impossiblefork

Yeah, and Anthropic probably got inspired to this new fast read-in thing for making agentic stuff make more sense from the latest DeepSeek model. Maybe it was in the pipeline, but it clearly has the same effect and DeepSeek had published it by the point Anthropic dropped their prices for reading tokens in, so they may well have copied it.

Consider though system like the Swedish system which existed in the Viking age with Things and a king.

Things were courts with huge power, and consisted of a gathering of all free men and had basically unlimited power, because they were the people. Meanwhile, the government was the person of the king.

I think that's an example of a system where the courts (Thing) is clearly not part of the government.

Yes and no. You can even do this as a group, to other groups for the group's benefit.

Imagine a group that chucks rocks at everyone else who lives in the place where they want to live, then try to buy the people living there out. It's the same strategy.

Well, if ugliness weren't enough, imagine if they instead did everything to make things unpleasant for people living nearby.

Since that would reduce demand in the area, there's a real risk that we'd infer that the neighbourhood is more inherently undesirable and drop the rates there, even though we shouldn't.

I think you're really basically just saying "but no one would do this". People would absolutely do this. People even do this today in inter-group conflict about who is to live in specific neighbourhoods.

I actually see a reverse problem.

Imagine that there's somebody who wants to build unpleasant things. Let's say there's a group "association of people for ugly and genuinely unpleasant buildings" who build their collections of ugly buildings, buying up the cheap land that becomes available as people who no longer want to live near them move out.

Well, that group is rewarded by this system.

I think the problem is really: LVT makes sense, there's no reason to tax buildings, but if it is to be fair, it must actually tax the unimproved land, and this means it can't punish people who buy things next to someone building something attractive and then not doing anything useful with it, so that particular goal, sometimes held up as one of the points of a pure LVT is not achieved.

If you don't have power, somebody else gets it, and then they have that power over you.

So, how will you ensure that you have some influence over the world or power, if all human labour ends?

That scenario is precarious. Dangerous as fuck. I have a short story, basically a horror Isekai, portal goes straight into a place like Sarek or similar pretty northern fell landscape, only full of bears and savages. I think my protagonists are safer in that, than the average human in your scenario.

Huge list of "No"'s. The "No"'s are a core part of the American system, whereas the absence of "No"'s is a core part of the British system.

Your constitution literally has limits on what sort of laws congress can pass, i.e. "congress shall make now law..."

Ah, I upvoted specifically because those countries do not control Anthropic's products, and thus reasoned that the comment implied that an adversary, for the purpose of the law, was some external not-quite-enemy type entity, and that application of the law to Anthropic was thus unreasonable, as it obviously is.

Congress is not the British parliament. There is no congressional sovereignty.

The US is a constitutional republic, it does not have a system where anything Congress decides is law.

That sounds way too categorical.

It's not like people actually need satellites. We already have ground-based communication in the form of mobile phone networks etc., so I don't think the harm of making LEO unusable would be very great.

This is why it would be so nice to have an EU that actually made law, instead of just handing over the right to oversee things to the commission.

Imagine if we actually had real regulations, instead of these negotiated things. Then we could just sue and normal courts could handle it.

It's a really strange decision to choose the security council as the forum, given its purpose.

I think the reasonable thing would have been to let some sort of committee of interested countries to have access to a bunch of relevant. It could still be public and in video form.

I like the call for ensuring that AI isn't concentrated in one company or country though. I would be happy if this were followed, with appropriate EU efforts to make good training accelerators etc. so that we could have our own reasonable 10T+ models.

I've poo-pooed the bio stuff earlier, but I think I agree with the threat to some degree, but I still absolutely hate the idea of central control of models, probably because it's still central control.

Yes, I feel that it's weasel-wording trying to deemphasize the agent aspects to FUD people into not going to demonstrations.

That's still incorrect though.

FARA requires coordination with the foreign power. You are perfectly allowed to further its goals unless you have actually coordinated with them.

You have to actually be an agent of the foreign power. You can't be that just because you share their goals.

There's been a lot of stuff bringing us back to the 2002-2008 era, with the occupation of Afghanistan, etc., now that the Brits are finally investigating the SAS men who murdered people in their beds etc., so I've been reading about the old El-Masri case and the CIA black sites in Europe, and the use of state secrets privilege to block El-Masri's lawsuit in the US, the Polish unwillingness to seriously investigate.

The only two good things are I think the ECtHR's willingness to demand an investigation, and one can question whether the CoM of the CoE have done their job in ensuring implementation, but they're at least regularly checking whether there are implementation attempts.

But what struck me was the endless deference of the ICC. They've limited their Afghanistan investigation to Afghani perpetrators even though they have access to vast numbers of Europeans with information about the black sites and the investigation of these things is even more tractable than investigating things in Afghanistan, and I think it's this deference that is the ICC's problem.

The ICC actually has powers sufficient to deal with the sanctions completely, with no need for aid from European states in any regard.

It's to the point where anyone participating in anything affecting the ICC's ability to do its job can be ordered arrested and confined indefinitely. The ICC can literally order the arrest of the workforce of an entire bank if it participates in anything having to do with retaliation against the ICC. The only thing preventing milder things like ordering the arrest of the CEO and board is the ICC's insane deference. They can also apply these things to the American political leadership who have passed the sanctions.

So I really don't understand the Americans. The ICC is doing exactly what they want. They're not even subpoenaing Europeans who sit right here with knowledge about the black sites and torture, even under intense criticism from victims who are of course pushing for investigation.

The article really misunderstands what sort of powers the ICC has. The ICC doesn't need the blocking statute to end enforcement of sanctions, they can order the arrest and indefinite detainment of anyone participating in retaliation against the court.

Surely that is just the US asserting themselves to be more belligerent than they are? Just a bluff?

Imagine if China seized a US ship carrying nuclear weapons components. It'd be war immediately, and the US of course knows that the same is true of China.

There's also no basis under international law. China is of course a nuclear weapons state and numerous nuclear weapons states have transported nuclear weapons around the world, with nuclear weapons sharing being a something old and accepted.

One special reason that one would expect China to respond to such an operation by actually going to war immediately is that, if it were a nuclear weapon, with all the details and delivery systems etc., it could be analyzed to see how it reacts to missile defence stuff, which might reveal some unknown weakness that would allow MAD to be ended. So somebody getting themselves access to the core reentry, MIRV and maneuvering stuff would be a reason to attack him right away.

It's possible that it is, but if someone tried to prosecute it, state secrets privilege would like be invoked, as it has been in similar cases, so prosecutors don't even try.

No, but the US has historically permitted even cold-blooded torture of innocents with no liability, and has asserted the state secrets privilege to prevent lawsuits and prosecutions, so it wouldn't have mattered.

But that's a US-specific thing. With humans you at least have this theoretical liability-- that there is someone who could be punished.

Yeah, I've heard about it, but presumable Americans soldiers still care about IHL at least to some degree, even though they've historically not bothered with the Geneva convention and have tortured people.

Personally I'm more interested in the justification for the second and third strikes.

There needs to be some protection for first responders and others helping the injured.

The VSORA machines, possibly. They are apparently delivered and being installed at Scaleway.

The Euclyd machines, probably many months away.

That's a real risk.

Hopefully it's for buying VSORA or Euclyd machines, but well...

It turns out though, that this doesn't matter. There's actually a list of people who are known to have been tortured to death in these places on Wikipedia.

Still, I think there's a point to this statistical reasoning: Assange could have made it at the time, and been correct, and thus we have a strong argument for his duty to act under Icelandic law.

Censored variables are a very real thing and this model is perfectly legtimate. This is how you do maths with conditional probabilities.

It's ad hoc, but so is all maths, and all reasoning.

A man with a paper cut is at D=0.9999 or more. You probably have more noise from variations in sleep or eating or colds. But people don't end up at D=0.17 just randomly. El-Masri was in danger of dying. The fellow was actually tortured.

There's also no censorship in the example of the paper cut. It also isn't possible to infer much from a something like that E[D|some positive condition]=0.9999, so even if there were censorship your example with a small scratch doesn't allow the sort of argument I gave in my previous comment. My previous comment specifically relies that you have a censored sample D~P(D|something that you'd expect would make D large) and then finding that this D is small.

So imagine a censored random variable.

Let's say that D is a random variable representing whether a certain person in one of these black sites is dead due to mistreatment. It's not so simple that D=0 if the guy lives, D=1 otherwise, D is a continuous variable, a damage level.

You can't sample from D ~ P(D) because people aren't releasing such information; and we know this, because when El-Masri sued the US he was prevented from doing so by means of the State Secrets doctrine and it was argued that whether he had been tortured and by whom was a state secret. Consequently what we actually have samples of is P(D|released) and I think P(D|released)=P(D|innocent,recognized as innocent,slightly lucky). So if we have D ~ P(D|released) where it turns out that we have observed a realization of that with D = 0.17, do you think there are only a few outcomes where D=0, when taking into account that E[D|innocent,recognized as innocent] should be much larger than E[D], and when taking into account that P(released) is really small, something like 10^-4 or 10^-3?

No, it does not.

There's a guy from Lebanon who ended up moving to Germany called Khaled El-Masri who got seized in Macedonia by the US and who got sent around a bunch of US black sites.

Eventually people figured out he wasn't Khalid Al-Masri and started treating him better, but he still almost died. Consequently, the people who weren't treated better almost certainly did.

This can't really be disputed. The US certainly killed people at these black sites. The obvious danger El-Masri was in makes that clear.

There is a screw-up in my previous comment since I say Poland rather than Macedonia or Afghanistan, but there's reason to think that the Polish black site is iffier than the others because of how the investigation of the location was performed.

My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.

The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.

Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.

So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.

Yes, that he was forced to do so by the Brits in order to be release is what I referred to, so of course it is coercion.

He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.