trescenzi

Nothing to apologize about. Part of learning is realizing what you don’t know and sometimes making a fool of yourself when you think you know more than you do. I care about this stuff so I’m glad to know more than I did yesterday.

Thanks for some solid responses!

I got a 5 on the AP US History exam; think it was just a 4 on AP US Gov though. Reread the federalist papers this year given the year. Don't even think they mention it. Reading the history of the clause it seems like it's such a given inherited from English law that it's not super commonly talked about nor the meaning frequently debated.

My takeaway is I'm a bit embarrassed. I don't know if I'd expect others to be though.

That being said it still doesn't seem unreasonable nor impossible given the clause for Congress to limit itself. In fact that does happen with things like censures. Sure there's no literal punishment but there are standards of speech which have been used in the past(many times for questionable reasons).

Huh that’s super interesting. Genuinely did not know that was expressly defined. Thank you!

At first glance this came off as a bit absurd to me but the government puts restrictions on what it can do all the time. Now it is probably too far to say officials not currently in government have speech restrictions but restrictions on those in office is no more outlandish than any other regulation or rights legislation. Elected officials _are_ the government.

That’s edging up on credit card rates for strong borrowers wild. NerdWallet has Chase Freedom with a lower bound of 18.49% and Citi Diamond Preferred with 16.74%.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/credit-cards/best

Then maybe it shouldn’t be built

I don’t like the guns don’t kill people; people kill people argument however it is much more accurate than Claude doesn’t hack people; people hack people. If the safeguards do not work then there’s no telling what these could do. It doesn’t even have to be aggressive hacking. In the act of doing everyday work Claude will happily go around safeguards to satisfy what it believes is the ask. If that involves doing something dangerous it’s much more on Anthropic than than the user who was just trying to summarize their email but forgot to include a token with read permissions.

At the end the author briefly contemplates this:

> One outcome that would be genuinely ironic is that if these models are more compute efficient, it reduces the need for these massive data center buildouts, which could cause cascading economic failures. However, that likely won’t happen since inference is only one part of the compute mix and those data centers are still needed for other parts of the pipeline.

Don’t agree with the however. I think like you’re saying we’re going to get to see in real time what happens when something is commoditized and it gets massively overbuilt.

Well that's the difference between data and information. The writing is _data_ dense but not _information_ dense. Data is just the numbers. Information is what comes out of the data when you analyze it and provide context. The text being data dense, information sparse is why it's so hard to read. You're continually being bombarded with irrelevant noise.

Yea the hypothesis seems the exact opposite of what I find with LLM writing. It’s not that it’s overly dense instead I find that it’s hard to read because it’s so information sparse. Like you’re saying it feels optimized to “good writing” not to conveying information.

If you like simple drop in stylesheets this site has a whole bunch of cool options.

https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/

This is the core hubris of everyone behind the LLM craze. I do not want to deny their utility there absolutely is some there. But the inherent assumption behind the whole thing is that with a "country of geniuses" problems will melt away. But that's not the case. The reason problems like housing or famines or war aren't being solved is because structurally there's no incentives to solve them not because there's not enough geniuses out there.

Right obviously. So then what happens with 10x the data centers? How do you saturate that in any reasonable way? The options are 10x usage, 1/10 cost.

I’m still shocked at how nonsensical it all is every time I hear it because there’s people who claim it makes sense. There’s a chart in that article showing that 1/10th the proposed GW is online. And that’s just for Texas. What the hell do we need 10x the capacity we’ve got right now for? The best case is that makes tokens too cheap to meter which would be sweet for everyone but the investors. I don’t see how this ends any way other than a massive burst.

What a throwback. I haven't thought about the movie Fly Away Home since I was a child. Really awesome to see people caring enough about animals to do stuff like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_Away_Home

That’s not what’s being said. It’s possible to support the freedom of anyone to say anything while excluding those whose beliefs are directly opposed to your goals from your organization.

The keyword is `regime`. It’s smart if the goal is to run a political regime where you separate your friends and enemies and prove to your friends that you can make them jump when you say jump.

But they are contributing 3M to Omarchy[0]. Makes it very clear where their allegiances lie. I’ve moved my stuff off which is sad since Digital Ocean was a really solid platform.

0: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/digitalocean-joins-as-found...

Yea I took it as consciousness was maladaptive and sort of a local maxima that humans were trapped in which prevented them from gaining higher intelligences.

I felt similar. I finished it but couldn’t finish the sequel. The primary idea was “intelligence can take different shapes” and I kept reading to get insightful descriptions of these different shapes but they never really came. I don’t disagree with the premise it just didn’t really get across the message very well.

Right there’s a lot of easy answers mechanically but they are challenging politically. The longer we wait to do anything the better they’ll look though that’s for sure.

What’s the question? Why model output isn’t always what you expect it to be?

Consensus is just populating the model with rationale for different new output.

It shouldn’t be a question but this is where the anthropomorphic language and things like “agent welfare” come in to enable responsibility laundering of some of the most powerful people on earth. How we talk about these models matters because it impacts the public’s understanding of what they are genuinely capable of. The more that they are described as having anything close to free will the easier it is to even ask questions like this.

Yes 100%. The language used currently maximizes the ability of those building these models to get off the hook. The anthropomorphizing we do of these things presents them as maximally capable and the companies as helpless to contain them. The way we talk about things impacts how we think about them.

If you read the rest of the piece they do argue for more regulation. They aren’t making a personal responsibility argument like other commenters are saying.

The problem with bans is they claim the technology itself is purely bad and the only solution is to keep it from children. Which on its face is nonsensical. It’s ok for a 17 year old but not a 16 year old?

We need genuine regulation tackling the actual problems with this technology. Blanket bans do nothing but make adults feel good about “protecting the children”.

LLMs can be supremely useful but also not intelligent. It might seem like a pointless distinction but the way we talk about these models matters because it impacts how we interact with and understand their outputs.

For example if there’s a strongly held belief that models are independent intelligent entities we’re more likely to lay blame upon them instead of their user. It’s important for the safety discussion too. If they are a new class of life then safety is going to focus on making sure they don’t do bad things. If we instead see them as statistical models we will instead try to make sure people don’t misuse them.

This distinction is even more important today when some of the most powerful people are looking to absolve their crimes by passing them off on their LLMs.

Yea I’m a weirdo who’s willing to claim that a for loop might be conscious. There’s physical state and comparisons happening after all.

But all that actually does is abuse the question being asked and the definition of consciousness. The question isn’t even “does a for loop have qualia” it’s actually “what does it mean if a for loop has qualia”. The individual asking if LLMs are conscious is concerned about the implication of the answer. To which a yes based upon a very improvised definition doesn’t actually resolve.

Or you could, you know, raise taxes. There’s policy solutions to these problems they just happen to be painful in a way that is easier to point to.

In Connecticut it is only now cheaper to use electric instead of gas in my prius prime. I get 50-53 mpg highway, even over very long distances I drive to family in STL a few times a years, and electric is $0.33/kWh. So even at around 4 miles/kWh I'm paying $0.0825/mile for electric which breaks even right around $4.25/gallon. So it's really going to depend upon where you live.

That's not to say I wouldn't buy an electric car tomorrow if I had the option. My somewhat frequent long drives make gas slightly preferable but these days I'd much prefer electric.

I recently heard the term _vice signaling_ and it’s very appropriate for this era. While in the past virtue signaling would be used to identify yourself as the member of an ingroup. It’s now common to signal that by doing things that would previously, and by many still are, considered beyond the pale.