P-Necromancer
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User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
10d ago
Ah, that is part of what makes it appealing, for sure. But communes have strong Exit rights too, so I don't think it's obviously biasing the comparison. Is the argument that Exit is more important for anarcho-capitalism-lite given reduced Voice? I'm not actually sure Voice is reduced in ancap societies -- you have all the tools of persuasion and politics to get your way and you can pay to get it too, whereas in ancom you only have the former.
This might seem superficially counterintuitive: Sure, in ancom you don't have money, but you also don't have to work for money. Doesn't it cancel out? But in fact theory predicts this result: You are rewarded for your service to the interests of others with influence over others' actions in turn. This has the natural effect of maximizing total utility, as each individual makes money doing what most efficiently enables them to help others and spends money on the help they most want. In other terms, trade is positive sum: both parties are better off for it, both get more value out than they put in. So forbidding (or failing to adequately facilitate) trade reduces total utility.
The communist ethos may be 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' but getting one's needs (and wants) satisfied is the whole incentive for providing one's ability. If you remove that incentive, people just aren't going to try as hard. Auth-left can force them (which is just slavery, and is inefficient and destabilizing in the same ways, but isn't completely unworkable), but lib-left can't, really. So the only way it can ever really work is if people want it to.
P-Necromancer
10d ago
It might not be truly autonomous and stateless, but you can join a commune today and get 80% of the way there. Many people have... and almost all them gave it up when it proved unworkable and dumb, and not because of the compromises they had to make to exist within a capitalist society. I have no issue with voluntary communities living in (just about) any way they please, and I'm happy for the people who can find happiness there... but the evidence is that it just doesn't work for the vast majority of people even after self-selecting for the people who want to make it work the most.
(The community that's similarly 80% of the way to anarcho-capitalism is... pre-Civil War America, I think? Not no public spending or government action, but much, much less. Though it looks so good in comparison I'm afraid I've put my thumb on the scale somehow.)
P-Necromancer
10d ago
Just like a gun control advocate can advocate for changing the laws with regards to who can own which gun, he can obviously also advocate for actually forcing the cops to protect people.
I mean, he can. Does he? Could be my own ignorance talking here, but I don't think I've ever heard this point from gun control advocates. It ought to be a lot easier to get passed than gun control, since the committed opposition is... the police union, I guess? Not half the country; you can see the rightists in this thread agree cops should have that duty. And by doing so first they'd make gun control more likely by neutering this argument against it. So where is the advocacy?
P-Necromancer
12d ago
I would argue that the IRBO only really emerged during the cold war.
The Atlantic Charter, signed 1941, called for:
[N]o territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned
(It called for several things that didn't happen, actually, but if we're looking for the emergence of the principle, I think this counts.)
Now, the USSR didn't sign it (not that version, anyway), but America did (before actually entering the war, even). Most of the involved parties decided they didn't really mean it within the next few years (it didn't go over terribly well in Britain's colonies, for one), but that kind of makes my point that such promises were hard to take seriously. The UN Charter, 1945, expressed the same sentiment, but of course was careful to grandfather in the allies' recent conquests, and in fact would compel the signatories to condemn e.g. Finland trying to take back the territory the USSR stole in the unprovoked Winter War.
Contrary to common belief, nukes are not the "I win" button. Japan's war had gone very badly and they were facing an invasion, getting nuked was simply the last straw. "The killed 100k Russians when they nuked Leningrad, better make peace before they kill another 100k of my poor countrymen" would not have persuaded Stalin out of all people.
This is true, especially for fission bombs, especially given the very tight production bottlenecks they had at the time. It would still have been a huge advantage -- less so for bombing cities than for discouraging any concentration of force, I would think. MacArthur was general then, too. It'd have certainly been expensive in blood and treasure, but it's hard to imagine it's a fight the US actually loses, provided they had the will to see it through. It certainly didn't get any cheaper for the next 40 years.
(The USSR did ultimately dissolve without a fight, but not before doing an enormous amount of damage around the world. Their efforts to undermine Western dominance were quite successful in tying anti-imperialism to socialism in the public imaginations of much of Africa and South America, arguably immiserating those nations to this day and for who knows how long to come. You could fairly blame that on the Western Imperialism too, but the British and French colonial empires would have dissolved regardless; there's no USSR making Britain pay Mauritius a fortune to rent islands Mauritius never actually occupied today.)
If the US could have defeated the USSR by prolonging WW2 for a year or so, I think they would have done so, not for the right of self-determination of anyone but because any fool could see that the USSR would become their rival superpower. But they had just spent a lot of lives and productivity on winning a big war. Telling the Americans "change of plans, you already freed France from the Nazis, no you get to free Poland from the Soviets" would not have been popular, especially if you consider that plenty of intellectuals were leaning communist.
My point is not that it would have been easy or even smart (though I not-very-confidently believe it would have been), just that it casts a lot of doubt as to just how committed the US (or anyone else) really was to the principle.
P-Necromancer
12d ago
Presumably after WW2, what preserved the borders in Western Europe (say between Belgium and the Netherlands) was less a deep respect of the IRBO learned overnight and more the fact that everyone knew that if they tried to make war the US would come down on them like a million pound hammer.
What about Eastern Europe? The notion that the US was truly interested in the principle of national self determination is difficult to credit in light of the enormous support they offered the Soviets in conquering half the continent. America was the world's sole nuclear power for years after the war; didn't do Poland or Czechoslovakia or Karelia any good. They said they'd keep the borders right where they were... while simultaneously allowing Stalin to redraw them as he pleased in the areas he controlled. Why would anyone take those commitments seriously?
P-Necromancer
13d ago
Sure, I don't disagree with anything here. Or really anything in the OP; just adding my two cents and offering a couple tips for making productive use of LLMs.
For the example of fixing some OS issue, imagine I didn't have really any technical knowledge of how things work (say, I don't really even know what the registry is unless a tech/LLM tells me something about it). Maybe I'd take my computer to a human tech. Could even be a corporate IT guy. Perhaps, knowing that I don't have a clue, I just give it to him. "Here's my problem; please fix it Ralph Rufus."
Who knows what he'll get up to? What stuff he'll mess with along the way. Things he'll try just because, and then maybe leave it in a changed state, even though it didn't progress toward a solution to the actual problem. This cruft can build up. After years of having this corporate IT guy and that corporate IT guy and the other corporate IT guy just doing who knows what, maybe at some point, things get bizarre enough that the next one says, "Dude, stuff is wild here; we probably should just wipe it and clean install."
I think there are two different use cases here it makes sense to distinguish. This is an example of allowing the LLM to act 'directly' (not actually directly, there's a human in the loop, but it's giving you commands to execute, not writing a script) on a complex, persistent system. Which, yeah, that can absolutely build up cruft that's difficult or impossible to clear away without starting fresh. But even the most careless vibe coding has a serious advantage, in that the actual operations are recorded and auditable. If you put in a tiny bit of effort and use version control, you (or someone else, or another LLM) can even audit how the code changed over time. And, better, you can separate out tasks into different, independently tested scripts to be sure there isn't some complicated interdependence issue. It's the difference between manually tinkering with a machine and writing a dockerfile. It's still certainly possible to build up technical debt to the point you're better off starting fresh, but it's a lot harder. At least for small personal projects, which I hope are most of the things people do make this way.
Careless vibe coding carries real risks; I haven't caught a model trying to do anything dangerous (as opposed to dumb), but I believe the people who say they have. I'd be very leery of running code I can't understand at least well enough to tell if it's making web calls or deleting things it shouldn't be. (But I'd say the same for StackOverflow.) I double check the library names. I wouldn't let it touch anything security-critical, or any files I care about and don't have backed up. I haven't pushed any generated code to a public repo, but if I did, I'd be very careful to ensure there aren't any api keys or passwords or other secrets anywhere in history.
It is... concerning that same tools are available to people less cautious and knowledgeable than me, and I'm certain that will lead to problems. (On the other hand, I'm sure there are people who'd put me into that group.) Enough to make the whole endeavor net-negative? Hard to say, but I'm pretty sure the answer is 'no.' At least, I think someone smart enough to get Antigravity or Claude Code or whatever running ought to be smart enough to understand the big dangers and a few basic principles of good, maintainable code with a short crash course-- which, actually, the LLM is very capable of providing, even if it can't (perfectly) reliably avoid those pitfalls.
P-Necromancer
13d ago
I think there are three things going on here, all with the same (somewhat inconvenient) solution:
- LLMs have a tendency to get stuck on certain ideas, even if they acknowledge they're wrong. Once something is in context two or three times, it can be very hard to get it to let it go.
- LLMs advertise huge context limits, and, technically speaking, you can run Gemini Pro 3 on a million tokens... but you definitely shouldn't. Models get way dumber at high context, and noticeably dumber even at relatively modest context (anecdotally, it's significant even at 32k)
- Models tend to get dumber/less obedient the longer a conversation goes, even if the total context is still short*
The answer to all three problems is just to start a new session frequently and copy only the relevant and correct details into the new chat. It can be a pain if you're in the middle of something, but it gives the best results.
This is... somewhat redolent of good coding practices, I think; encapsulation and abstraction, at least. If you break a problem into smaller parts and keep the boundaries between those parts strict, it's easier for both humans and LLMs to conceptualize the totality of what they need at any given time. Ideally, structuring a project this way will not just result in better LLM performance but in more maintainable code too.
On the other side: having an LLM write code at all (rather than, say, directly making system calls) is already a big step towards legibility (and thus maintainability). Such a system is obviously insane, but it's perfectly possible for your program to be a particular internal state of an LLM. For that matter, it's perfectly possible (and indeed ubiquitous) for your 'program' to be the internal state of a human mind. By analogy, 'human vibe coding' is telling the human to design a set of legible policies rather than using their own judgment directly, which does actually have the expected advantages of consistency, comprehensibility, and interoperability.
I guess the takeaway is that we should look to normal management strategy for clues on how to manage LLMs, which might be obvious.
* This at least I think is mainly a training issue: most RLHF/DPO is done on single-turn responses.
P-Necromancer
13d ago
Coincidentally, you can relate this to how Locke defines a ruler tyrannical: he who rules not by law but uses power "for his own, private, separate advantage" and "makes not the law, but his will, the rule"
I haven't read Locke, so apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but this seems pretty obviously false to me? Or at least a very non-standard definition of tyranny. If the USSR under Stalin were less corrupt and arbitrary, would it have been less tyrannical? It would have been more thorough in its oppression. In 1984, no one actually benefits from the system: the more power you have in the party, the less freedom it permits you. It's pure Molochianism: the party accumulates all the power it can and crushes all opposition not because anyone actually wants that, but because the party that prioritizes winning over all else is the one that wins.
I suppose such a system would be less tyrannical in the sense of having less of a tyrant? Not necessarily: if the law permits absolute rule by an individual, which many systems of law through history actually do, the tyrant need not override the law to exercise power capriciously. And again, in such a case, I'd see an absolute ruler who uses his position to enrich himself as less tyrannical than one that uses it in support of sincere authoritarian ideology. Hitler's corruption must have had a (very) small but real impact on the efficiency of the Nazi state, and a less efficient Nazi state is less able to pursue the Nazis' tyrannical aims.
P-Necromancer
15d ago
Huh, why offer lower interchange fees for category 3? After all, the businesses they're charging don't care about how the customer is using their card -- if anything I might expect group 3 to be more free with their money, justifying a higher fee -- and they're not going to offer a discount for using a lower-fee card (or at least I've never seen that). I suppose there might be marginal businesses that'd refuse higher fee cards? But at most I've seen businesses refusing whole brands, not the products within those brands that are meant for group 4 instead of group 3.
You say this like it's shameful. Protecting citizens from banditry is among the most noble duties of a nation. It's not an 'open secret,' or at least it shouldn't be -- it's a far more honorable casus belli then ideology or great power politics or rumored possession of WMDs, to be sure.
Countries that invoke might-makes-right to rob foreigners have no room to complain when those foreigners' nations invoke might-makes-right to seize restitution and inflict punishment. In fact, the world would be far more prosperous if those norms were consistently and strictly enforced. Not like it's ever a good idea, just some combination of stupidity (ideologically motivated or otherwise), short-sightedness, and corruption, as Venezuela's poverty demonstrates: they own their oil now... but they can't refine it and no one who can is dumb enough to invest in the nation.
No, the whole problem is that the US didn't do enough to punish the theft. Individual criminals tend to be dumb, high time preference, and low executive function, and that seems like an apt analogy to me. Studies show such people respond best to rapid, consistent and highly visible punishment. Letting things drag out for decades and using such indirect methods as funding protestors sends the wrong message and only multiplies the misery of the population.
P-Necromancer
22d ago
I also can't imagine stepping in front of a running car
... What do you do at crosswalks?
Walking in front of cars that, while running, are currently stopped isn't actually dangerous in most situations, and most(?) everyone does it all the time. It was a mistake in this instance, obviously, but I hardly think it proves the officer doesn't believe getting run over is dangerous(? Is that really your argument?), just that he didn't think she'd suddenly accelerate.
P-Necromancer
25d ago
It's obvious why officers like it as a tactic. Most people are probably not willing to make contact with a person with their vehicle to flee a crime, so it effectively prevents the obvious way someone might escape. If they are wrong about that individual's willingness it lets them escalate to shooting.
I continue to have mixed feelings about it. I don't like it as a means of manufacturing an excuse to use deadly force where you wouldn't normally be able to but it is not clear to me what reform of it as a tactic would look like.
This logic strikes me as dubious. Are cops (or ICE agents) really so dedicated that they're eager to put their lives on the line -- and the danger of standing in front of a car that might abruptly accelerate is very real -- for marginally better clearance rates? Isn't the standard leftist line that cops are so quick to escalate to lethal force because they're cowards unwilling to accept the risks associated with de-escalation? I'm not sure that's true, but it's at least not obviously contrary to their individual interests.
(I could envision a version of this scheme -- leaving out an unloaded gun in easy reach of a suspect, maybe -- where they could try to manufacture an excuse to escalate to lethal force without any substantial personal risk, but this certainly wasn't that. If we're arguing about tire angle, then the officer's life was in the suspect's hands.)
As to why the cop did step in front of the car? I think incompetence is more likely than suicidal malice; the latter exists, but the former is vastly more common.
P-Necromancer
26d ago
Actually, modern financial instruments enable you to profit off low volatility too; look into iron condors and calendar spreads. I imagine this is one of the more common insider trading opportunities, in fact: if you know beforehand that this quarter's earnings report looks a lot like last quarter's (or the same quarter from last year, depending on the business), for instance, which it often will.
What you really profit from is not volatility but surprise. If you know better than market, you should be able to find a way to monetize that knowledge. Of course, your profit depends on degree of surprise, so it's hard to make much money when the market is already close to right.
This is not in fact how the word 'execution' is used in any other context. Your definition would include killing in justified self defense too. If a man kills a home invader rushing at him with a knife, do you think his defense attorney would call that killing an 'execution?' If you look up how many Germans were executed by the allies during and after WW2, you will get a number in the thousands, not the millions; the allies -- allied soldiers tasked with violence on behalf of the state -- killed millions of German soldiers in the war, but absolutely no one calls those deaths 'executions.'
'Execution' implies deliberation and, most critically, control over the situation. Killing in the course of an altercation can be (and is in this instance, I think!) manslaughter or murder, but it is never an execution. If your definition of 'execution' is co-extensive with 'killing,' why insist on the former? Is it because 'execution' sounds worse because no one else uses your definition?
(ETA: After considering it a little more, I think 'execution' particularly requires that you kill because you believe the victim deserves to die (as a necessary but not sufficient condition). Killing out of confusion or fear of someone's current behavior can't qualify. 'Extrajudicial summary execution' refers to cases like occupying soldiers hanging or shooting civilians on suspicion of sabotage, not those same soldiers firing into a crowd of rioting partisans.)
This sounds good, sure. Have you actually considered the implications? US (non-ICE) police have acted incompetently in high stress split second situations before -- I expect you're familiar with at least a few examples -- so should we abolish the police? US soldiers have absolutely made mistakes like this before; do we need to disband the military? Unfortunately, while 'no lethal mistakes, ever' is a laudable standard, it's one that no group tasked with exercising the state's monopoly on violence has ever met or ever will.
I certainly agree Pretti's shooter, specifically, shouldn't have a gun or the power to exercise the state's monopoly on violence, and in fact should be tried for homicide. The shooting is cause to update in the direction of ICE being incompetent thugs... but update how much?
Out of 50,000(? Organizers claim, anyway) protestors in Minneapolis, ICE has only actually killed two of them. I happen to think that Good's shooter would have been easily acquitted had it gone to trial, but allow that that was murder too: is the failure rate per violent encounter here actually worse than average? I'm not sure, but you haven't even tried to make the argument that it is.
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