holmesworcester

This was one of the rare critiques of AI doom that actually understands the case for it and presents them well, so I kept reading to see what its arguments for our safety against AI doom were. They were roughly:

1. It's hard to put a cat in a box despite us being smarter than a cat, so we're safe. (Counter: we're pretty good at putting cats in boxes when it matters.)

2. It was hard for Australia to kill Emus, so we're safe. (Counter: Australia could probably kill all Emus if it mattered enough, and we definitely accidentally kill off species when one of their inputs for life matters enough to us.)

3. Some smart humans get paralyzed by hedonism or existential angst instead of optimizing for arbitrary goals implied by their arbitrary value sets, so we're safe. (Counter: others overthrow the Czar, land rockets, etc.)

4. Modern AI is data-trained, so recursive improvement requires more data, so we're safe. (Counter: AI-crafted, synthetic data is a thing.)

5. We don't (yet) know how to improve our brains with brain surgery, so we're safe. (Counter: same as #4 above, which unlike us/evolution AI is being deliberately trained to understand and perform.)

6. Children take a long time to grow up, so we're safe. (Counter: the author's own "Premise 5: Computer-Like Time Scales", where they correctly note that computers can be arbitrarily faster than us.)

7. Individual smart humans on a desert island would be cooked, so we're safe. (Counter: nothing says the capability of a single AI must stop at that of an individual human, or that of a small group of smart humans; humans brains got dropped into a savannah and eventually they launch rockets.)

8. If AI doom is not a real threat, believing in it makes you believe some other not-real things that seem crazy or distasteful. (Counter: do we have a clear argument why it is not a real threat yet, in the list above?)

Within software engineering, security, reliability, and scale also seem boundless.

Software that never breaks (including because it never runs into scaling problems) and never leaks your data is preferable to software that breaks and leaks your data sometimes, but it has been too costly to be practical.

Current models are still very far from the reasoning muscle required to build things that never break, scale to billions of users with no issues, and cannot be exploited.

Doing anything you want to do that does not harm anyone else, and helps some, is most certainly a human right.

To arbitrarily repress this most basic impulse, the one to go after a dream to make better ways to do things, is severely anti-human.

Most businesses are in this category.

Good luck finding any objective distinction between HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal, or email + listserv and "social media"!

Or finding any one of "social media's harms" that could not, in some world where Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok did not exist, be delivered in just as socially harmful (and beneficial) a form by sufficiently-accessible versions of the apps and protocols you value and use every day.

I met someone recently whose primary addiction is Wikipedia.

For me, Signal and Hacker News are the most addictive pieces of software I still use.

Serial television (best delivered by WebTorrent and The Pirate Bay) is by far the most addictive, for me, so much so that I had to quit.

And you can definitely run successful social movements and political campaigns (for both very good and very bad things) over HN or WhatsApp/Signal, given sufficient adoption.

Or nostalgia for simpler times

Bravo, palmas! etc.

The visuals weren't terrible, I thought, but the writing, dialog, acting (except for Moura), and narrative arc were terrible.

It's one of those movies where almost everyone looks like they just really love being on stage ("isn't cinema lovely?") and where the writers have an idea of what cliches they're trying to work with but can't land them into an actual story, even a story made out of cliches.

If it becomes commonplace for existing prediction markets to get undermined by this kind of manipulation, won't that just be an opportunity for people to create better prediction markets that are less vulnerable to manipulation?

And doesn't that just mean more resources and energy is going into solving the problem of determining the truth of past events (and, as a result given that these are prediction markets, the likelihood of future ones?)

And isn't that a good thing?

It's wild that there are as many jobs in the category "Top Executives" as in the category "Retail Sales Worker".

This makes sense given both automation and the US's role in the global economy, but it runs somewhat contrary to standard ideas of class and inequality.

> That’s not their call to make.

Whether they participate voluntarily in a commercial transaction or participate only when compelled to by law (setting aside the question of whether the government does or should have that power) is certainly their call to make.

Just as any individual can decide whether to volunteer, whether to wait until drafted, or whether to refuse to be drafted and face the consequences.

(History shows these decisions, and the rights to make them, are meaningful at scale!)

Finally, governments who expect their leading scientists to do groundbreaking work simply out of fear of imprisonment are NGMI against governments whose scientists believe in their cause.

Isn't insider trading on a prediction market only wrong to the extent the insider is violating some duty of secrecy to the company?

And isn't that just between them and their company in a case-by-case sense?

If there was some valuable-to-the-public information that the company did not care about keeping private but just hadn't bothered to make public, for whatever reason, and an insider traded on it on a prediction market, that would only benefit the public's interest in information and would not violate any duty to the company. It'd be a pure win for everyone.

It seems unfair to other traders, the way it would be in the stock market, but in prediction markets (unlike the stock market) all participants are explicitly taking on the risk that somebody else might have better access to information than they do. So it's not subverting the system in the way we have decided it does in stock markets.

A lot of commenters are getting the wrong take here by looking at this like it's a stock market where there is some society-level interest in giving participants protection from having less information than insiders. It's just a different thing.

That's not always true. Regulations increase the cost of transacting and make ranges of transactions non-viable, just like a tax.

So there is "dead weight loss", where transactions that would have been mutually beneficially and socially productive are eliminated by the regulation, and restored when somebody finds a loophole, restoring the individual and social benefit.

The world is not zero sum!

A reminder: Israel counts Hamas soldiers as military targets, even when they are out of uniform and in civilian life.

If we apply the civilized world's standards of war then yes, Israelis who are also off-duty soldiers or reservists don't count as military targets.

If we apply Israel's standards, however, they are.

Are Gazans not allowed to apply the same standards to their adversaries that their adversaries openly apply to them? Would you be this courteous, in their position?

It was standard practice by the police and DA in 2000s Massachusetts.

Neighbors were annoyed at loud college parties at the school I went to, so local police waited in bushes to catch people peeing in them, arrested them, and one of the charges was indecent exposure.

Happened to one person I knew personally so it must have happened to several others at just this school.

My friend plead out to some lower charge or probably got a continuance, but it massively increased the leverage they had over him and the fees and fines they could collect, and it massively lowered the chance of him doing any pushback that could have lead to a jury trial, which at least as far as he understood at the time would have put him on the registry, and which is why they abused the law and charged people this way.

> You don't casually give up massive abstraction wins

Value is value, and levers are levers, regardless of the resources you have or the difficulty of the problem you're solving.

If they can save effort with Electron and put that effort into things their research says users care about more, everyone wins.

"Spotify" literally means "put ads on things".

It's not obvious to US English speakers but "spot" was ad industry jargon and became the word for "TV commercial" in several European languages. It's so gross that this ever slid through as a brand for a music app. We've descended so far...Music app branding started with Wesley Willis jokes!

I think it's important to not throw babies out with bathwater here.

One can disagree with Mozilla and think advertising sucks, and use tools to block it or FOSS products that don't force it on us, while also seeing how e2ee encryption bans ("chat control") and age verification rules are a restriction of both the rights of service providers and the rights of users.

Another way to put it is, just because a regulation is a restriction of the rights of a service provider does not mean it isn't also a restriction of the rights of a user.

The former does not make the latter true, but in some cases both are true.

I'd also add that if we can't stop bad laws that restrict the rights of (and piss off) both service providers and users , we have no hope of stopping similarly bad laws that only restrict the rights of users.

(Service providers, even small ones if they take the time to speak with their member of Congress, can be very credible, sympathetic, and persuasive stakeholders. When we can fight on the same side--realizing that sometimes we will fight on opposite sides--it's better for user rights that we do so. One of the tragedies of the left and parts of the right in the Trump era is that they see any regulation that hurts Big Tech as a win, even if it also hurts user rights. User rights are safer if we can distinguish between regs that hurt Big Tech and users from regs that don't hurt users.)

Same, so much so!

My feelings of freedom in that era, as a teen in a small 90s US city, were what fueled me to co-found one of the organizations (Fight for the Future) cited in the article!

(No longer in the trenches, just on the board, deserve zero direct credit for any of this work--it's all them!)

The most important reason for privacy is that without it, social norms calcify.

If a norm is outdated, oppressive, or maladaptive in some way and needs to be changed, it becomes very difficult to change the norm if you cannot build a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.

It is even harder if you cannot even talk about building a critical mass of people practicing the replacement norm.

For many norms, like the taboo on homosexuality which was strong in the US and Europe until recently and is still strong in many places today, the taboo and threat of ostracism are strong enough that people need privacy to build critical mass to change the norm even when the taboo is not enshrined in law, or the law is not usually enforced. This was the mechanism of "coming out of the closet": build critical mass for changing the norm in private, and then take the risk of being in public violation once enough critical mass had been organized that it was plausible to replace the old oppressive/maladaptive norm with a new one.

But yes, obsolete/maladaptive/oppressive norms are often enshrined in law too.

You wouldn't say this about a message encrypted with AES though, since there's not just a "human patience" limit but also a (we are pretty sure) unbearable computational cost.

We don't know, but it's completely plausible that we might find that the cost of analyzing LLMs in their current form, to the point of removing all doubt about how/what they are thinking, is also unbearably high.

We also might find that it's possible for us (or for an LLM training process itself) to encrypt LLM weights in such a way that the only way to know anything about what it knows is to ask it.

I know HN viscerally hates crypto, and yes Trump is embarrassingly corrupt, but the charges against CZ were a greater wrong than whatever quid pro quo happened in the pardon.

This is the most embarrassing part of all of it. The US is ping ponging between two very different ways of misusing state power.

CZ was charged with violating a highly technical US securities law that is not common to most countries despite not being a US citizen or ever setting foot in the US. His crime was letting his employees (also non-US and under no affirmative obligation to learn the laws of every country in the world just because they run a website) tell crypto whales they could use VPNs to get the non-US, non-nerfed version of Binance.

The public's interest in protecting crypto whales from Binance is extremely tenuous. Unsophisticated users would hit the geofence. These were whales using Binance because they wanted to, not because they were tricked.

The US's right to enforce arcane securities law outside its own borders is also very tenuous. If every country pulls this level of aggressive enforcement of atypical law on every website (even geofenced ones!) we will have total chaos. Should China, Russia, or India be able to hunt you down for violating some arcane law? No? Then why should the US?

This is also happening in the context of an active public debate over the application of this law within the US, one cryptocurrency supporters won fairly definitively in the last election.

Whatever discretion the law provides US enforcers, they should have recognized that it was wrong to use that discretion and left CZ alone once Binance made reasonable gestures at compliance.

Instead, once their political coalition signaled that they should put symbolic heads on platters, they went about scoring career points. This is the kind of misbehavior that drove Aaron Swartz (a friend of mine) to suicide. We should be clear that it's wrong.

And here we are. A choice between venal corruption and cruel punching down at immigrants on one side, and a blind, symbolic use of power for power and ideology's sake on the other.

I think "if their authorities can kick down the door of the house you were born in" is a good enough guide here to see the problem as distinct from other military interventions, not like the invasion of Iraq was a good idea.

The US was not established in Iraq long enough for generations of adults born in Iraq to have grown up under US control.

The border between US and Iraq is not like the border between two suburbs, and there were never Iraqis crossing that border daily to drive a taxi or clean someone's house or see a doctor.

They had enough control over Gaza before October 7th to deny Gaza a port, an airport, and even the right to do peaceful commercial fishing without getting their boats lit up.

And for whatever limited access their law enforcement institutions had to Gaza for kicking in doors, they just did missile attacks on cars or apartments instead of kicking in doors, because they had no reason to care how many bystanders they killed.

A country loses its right to "re-establish deterrence" when the population it's "deterring" is born inside its own de-facto borders, and when the only reason it needs to deter so many of them is that they would (rightly) like one of a) sovereignty or b) voting rights inside the federal system that controls their borders and can kick down the doors of the houses they were born in.

If Israel would like to give Gaza full sovereignty, or Palestinians born inside the occupied territories the right to vote in the federal systems that determine their law enforcement environment, we can talk about deterrence and law enforcement respectively.

Israel has unilateral control of who it recognizes as its citizens, and what sovereign states it recognizes. No complaint about current or past bad behavior by the Palestinians excuses its failure to grant sovereignty or voting rights to people under its territorial control.

Israel's main best option is to give Palestinians, at least those unambiguously born under Israel's control, the right to vote in Israeli federal elections.

A government that can kick down the door of the house you were born in has a duty to give you voting rights.

(And if your ethnic group is denied voting rights, you have a basic duty to your fellow man to raise hell until you get those rights, because arbitrary starvation is always on the table for your children until you get them.)

And not in a war zone, even. (West Bank is governed by Israel.)

Everyone here is talking about Israel, even the person with the wild comment about Epstein and Kirk.

It is common for a minority of people to say similarly wild things about the US, Russia, China, and so on.

Electric does make it pretty important that the software is unusually good for a car, though, because the software has to compensate for non-ubiquitous charging infra. Tesla does this very well. There are some quirks around charge scheduling and charge limiting that Tesla does really well too. It's not rocket science but software in most "current cars" is terrible.

One way to look at this is that the Bay Area focuses on transportation technology that works and scales regardless of the rare socio-political star alignment that makes HSR and subways possible.

And the Bay Area, largely, eats its own dogfood.

There is no faster, more powerful public transportation system than a city that allows Uber to offer mototaxi service. Uber was allowed to turned that on in Rio at some point in the last couple years and it puts busses and subways to shame. The number of cities where a subway is consistently faster than a skilled motorcyclist who can lane-split is very small if not zero.

I think I agree overall, but "these kind of deals should be boring, not a media event" make me doubt that position, because "deal becomes a media event" seems so eventually-inevitable given how democracy works.

When did China become part of the free world?