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SpicyLemonZest

9,951 karma · joined September 11, 2018

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SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
It's not a high horse, you're just misinformed. The Trump regime does want to blow up a school with 120 children. The military had, until recently, a program to prevent such incidents; Pete Hegseth gutted it (https://www.propublica.org/article/hegseth-civilian-harm-mit...) because he wants to achieve "maximum lethality" at all costs. To this date, the regime has not issued any sort of apology for the school bombing, because they're not sorry and they'd happily do it again.
SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Because this is an illegitimate ruling with no legal basis issued by an aspiring dictator's cronies.
SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Actively handicapping a product that's otherwise capable qualifies. If you discover that the military is using your capacitors to make rocket launchers, so you introduce a manufacturing defect that will cause them to fail at high heat, you're a supply chain risk and can be rightfully designated as such.

The converse does not qualify. If I advertise a chemical with an admixture that prevents it from being used to make explosives, the military has absolutely no right to demand that I produce a version of that chemical without the admixture. Selling a product which can't do what the DoD wants does not make me a supply chain risk, no matter how easy it would be for me to make a different product that's fit for their purpose.

SpicyLemonZest··on Supreme Court permits states to use SAVE database for citizenship checks
The opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause (https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/588/18-422/) is pretty clear. The North Carolina and Maryland redistricting committees both sought to override the will of the voters. They had specific, explicit goals for precisely how many Democrats and how many Republicans should be elected in their state, and they knew the voters would not vote in accordance with those goals, so they redrew the maps in a successful attempt to ensure the partisan balance they desired. To me that's a clear example of disenfranchisement.

The Supreme Court didn't quite rule that this was constitutional, I suppose, only that no court is allowed to consider the question.

SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
What if an Amazon employee uses Claude to develop the S3 storage service, which is a core product offering unrelated to the DoD but also something that will be provided to the DoD in govcloud?

In practice, I think it's fair to say there's an informal understanding that AWS will not be punished for this so long as they stay in the regime's good graces. But that's how fascist power accumulation works; now they have to stay in the regime's good graces, or they risk being destroyed.

SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
I'm intensely skeptical that Walmart has clauses in its contracts saying that no supplier may use FooCorp software in the process of delivering its goods. If they do I would definitely call that an abuse of corporate power.
SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
It's certainly rhetoric! Corporate leaders must be made to understand that the business risk of collaborating with fascism is greater than or equal to the business risk of standing up for the rule of law. Really, we're being generous if we only punish a few companies and only hit their contracts; a strict application of the law would put quite a lot of CEOs behind bars for their overt bribery of the Trump regime.
SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
Again, it's unreasonable to play this game. The regime must be held to account for the actual things that they say, not whatever sanewashed policies we can backfill underneath them. If Hegseth's statements exceed his legal authority, that doesn't mean he's lying, it means that the government is knowingly pursuing an illegal policy.

If you don't like that, and would prefer to discuss a lawful supply chain risk designation, you should convince him to retract the statements or impeach him.

SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
I think it is impossible for anyone who's not fascist to look at this story and take the regime's side, even if they don't like Anthropic.
SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
People have been making this claim because the Secretary of Defense personally issued a statement demanding that "no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic". We're not going to play this absurd game where government officials issue fascist instructions and we all pretend they said something more reasonable instead.
SpicyLemonZest··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
I don't see a need to come up with a complete definition at this point. Let's start with cancelling all SpaceX and Palantir contracts and see how we're feeling; that may be enough to keep corporations in line.
SpicyLemonZest··on OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says
I think it's pretty clearly negligent to set up a harness that will run whatever outputs it receives from your LLM if you cannot reliably stop it from outputting hacking instructions. I've said in the past that I'm sympathetic to the idea of testing your anti-hacking controls, but that doesn't seem to be where this incident came from.
SpicyLemonZest··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
No. It's hard to get even small molecules where we want them in the body, there's no way that the gigantic molecular clusters called "nanobots" could reliably get access to every single cell. (What may be possible is using things like the Moderna cancer vaccine to make your body an inhospitable environment for the growth and multiplication of the cancer cells.)
SpicyLemonZest··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
There's a lot about biology that makes cancer fundamentally hard to treat, and the efficacy of cancer treatments fundamentally hard to measure. I'm optimistic that we'll eventually get to a point where we can meaningfully say we "cured cancer", but it will almost certainly be a cluster of thousands of treatment protocols which each have to be tested over 5-10 years for recurrence. There's no reason to expect that there should exist any broad-spectrum cancer treatment better than radiotherapy, or any fast test to determine whether long-term remission will be achieved.
SpicyLemonZest··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
Most technical interviews aren't designed to emulate what the job will be like, so what you would or wouldn't have access to on the job isn't really relevant. The goal is to evaluate the human being applying for the job. An interview that effectively emulates the job would really have to be done over at least a week, and most good candidates can't or won't make time for that.
SpicyLemonZest··on Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem?
I don't think Anthropic needs such a committee because they don't make a habit of hill-climbing other people's problems.
SpicyLemonZest··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
I at least was pretty disappointed to scroll down and discover this is a self-promotion. I'm willing to accept some level of slop for an interesting analysis, but an AI-generated report to promote your AI-generated product with AI-generated copy is too much.
SpicyLemonZest··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
If I were in a meeting with a current employee, and discovered that they were reading an LLM script at me instead of considering and responding to my questions, I would definitely tell them and their manager that this is unacceptable.
SpicyLemonZest··on 28% of job postings on company career sites have been open over 90 days
Hiring the wrong person in corporate roles is very, very, very expensive. New hires are expected to be unproductive right out the gate, and it's hard to measure productivity in general, so you can easily end up in scenarios where it takes months to notice there's an issue and a year or more before you can get the person back out the door. So you really do have to double and triple check that a prospective hire is the right choice.

It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.

SpicyLemonZest··on Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem?
At the time that the Millenium Prize problems were formulated, the force term was understood to make the problem more realistic, since real fluids are always going to have external forces applied to them. A blowup that happens under constant gravity, for example, would probably be no less interesting than an entirely unforced blowup. The strategy of constructing impossibly complex external forces to induce a blowup was pioneered by Córdoba and Martínez-Zoroa only over the past few years.
SpicyLemonZest··on The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
I'm not sure why you see bullying here? OpenAI has always worked with expert mathematicians; their unit-distance result (https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c...) was a much deeper collaboration. They published the Navier-Stokes result early, to either benchmark or show off their new model depending on how you look at it, and they want to understand more about the negative effects which many mathematicians feel that early publication had.

If the advisory group says something like "AI is bad and nobody should use it in math", I'm pretty confident OpenAI will ignore them.

SpicyLemonZest··on The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
I'm not sure how you've ended up so frustrated with an advisory group whose advice has not been given. Human mathematicians routinely delay publication of their results past the point you describe; is someone gatekeeping when they take a month to clean up their paper?

Or are you perhaps sublimating your own AI anxiety into confrontational assertions that other people who discuss AI aren't as AI-pilled as you?

SpicyLemonZest··on Suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption for imports $800 or less
> Do you think this will motivate people who may have voted for trump but been ok the fence by calling them stupid?

Yes. That's been a surprising and important lesson of the Trump movement's success; we've learned that insulting your political opponents can help convince fence-sitters, and doesn't automatically repel them. I wish it weren't so, but in the modern political climate, abandoning insults seems as strategically unwise as abandoning fundraising.

SpicyLemonZest··on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices
Is there such a pattern? I'm not aware of any data pointing towards one, and I know lots of businesses with no monopoly or regulatory moat that have been acquired by private equity firms. I think people just don't care when PE buys businesses that don't seem very important.
SpicyLemonZest··on Economics Nobel Laureates' Letter Supporting the California Billionaire Tax [pdf]
What the linked poll asked is "Would you prefer to vote for a candidate for Congress who supports tax increases on wealthy Americans?". I would say yes to that, even though I don't support this specific California tax proposal, and I don't think that's a terribly uncommon perspective.
SpicyLemonZest··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
It’s like asking why we don’t just run all the programs instead of making users decide what to run. There’s an infinite number of problems that could be solved, and the question of which ones are important to solve is a question about us and what we want.
SpicyLemonZest··on For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
Is there a retrospective on AlphaFold you’d recommend? Maybe that’s the insight I’m missing, I didn’t realize it had broad identifiable gaps like that.
SpicyLemonZest··on For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
We understand "superhuman coding" to mean very different things, and I think it's a me problem that I can't figure out where you're coming from, because it doesn't sound like our practical experience differs. I'm going to have to think on this.
SpicyLemonZest··on For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
I've read Gary Marcus's critique of AI 2027. How do you grapple with the fact that superhuman coding arrived on schedule, despite his skepticism that it would? Doesn't that mean that the other predictions are also more plausible than we may think?
SpicyLemonZest··on For AI leaders Doom is a form of hype
If someone showed you such a path, would you consider changing your mind? You're always going to be able to find a reason that such an explanation doesn't count if you're dedicated to looking for one.
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