estearum

Do you think animals pick their food source based on whether humans have taxonomized them under a similar heading, like "mosquito?"

Would an alien species contemplating the eradication of wheat be correct to think "that won't hurt Homo sapiens much, wheat makes up <1% of our taxonomic category 'things that grow in dirt!'?

> we've been doing local eradication for a long time without much visible downside

(aside: There are lots of visible downsides to lots of local eradications of lots of things)

> this effort is interesting because it's much less local

So in other words it's very different from all the success cases you're alluding to?

Completely illogical argument. Our destruction of other parts of an ecosystem makes it more fragile, not less.

Such a vague blanket statement sounds like an article of faith and not an actual informed opinion about the specific species of mosquitos, the animals that eat them, and the fungibility of their food sources. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

"Invasive" is a made up human concept. The question is whether there are species that now rely on these as a food source. The entire natural world is a hodge-podge of "invasive" species coming from some nearby land, disrupting the ecosystem, then the ecosystem evolving around it – typically a gradual process over thousands of years.

If it took a couple hundred years for this species to proliferate, it's absolutely plausible that eradicating it in a few years will have surprising second- and third-order effects.

The mere existence of other things that we call mosquitos does not mean they are all interchangeable as a food source for the animals that eat them.

Is your level of knowledge on this just "there are other things called mosquitos ergo it's not a problem," or do you have deeper affirmative knowledge that the animals that eat these mosquitos also eat those other mosquitos, and that those other mosquitos can increase their population to replace the lost food source?

The US on a PPP-adjusted per capita basis is on the upper end of OECD but 1) not the top in the world, and 2) not even uniquely high among what Americans would call their "peer countries" (Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada, etc)

And education is unfortunately one of those things with diseconomies of scale. The US has worse wealth disparities, health disparities, nutrition disparities, and greater cultural variation than all of our peers.

The US isn't spending more than everyone else, but you really would expect them to have to do so to reach parity with others.

People dislike secretive bureaucrats more than they dislike slow or overstaffed ones.

Good luck with this attitude homie!

There's no advantage to be had, for anyone, by pushing the red button.

The opposite is true of releasing ever more powerful AI into the world to do your bidding.

No, it's really not like that. There are specific protections for federal agents against state prosecution. Private companies have no such protections.

You're talking about one specific dimension of liability which is federal criminal liability. There are several others!

"My sources go to a different school... in Canada... you wouldn't trust them"

You expect you, an outside party, to have an answer to this within weeks of the attacks being discovered by the attacker?

Just because it's not obvious to you at this point in time does not mean the reasonable assumption is there is literally $0 in damages. One hour of investigation can easily cost thousands of dollars even if it arrives at the conclusion the attack was completely "benign."

There are a number of federal agencies who can claim jurisdiction over these matters, then there are state agencies who can claim jurisdiction over subsets of them.

I'm saying that it's absolutely silly to assume they're in the clear based on lack of public declarations of legal action in the weeks following a pretty novel event.

You expect me, an outside party, to have an answer to this within weeks of the attacks being discovered by the attacker?

Or is this just a lazy “gotcha” question?

You have a very unreasonable expectation of timelines for legal proceedings, both civil and criminal.

There are dozens of new victims and they seem to be finding more every day. I'm doubtful that everyone will be partnering and willing to sweep it under the rug like Huggingface did to keep the circular economy circular.

It's not even fair to call "run code" to be indirect compared to what a human would do. The word raspberry has no Rs in it in human language either. We have a written representation of it, which we can then write down either in our head or on paper, and then we can "run the algorithm" of counting each of the letters.

Nothing intrinsically more or less direct about the LLM's method than ours.

Oh gosh darn it. Now GP is gonna have to do the gymnastics of "this technology is [expected to be] so transformative that it's attracting a trillion dollars of capex... and also it's basically the same as a pencil"

:(

Roads, cars, and drivers are all separately regulated despite nearly all failure modes requiring the other ingredients.

Well they're probably on their way.

That’s not how coordination problems work.

I agree! Participants looking for an external coordination mechanism is very sensible and if anything evidenced their earnestness about being trapped in a race.

Can you link me to any written evidence of someone saying one of these would kill everyone? or are you speaking hyperbolically?

“Climate change” is a bit squishy since yes obviously a certain intensity of climate catastrophe can kill everyone, but no scientific prediction has said this is likely to be the case.

Right, and this was and remains a very valid fear.

You are incorrect. Flock is not a government agency – it is a privately owned business – therefore it is a third party as it's relevant to Third Party Doctrine. Whether it's contracted by the government or not is irrelevant.

Even if you were correct, it would strengthen the 4th Amendment protections on Flock-collected data, not weaken them.

Do you have some examples?

There are very very few things that could even hypothetically kill us all, so I'm curious if you grew up being passed around a series of apocalyptic doomsday cults or something?

We have P(Doom) also for "kolinko not wiring me a million dollars today" and that is not being discussed enough either imho.

What on earth are you talking about?

Yes, duh?

Your "theory" is that participants locked in a race to the bottom are looking for an external coordination mechanism?

Yeah!

Don't work at a lab: dismissible for not knowing anything

Do work at a lab: dismissible for being conflicted

Used to work at a lab: dismissible for having ulterior motives

I'm feeling safer already!

It's good that new bad things never happen.