GeneralMayhem

Because Democrats, being (at the moment, and relatively speaking) the party of government actually functioning according to laws, are extremely unlikely to do this in the other direction. The two sides are not the same. It is not possible to be the party aligned with institutions, rule of law, and predictability, while also using the power of government arbitrarily and vindictively. On the other hand, it's entirely possible to use the power of government arbitrarily when you're the party of greed and corruption. So "Republican-aligned companies" don't have to be nearly as worried, and otherwise-neutral companies will become Republican-aligned out of self-preservation, because one side is going to punish them for disobedience (legally or illegally) and the other side isn't.

There's a difference between, on the one hand, knowing who they are and having read a few chapters of HPMoR, which I agree is standard for anyone who spends enough time on the Internet, vs. on the other hand actually identifying as part of that culture. I know who Stallman is, I've even seen him speak in person, but I'm not a GNU zealot.

The people described in the article aren't just "people who know who Yudkowsky is", they're self-avowed EAs and active LessWrong members.

What other solution do you suggest to the coordination problem?

Not OP, but I think they're way more essential with AI doing a lot of the coding. The biggest thing that AI, even the frontier models, is not great at is staying on topic and actually finishing a project with reasonable priorities instead of ratholing on insignificant details or claiming it's "finished" when it's half done.

The most important thing that a good design doc does is specify what's in and out of scope. The second most important thing is to precisely define common vocabulary - what are the important concepts in the problem you're solving, and how should they relate to each other? All of that information serves to ground the day-to-day work in what's important. I find myself starting every Claude session with "read this doc and get familiar with the world, then we'll get to work on a part of it".

(The same is true when working with humans, especially but not limited to junior engineers who aren't used to managing a project longer than a week or two. AI coding agents just never grow out of that phase.)

There is a specific, unilateral action that he is taking described in the article.

And the "why are they developing AI if they think it's so dangerous" argument is neither new nor persuasive. They're developing it because (1) they think the potential benefits are as great as the potential risks, and they know that if they aren't one of the actors on the frontier (2) they won't be able to propose meaningful solutions and (3) their opinions won't be taken seriously. Amodei is in rooms with powerful people to propose these things because Anthropic is successfully developing frontier models. The heads of various NGOs and advocacy groups that are concerned with AI safety but not themselves working on those systems are... nowhere, writing pamphlets and blogs that not you nor I nor anyone in Congress will ever read.

Yes, that is exactly Dario's concern. Either one of the US labs or one of the Chinese ones will eventually release something with insufficient safety controls for its power level because it gives them slightly better user retention (look how much complaining there is about current frontier models, especially Fable, rejecting requests). Regulation or consortium is how you avoid the prisoner's dilemma.

Sure, I acknowledge that it was incredibly rare and lucky for "the thing I enjoy doing" and "the thing that pays" to have been the same for so long. That doesn't mean it's not painful for that to change out from under me - especially when I can't quite convince myself that the new way of doing things is actually better by any metric.

What supply chain controls can you have on biotech? Part of the problem is that you can do a lot of damage with ingredients you can buy over the counter or make at home.

Except that there are finite hours in the day. I enjoy the process and craft very much, but I also enjoy making high tech salaries. Up until a year or so ago, those weren't contradictory, because the craft paid well. Now, continuing to be employed in an AI-dominated industry means that I can no longer practice my craft at work most days. So now I need to find the motivation to do it in my spare time - and this while the work hours are significantly more emotionally and motivationally draining because it's less fulfilling.

If I switched to spending more time on the hobbyist craft, I would pretty quickly have to give up doing well at the job. And the parts of the craft I enjoyed the most are the puzzles around distributed systems and high-scale correctness, which tend not to come up in the hobbyist context anyway.

Cynicism is fine. They don't have to believe in any sort of ideal to do this. They just have to be thinking more than a couple months ahead to realize the math favors quality.

Related in that some of the same organized groups tend to be carrying out every kind of attack at once, but operationally a different thing.

In the ad marketplace there are four participants: the advertiser, the user, the network (Google), and the publisher (also Google for AdWords, other websites for AdSense and so on, and effectively the channel owner for YouTube).

In the click spam or botnet case, the bad actor is the user, who is usually associated with a publisher trying to get extra money (although not always - there's reasons like auction manipulation where some advertisers run click bots too). In the bad-ads case, the bad actor is the advertiser.

At Google, each of those problems has their own well funded team, but they do also share some data to help catch rings of bad guys.

I don't understand what point you're making.

Your "point 1" is literally the argument of the paper. If that scenario arises, the market collapses and no further sales can be made. That's the whole problem. As someone who takes a percentage of every sale, you want to keep the lemon-sellers out even though in the short run they make you extra money.

Your "point 2", if it's meant to be a rebuttal, isn't much of one. Buyers don't need to accurately know exactly what fraction of sellers are fraudulent; if they believe that it's 50-50, the same thing happens, even if the true rate is 80-20 in favor of good sellers. Conversely, if buyers are overly optimistic about quality, the market can persist despite a level of fraud that's higher than should be tolerated. But in any case, things like reviews and external reporting should eventually give them good information.

Google is also competent enough to know that taking spam & fraud seriously is incentive-aligned in the medium term. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons.

Google's AdSpam/fraud/bot-prevention team was, when I worked there, world class and fairly well funded, took their job seriously, and had access to all the data. It's an existential threat to the ad business, because if Google gets a reputation for being full of bots/spam, then the advertisers will bid lower per click/conversion to compensate, which means that legitimate website publishers will get paid less and go to other networks, which is a feedback loop that leads to the entire market collapsing (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons). It's absolutely worth refunding/zero-rating huge amounts of advertiser spend to avoid that situation, and they do.

It's not that they're not trying, it's just a very hard problem.

They come with renewal expectations, assuming the situation hasn't changed. Reserving the right to change the rules unilaterally doesn't make you not an asshole if you actually exercise that right. And government only functions if it's predictable - if it's a random-number generator (outside of processes that are explicitly lotteries), what is anyone supposed to do? Why would anyone engage with it?

In most states, employers have broad rights to fire employees at will, including no reason or "he wore the wrong color shirt". That doesn't mean that if you have a dickhead manager who fires you because he doesn't like the color of your shirt isn't a dickhead, and if you defended that manager I would similarly consider you unfit to participate in civil society.

> the point isn't that "Leave to renew" is some kind of horrible policy

I mean... "leave to renew" is a horrible policy, it's just one that we've normalized since 9/11. It's incredibly wasteful and disruptive, and serves no purpose. There's no legitimate reason why a long-term residential visa like an H1-B can't be renewed by mail or electronically. I can renew my driver's license by mail, and I'm a hell of a lot more likely to cause serious damage with a car than my foreign coworkers are by continuing to do their jobs well.

The reason the State Department hides behind, by the way, is that domestic offices don't have the ability to take biometric data (fingerprints), which is self-evidently pretextual.

They say it out loud. The people writing these policies are vocally proud of being white nationalists. Defending them with "well maybe they have a good reason!" is evidence that you're either on board with their actual agenda (i.e., evil) or incomprehensibly naive (i.e., stupid).

First, that's not what this is talking about. "Leave to renew" becoming "leave, and you will not be renewed" on a whim is insane, self-destructive cruelty.

But also, it's only been "the policy" since 2004. That's technically "decades", but only just, and it was also introduced for idiotic pretextual reasons. The ostensible reason is that domestic State Department offices don't have the equipment to capture biometric data. Seriously. That's the argument. The law doesn't say "you have to leave to renew", it says "you have to get fingerprinted to renew", and conveniently there's nowhere in the United States that can do that, despite every police station in the country having that equipment at this point.

In what universe is Russia "doing just fine"?

> Russia

Totalitarian, and trending toward failed state.

> US

Not eligible for the reason I stated: the US economy is much less than 10% petroleum. We have a lot of oil, but we have a lot more of everything else.

> gulf states

Mostly brutal, repressive dictatorships (especially Saudi Arabia and Iran) - some are better than others, but the trend is poor.

> Just because you don't like a government doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at, well, holding a state together

You're moving the goalposts a fair amount here. The thread started with "good governance", and I said "well run" - it's hard to say that the bar for either of those is simply maintaining superficial order. But even if you set that aside, consider the famous quote from the Shiekh of Dubai about the fragility of the petrostates that haven't figured out how to build strong civil societies with their wealth: "my grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel."

Norway is pretty much the only country with oil wealth that can reasonably be considered well run (unless you count Canada or the US, which, while resource-rich, have a lot of other things going on and aren't dependent on their petroleum resources).

Of the other countries where petroleum is >10% of the national economy, I think Norway might be the only one that isn't a brutal dictatorship, a failed state, or both?

Is your argument that anyone saying "there should be laws about this" should spell out "and we mean actual laws, not arbitrary misapplication of existing law by one petulant executive"? I don't know how they could have been more clear - they've suggested industry-wide regulation and even what shape that could take.

Accepting your dichotomy for the sake of argument, I'm in camp 1, but camp 2 could still be humane and comprehensible. Many countries have strict immigration rules, and while I disagree with that philosophy, it's not necessarily objectionable in the same way.

The Trump administration is not in camp 2.

The Trump administration, as this rule clearly illustrates, is in camp 3: Those who believe that the people who are not currently citizens of your country should never be able to become so, and should be punished for even trying.

The problem is not that the system is "strict" in the sense of holding an incredibly high bar. The problem is that the system is arbitrary - there is no process you can follow that will give you a high degree of confidence that you'll be allowed to enter, or even that a decision _will be made at all_ in a fair manner, no matter who you are (unless you're a personal friend of the administration) - as opposed to you being randomly arrested by ICE halfway through waiting for a decision. And even if there were such a process, you would have no confidence that it wouldn't change retroactively in another week.

It is laughably naive to believe that they are doing this in good faith out of any sense of strictly filtering immigrants. There's exactly one explanation that isn't transparently pretextual, and you and I both know what it is.

Oh... that's embarrassing. Honest mistake, I swear.

In FY25, according to their budget [1], TriMet - the Portland public transit authority - spent $19M on bus services.

In that same budget, PDOT spent $56M on streets, signs and streetlights, before you even consider the $242M spent on "asset management" - which appears to generally be capital improvements; i.e., rebuilding roads [2, page 509].

I don't care what fraction of that wear and tear is due to buses, it's not remotely close. And in any case, by the same fourth-power law, private 18-wheelers do astronomically more damage than buses.

And yes, PDOT makes revenue back from some of those things, so it's not all straight from the city general fund, but it doesn't matter in any practical way. They don't have revenues broken down as far as I'd like on that budget - there's one big $89M line item for "charges for services", which appears to include parking meters as well as tram fare - but the vast majority of their budget still comes from taxes plus "intergovernmental" sources (aka state and federal money, aka taxes).

[1] https://www.gpmetro.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/2025-Oper... [2] https://www.portland.gov/budget/documents/fy-2025-26-city-po...

If you only wanted to run buses, you would not build nearly as many roads as we do.

> by simple virtue of being a car

State and local governments spend a truly obscene amount of money building and repairing roads, and set aside a nauseating amount of publicly owned land to serve as roads, street parking, and parking lots. Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure, because of the efficiencies of shops needing deliveries and whatnot, but not anything close to proportional to what drivers get out of it. And we accept this as the default way that things should be, whereas we assume that public transit needs to "pay for itself".

Right, but the impressive part is finding addresses that are actually on different memory channels.

> My current thinking is that queues don’t increase average throughput. Instead, they act as buffers that absorb short-term bursts and timing differences between senders and receivers

Absorbing bursts is one purpose for a queue, but often not the only or even most important one. Other reasons include:

Correctness reasons:

* Providing a durable history of requests that were sent

* Creating at-least-once semantics for important (e.g. financial) data

Scaling reasons:

* Allowing a shuffle between producer and consumer to change shard/key affinity (can be done with direct RPCs, but would need extra library support)

* Pipelining variable-cost requests so that consumers can self-rate-limit and stay optimally loaded

Do you take down all of your projects and then bring them back up at the new version? If not, then you have times at which the change is only partially complete.