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Comment by 65a | Hacker News Reader

Laws should be about the outcome, not about processes that may lead to an outcome. It is already illegal in California to produce your own nuclear weapon. Instead of outlawing books, because they allow research into building giant gundam robots, just outlaw giant gundam robots.

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> Laws should be about the outcome, not about processes that may lead to an outcome

They have to be about both because outcomes aren’t predictable, and whether something is an intermediate or ultimate outcome isn’t always clear. We have a law requiring indicator use on lane change, not just hitting someone while lane changing, for example.

But even this example is a ban on a specific action: changing lanes without using a legally defined indicator with a specific amount of display time.

The equivalent would be if the law simply said, "don't change lanes unsafely" but didn't define it much beyond that, and left it to law enforcement and judges to decide, so anytime someone changed lanes "unsafely" there's now extremely unknown legal risk.

> even this example is a ban on a specific action: changing lanes without using a legally defined indicator

This is directly analogous to requiring disclosures and certifications be filed with the state. Those are actions as much as hitting an indicator.

I haven’t read the proposed bill closely. But it seems to be a standard rulemaking bill.

Laws also should be possible (preferably easy) to implement. Why does DMCA ban circumvention tools? Circumvention is already illegal and it is piracy that should be outlawed, not tools to enable piracy? The reason is piracy tools are considerably easier to regulate than piracy.

The DMCA ban on circumumvention has been both stunningly useless at discouraging piracy and effective at hurting normal users including such glorious stupidity as being used to prevent 3rd party ink cartridges.

Circumvention also absent the DMCA isn't illegal.

> Laws should be about the outcome, not about processes that may lead to an outcome.

Some outcomes are pretty terrible, I think there are valid instances where we might also want to prevent precursor technology from being widely disseminated to prevent them.

There are certainly types of data that are already prohibited for export and dissemination. In this case, I would argue no new law is needed, the existing laws cover the export or dissemination of dual use technologies. If the LLM becomes dual-use/export-restricted/etc because it was trained on export-restricted/sensitive/etc data, it is already illegal to disseminate it. Enforce the existing law, rather than use taxpayer money to ban and police private LLM training because this might happen.

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