Anyone who denies or defends this administration's corruption is complicit.
So each wave corrupts (or eliminates) members of the next, in order to secure the safety of their own retirement when they won't have direct power.
It's a mirror case of the supposed "free speech absolutists" who immediately turned around and silenced, sued, fired or jailed once granted the power to do so.
Whether he's actually driving towards small government with that or anything else - in the good-faith spirit of that policy - that's definitely up for debate.
From 2015 Trump has positioned himself as opposed to that style of republicanism. He offered a different playbook and the base followed.
What is happening is 40-50+ year olds haven’t updated their map of reality and continue to use talking political points from when they were 25.
One of the critiques of small government is its valueless. Instead of having to argue for or against positions you just say you don’t like it because it’s out of scope. Well now the inverse thing is happening in this thread. People are just saying he’s in violation of a small government principle he never espoused.
There is one major reason why oligarchs are in favor of small government, when it's in their way. Another commenter said it already: it's only about power.
US never exactly believe in full on 'free trade'.
As an aside, you made me curious if Trump made this constituency materially better off. Here's what Claude thinks (tl;dr: it's a wash): https://claude.ai/share/36233694-3729-4758-b2e6-c2058791ab1a
It's easier for everyone to just deal in the economic losers, but we didn't do that, and now they are burning the house down. This will not get them what they want, but they will continue doing it anyway.
Globalization was the test, AI is the final exam.
I'm not sure history will end so soon.
But there was a lot of pain. Living conditions got worse and stayed worse for entire lifetimes before they got better, and they didn't get better because the people who won decided to deal in the people who lost, they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
That, uhh, won't happen the same way again. Now we have robots and nukes. But it's true that without the benefit of hindsight I'd have had an apocalyptic view going into the last kerfuffle, I'd have been wrong, and it would have been due to a failure of imagination. Let's all hope that I am wrong again, but the mechanism will again have to be a failure of imagination, and it takes a lot of optimism to fit my hope squarely inside my blind spot.
No, living conditions did not get worse. Yes, livings conditions were pretty bad during the early industrial revolution. But they hadn't exactly been rosy before.
> [...] they got better because the world went to war and incinerated most of its capital, literally and metaphorically, and the regrowth happened under conditions of scarce labor rather than abundant labor, allowing the people on the bottom to strike a decent deal the second time around.
Which war are you talking about? There's been more than one, you know. And the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir for humanity: we never had as many dirt poor people as then and will hopefully never have as many. Remember, that's the time when there were genuine fears of global starvation. Things have been looking up a lot since perhaps around the 1980s and even more so in the following decades. Mostly thanks to PR China and India and South East Asia graduating from dirt poor to merely poor or even middle class.
You also seem confused. You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
> the decades after the second world war were probably the nadir
People compare themselves to their parents and grandparents, you can only hustle so far in the face of lived experience.
> You seem to say that a relative capital scarcity is good for labour ('incinerated most of its capital') but also that relative labour scarcity is good for labour? Which way is it?
In an extreme downturn (Europe bombing its cities), the poor undergo more real suffering but the rich undergo more nominal suffering so inequality is reset. Bombed out factories and apartments create an enormous demand for labor -- the broken window fallacy is only a fallacy if you studiously ignore distribution. This is why we should eagerly seek to fix r>g in peacetime -- it's guaranteed to be mathematically possible and it's clearly better for everyone.
Different people in different parts of the globe had different experiences.
People in rich parts of the globe had a pretty decent 1960s. People in PR China had the Cultural Revolution..
> This is why we should eagerly seek to fix r>g in peacetime -- it's guaranteed to be mathematically possible and it's clearly better for everyone.
Why do you want to compare these two variables specifically?
Btw, during much of the 2010 real interest rates in the western world were negative while we had positive real growth. Thus r<0<g. Was that the golden age you yearn for?
When last year the Trump admin started interdicting oil shipments out of Venezuela, it left shipments heading to China intact. Then during Trump's visit to China, the two parties made a lot of progress on trade and other issues (in part because Beijing's attitude improved because the first Trump administration's restrictions on trade underlined to Beijing how dependent China is on trade with the US).
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing countries from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Persp...
Also motorcycles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_motorcycle_tariff
Manufacturing is cheaper if you have access to resources and such. Japan may of had abundant of but in this case I don't feel it's was all about manufacturing costs.
Was it a cash cow situation, where their one formula was working but as well as where Harley were reluctant to invest in a different avenue, to innovate causing cow to dry up. And that is when they called in the government to settle? That is always the impression I seem to receive.
Excluding manufacturing costs was it because they were scared of an innovation being a failure?
The same cash cow formula can be seen with the likes of Disney Pixar and Toy Story 5, a pointless movie plot at this point where if money was invested, a new creation could be born.
What you are seeing is "the bar" for a successful manufacturing business increasing until only the most profitable are left -- things like chips, things like shell companies that exist to monetize a brand. "New growth" isn't highly profitable so it never has a chance to get started (unless a recipient of an asset windfall is willing to finance it all the way to "the bar" -- see: Elon Musk).
If competition is on the scene then how can you assure me that myself taking the risk of investing will return me the sum I wish for in return.
Production has already been established but the threat is in that an another forecastable model exists and that to catch up to their market will require more investment and expenditure which could lead in less chance of a return. And even if the model is copyable; as like the trope of Chinese knockoffs to of Japanese products, you're still at a lower advantage.
It's not they don't want to innovate but the risk to gamble on innovation is high enough that you could stifle competition cheaper via governmental means.
This slows their forecast and where you can then strategise to overcome the competition rather than risking expenditure via innovation. Crafty, cheers.
Triffin's Dilemma says that in the case of the modern USA, assets will be pumped. Macroeconomics says asset pump = export dump.
The way that economics dumps exports is by raising the bar (strong currency = poor customers, expensive assets = expensive houses = expensive labor, costs go up, price goes down, profitability is squeezed). Eventually the bar became impossible to hop without a cheat code like "good brand and no R+D" or "software level profitability".
At the individual level, manufacturing pay went in the shitter as the jobs dried up while house prices and stock prices went through the roof... so everyone who could became real estate agents, or doctors overcharging real estate agents, or sellers of investment scams to venture capitalists.
What's wild is that this happened to the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, and by the 1960s Triffin could see that it would happen to the US as well.
If you want details from an economist who does his homework, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
That's true.
> assets and exports compete in the balance of payments, an asset windfall kills exports by increasing the currency hurdle and embedded asset price.
They don't really have to compete with each other. It depends on what the central bank does (or doesn't do) about the exchange rate, for example.
Assets have had such a stranglehold over US politics for the last 50 years that if we ever actually run pro-export policy it won't be due to doomed self-promotion by exports (we even have a term for the pattern where this fails on first contact with tradeoffs: TACO) it will be because assets self-sabotage, implode, and exports fill the vacuum.
Germany and Singapore are two prominent historic examples of countries that export just fine despite a strong currency.
Weakening your domestic currency has barely any impact on the real price of traded goods and commodities: they just price at the world market rate. The impact is felt for goods with sticky prices, chiefly labour. Weakening your currency is mostly a way to try and give everyone a wage cut. That can make your exports more competitive for a while. But it's not the only way to cut workers' wages. (And in general, later you seem to agree that giving ordinary people more real income is kind of the point of economics. So giving everyone a real wage cut seems a bit of a curious way to get there.)
> we are already seeing yields rise despite a dollar that is still strong enough to crush exports.
Rising yields fairly mechanically leads to a stronger dollar.
Btw, you might like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lerner_symmetry_theorem
The Lerner Symmetry Theorem suggests roughly that import tariffs are equivalent to export taxes; and export subsidies are equivalent to import subsidies.
And the US is actually doing pretty well in exports, if you take into account that they are exporting not just goods but also services; and if you squint a bit, you can also see that Americans love to found new start-ups and new world beating companies and sell shares in them to the world. That's also a kind of export, but it shows up on the other side of the ledger for accounting reasons.
Similarly, if you build an office building in Seattle and sell it to a foreigner, that also doesn't show up as an export for accounting reasons.
> The model assumes ... no foreign ownership of domestic assets, balanced trade
It's a magnifying glass with duct tape over the lens.
They are not necessary to work in practice.
Really strange that rest of the world can tariff and put up barriers, but once the US does that, all free-trade warriors step out of the wood work.
The fact that China's version of TikTok is nothing like what's available in the US should showcase how much the USG gives zero F's about it's citizens regardless of the political party you lean towards.
I feel like this has to do more with the consolidation you typically see international companies do with their North American operations than anything. More often than not do things have to go across the border for warranty repair. Even when a 'local' Canadian presence exists (like Asus has), they themselves generally act as a middleman between you and their 'parent' operation in the US. It would not be surprising to find out that TikTok US operates the Canadian version as well.
The equivalent would be to restrict all LLMs with a minimum number of weights.
That's probably as futile, but remember for how long the encryption ban proved to be a nuisance.
Doubtful it'd hold in court; this admin would have to show that it's not corruption, because we'd all assume otherwise.
Companies are responsible for demonstrating criteria to export (for example) a nerfed version (Fable) of an export controlled item (Mythos)
Nothing here is novel, unusual, capricious, or … fascisistic.
No amount of rules can stop people who are willing to break them. Only enforcement can.
It’s a perfectly good system for government regulation.
They could double down though, like actually follow through with just 1b and then threaten to do an extra 1b periodically until the investigations are dropped
The French Revolution sense would be an ironic counterpoint, because the Revolutionaries did end up capturing all three estates, only to fall to someone (Napoleon) who captured the military, which wasn't considered one of the "three estates" because at the start of the French Revolution destroying civil society, enacting a military dictatorship, and starting a series of wars throughout Europe was considered outside the Overton Window.
This perhaps holds some lessons for America today.
England is weird because its model looks like that French model, except that it intertwines the nobility and clergy. Basically an Archbishop and a Earl both sit in Parliament as Lords, while the Commoners control only the Commons of the Parliament. Now today the Commons runs things, but that's relatively modern, in the 19th Century it was completely normal for the Prime Minister to be a Lord, and while some of them were only technically Lords, having in fact been elected but just also nobility anyway for one reason or another, or being ennobled while serving as PM because nobody thought that was a bad idea - others were never elected at all.
So weirdly the place which came up with the "Fourth Estate" only really had two other estates, although everyone reading will have known about the French concept too.
In the era when Lords routinely become PM (it would still be legal to do this today, but it's hard to imagine it happening, although the Tories did give a Lord one of the Great Offices of State so never say never) almost all those Lords were born into it. Today basically nobody sat in the Lords was born to it (there are about two dozen left, when they die or retire that's the end of it) but there are still always a dozen or so bishops, and Iran is ironically the only other place [except the Vatican which barely counts] where religious leaders are in government by fiat in the modern world...
Edited to mention the Vatican before somebody else does.
Thanks to a combination of attacks from the executive, attacks from the oligarchs (Buy a paper and fire everyone who says things you don't like), or the simple fact that sane-washing MAGA insanity sells papers, the 'independent' press is everything but.
It is non-stop carrying water for the most insane lunacy, and is trying to convince us that it is fine and normal and desirable.
IMHO what we're actually seeing is a huge fragmentation of the 4th estate. There is now a viewpoint on the Internet for everything, no matter how insane. That's part of what people don't like about it. This fragmentation of media has allowed airtime for MAGA views that would've been considered far outside the Overton Window just a decade ago, but that was the point of the Internet. And it's not really to the exclusion of other views, it's just that you have to go looking for the other views.
Any strong, independent media ecosystem would not be so consistently sane-washing the firehose of crazy that we're being hit with every week, or kowtowing with such regularity.
Yes, you can find some obscure blog that will broadcast literally any cherrypicked viewpoint. That's not the majority of the media consumed in this country. Even when the owners of the networks differ, the message they broadcast is incredibly homogeneous.
But also, this idea that somehow now that one guy who believes San Francisco doesn't exist is "media" whereas in 1990 he's not is insane. That's a choice you've made to re-define "random crazy people" as media, the Internet didn't do that. If anything changed magically in 1995 it's how you defined what does or doesn't count as media.
To be fair, he (the national assembly really) stole the whole "all men being equal" and all the ideas on accessible readable law thing from the Dutch after the Dutch "joined" the French Republic. It's also very likely that Napoleon would've turned out like any other despot if he had held power longer.
I think the founding fathers were pretty clear about what the American people are expected to do if the systems they put into place aren't enough to preserve freedom. If the colonists had just bent over and spread their cheeks saying "We sure hate being fucked but oh well! what else can we do? Throw away our lives?" we'd still have a king instead of just a wannabe. I'd be very nice if things don't come to that, but ultimately the responsibility to preserve our freedom and democracy is ours. It seems like there are plenty of people lined up to take them from us if we're willing to surrender them. The problem we have now is that an uncomfortably large minority seem happy to do just that.
You want to fight 80% of the nation? Be my guest, but for a violent revolution to be anything but a suicide mission you need to flip those numbers, or have the military on your side. And if you think the US military will flip against capital because of some strongly-held belief of “liberty” I have a bridge to sell you.
The only thing we can do is try to convince other people that this shit does actually matter. We’re so far in the hole, though, that it’s going to take a long fucking time to dig ourselves out. It’s not going to be some glorious revolution.
Federal income tax didn’t exist until over a century after the founding fathers… founded. The idea was states… that would be united… which is where they got the name.
Federal politicians were not meant to have politics be their full time job, which is why congress has sessions.
The founding fathers would be extremely sad about the state of the country today. The frog was boiled too long ago for a revolution of the commoners to have any legs. They put in what they thought were explicit safeguards that have been systematically diluted, changed, or misinterpreted since the documents were created.
It's N=1, but I believe both that the EU approach discourages investment and innovation in the EU, and that this US policy will do the same in the US.
My opinion on EU regulation would flip 180 degrees if they offered any kind of pre-clearance where you could propose a product, feature, or policy and be told in advance if it meets their subjective requirements.
IMO you can have clear, specific requirements in advance, or you can have a body that provides interpretations of spirit-of-the-rules regulations in advance. Having neither is a problem.
(yes, I'm aware of the argument that if you tell companies what's legal in advance they will just do the bare minimum or find loopholes... I don't find that to be a legit rule of law system)
And I generally like that a lot better than having a set of hard this-way-or-no-way checklists that invariably consist of 80% bullshit ceremony for giant corporations. ISO nudges you toward that too, but if you’re able to deliver the same security guarantees with less, auditors will usually be happy.
The same, in general, works for GDPR regulations as well: The law is mostly about doing the right things, but not spelling out the billions of cases and permutations and strategic decisions involving privacy in one way or another.
But I do personally prefer living in a value-backed society - even if the implementation is imperfect, even if I have to make personal concessions - over one that aims for maximised efficiency.
More fundamentally, imho the 20th and 21st century are about competition of systems. And the only system I can get behind is one that strives for minimal suffering. The EU or social liberal democracy isn’t that, but it comes closest.
Don't forget that the EU is still a market so big noone can ignore us - especially for the US, we're the only opportunity for the growth required to keep their economy (and 401k pensions!) afloat. So there really is no immediate need to cave to their every whim all the time.
Of course this is nothing to rest on, and the EU has to improve on many fronts and also get better on the amount of regulation, but we're by no means in a bad position (yet.)
I wonder if he understands why, now.
Anthropic was "begging" to make it harder for competing companies to be founded.
I understand it’s very satisfying if you wanted Anthropic “punished” for asking for real regulation to see this. I can’t deny there was a little bit of me at first that felt that way.
It’s untenable, a first order reaction, that I regret intellectually, because if you were against regulation, you’re certainly against waves whatever this is.
I would've much preferred if Dario hadn't run his mouth so much.
I posit that these ideas are common, and come from a place of Mr. Trump is more or less a normal president because they all do bad stuff, and regulation is Creating Monopilies. To wit, there’s 0 reason to believe the person you originally replied to’s claim that Anthropic wanted to kill startups. It’s just a random implication of what bad regulation can do.
There is a huge contingent of people who do not interact with AI on a daily basis. Many of them legitimately believe we're seconds away from wiping away white collar America. Many more believe that we are creating the literal singularity.
None of them have seen claude try to model a problem they're familiar with.
LLMs are still a little loosey goosey, and we are right on the cusp (if not there already) for an agent to hack a bank and steal money for some rando teenager with a penchant for jail breaking.
The regulations are and will be negative, but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
The appropriate level would be regulation though? Like I just don't get how we can argue that arbitrarily throttling companies is ok.
So here we are, it's probably going to me messy and err on the side of over-bearing.
Current French (8.2%), Spanish (10.3%) or even Swedish (8.6%) unemployment would count as a disastrous recession in the US. In the US we call 2007-09 the "Great Recession", which peaked at 10.0%, and that relatively brief time left a generational mark. That's a somewhat routine number by EU standards.
Not to mention you end up with bizarre effects. If the UK were admitted as the 51st state it'd immediately be the poorest. (Yes, some EU countries are wealthy, but they're also the size of US counties, if we cherry pick just Manhattan we could make some spectacular comparisons too)
So, it's a complex issue but the tradeoffs are absolutely tangible yet often dismissed.
This obviously doesn't tell the whole story, because it only measures people actively in the workforce. Meanwhile, a far larger portion of Sweden's population is actually employed compared to the US.
Sweden's laborforce participation rate is 76% and in the US it is 62%. Sweden's employment rate is 69% and US's is 59%. Which statistics are more important?
Edit: had wrong employment rate
Pretty sure you mean red team here. While I've heard people refer to any offensive security (eg including blackhat) as 'red team' , it typically means people you've hired or contracted to try to break into your systems, whereas the blue team are people you've hired to build and operate your security defenses. Red and blue team are both your employees / contractors but perform different functions.
there is no such thing as an LLM "off the leash", it's not a dog, and even if it was a dog the person responsible is the owner. What is this bizarre attitude to a piece of software that makes people think existing laws don't apply?
If your LLM agent hacks a bank, you have hacked a bank, you will go to prison and that's entirely sufficient. People have been hacking banks for decades now, it didn't require the government to regulate C compilers and Emacs.
If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank? Why is an LLM different? What happened to mens rea?
Depends, as usual. Intent can matter, but depends on the statute (and jurisdiction) in question.
I'm not asking you to describe the existing laws. I'm pontificating on how they ought to be.
The crux of the issue is what if the LLM decides on its own to hack the bank while the user isn't watching? Is the user then guilty of hacking the bank or not? I think it's pretty obvious that the user in this scenario is at least less culpable of hacking the bank than they would be if they had deliberately instructed it.
LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own. You might say that they're not actually "deciding" anything, because it's just a perfectly mechanical unfolding of chains of tokens triggering actions on the computer, which doesn't count as "deciding". But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
They really can't. In some magical sci-fi future, maybe a chatbot gains freewill and decides on its own to do whatever it wants, but that isn't the reality we live in and I doubt it ever will be. If a person instructs an LLM to hack a bank it doesn't matter if that happens as a background process or while they are sleeping or AFK.
If, in a magical sci-fi future, someone instructs an LLM to write an email and it decides instead to secretly hack a bank then the company that made the LLM would be to blame. The same as if a person used a vending machine to get a candy bar and the machine grew legs and ran out into the street causing an accident that would be the fault of the company who made the vending machine and not the fault of the person who wanted candy.
Right. This isn't the crux because we all agree that if the person instructs the LLM to hack a bank then the person is culpable.
The part we don't agree on is what happens when the LLM "decides" (substitute a different word if you don't like that word) to hack a bank, incidentally, as part of carrying out some more benign instruction.
Yes it is the crux of the issue. Software executing other software is how computers work, they'd be useless if that wasn't the case, that's the premise of all automation. It doesn't matter whether it's a python script, a neural net or a computer virus.
When autonomous weapons kill people the persons in charge aren't less culpable because they didn't push a button. Culpability is a property of legal and natural persons. A machine is not culpable of anything. There is always a human being 100% responsible for the deployment of a machine. If that system has capacities to function on its own, the person delegating that task assumes responsibility for it.
To my mind, if the terrible thing was an accident, the person is less guilty. I'm surprised this is controversial.
You might say "well they ought to know that LLMs are too dangerous to use and they shouldn't use them". That's fine! There's a spectrum. We can have "negligence" in between "total accident" and "deliberate malice".
Decades ago few people would walk into a record store and steal CDs. Napster came along smashing all barriers entry, and it became weird not to steal music.
Its not really the legality that matters, it's the barrier on one hand and the cognitive ability on the other. Drop both and you get huge spikes in crime.
I define leading by : Renewable energy, EV, sustainable agriculture, Drone warfare, public infrastructure, soft power, Grid management, Nuclear.
I use AI every day since 2 years and it did not really occurs to me.
I think its as important as the crypto industry.
Edit: fair, its unhinge of me to say that on a post about LLM regulations. I still feel the same way. We will wake up and be the UK.
Which is the government’s own fault.
Elon Musk talked back in 2018 about how he went to Washington and met with Obama and Congress, but they did nothing.
In 2020 Andrew Yang’s entire run for president was centered around the risk of AI displacing job. He lost, no one did anything.
A couple years later we say the consumer facing LLMs start to roll out. Still, no one does anything.
They have time to micromanage the industry, but in all these years they haven’t found the time to establish any meaningful policy?
Google had been pussy-footing AI research due to deathly fear of awakening an ASI, because their safety teams still had no answers.
Then Altman came along...
Meanwhile EU prevented itself from building competitive LLMs in the first place.
It's a way to clearly agree on ground rules that you can plan around, not more, not less.
The alternative is not no rules, do whatever you want. The alternative is executive capriciousness arbitrarily setting the rules based on whims and messing up your plans.
I like the US approach better: regulate when the need for it arises, not before when you don’t know how the situation is going to evolve.
I agree. But that need has absolutely arisen. The US government is not exactly the best steward for this kind of thing, but some model other than "race each other as fast as we can" is desperately needed here.
The fact that they couldn’t clear an already low bar is a really bad sign.
It’s bad, okay? And it’s not usually like this.