ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
the prkdpa didn't fix this problem any more than
Well, of course it didn't fix all of the problems with pricing in the industry. The industry has amazing lobbyists. All they could do is fix the one very very narrow problem of insurance companies banning doctors from telling patients they could get their meds cheaper without using insurance. Similarly with the anti-kickbacks. The laundry list of exceptions is phenomenal, and it's questionable whether they even conceptualized the problem correctly in the first place.
I'm generally skeptical of regulation. It's usually ineffectual, produces unintended outcomes, and gets ground up by lobbying efforts to protect entrenched interests. It would be my last resort as a tool to improve price transparency in medical services. However, at this point, I'm pretty much out of other ideas for how to accomplish it. If you have any, I'm all ears. Absent that, I am at the point where I would support as minimally-scoped of a regulation as is possible to say some version of, "You just have to give them a good faith price estimate for services that you're planning to do before you do them (subject to the caveat of situations where informed consent is otherwise infeasible)."
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I don't understand why people would expect medicine to be any different.
You had said:
[a plumber...] quoted to replace it
The medical industry currently is different. They refuse to do this part. At all. You can make it not any different. You just have to start giving some quotes/estimates. It's not all that hard; even a plumber can do it. Why can't you? Do we need to tack on some plumber school at the end of medical school or something?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
There isn't something comparable for most contracts that have penalties.
I don't believe this part. There's literally all sorts of shit that can be stopped (FYI, you actually mean "stopped", because you clearly don't mean "prevented") if you exit other contractual relationships. Perhaps you could start describing some items in the class of things you're thinking about in the employment context, and then we can check to see if there is anything comparable elsewhere. Without any examples (or, I guess, some conceptual description of this class), it's kinda hard to believe.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
by no means binding if unexpected things come up
Literally no one is asking for this. They still give you the estimate, anyway, with what they do know. You can do at least that much, too. You can be better than a shitty, druggy, probably criminal contractor.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Absolutely correct. The correct lens to look at this through is informed consent. Patients must be reasonably informed of the known costs/risks/benefits of medical procedures at the point when they give consent. Prices are part of costs, so they need to be reasonably informed of them when they give consent.
Of course, when they're lights out and cut open and something happens, there is no opportunity to inform them of the medical costs/risks/benefits, so we reasonably say that in such situations, it is acceptable to proceed anyway. All you need to do is import the exact same considerations to the question of when you can skip informing them of pricing information. If you feel ethically comfortable not getting informed consent for the medical costs/risks/benefits, sure, go ahead. Otherwise, when you're informing them to a reasonable extent about the medical costs/risks/benefits, you also need to inform them to a reasonable extent about prices. Just tell them what you're planning and what you know about that plan.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
h-What? Leaving a job doesn't save your dog if your employer shoots your dog, either. This makes no sense to me.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
the opposite complaint would be that doctors and pharmacies are banning insurance companies from offering cheaper alternatives, but I think I get what you mean
I chuckled. But anyway, what I meant (as you probably know) is the insurance company banning doctors/pharmacies from using more expensive alternatives. Dubbed "step therapy" or "fail first", the insurance companies were saying that you had to have the patient try a cheaper alternative first, and only if/when that didn't work would they cover the more expensive drug. I'm sure there are nuanced arguments on both sides of this, and I don't have a dog in that fight. Probably sometimes one approach is good; probably sometimes the other approach is good. Not worth getting involved from the outside.
insurance companies banning doctors from telling patients they could get their meds cheaper without using insurance.
I agree that lack of price transparency here was a problem. At a cursory look, I would agree with the goals of the Patient Right to Know Drug Prices Act that they cite, which fixed this problem. All we need to do is take that same name, swap in "Medical Services" for "Drug" in the title, and perhaps we can work out a text that can fix more of this price transparency nightmare.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
How about deferred bonuses? ...how about just annual bonuses, where you typically expect a significant sum, such as in the financial industry? I'm really trying to figure out the nature of your problem.
...how about penalty clauses in many other contracts? When you're doing M&A, you often agree to something like, "...and if I pull out of the deal for anything other than [acceptable reasons], then I'll have to pay you a penalty." In real estate or other transactions, people often put money down in the same sort of way, basically just pre-paid. Are all these things absolutely terrible, because then the counterparty will just arbitrarily harm them? Why have they stuck around so long, even when there are sophisticated (and possibly well-capitalized) parties on both sides of the transaction?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I'd say I'm certainly open to hearing ideas and possibilities
Great! That brings us back to about:
Let's start with just the basics...
You now seem to have agreed with one of the specific proposals I mentioned (HCTs). How about the rest of the specific basics I mentioned, before we get into yet more specifics?
I think even you could agree that you shouldn't further delay things in order to try to swing an election. Moreover, you shouldn't even threaten mandates in order to justify performing so poorly, much less actually implement them.
These should be pretty easy points of agreement, and it's always good to try to generate some nice easy agreement early on to show mutual positive sentiment and likely compatibility of underlying goals/schemas between interlocutors.
It's the insurance companies who ban pharmacies and doctors from talking about the price of medication and offering cheaper alternatives.
Can you provide citation/further reading on this? A brief search actually turned up basically the opposite complaint (in multiple articles that were clearly founded on pro-doctor propaganda advocacy), so I'm definitely interested if the surface internet has it all wrong and no one has been talking about these secret bans.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I'm not actually asking about an ideal system for handling pandemics. I don't think that's possible.
That's a hell of a thing to drop this far into a conversation about pandemics.
if you were making a system for all pandemics, you'd have to handle Covid, plus Aids, plus Ebola, plus everything else that's come down the pike, plus whatever the next pandemic may be, which none of us can predict.
Do you honestly think there are no differences between conceptual schema or patterns of behavior/regulation that can be applied across different flavors of pandemics? There are no better or worse ways of doing things in advance?
We can get to the rest of your comment in a bit, but we really ought to stop here for a second, because if I'm hearing what I think you're saying, most of the rest of the discussion might be pointless.
I skipped over the "HCT/RCT debate" question because I honestly have no clue what that is. A few google searches didn't provide much insight. What is this debate?
HCT is Human Challenge Trials; RCT is Randomized Controlled Trials. I do kinda sorta think that you might just not be very exposed to any of the debates going on about how to improve our systems for the possibility of new pandemics. I guess I'm not sure why you would be, given that you seem to think that it's pointless to even try. I guess I'd just wonder which came first. Did you decide that it was pointless to try, and thus never went and learned anything about what factors might be considered? Or is it just that you have no idea what factors might be considered, and so you concluded that it must be pointless to try?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Do those differences show up with different billing codes when you send them over to insurance? If so, how is that difference expressed in the content of the billing codes?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I hate to say it, but people probably shouldn't torrent movies or other IP. The analogy there would be more if this contractor's truck was in the street, maybe he was working on a neighbors house, and the redditor went and swiped a few screws from it. Then, when the contractor noticed, he threatened to sue the guy for OneBillionDollars.jpg. Like, okay, buddy. Silly, yes. But kind of different in kind. Perhaps one could make other analogies to try to make it somewhat more sympathetic, like if the contractor was working on the neighbor's house, and the neighbor swiped the screws and gave them to the redditor. I get that there are complications here, but I think it's really just a different type of thing.
Debt collection should mostly be premised on the validity of a previously-agreed-upon debt. That's usually the first line of defense - "Prove that I owe this debt." When done above-board, the debt collector can produce a document that the debtor signed that specifically authorized the terms of the debt. Things get sketchier as the underlying facts get sketchier. Usually, how sketchy it gets depends on how sketchy the original transaction was. The extreme end of sketchy for underlying debts would be, "We refused to give them a price, just did the service, and then unilaterally made up a price." (Yeah, I guess even more extreme would be that they just didn't even do the service or just totally made up the whole thing, but that would probably be better categorized as obvious outright fraud rather than "sketchy".) I guess if the conclusion is that routine practice in the medical industry is akin to the sketchiest versions of underlying debts that are claimed by debt collectors, that's damning with faint praise.
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:
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.
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