jimz

The prize is that you're the only person in the room with the expertise in the area when it comes to writing regulations.

People are already doing that, and have frequently lost track of the fact that it does not mean that they have gained any skill or knowledge, nor do they have an actual way ot ascertaining whether when there is a correct answer the processes used, which they do not understand, is able to reliably reach it, especially edge cases.

Sometimes the outcomes are comical. I just received an automated email from ElevenLabs saying that its automated systems have detected that I may be using its services to create voice versions of materials that harm children. I had it prepare audio versions of several books and academic papers about moral panics that conjured up out of nothing... about harm being done to children. At least that's what I assume. Either that or somehow I had an API key leak from my on-premise homelab, but the usage recorded would mean that they are basing a semi-conclusion based on a tiny sample. I have no distributed any of the outputs, I own the books and have access legally to the studies, because I have a background in the humanities. I also have no children, which ElevenLabs better not know, although how studies of moral panics can cause any harm in children of any kind is literally unimaginable. It's a waterfall of potential errors summed up in a vague email. My API key and the web interface works just fine regardless.

It's one thing if this is a product in beta, but this is their production model. Harming children is a serious accusation except the legal concept impossibility and the admission that this was not an actual lawyer (like I am) but some effective form letter hedging the vaguest of accusations made by some model lacking the ability to discern substance and meta-substance makes it frankly hilarious, and wildly irresponsible. I realize that by academic credentials I'm out of my lane but by experience I am certainly not, and they should recognize when they should stay in their lane and not just run Jev and think it's fine and dandy when done unsupervised (I presume).

Also, AGI is by definition asymptomtic surely, since there would be no way to benchmark it in a manner that isn't asymptotic. We're nowhere close to that. But we're so far from that, it's comical that people who clearly have zero idea of either the technical or conceptual aspects of basically a piece of software that is very good at quickly bruteforcing the correct or acceptable next token to be anything more than that. Even with some serious training and many hours spent on vast.ai I've yet to have created a version of a frontier model that is actually "good" at hacking in my own homelab setting. Although the the time stock Fable 5 missed a favicon shell on a basic jar (turned out they nerfed the hell out of it, this is why I only pay for the massively discounted tokens from Chinese proxies if I'm using American models or sometimes the freebies if you figure out how to get onto linux.do or similar sites). If anyone reading this is a high school English teacher, please inform your class (assuming the homeric stuff is still being taught) that there's no upside of being Cassandra but the record itself, and that should be enough.

State capacity has always been the bottleneck for authoritarian regimes. China can't keep track of who is even a citizen or not in many cases simply because having a national database doesn't get rid of the birthday problem + the limited number of common surnames + the administrative state's limited capacity to process data that until recent decades came in handwritten + a unsurprising amount of petty corruption that adds up. If you start with bad data there's no magic bullet. And the data is always bad to start with. The spectre of "birth tourism" only works on the Chinese side because through quotidian corruption someone without Chinese citizenship can be made into one by a civil servant of sufficient rank, which is also why it's not a real problem - not enough people actually have that level of connection within the bureaucracy. The US by definition cannot have an accurate database of even who's a citizen - thanks to repeated changes in citizenship laws from the 60s through the 90s that was then frozen around 9/11 as well as the lack of a coherent system that is accurate, immutable, and can act as an oracle. Home births were not just a western thing (although it certainly happens more often on a per capita basis out here, I'm in Nevada). SSNs are not indicators of citizenship, nor are driver's licenses. I spent most of my 20s in NYC where none of my friends who grew up in the city had a driver's license and the state DL/ID wasn't REAL ID compliant until after I left. We only have vaguely reliable data from Texas but ICE, the presumptive arbiter of documentation validity (not part of their mandate), has an error rate of 1% that they admit to, but that's after immigration court and appeals and administrative actions ameliorated their error rate down to 1%. At this point we are removing US citizens and rendering them stateless almost casually, almost as policy.

AI is trained on these flaws. These aren't flaws that can easily be fixed. The ramifications can be significant. Garbage in, garbage out. Records, however official, are wrong all the time. I have an entry in my "criminal record" from a clerical error that is attached to no charges but 4 days in LA County Men's where I had a seizure, which can be interpreted as the record being correct but incomplete or a giant screwup. What sort of process would it take to fix this if the AI decided on the latter? It doesn't affect me, but someone less privileged? Absolutely it will have consequences. Worst of both worlds indeed. People routinely forget that LLMs ARE NOT PEOPLE. Mistakes get compounded. Biases if not caught in time get baked in. There are multiple AI safety dialogues that should be happening but you wouldn't know it from the media, and it's the wrong one that is front and center. You can rotate keys, you can roll out patches, you can't open up the corpus and use a scalpel and cut out the errors and omissions and biases, and the latter aren't logged.

We don't have enough people who possess professional expertise in widely varied fields that nevertheless intersect in the conversation. This might be because there aren't many people that fit the descriptor, but these are the blindspots. Anyone talk to Orin Kerr lately?

The 4th Amendment in practice, as really any law, cannot preemptively stop the bad practices of actors working in bad faith. It's remediative, as in, the evidence it collects at least in theory cannot be admitted as evidence in court. If you look at indictments, informations, any initial charging document, you'll see at least some if not a deluge of blatantly inadmissible or dubiously obtained pieces of information that makes up probable cause. This is a feature of the system, and also why you don't plead guilty on the information alone (in state and federal felony practice I've seen 1 person plead guilty on the indicting information, he was pro se, this was 2013). Superseding indictments frequently look nothing like the original. Call it cynical, or pragmatic, but in 20% of the states - including some of the larger states like New York, Washington, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin etc. - it's not merely allowed and common for cases to end up with a plea that contains charges that have no factual basis linkable to the allegations first presented because we know what the game is and it's not about justice or public safety, it's about retribution, on someone lower on the totem pole. The evidence becomes secondary because the system incentivizes it. The 4th Amendment of course covers more than that, and if we simply reverted the interpretation back to the text we'd be doing much better.

Sadly it has been whittled down and have not caught up with tech - it's a lagging indicator at best. Things like the third party doctrine, automotive exception, pretext stops, etc. are things that should enrage anyone who cares about the most fundamental rights we have not just as Americans but as people, individuals, private persons, who are fundamentally equal to each other if not in circumstance but at least in substance. The courts sometimes even mis-states their own doctrine and usually in favor of the state. Why is there no good faith exception the other way? Any idiot can see that the plain view doctrine opens a pandora's box. We don't need the NSA for our rights to be handwaved away, that's already done.

The NSA does not testify in open court, and we can only speculate what they are able to really launder down into the criminal justice system. But considering that the state of the 4th Amendment have already made the system extremely coercive with limited recourse in so many "exceptions" that are no where near the intent of the framers of the Constitution and frankly tilts the ice more than any crooked lower league Russian Hockey match, it's likely not even necessary for them to jump in most of the time.

I suspect that the greater influence they exert is through the military-industrial complex in its modern day form. We're the only country that can just waltz in and invade.. what, 7, 8 countries? Has anyone been to China lately and have the connections to assess the state of their military and economy with clear eyes? Do people see the laundering of BS national security concerns into reputable papers and conspiracy rags alike? It's usually innocuous sounding, but no small part of the economic quagmire comes from the continued funding, justified by the agencies that are the constituency with a vested interest, of this pit of unaccountable money. We'll be paying for it either way, because not enough people care, unfortunately.

Yeah, how much of this came from the US government? Considering how little hardware has been auctioned versus how much has been subject to forfeiture in view of the DEA's long track record of creating the funding loop.

Context:

https://archive.org/details/a-20071-1

Raw data:

https://www.forfeiture.gov/

xref

https://cwsmarketing.com/

xref

https://www.appleauctioneeringco.com/usmarshals

A very odd real example is how Sony went backwards with passkey compatibility on their apps. It's I think what happened when they tried to have a single OIDC setup instead of multiple (PSN was a totally separate setup for the longest time and had it solved, but other parts of Sony, on a separate system, was almost wholly incompatible. The merging of the two made it impossible for their current webkit implementations to detect passkeys in say your 1password when it was working like a charming for years on PSN). This kind of stuff happens but to put it into production when it's almost immediately obvious that they screwed up is pretty wild.

The VRP is a wholly manufactured and in the long-term, unsustainable model to begin with. It's the most duct/duck-taped solution that, with a virtually entirely tech-illiterate police force, can work under the interpretation of the CFAA prior to the van Buren decision in 2020. In practice it's easily ludicrously inefficient and requires trust that simply can't exist. In fact the tech-illiteracy is so profound that even post van Buren, which fixes some of the most glaring problems Orin Kerr has spent his career screaming into the void on with the CFAA, a law drafted 6 years before the web came about but with such vague and broad language and it manages to cover, at this point, almost anything (see also: wire fraud, money laundering statutes, the Mann Act aka the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910 and on the flip side, how RICO primarily serves as a tool of coercion because in practice if you take it to trial the charge will not stand, but a host of more minor but still overwrought and expansive felonies will do the job). It's the stopgap of stopgaps and the fact that it at any point had any buy-in was a minor miracle. I once submitted a bug report only to find that no, the company's intent was to defraud its users, and they simply put the (entirely unenforceable but are you going to test that? I've defended a federal criminal case and didn't lose - hung jury - and that took so much that it was almost a pyrrhic victory but it also without a doubt ruined any political aspirations of the AUSA. Anything less than that and it's pointless.) clause that they are indeed attempting to defraud you, and you just have to take it, in laymen's terms, into their ToS, without notice. Same company also has an working admin key in their production apk for their Algolia cluster and guess who isn't reporting it? There's no point. To quote Yates in his prime, "No likely end could bring them loss/Or leave them happier than before."

The correct way to address this had always been to modify or entirely get rid of the CFAA and start from scratch with a framework that actually works, that isn't punitive, that make some sense, that did not come into existence thanks to Ronald Reagan's admiration for the uncanny realism in the 1983 film WarGames. But we have a constituency now that relies on the inefficiency machine for their living and their votes will be in their self-interest, security be damned. The best people have been sent on a fool's errand for generations. The incentive structures are entirely misaligned now. I published a PoC last weekend that indirectly but pretty clearly shows that the FBI was relying on an anonymous twitter's account's assertions, none of which were going to be admissible in court in the alternate universe where that matters, to avoid saying "I don't know" by blaming North Korea, something that someone with open source tooling that existed back then, who have never taken a STEM course past 11th grade AP Stats, whose terminal degree is a JD, could whip up and test in under an hour, probably shorter except my home lab with the GPU was occupied. We go through the motions but really, those with power are relying on the inherent imbalance of power and well, lying, essentially, to keep order. How is that sustainable?

The whole model needs to go but it likely never will and that's perhaps the real legacy of Reagan and our moribund power structure. Looking at the payout rate in hackerOne's heyday, why would anyone ever report anything to the companies? My assumption is that people who have any rationality are doing just that. Most data breaches are never disclosed officially but at best passed in rumors. I have no hard evidence that I can disclose, but the least leaky operation is a one-man operation and attorney-client is forever.

By the way, your AI benchmarks in the legal realm aren't tested on criminal matters because how do you benchmark two probablistic systems that are both subject to the prisoner's dilemma and imperfect information? If they did the score would likely be low. You'd need to build out so much back-knowledge just to set up any scenario that really any answer is "it depends" is not a joke but the best answer. Any suggestion that we simply take the status quo as is and run with it cannot be taken seriously. It's a foolish system made by clueless men who hit the lottery and didn't even see the ticket until years after. It was then exacerbated by politically ambitious AUSAs who do not care about getting the right person behind bars but someone behind bars. Fast forward 30 years and this is the state of things. Your sophisticated defenses may have been thoroughly hand-reversed years ago but to dodge the DMCA the source was put somewhere like Gitee instead of Github. I'm not sure if you can finish the signup flow without a Chinese ID at this point, but a decade ago you can, at least. Those are outliers too, but outliers in charity. Good luck with the rest. I'm not being cheeky: just because there's a vulnerability does not imply knowledge to how to maximize its impact. Data breaches are put in the open frequently because of petty feuds and a failure to recognize the importance of the data. After all, China does not run on private credit, and hence, your identity being stolen there is virtually meaningless, as meaningless as you having next to the biometric ID card data of all of their citizens. Like harm, value is contextual, and constructed so that it's framework dependent, and we at least know the frameworks that exist broadly. And what you don't know, well, you don't know.

And less than a decade later we have multiple devices that are effectively fitbits for your genitalia, for both sexes. How times change.

Because they kind of did what you described and the reason the data never surfaced is either because it's too valuable or too worthless

Jill Fields at Cal State Fresno have actually narrowed it down to a (temporarily successful, but not in the long term, obviously) effort by the corset-making industry seeking to stay relevant after WWI during which corsets basically disappeared and there was an organized campaign that was organized both in person and through trade magazines. Women's silhouettes basically took a quick 180 right between 1900 and the start of the war only to turn very very retro in 1919 and while the first was organic and resembled how styles change in the century prior, albeit much quicker, the 1919 switch was openly plotted out in writing that was published but in such a niche publication that I get the sense that people not in the industry didn't even know that it existed. The cite to her paper on Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17641417785638413...

You might have to shadow library this one, but it's a good read. Interestingly it seemed to be something entirely separate from Bernays whose observations were based on a derivation of what began as a homebrewed effort in a corner of the market. Valerie Steele wrote extensively about the trends and the after life but the source seems to originate in corsetry and ended up being copied by the garmet industry generally in the 20s.

There's no English-language article that can fully capture the system because it's a moving target to begin with, and anything official is vague on purpose (to be fair, much of the legislation in the US is too, except the Constitutional backstop and co-equal judiciary does not exist in China). The official messaging is always targeted and curated with a specific audience in mind and how much truth is contained within varies. The best way to describe it without turning it into an essay is that it's "aspirationally market-driven" system that is not defined by a fixed and consistent ideology but rather the constraints of the capacity of the administrative state to control the parts of the economy that is legible to the state. It's not a free market except for the black market, but the black market is frankly huge if nothing else to compensate for the state asserting not just a monopoly on the use of violence but also the monopolistic determinator of morality, which the people are less willing to buy into, but that disconnection itself creates an opportunity for arbitrage. That is the relationship dynamic that have retained some degree of stability, but everything else is effectively subject to change on a dime without notice. The party will never accept openly that it is capitalistic and in some sense that's not even a lie, but what the state is able to impose and what the people actually do are very different things. As the state excludes 99% of the population writ large from politics, full stop (you are either born into it, or you're not eligible to participate, with some narrow exceptions that occasionally pop up), there's not much of a ground-level appetite for dogma and doctrines. Instead you end up with a pragmatic, descriptive market that exists differently within and without, and just like the socialism label being basically symbolic, same goes for capitalism.

People have been talking about late capitalism in the west for a century. The Chinese state would argue that we cannot be in late capitalism because we're actually in the first stage of socialism, and the people would wonder how we got to late capitalism when they never got to experience early or middle capitalism. But really the only thing we know that definitively does not work is implenting Marxism and Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and its offshoots as doctrine. Whether that means that the default is a prescriptive version of capitalism is, well, open to debate, and probably too simplistic.

So they take the playbook of the least competent administration and think that's the way to go? Not to mention that Spain is not a common law country and how the US conceptualizes both the methods and definitions and even the law itself differs quite a bit. Tech companies have in house counsel, but they are not, by large, familiar with criminal law. At least in the US, they focus on civil litigation, IP, Lanham Act matters, in addition to contracts, licenses, and that sort of thing. It's a completely different world and Orin Kerr's writings are much more instructive. He's at Berkeley and probably the leading legal mind at the intersection of tech, policy, and crime.

I average 1 DMCA notice received a year and I've counter-noticed every single one except one. I'd like to be in federal court. I have experience, my law school friends owe me favors and many are interested in the subject matter, and my response does represent an invitation to file in the appropriate venue. None have done so. The one I did not write back, frankly, I couldn't. It came from outside counsel hired by the New York Times that alleges not one single correct assertion and also, accidentally admits to intentionally committing a crime themselves. It took nothing down (It was sent to Github) and accomplished nothing. There's nothing to respond to if their remedy requested is imaginary.

That's how you want to fight your "cyber battles"? Better get used the phrase "corpus delicti".

Well, you can take a walk on the wild side and for whatever reason this aggregator has a particularly robust set of sorting categories when it comes to hard drives. https://www.saleturbo.com/techdeals/

Caveat emptor, of course.

Your "productive outlook" in this case is mere wishful thinking and campaign rhetoric. It will never come to pass in a meaningful way. The legitimacy of the state is defined by its monopolistic right to use force without meaningful consequence to the institution. It's a difference of degree, but since a government would lose a great deal of its supposed raison d'etre if they actually accomplish the goal, there isn't even an incentive to act on it.

What's all the fuss about? I've been gaming on my Mac just fine. https://files.catbox.moe/dfcfha.png

Since when is Chime a bank since their customer service repeatedly told me in no uncertain terms that they are a "spending account" and absolutely not a bank.

Lake Las Vegas, the biggest user by far, is at 82% reclaimed. The Las Vegas Valley Water Authority's name-and-shame list for water use is still FOIA-able (last year's, obviously). https://archive.org/details/top-commercial-water-users-south...

Yep, that's how they do it in here Vegas. Datacenter water use isn't the problem, the state law mandating 15% of electricity must be bought from the privately owned state utility monopoly is.

The problem with the article cited as the source is that it's unclear as to how many are former public servants or serving ones. Of course, Peers hold their seat in the Lords by virtue of appointment and title, and unless they quit, the implication is that at least some of these are basically side gigs and hence, not a revolving door (that would be how regulatory capture happens in the US and the mere fact that one can straight up a member of the Upper House, however broadly powerless it nowadays, is frankly, asking for the appearance of impropriety). Also 18 people still work there and the PR firm might have screwed up by making a statement that needlessly bring up the question of whether those who no longer work for companies and the veterans mentioned overlap in part or whole. The list of names don't add up to to 30, but 26.

But it'd be really helpful if this obvious moral hazard is explicitly enumerated in the law somehow. Look, the Commons runs the country, and the PM can't violate the constitution (not that there is one and I don't think it's a coincidence that countries have tended to write theirs down, apologies of Bagehot). Why does the Lords still exist when they are basically a rump branch anyway? If the lower house can simply legislate every aspect of it, it's a liability and not that great of a look from afar, whether some sort of influence peddling actually occurred or not. In the US the standard is appearance of impropriety in addition to actual bias and conflict of interest (as in, more than appearance) because this kind of relationship erodes public trust. At some point, it can't be worth the potential PR problem to keep around a rump branch of the government. There's almost 1000 years worth of sunk cost so gotta know when to let go. Are the OBEs and CBEs and all that honours list stuff not good enough? I'm with David Bowie on this one.

Ironically it also created a ton of really badly written Python in the process.

It's symbolic since these cases broadly speaking need to be adjudicated in federal court for the most part and the federal law doesn't mention any immunities, it's a court-created doctrine. But neither the court nor congress thinks it's urgent enough of an issue, the last time a bill had support it ended up with around 70 cosponsors and it adds nothing but affirms that the law is applied as written and didn't get a vote, during the short period of tri-partisanship in 2020, because nbd it only accounts for 3-4 billion dollars of money that is taken from those who aren't able to be charged with any crime and redistributed to cops around the country in a sort of slush fund fashion, chump change if you consider how much debt we're running for... god knows what at this point. When you speak in trillions and can simply handwave that sort of deficit away, a few billion eventually sounds trivial, I'm guessing.

Back in 2019 the police in Fresno stole a bunch of rare coins during a search of a house where the warrant did not cover anything like said coins, valued at $125,000, by reporting that they seized $50,000 when they actually took twice that much in cash and the coins. The 9th Circuit ended up deciding that while it was obviously morally wrong, qualified immunity applied because there's clearly established case law that stealing property that was specifically targeted for a search does violate the Constitution, because there's no analogous case regarding property stolen by police that the police did not know was there and are not covered by the warrant, there's no clearly established violation of the 4th Amendment even though it is literally an unlawful seizure of property. Supreme Court denied cert, allowing the decision to stand. I wish I was joking.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...

eBay currently allows (or at least tolerates) sales of items not in the possession of the seller and are effectively lottery tickets. Lotteries are illegal in my state (NV) but eBay does not restrict me from bidding. That's low hanging fruit right there.

It's not great for sellers either. I was banned during the time period before the Paypal divestment for having the galls to subpoena a nonpaying buyer's records. They take a cut from both sides. Sotheby's takes 10.5% (I think). eBay takes twice that for something comparable in value.

Yes, so much so that cards that were sold at retail in 2024 after grading sold went from around $100 in cost to well over $1000 in 18 months, and this was me making the market. The prices have since 2.5x-ed on the same card (2024 Topps Chrome Sapphire Base #500 PSA 10). It's correcting a little, but a 10x rise on a card that is effectively not considered limited edition and most had placed in storage suddenly 10x and then 2.5x is quite rare, especially since it's a new card.

These are just public sales. Private deals are done with agents on both sides routinely and without any reportage. There's an element of gambling to most transactions but on the origination side, mostly because Topps, who owns licenses to the major sports leagues, are neither timely nor accurate in posting pack configuration odds, and seems to somehow have nobody competent enough to properly ensure that the same cards don't all get clustered in the same box. On multiple occasions I've bought cases where 3 out of 10 cards of a player were pulled, and multiple 2/10s. The checklist is only 100 cards. The case had 384 cards total. It's downright negligent, but screw the consumers, right? Thanks, Lina Khan, for making it all happen.

There's money to be made but it's a lot of dumb money mixed in with some very sharp acquisitions. Who knows how it'll play out. The market is inefficient largely because USPS is effectively a crapshoot in a time-sensitive market. The likes of Courtyard.io have only partially caught on, and ArenaClub, their competitor, ran for 2 years where a bookmarkelet allowed the user to turn what was supposed to be a random draw into a completely predictable purchase at way below market. Upon reporting, they just added a line in their ToS that put users in theory on notice. They did not fix the bug. They don't even have a SECURITY.md. The company served so much unnecessary data on their API that I now have Steve Nash's personal cell number, among others, before they designed their front page.

There's a gold rush going on but this really should be a hedge. At some point the market correction will screw over a ton of people.

Just because it's not openly shared does not mean that there aren't large databases of everything from working refresh keys to entire profiles indexed out there for the large services. Most data leaks and breaches don't get reported, or acknowledged, or are downplayed in their potential effect (but weirdly, also given more weight than they deserve since it becomes pointless to have so much data that doesn't add anything new to, say, a profile of a person)

HIPAA doesn't have a private cause of action so if a violation happens, it's a wealth transfer to the government, it doesn't mean anything to you or any individual.

And most companies can simply price it in as cost of doing business at this point.

It used to want to keep up appearances, it no longer does.

Except Chinese hegemony is illusory beyond what it considers its immediate sphere of influence which also means it really cannot project force in any way but economically. It can barely take care of business at home. It's puzzling to many as to why America sees China as somehow equal in threat and in capability since in reality neither is remotely true. China doesn't even have a policy that is truly expansionary since Taiwan is an irredentist claim. Its armed forces have not seen combat since 1979 and that was largely a ground war. Without connections or having acquired one previously it's becoming difficult to obtain a passport to leave, although, it's also not all that easy to find a place for you to settle as a Chinese citizen without some sort of skills that allow you to pretend like society under you is unstable.

HAHAHAHAHA my goodness. You actually believe that?

Everyone in China is constantly violating laws, the difference is that black letter law is essentially meaningless and the country is run by an administrative state that is controlled by the party.

You can't really get things done without breaking the law. China doesn't properly tabulate, and therefore cannot release, anything like accurate crime data. But the crime rate is certainly higher since it's pretty much impossible to even go online and do just about anything without breaking some law. What is written is so vague and nearly any conduct can fall under it.

The ambiguity doesn't make the country safer, they just have a media hegemony and active censorship. Healthcare is woeful and "cheap" comes with "quotas on patients seen" meaning that doctors frequently have 1-2 minutes to see patients and one can become an MD much earlier than one can in the US. And since the perception is that no food is really 100% safe, it's more acquiescence, and not confidence, that people show.

Hell, you having the option of choosing to opt into vaccines is even an improvement. In China you are stuck with the state prescribed schedule and that's it. Unless you're extremely wealthy, but then again, where is that not an exception?