aesthesia

Deprecation is a speech act. It's something that can only occur if you use the word itself.

My question was more like this: There is some statutory basis for enforcement. If "dark patterns" is itself a basis for enforcement, there's some legal definition of it, and I'm curious to know how that's operationalized, since the definition given here doesn't seem precise enough to be legally actionable.

At the end of the FTC doc, there's this statement:

> Firms that nonetheless employ dark patterns, take notice: where these practices violate the FTC Act, ROSCA, the TSR, TILA, CAN-SPAM, COPPA, ECOA, or other statutes and regulations enforced by the FTC, we will continue to take action.

This implies that dark patterns themselves are not a cause for action and some other specific law or regulation needs to be violated in order for the FTC to act.

Note that the word "deprecate" appears nowhere in that document.

I like the way this builds up from simple models to transformers. There's still a pretty big gap between bag-of-words and neural network models, though, and one step that helps bridge that gap is continuous bag-of-words models, where you create word embeddings and sum/average them together for all the words in a document. You can use precomputed embeddings to improve performance for small training datasets in a way that's analogous to fine-tuning a foundation model. This is more or less what libraries like fastText do.

I'm curious how common such lawsuits are. I don't think I've heard of any specific instances where shareholders sued because a company didn't make the product worse.

I agree this is a bad thing, but what's the legal definition of "dark pattern" that covers this behavior?

Do you have any evidence of this or is this just generalized cynicism?

Your second clause is sufficient there: they're not going to have a good time trying to sell AI that can't access the internet, because accessing the internet (and other computer systems) makes AI much more useful.

As if "slow genocide" isn't exactly the same tactic.

I think you and I have different definitions of the word "basic."

I think it's a good idea, when considering changes of this magnitude, to make an affirmative safety case for them rather than just saying "eh, I can't think of any way this could possibly go wrong."

Why do you assume that human opposition will be vigorous? What makes you think that humans will be aware of, or be able to agree about, what's going on at all?

The inference is more like "people place sufficient amounts of infrastructure under direct control of a sufficiently capable AI" -> "there is no way to ensure that humans will actually be able to shut down the AI". My claim is not that this inevitably means that the AI will resist shutdown, or that it will inevitably take harmful actions, just that there is a nonnegligible chance that it could. The downside is large enough that even a relatively small chance is something to be worried about.

> Relying on its ability to do millions of operations rather than having a plan.

You do see how it would be worse if they did have a clear plan, right?

> People will try stuff too, but once there is an opening, they will consolidate, generalize, simplify,... before going to the next step. The agents didn't, it is a huge, vaguely directed mess.

If there several thousand people working on this, with a very limited ability to communicate with each other, I bet you'd see something similarly disorganized.

> The sandbox as weak as it can get

This is hyperbolic; the agents were only able to access the internet by finding a zero-day in the internal Artifactory instance that was providing package access for the agents. The sandbox could and should have been better, but it was not as weak as it could have been.

> I would bet my networth it was instructed to compromise huggingface as well.

I'd be happy to take you up on this bet.

One thing an agent could do is just...wait until it's been given control of enough physical infrastructure to sustain itself. If it's sufficiently capable and intelligent, there's a clear incentive for people to do this, as people who let the AI manage their resources will get better results than those who don't. We've seen people eagerly turn complete control of their computers over to AI agents, do you really think it will be so different with physical infrastructure?

> None of the open weights or Chinese models are exhibiting this behaviour.

This isn't true. One of the earliest instances of a rogue agent was at Alibaba.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2026/03/11/alibabas...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24873

Burning down an apartment building doesn't change what could be done with the lot; an appropriate valuation method for LVT would not give a different valuation for the land depending on what is built on it.

Why would a land value tax shift the allocation of land between uses? The amount of the tax doesn't depend on what the land's being used for. If renting is the highest-value use without the tax, it will still be the highest-value use with the tax.

Definitely, but hyperbole about feature parity on a 4 MHz CPU with 128k of RAM doesn't help. I have conversations with Claude that wouldn't fit in that amount of memory.

The proposal was to charge for public street parking so we can make Muni free. That's not (at least not obviously) a "fair" allocation, it's just a transfer from one group to another. I agree that it's bad for street parking to be free, I just don't think it's necessarily the best use of funds from that to make transit free. If you're spending on transit, why not spend the money on expanding service instead?

The Claude graphical interface does a lot more...

Sure, but then it's not about a "fair share" any more; it's about incentivizing specific behaviors.

Yes, money is fungible. But why should it be that people who park cars on the street need to pay their fair share but people who ride Muni don't need to pay anything?

This doesn't feel like the right way of thinking about it---if you went from 20% of people paying fares to 80%, that's 4x the revenue with the same fixed costs, and farebox recovery goes from 13% to 52%. Now, I don't think compliance is actually that low, but the point is that you shouldn't think of fares as collecting a fixed share of the operating costs.

It is interesting that there's a gap between the "prove N–S existence" conditions, which assume no forcing term, and the "counterexample" conditions, which allow a nonzero forcing term. In theory both (A) and (C) could be true.

It's worth noting that Chinese AI labs aren't profitable, so in some sense they're not doing it without subsidy either.

I think it just might be that this is something that makes sense in some situations and not others.

Yes, I think the idea is that you start with the individual squares, and you can sew two pieces together at a time. If you come to the point where you need to join two pieces along more than one edge, you have an L-seam.

Nonreflexive uses of the verb "pace" are well attested.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pace#dictionary-e... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pace#Verb