ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
23hr ago
Nifty. Will you go one step further and say that all those pesky court rulings that were based on an obviously faulty premise the entire time should just be overturned?
Hlynka-watch. Multi-agent environment.
There are at least two other relevant players exerting agency here. First is the group of folks who are simply opposed to any sort of death penalty on principle. One strategy they've taken is, instead of letting the argument be directly about the principle of the death penalty, focusing everyone into arguing about methods of execution. That you are even asking this question is a testament to their success on this goal.
Now, once they've gotten the focus onto methods of execution, they can focus on any extreme outliers. If there's even a 0.01% chance that someone will have an adverse reaction to something in some way, feel any anxiety or pain above the typical level, they latch onto it. They treat it like it's "possibly" the rule rather than the exception. They don't ever directly claim that it is such; they just say that perhaps sometimes things go poorly and hope the reader imagines statistics that aren't really plausible. See also arguments about unarmed black men being killed by police, abortion due to rape, or the focus on complications in the operating room preventing medical providers from providing prices.
The other relevant players are the executees. They don't want to die; this is only human. If they are aware that it is coming, they likely will have some amount of anxiety or negative psychological affect, and this may naturally lead them to struggle in any way possible in what may or may not be a vain hope that someone will make it stop.
Now back to the folks who are against the death penalty in principle. It takes no effort at all for them to interpret any outward sign of struggle as pain or whathaveyou. When Alabama used nitrogen hypoxia, a method that is used in Canada for doctor-assisted suicide specifically because it is so gentle, peaceful, and low risk1, you saw it all on display. An executee didn't want to die and knew he was going to die, so he struggled. Onlookers who don't like the death penalty can interpret that as something going wrong, pain, or whatever. So they write about how terrible it was and how everything must have gone so wrong compared to what they expected.
So unless you can win the argument of, "Yes, people may choose to struggle against their execution, even when there is no pain being imposed, and everyone just has to accept that and shut up about it," this is the problem that pro-death-penalty people have to solve. Unfortunately, the typical solutions to that are actually pretty ugly. See also ISIS, who would perform many mock executions that they wouldn't go through with, so that the executees would simply lose the will to put up a struggle every time, and hopefully they wouldn't realize which one was the real one in time to turn it back on. (Also heavy drugs; they definitely used heavy drugs which wouldn't be acceptable in the US.)
There are other ways to get around this, modifying your own protocol. Put someone in a room where you control the air content. They can even know that this is "the death room". Maybe they'll jump around and scream and put on a show, but your task would be to be able to clearly demonstrate to observers that during that time, they are absolutely receiving 100% pure, regular air, so that it is only a show, not any sort of 'execution gone wrong'. Then, when they've given up or maybe even gone to sleep or something, you turn on invisible, odorless gas, letting people observe that nothing wildly obviously painful occurred. Even if you did this, it is almost assured that the anti-death-penalty people would yet again move the goalposts, saying that it's not about the pain, it's about the psychological effects of however long they're in the room before they die, knowing that they're going to die in that room. There will always be a new set of goalposts and always a new impossible 'problem' that one has to solve.
It really is one of those, "JUST FUCKING TELL US HOW WE'RE ALLOWED TO EXECUTE PEOPLE." In a bizarro but hilarious world, the "King" would round up all of the most ardent opponents, lock them in a room, and say, "You're not allowed to come out until you tell us which method is the best method according to you. 'No method' is not an answer."
1 - You can see an example of the typical affects of hypoxia here. People report feeling perfectly fine and capable. My understanding is that even after the event, if you ask them to reflect on it, they think that everything was just fine and that they were perfectly fine; it's only when they go back and look at their own video that they're like, "WOW! I had no idea that it affected me like that!"
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Others have hopefully properly warned you off from becoming a day trader, YOLOing on 0days and HODLing TVIX. As for "modern finance, investments, banking, markets, financial regulations," a couple things I would recommend are Matt Levine's Money Stuff column in Bloomberg and Patrick McKenzie's Bits about Money. They're not what you would get if you pounded the textbooks, but they cover a pretty wide array of random happenings, at which point, they dig in enough for you to get a sense for how such folks think. Then, if there are any particular areas you're interested in, you at least have some of the right terminology to help you dive in more. They're also both hilarious.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
A good thought experiment I heard from Russ Roberts to help think about the tradeoffs involved is to consider the extreme possibilities. On one end, we could extend open market/active trading hours to be 24/7/365. On the other end, we could just have one market at one moment each day, say, everyone brings their orders at exactly noon every day, all the orders that can get filled, do, and then they go home until the next day. I don't really have all that much of a personal opinion, but it helps one think about possible tradeoffs.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
I'm sure there will be infinite variations on "true communism DEI has never been tried".
ControlsFreak
4d ago
One thing that is important to keep in mind is that there was a little cottage industry in the academic literature that strained to try to prove that diversity initiatives were actually supported by a simple business case, that increasing diversity would increase performance and increase profits. There were plenty of lit spats about such claims. But some folks still believe genericized versions of it.
The kind of funny thing is that a lot of those same people are the ones who are now saying that these companies are cutting such programs now just to make more money. If one truly believes that DEI programs increase performance/profits, then they should believe that cutting DEI programs decreases performance/profits. Thus undercutting at least one of their two rationales.
One would think that some set of these large companies who adopted such programs ≅4yrs ago would have seen their performance indicators and profits taking off. They'd be saying, "We can't cut this; it would cost us too much money." Instead, I think the much more likely interpretation is the one that is supported by the current claims, not the former claims - lots of companies adopted these programs in the wake of George Floyd; some were just trying to play the PR game, others may have legitimately believed the predictions of increased performance/profits. ≅4yrs later, they've seen that the magical increased performance/profit simply hasn't materialized, the political pressure is decreased, and they now, indeed, want to save some money.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
I think a lot in here depends on how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces... and how much ability they have to alter their internal processes. I imagine there are a variety of answers for the many, many agencies in question.
I've heard legends of a head of an agency taking a huge, 500+ page binder of rules, policies, and procedures to his bureaucratic overlords (plenty of agencies are subordinate agencies), basically begging for some of the constraints to be lifted and other authorities to be delegated down. Many hindrances come from other bureaucrats. I don't know if I'd call this a third axis or a part of the second axis.
The gold standard of have-to-dos are statutes and judicial rulings. I think most everything else is flexible... if you can get it to the right high-level bureaucrat or political appointee to sign off on it. I have to imagine that, like any sufficiently sizable company with loads of legacy internal 'rules', some of them just get conveniently forgotten anyway, unless some top-floor Joe gets a bee in his bonnet about it. So the question is what does the ratio of have-to-dos to flexible look like for different agencies? Of course, this plays into Scott's point; the measurement here is difficult - and different from just counting the number of bureaucrats.
Like, what happens when FDA staff slow-roll you because
I think that goes back to how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces. This is picking a different point on the 'responsiveness to political forces' scale.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
I doubt Apple ever officially used those words, because it is dumb. But all sorts of tech industry/press folks say variations on the theme. The link I gave to the CKV/"AKV" debate was a back-and-forth with people who are still very prominent, who were absolutely actually claiming that it was technologically infeasible (to get there, you need to add certain qualifiers as to what "it" is). Reading that whole back and forth is probably the most useful for understanding where people try to draw the battle lines.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
That is a claim, but it's in a different debate. One is, "The government wants Apple to get into this existing phone right here, right now." The other is, "The government is considering passing a law that would require Apple to build future devices which would allow them to perform searches." I don't think anything that anyone has said so far in this thread is really relevant for the first debate; I certainly haven't said anything about that. It's the latter debate that is the context for so many of the poor applications of, "...but that's technologically infeasible!"
ControlsFreak
7d ago
The encryption methods seem like they should be far more expensive than Apple is letting on
Oh, I would read it differently. I think they're letting on that it's pretty expensive, which is why they're doing all the mess with sharding and DP.
Are the encryption keys different per-device? If so, how do they avoid needing a separate database per device?
My understanding of BFV is that when the device does its keygen (unique for each query, I assume), it produces and then passes an "evaluation key" as part of the public key. One has to design the scheme so that there is sufficient expressivity in the set of evaluation functions that can take in the evaluation key and perform the desired operations on the encrypted message. I don't believe this involves completely encrypting the entire database from scratch using the public key every time; it just requires running the same operations on the same underlying database, but with the evaluation key in the operations. They call out that it's important that the BFV scheme has many of the operations they want, expressible in, shall we say "evaluation key parameterized form".
I think a lot of the work in library building is essentially building up a set of these "evaluation key parameterized" operations. You have to start with extremely simple operations and then build your way up to more usable tools that are composed of those simple operations.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
ControlsFreak
8d ago
“The fact checkers have just been too politically biased.”
Wild. As always, no one on the outside will know which folks are true believers and which are just weather vanes. Of course, I also note that every single specific item mentioned will reduce FB's costs (and including "civic content" will likely increase engagement and revenue).
ControlsFreak
8d ago
If they were designing a system to enable this, they might not include all of the features they currently have. It would probably be easier to just make one that does it than to start from what they have and add it in. For example, they wouldn't go to all the trouble to try to hide the correspondence between a device ID and the encrypted bag of photos, either (or they'd have to similarly specially puncture it).
Also, most of the concerns about "can't people just turn it off" forget how strong Apple's control is over their walled garden. Ultimately, this usually descends into arguments over Apple's update process, which is where they are the strongest. I'm mentally skipping some steps, but I could imagine designing a system where, when the device requests the latest update, their request must come with certain proofs, and one could imagine building in that those proofs show that they're doing things that Apple wants (it can check by, say, leaving a blob on their server, one that still doesn't reveal the contents of the photos, but can be used to verify that they're being truthful about them), and denying the update if they can't prove that they're doing what they're told. (Probably still easier to just do it the first time, though.)
That discussion usually descends into questions of society, not tech. Whether people will still use Apple devices. Whether people will eschew updating their devices with Apple software and try to go their own way, etc. All of those discussions mostly amount to, "Yes, you can leave Apple's walled garden and go your own way," but that's true of any piece of electronics if you try hard enough. For any devices that stay in Apple's walled garden, Apple is nearly omnipotent (absent possibly nation state level efforts).
Fair enough on the strategy piece. One clarification, though. I did not say:
the truth always wins in the end
Often times, the truth doesn't win. Many of those times, it's because the people who could have the credibility to fight have publicly burned it until the truth doesn't matter anymore.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Right. That's the this part:
Apple destroys its copy of this key before the phone is sold, so the key only exists on the device itself.
Apple's claim is fine. It just also demonstrates that other schemes are not, in fact, technologically infeasible. Actually, there is slight quibble; the quoted bit isn't entirely true. Apple doesn't destroy the only copy of its key. It destroys the mechanism by which they can access the key (they put the cards in a blender); there remains a copy of the key (or the key ("Apple's key") that unlocks the key ("user's key"), to be strict) in the HSM that they keep possession of. They just believe that there is no longer any way for them to access it (short of theoretical attacks like decapping the HSM).
ControlsFreak
8d ago
They say Apple COULD make a law-enforcement accessible version
Precisely as I claimed.
Certainly it has always been technically feasible for Apple to search your phone for child porn. No one said it wasn't, as far as I know
Oh my. I'm not sure what rock you've been living under.
Apple announced they were doing it in 2021 and backed off.
Right. Anyone paying attention back then should have knocked it off with the "it's technically infeasible" song and dance, but sooooo many people haven't.
It sounds like you're in about the same camp I am; we just have different judgments regarding the extent to which people have been claiming technical infeasibility all the time. That's one of those 'sense of the discourse' things that is basically impossible to prove, because one would have to set weird standards about, "Oh, it needs to be person of this much prominence," etc. Probably the easiest way to see how pervasive the meme still is, even if some voices have started to shy away from it, is to peruse /r/technology.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
They said it concerning device access, and that was a lie. They said it concerning private cloud compute, and that was a lie. Hell, they said it concerning even the conceivability of secure backdoors, and that was probably a lie, too (not even getting into the fact that they definitely already have magic numbers that can overtly tell your phone to execute arbitrary code).
Apple has now introduced Enhanced Visual Search, technomagic which whizzes your photos (even the ones not in iCloud) off to Apple servers, using all sorts of mathematical goodies like homomorphic encryption to keep them private while allowing them to tag said photos with labels like, "What is this landmark in this photo?" It would be strictly easier to design a system that looks for stuff like child porn and alerts them.
Yes yes, you will rapidly object. False positives, false negatives. I grok filtering theory. Who will have the authority to do what with the information? Sure sure. Who will have to maintain the databases or filters that look for it? Yup, I hear ya. Those are not technical objections. Those are process objections.
I have never supported having the government involved in any of these things. I understand the significant nature of the tradeoffs at the societal level. But I have routinely said that the cry of, "This is just technologically/mathematically impossible," is total bullshit. It's just not true. Several other influential voices in the tech privacy world are coming around sort of slowly to this. They're seeing the deployment of these systems and saying how they're taken aback. How, well damn, if you can do that, then you probably can do this other stuff. But of course, doing the other stuff seems socially problematic, so they don't know how to feel.
It's actually easy to know how to feel. Just drop the lie that these sorts of things are technologically impossible. They are possible. But there are process tradeoffs and there are potentially huge liberty concerns that you can focus on. The more you continue to try to push the Noble Lie, the more likely you're just going to harm your own credibility in the long-term. Better to fight on the grounds of true facts with, "We don't want it," win or lose, than to prepare the grounds for a complete credibility crisis, such that when the time comes, no one is able to responsibly push back.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
My read of the text was not that. There is an economic interest in OpenAI and a commercial deal. The economic interest is just that whatever happens, AGI or not, Microsoft makes up to ~$100B if OpenAI makes a bunch of money. The commercial deal ends when OpenAI "decides" that they've reach AGI.
Frankly, it would even be weirder if it was the other way around. People still kind of think that "achieving AGI" is some sort of factual state of affairs, even if it's ill-defined. It sort of doesn't make sense to define AGI in terms of revenue/profit. I mean, I guess someone could, but I don't think that's what they've done here.
Spitballing some factors for a completely ridiculous hypothetical that is never going to happen, but is funny to think about.
Remember how important it was for Ukrainian will in putting up organized resistance to have Zelensky making big decisions, appearing in videos, rallying folks? How the Russians wanted to claim that he had fled, because that would make it seem more like a fait accompli, but they could just counter that by videos of him? Canada will have no PM for the next couple months. There is no face of the government. No voice to rally around. No one clearly in charge of making the big decisions. The next couple months are sort of a unique opportunity. Ideally after Trudeau has been out long enough that the conversation has moved on enough that it's basically impossible for him to slip back into the leadership role by default, but not delayed so long that narratives have formed around potential replacements to the point that people have positive thoughts along the lines of, "Our sacred political process is selecting a new leader, and we need to support the outcome of the process." You need them to still be sort of scrambling a bit to have any vision of where the country could go. The countervailing factor is that Trump is just now regaining power in the US. He has enough on his plate just asserting his control over the bureaucracy and hasn't had time in office to make the necessary preparations to exploit this moment. ....but assuming he somehow could....
Presumably, the military has someone who is effectively in control, but how many people know who that person is? On paper, it's King Charles. Lol. On paper, that authority is delegated to the Governor General of Canada. Just look at her. "An Inuk leader from Nunavik in Quebec, Simon is the first aboriginal person to hold the office," says Wikipedia. Closer to reality, one would point at the Minister of National Defense or perhaps the Chief of the Defense Staff. Again, for the latter, she's career military, but kinda just look at her? Also take note, Wiki says, "Marie Annabelle Jennie Carignan was born in 1968, and grew up in Asbestos, Quebec, in a French-speaking household."
So, I'm thinking a couple things. First, plan real hard for a targeted killing of the Minister of National Defense. Sparks massive confusion within the apparatus as to who is in charge. Let them see if they want to make one of the two women the face of their defense. Second, figure out the right moment to back-channel comms to Quebecois leadership (even explicitly loop in the Quebecoise Chief of the National Defense Staff), pretty much right at the moment of the surprise invasion. Let them know that you will not be entering Quebec and that if Quebec would like to remain an independent nation, you will absolutely support them. Be extremely open if they give you any positive signs, especially if they request additional French-speaking territories nearby; concede them immediately.
You can occupy Toronto/Ottawa within 24 hours, almost guaranteed. Use cyber and other means if necessary to kill CBC/CTV. It's debatable whether trying to turn the lights out on their internet will do more harm than good. If you can rely on Elon enough just to kill any tweets promoting or displaying violent resistance, you might be okay. Each province has unique reasons for disliking the rule of Toronto/Ottawa; leverage province-specific expertise to tailor your propaganda specifically to those grievances, promising that much of their provincial control over local matters will be preserved. Frankly, what the northern territories think doesn't matter. They're probably also unlikely to be the ones who are going to be engaging in significant asymmetric warfare.
Who will have the will to fight? Who will have the means to organize? What leadership would they organize around, and what paltry military assets would they have to leverage, anyway? Cruise missiles in the middle of the night, upon initiation of hostilities, can almost certainly take out many of their most concerning assets. What other countries would even want to come to their aid, much less have the means to provide it across the oceans in a remotely timely fashion? The world would be utterly shocked, because this is, indeed, a ridiculous hypothetical and America Just Does Not Do This. They would be crippled, worrying more about what this means for NATO, Pax Americana, and their own regional security situation than they would be able to project power and aid Canadian resistance.
There might be pockets of asymmetric warfare; there always will be. The question is what percent and where, whether you can reduce the spread of information about isolated attacks (plausible, given how sparsely populated much of Canada is). Cities are always the major concern, so probably the biggest questions will be extremely localized in certain cities. This is where armchair hypothesizing probably has to end and genuine, very specific intelligence has to come into play.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
From my contacts that run in Canadian circles, immigration was huge. When I went back to visit not too long ago now, it came up, unprompted by me, in almost every conversation I had. Even from people who were otherwise good lefties. You could just watch how their brain was trying to thread the needle, avoiding saying that it's outright bad, but talking about how it's "changing the culture" and surprising that when you go to Sobey's, you might (voice gets quieter) "be the only white person there, ya know? It's different." I've had other recent conversations with a family who lived in a different part of Canada, but recently moved to the states. Sure enough, immigration was the topic du jour there, too. How the neighborhoods were composed now, which ethnicities owned all the houses (and they rented from), etc.
Trudeau may only be the current face of a longer trend, but he is absolutely the face of it right now, in the moment that people are thinking about it. Perhaps they should be smarter and thinking about the longer trend, but I kinda doubt it. From the perspective of a fair number of people, it's almost as if they disappeared into a hole for COVID (longer than in the US), and when they emerged, at some point, they suddenly noticed that something had changed. That moment of realization happened during Trudeau, and that's likely what's going to stick.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Matt Levine's latest reminds us that there is no objective definition of AGI, but that "deciding" that they've achieved AGI allows them to trigger certain contractual provisions. So, on the one hand, such talk can be to pump up the hype chain... but it could also be laying groundwork and making threats for hardball negotiation.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Sounds fine to me! Maybe not even strictly necessary to put numbers to all the things. Again, it's just informed consent, just like medical costs/risks/benefits. You can say that there are risks in anesthesia, that unknown complications can happen, and if they do, you'll do what you can (where the actions and price are yet unknown). However, in some cases, where it's a "routine" complication, you can advise a little better. One doctor in these forums suggested that there are some procedures where they know that something happens about 1% of the time, that they plan for it, that they know what they're going to do if that happens (e.g., "If we see X, we're going to remove Y also"). In those cases where you have reasonably known specifics with reasonably known, planned actions, what you do is inform the patient. You can likewise inform them with reasonable information about likely costs of that relatively-known event and following actions. I think people would be perfectly happy with that.
All of this is getting into what is a common situation in hospitals, but is relatively rare for individual patients and in terms of total patient interactions with medical billing. It's kind of an edge case, though it is important to put some thought into. I think people would be pretty fine with a variety of practices concerning informed consent in these edge cases if the industry started getting the basics done on the much more vast world of much more numerous, much simpler services.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Both can be used in the appropriate time/place. Your plumber didn't seem to have any problems with a quote and then a revision for additional work.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
The same problem applies to bonuses, of course, unless the pay without the bonus, minus personal costs (such as paying tuition yourself) is market rate.
This is truly wild. Especially because you're getting into situations where it going to be essentially impossible to determine "market rate"; especially because in many places, the bonuses and tuition reimbursement plans are, themselves, part of the market rate. One example would be the financial industry, where bonuses are a huge part of compensation, to the point that for many folks, it hardly makes sense to talk about a market rate without them. Additionally, if you have two job offers that are otherwise all equally the same, but one offers a tuition reimbursement program (either in a standard form or in your Made It Worse form), that one may be preferred, thus making that type of comp part of the market rate. As is the case with most situations where people want to imagine that they know a magic "natural value" for something, you probably don't. The market is constantly deciding how much these different compensation schemes are worth, and you can't magically detangle it from your intuitions about "market rate".
ControlsFreak
9d ago
The big thing the employer can do is make the working conditions for your job worse
Sure, and in contracts, counterparties can do things to make, e.g., the negotiating conditions worse. Or to make the subject of negotiation worse. Pages have been filled in the M&A world about the problem of merger targets "getting lazy" with managing their business, letting things start to fall apart, or paying out questionable outlays that perhaps you would have fought against. There's all sorts of harmful stuff they can try to do; that's the source of a variety of standard contract clauses that are used to try to mitigate their effects in advance.
You also haven't responded to deferred/annual bonuses. Honestly, it seems like you just don't like that they can change your working conditions at all. That's fine; it's annoying. It's not at all unique to things like tuition reimbursement with a clawback. Let's put it another way; let's hypothesize that they've heard your complaint; you don't like clawbacks, but you're fine with bonuses. They can "fix the glitch" by just structuring it differently. In the before days, you'd pay the tuition when it was due, submit your receipts, and they'd reimburse you immediately, subject to a year-long clawback or whatever. Now, in the after days, they'll promise future reimbursement; you just pay your tuition yourself, and after a year, you'll get a "bonus" if you're still there. Congrats; you made it worse.
I would say that you are inferring it, instead. Everything you've presented is compatible with what I wrote. You described a plausible motivation for why such a person might take such a strategy.
...there is one quick check one can do, though.
One can simply ask such a person how they would feel about something like the nitrogen hypoxia room method I mentioned.1 Or to describe what they think would be the most sheepish, clinical, backroom euthanasia possible. Their answer (or non-answer) will likely be revelatory of their beliefs and views. It is left as an exercise to the reader to gather data and estimate relative population fractions.
1 - Could even go all Jewish on it and have the room be equipped with a fully autonomous random timer with some expectations on frequency so "no one is pushing the button"; could even just have no one watching the room at all if you want; could just come back to the room after some specified waiting period with some certain or almost certain probability that the deed was done. How sheepish can you come up with? Do you think your solution can satisfy folks who are motivated as you describe?
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