NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
There was apparently a widely held belief among those in local government that the best approach to riots was to allow them to burn themselves out. This was what we saw in Kenosha, where officials ordered police to establish a perimeter to contain the riot, but not to actually charge in and break it up. The same thing happened in my own city. There was daylight mass organized looting of the mall -- already closed due to COVID -- and police stood by a block away and just let it continue.
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
In my state of Washington they banned fishing. Not congregating with others to go fishing, fishing in general. Casting a line off of your own dock was illegal for awhile.
NewCharlesInCharge
10d ago
I think you underestimate the software capabilities of current models.
A pattern I've started to settle into is first to spend 2-5 hours collaborating on a plan. I put maybe 20-30 minutes of effort up front, then the rest is a conversation, with claude interrogating me for gaps, pointing out things I may not have anticipated, giving me options where it's not clear what to do.
I then feed this into into an in-house agent orchestrator. It has one agent that reads the plan, generates discrete tasks out of the plan, and then spins up dozens of agents to execute on those tasks. I can configure it with options for it to make all decisions on its own, and to devise its own tests to define when a task is finished, and force the agents to keep churning until done. It chugs and chugs overnight, and in the morning I have an MVP. For this latest one the plan for the backend was 18 pages. The plan for the UI was 8 pages. This was translated into about 40,000 lines of code. I've read barely any of them. Automated and AI powered reviewers have, resulting in many comments and iterations before the AI would approve.
This latest one I polished for about 3 days before inviting others to start beta testing it and give me feedback. I'm a couple days into that process. I'm probably going to launch end of this week. It's an internal tool, so I don't have to go through any bureaucratic review process.
This is the second time I've done this at this kind of scale. For smaller scales, like a simple CLI utility, the planning process compresses down to less than an hour, and the AI can spit out the first draft of the CLI in less than an hour later.
NewCharlesInCharge
26d ago
I have to wonder if it was pump or semi-auto. Can't find any sources online.
This guy seemed middle class. Guns are expensive but not in the context of "forfeiting the rest of your life." Open a credit card and get properly equipped. Even if you survive, the debt collectors aren't going to pay collect to hound you in Leavenworth.
NewCharlesInCharge
30d ago
Is anyone actually doing this? Are the evil UN bureaucrats taking the first derivative of their GDP(GHG) model to determine how much CO2 the world gets to emit? Have they invented psycho-history?
Deadlines have been kicking in for Washington state's climate bill, CETA, and power prices are rising as a result. They've gone up about 30% the past year, and the biggest utility, PSE, is requesting another 30% increase over the next few years. The bill required that we close the only coal plant in the state and that utilities no longer import coal-fired electricity from outside of the state. The law would have denied PSE the rate to pass on the cost of maintaining its transmission lines to generating facilities in Montana if they weren't compliant, so PSE had to make a big capital outlay to fund its own windfarms, as well as buy power from other existing wind farms.
We also have our "cap and invest" carbon tax that drives energy prices higher.
By 2030 CETA will make it mandatory that electricity generation in the state be carbon neutral. By 2045 it will be illegal to have any carbon-fired electricity generation.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Zuck cashing out in 2007 doesn’t mean the end of Facebook, it means another entity, even bigger than Facebook, gets to control Facebook.
Facebook, in not selling out, wrested control from the established media players who were looking to acquire it.
That’s an outcome in your preferred direction, no? Time Warner, Fox, et al are less powerful as a result.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
One comment sentiment I see regarding billionaires is "there's no ethical way for anyone to acquire that much money."
This reads to me as a complaint that billionaries aren't cashing out early enough.
Say you create a rocketship of a company. You're Mark Zuckerberg, it's the mid-aughts. Various media companies are offering hundreds of millions for what you've built. We know what actually happened, Zuck didn't sell.
There's a hypothetical where Zuck cashed out and lived a quiet but ultra-rich life instead of building one of the world's most valuable companies. In that hypothetical, Zuck would be a better person according to the anti-billionaire crowd.
What of the other side of the transaction? The only entities capable of acquiring Facebook would have necessarily been even more valuable, so then you're just enriching the established billionaries instead of creating new ones.
What do they actually want?
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
They serve Claude out of AWS GovCloud: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-for-government
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
As a practical matter how would Anthropic’s terms be enforced?
Their only real lever is to cut off access, and that could happen without warning in a way that gets people killed.
Tech companies also don’t have a great track record of judging when a user has violated their terms.
So the risk is that Anthropic could revoke the license essentially on a whim.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
A successful stint at Meta tends to imply you have been able to bring some order to sprawling, argumentative chaos.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
I think it’s not really possible to analogize, in the United States we just don’t have anything like this.
New Year is the most important holiday, so an American version would have to take place on Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving.
And then it would be an hours long variety show showcasing cultures and traditions from around the country. Maybe an Abbot and Costello routine, some skateboarders from California, jazz musicians from Chicago, a tech demo from Boston Dynamics, Appalachian musicians with banjos and jugs.
Everyone would be enthusiastically wishing one another a merry Christmas and be authentically patriotic.
And nearly the whole country would have it on in the background while opening presents on Christmas morning or having Christmas dinner.
I suppose the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade comes closest, but it doesn’t have the variety or the interest.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
What does calling bullshit mean in this context? That they’re paying for access to frontier models instead of training their own?
Coming down on the “buy” side of “build vs buy” is not a signal that you think the product is folly. Choosing the hidden third option, “neither,” would be.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
If the lawyer can't explain things sufficiently, then you simply don't have a good lawyer.
I think "don't have a good lawyer" is pretty common. Probaly about as common as "don't have a good doctor." And to most people who aren't themselves in the field the skill level of these professionals is quite illegible.
I'll share a personal anecodte. About a decade before ChatGPT's launch in a few minutes of Googling I was able to shield my deceased grandmother's house from being seized by the state. She had made use of in-home healthcare services from the state and this gave them a claim on the house after her death. She'd received years of care and the property was a two bedroom condo in a low cost area, so they would've gotten the whole thing. But, the statute included clear exemptions for if any of her surviving children were blind or otherwise disabled, and both of her living children did.
I called the state office that would've pursued recovery, they confirmed the rules, and said that they wouldn't pursue recovery in that case.
The probate lawyer that she had pre-arranged had never heard of such an exemption. If I didn't check on it myself then that property would've been the state's.
I just posed the scenario to ChatGPT and it was able to cite the rules in which blind or permanently disabled children will block recovery.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
I asked an LLM about this and it pointed out that the judge dismisses that work product doctrine applies here:
Third, the work product doctrine does not protect these materials. Defense counsel has represented that the defendant created the AI Documents on his own initiative—not at counsel’s behest or direction. The doctrine shields materials prepared by or for a party’s attorney or representative; it does not protect a layperson’s independent internet research.
And that work product doctrine is governed by rule of civil procedure 26 (b) (3):
Ordinarily, a party may not discover documents and tangible things that are prepared in anticipation of litigation or for trial by or for another party or its representative (including the other party's attorney, consultant, surety, indemnitor, insurer, or agent).
"by or for another party" (the other party being the one subject to discovery) clearly includes the party that is the target of the litigation.
The judge doesn't appear to cite anything that contradicts this. He thinks he does, with this bit from In Re Grand Jury Subpoenas:
[does not] shield . . . materials in an attorney’s possession that were prepared neither by the attorney nor his agents.
But that bit doesn't establish that work product applies exclusively to the attorney's work products. Here's the full passage:
The work-product doctrine protects documents and tangible things that are prepared in anticipation of litigation by or for a party, or by or for that party’s representative. … The doctrine does not protect documents that are prepared in the ordinary course of business or that would have been created in essentially similar form irrespective of litigation. Nor does it shield from discovery materials in an attorney’s possession that were prepared neither by the attorney nor his agents and that would have been prepared in substantially similar form irrespective of the litigation.
The judge's quote cuts off a crucial "and," which establishes that regular documents that aren't litigation prep that wind up in the attorney's posessesion aren't automatically work product. So the client's conspiracy laid out in Excel that he also transmitted to his lawyer is not work product. But his queries about how much trouble he might be in and what he can do to shield himself very well may be.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
My wife and I have been wanting to do a toy culling for months and just have never found the time.
At least in our social circle I think the high status flex would be an uncluttered playroom with low tech toys.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
On hospitals not letting exhausted new mothers sleep when baby is sleeping: I set myself up at the door to the room and refused entry for anything not critical, and it turned out there was nothing critical. Doctors making rounds, nurses taking vitals, all that can be deferred.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Have you not seen an LLM go from planning mode to functioning whole product?
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
All current generation AIs rely on someone telling them what to do.
A year or two ago the telling has to be very specific, and even then it wasn’t a guarantee of useful output. “Write a function that takes these inputs, performs this logic, applies this transformation, return this output.”
Now it’s “make me an iOS app that does X” and the AI enters planning mode and many iterations and hours later can give you a working app, though likely won’t get everything the way you want on the first draft.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
I sometimes work with people near the top of a trillion dollar company and they’re clearly bright but just make the minimal effort to communicate, like it’s better for me to burn time decrypting their ambiguity than for them to write clearly from the start.
I don’t know if it’s some kind of a power move, they really are too busy to communicate any better, or maybe they’re just operating on too little sleep.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Bad shoots are inevitable, they’re never going to be driven to zero. Even if we had Star Trek phasers eventually some guy will screw up and unintentionally use the kill setting.
ICE resistors are creating conditions that increase the probability of a bad shoot. According to them we’ve now had two, I would say we might have had one.
People who create these conditions don’t necessarily get what they “deserve” if one of them is a victim of a bad shoot, but their actions are necessary for the bad shoot. They do share in the blame, but they’ll never acknowledge as such or adjust their behavior.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
These can both be true, even though I think we don't have enough to conclude that the first is true or false:
- Pretti never moved in a way that a reasonable officer could construe as a threat.
- He was repeatedly playing a very dangerous game where his death was a likely outcome: picking fights with police while armed.
The second video supports the second point.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
I listened to part of one episode long ago, I forget the topic, but it was bog-standard Western media narratives, nothing insightful.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
The last time the government attempted to measure the proportion of illegals working W-2 with forged / stolen documents versus those working under the table was around 2013. Back then it was about half: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL32004
If you ratchet up the pressure on the under the table arrangements, you'll certainly get more W-2 fraud. And the most popular form of this fraud is to use some citizen's real identity, potentially causing them all kinds of trouble, not the least of which involves the IRS.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Your employer submitted your I-9 twice or they did their own research to confirm the authenticity of your documents?
The latter exposes them to legal risk.
The banking system need not fail generally for backup cash to be useful, it just needs to fail you. This could be through some bank error, or it could be because you got put on a list. Not long ago I would not have predicted that "donated a small amount to a non-violent protest movement" could result in your bank assets being frozen, but it happened in Canada. Now I think it's wise to assign some low probability to otherwise innocuous things exposing you to this kind of risk.
As anti-AI sentiment builds perhaps "frequently commented on SlateStarCodex" could be reason enough to freeze a person's assets.
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