Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.

This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.

andrewla··on Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture
https://www.qubrid.com/ai-appliances/qubrid-llm-gen-ai-appli...

This is crazy but honestly very tempting at this point.

andrewla··on New $100k H-1B visa fee pushes tech jobs offshore
I can't speak to your particular situation, but in my experience this has been two factors; one is location -- it is sometimes hard in some locations to find senior talent whereas H1Bs are (naturally) more amenable to moving. The other is pricing, which is echoing the GP's point. Senior talent is expensive and you can get it at (apparently) considerably lower cost by looking for H1B applicants.
andrewla··on λ Snap – An inviting programming language for kids and adults for CS study
I don't love graphical programming environments like this and Scratch and I can't quite put my finger on why I find them so unattractive.

A big part of it is that you can, to some degree, learn programming from this. But you absolutely cannot learn software engineering from this.

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