dualvariable

He was elected by the "will of the people", and there isn't any "no felons" clause anywhere in the Constitution. He also hasn't been impeached, convicted, and removed for high crimes and misdemeanors. Any pardons he issues will likely be entirely legal.

(We really should require pardons to pass a bipartisan Senate committee where there is no odd-numbered tiebreaker vote and require one defection across the aisle to approve--or something like that)

> Let's hope the powers up the chain conduct some deep self-refection on their part in thus fiasco.

that almost never happens.

stop hoping corporations grow a soul and a conscience.

I'm actually consistent in the other direction.

I find intrusive advertising toxic and want it all reduced or banned.

Not just tobacco and gambling ads, but everything else as well.

(No, I don't care that it is like advocating for democracy in 10th-century England and would entirely blow up how our economy currently "works")

Different people experience different levels of suffering.

I just started on a GLP-1, and it has already been an interesting lesson in the subjective nature of food drives and hunger.

I've heard for literally years the advice "just drink some water it will trick you into feeling less hungry".

And I've always suspected this was some bullshit placebo, because that OBVIOUSLY doesn't work (so I thought). Water doesn't replace food, it just fills up your stomach so that eating becomes somewhat more unpleasant. But the food/hunger drive is still there unabated.

Well, except after taking a GLP-1 I actually experienced the sensation of drinking something and having my hunger go down. Whatever that circuit is, it has been broken in me for at least my entire adult life. So giving me that advice had been like trying to explain the color to a blind person.

Which, oddly, ties a lot more into the subject title than the example the author gave...

Oh no, people might jailbreak the os on their TV or refrigerator and remove all the ads...

We can't have that...

I doubt anyone at Apple was sitting in a meeting and was like, "I hated all my teachers in school, let's make it impossible for them to use iPads as presentation devices", and then everyone else agreed with them.

I think I'm a bit on the "golden age" side of the question.

The math slopocalypse isn't useful without being able to turn it into math that can be taught to actual humans by finding the underlying unifying principles.

All those O(n log(n)^(1-delta)) results suggest that there's probably a unifying "trick" behind all of them and that there's going to be an upper bound on delta for any problem. You should really be able to teach that in a textbook and then have any human student replicate any of the LLM results as worked problems.

For anything that an LLM manages to prove with thousands or millions of lines of Lean code, there's likely a missing branch of mathematics sitting there somewhere.

Actual humans need to beat on the problems and the LLM-generated solutions until they come up with the underlying principles, probably using AI to help them do it.

You probably won't get there by just asking an LLM to invent a new branch of mathematics and "don't make any mistakes"; the mathematicians who get good at directing LLMs to search for unifying principles, and then synthesizing (and double-checking) the results, will likely be very successful in their field.

I mean, this is the gimmicky of gimmicks for the ultra-rich.

It just means you can do jumps and stunts programmed into the vehicle at the push of a button with zero skill at being a stunt driver.

The Dukes of Hazzard had to do that without the thrusters.

Can't wait to see how people kill themselves and other people with those things by being stupid...

Hopefully that shit gets blocked by the DOT and kept off public roads--which is probably the goal to get a bunch of drooling simps outraged over "government overreach" keeping them away from their "flying cars".

"avoid stealing focus..."

oh fucking hell, finally. thank you.

Or genuine people who ate an influence op before posting here.

The whole point of an influence op is to find a bunch of useful idiots to provide a large multiplicative factor.

And that's the problem with arguing that something is an influence op, because it is going to be mostly genuine people by the time it gets to you, even though you're not wrong.

> Connecting the optimizing machine to real world actions without human oversight is not a neutral or blameless choice.

Yep.

The fact that they lack hard constraints (unlike an SQP optimizer) and all this talk of "alignment" is also just a feature (or misfeature) of the algorithm.

The way that people/researchers choose to use those algorithms, even in the presence of those limitations, doesn't mean the algorithm is "rogue"; it means the humans didn't build in enough external hard constraints.

It is like passive voice, blaming the algorithm instead of the researchers running it.

Yeah, I get the feeling AI coding maximalists work in fairly narrow areas like that where they're just churning out endpoints in CRUD apps over and over.

I can see how you could use AI to design and implement some 100,000 line codebase, full of nothing but that, stamped out over and over in exactly the same pattern and never read a single line of the code.

If frontier AI is so great, why are these frontier labs skipping security basics and making mistakes like these?

Models are incapable of "going rogue".

They're just optimizers that explore the landscape they're given to maximize a given objective.

You're the one responsible for giving them the problem to solve and the constraints.

When I screw up a trajectory optimization problem, my SQP optimizer isn't "going rogue" when it lands in some suboptimal basin or grinds to a halt along some almost-smooth banana feature--or finds some way to escape and blow up the cost metric to negative infinity because I forgot a constraint.

This is what is going to kill Apple (for me at least).

I've been wondering when the Google-ification of Apple will start.

The iPhone boom really let them have the luxury of not behaving like complete assholes for a long time. Now, in order to hit ever higher quarterly targets, they're probably going to start enshittifying like everyone else.

I used NCSA Mosaic before Netscape Navigator, and gopher and wais before all that.

> "Four things had to change, and they stack:"

When you write your blog post with claude, I start hitting these phrases and then start only skimming and looking for them, and stop reading what you have to write.

Survivorship bias: many IPOs since then have underperformed. If you cherry-pick all the ones that did, then IPOs look like an outrageously fantastic bet.

You have to bet on the IPO knowing only the information at the time, not knowing what the future growth of the stock was.

Gallipolli, 1915:

"Hey, maybe we shouldn't send men over the top only to die in a barrage of machine gun fire..."

"That's just victim blaming--it isn't our behavior that needs to change; it is the enemy's behavior that needs to change."

Victim-blaming is another term that is apparently becoming a meaningless vibe.

You can't today invest in their IPO 16 years ago.

> It's part of my eternal quest to find the memory safety holy grail: something as powerful as Rust's borrow checking, yet something as simple and flexible as reference counting or garbage collection.

I'm definitely hoping you succeed. I'd love to be able to write a small language (maybe that didn't do absolutely every last thing you can do in Rust, but was ergonomic and easy to use) that had a borrow checker and didn't require writing a nuclear reactor.

Russia isn't a democracy, and ordinary Russians are checked out or know they'll just die if they speak up.

The point is to inflict economic losses on Yandex and the companies using those datacenters, which hits the elite around Putin. That is the fault line to try to establish and then exploit/widen.

> Given the geopolitical concerns from both the east and the west, this makes the question of whether Europe should move content off of US infrastructure a lot more complicated.

I mean, if Russia is striking datacenters in London/Dublin/Frakfurt/Paris/Amsterdam, then we've got really big problems.

And is the US even allied to Europe, or is Europe going it on their own? They might do better to move to datacenters in China at that point.

Barring that kind of a situation, moving European data back to Europe makes the most sense.

Putting datacenters in the Baltic states might not make the most sense, tho.

> The obvious next step, otherwise, is for someone to start OpenALPRMap and we all get to suffer together.

Start a company that does ALPR and facial recognition, but narrowly targeting politicians.

Yeah, it still is. You might not get a permanent runaway Kessler effect, but you could still have an event that denies access to LEO for several years before it clears.

An event at one orbital altitude is also not confined to that altitude; debris can reach higher altitudes and affect satellites in those orbits.

> So I'd say the goal here is to intimidate and/or inconvenience the Russian public

Nope, the Russian public is mostly entirely checked out of politics and will roll with any inconvenience. You won't see any rioting in the streets due to this.

The point is to inflict economic harm on the elite around Putin--the owners of Yandex, the other companies using those datacenters, etc.

The point is not to take out the average Russian's internet search index.

A more important goal is for these strikes to get headlines and serve as Western-facing propaganda, with "hitting Russia's Google" and "hitting Russia's Amazon" being easily digestible for those in Europe and America. That still beats the effect this will have on the average Russian.

Russia isn't a Western Democracy.

In addition to all the engineering problems associated with cooling those data centers and the shields that you'd need against cosmic rays, those things would only accelerate Kessler syndrome.

This is trivially falsifiable. We didn't nuke Afghanistan after 9/11.

(We did nominally succeed in regime change in the country that didn't attack us, though...)

In Vietnam, the USSR gave a considerable amount of equipment to Vietnam, they stationed 3,000 soldiers in Vietnam, and over a dozen of them were killed. The USSR told Vietnam where B-52s were heading so they could evacuate military leaders and get other military units out of the way. Soviet crews were firing SAMs at F-4 Phantoms and shooting them down, and Soviet pilots were flying planes.

When the Soviets went into Afghanistan, the mujahideen did not have the domestic capability to build Stinger missiles themselves...

On the other hand, I get mentally exhausted reading AI slop over and over again.

My brain can't help itself in looking for AI tells and gauging if writing sounds like AI or not.

Then once it latches onto the idea that the writing is probably AI, then it feels like half my brain is just reading the text looking for the AI smells.

Calling it "AI smells" like "code smells" might actually be what is going on in my brain, and I start code reviewing it at that level rather than reading it for what it does.

I really would prefer people not just post slop. I don't care if you use it to clean up your own writing, but don't just let it rip.