odd_primes
4mo ago
It might grow on you. The style does provide this sort of relentless momentum to some of the action set pieces. By the end I found the general misery and despair more of an impediment than the prose.
odd_primes
4mo ago
Personally I'm more comfortable with the government going "damn your product is so good we are going to buy everything you can produce" than "damn your product is so good we are going to ban you from selling it." A restriction to US citizens only is effectively a ban, since Anthropic doesn't have the KYC in place and won't for at least months.
And if the capability is anywhere near advertised, it wouldn't even be a waste of money compared to a typical DoD procurement.
odd_primes
4mo ago
This action seems pretty consistent with exactly what Anthropic has been claiming:
-
Mythos is "too powerful to release" to the general public, and enables an average Joe can hack stuff at an expert level.
-
Chinese models are advancing by distilling capabilities from Anthropic's models. That's how they are able to stay 6-12 months behind frontier models at a fraction of the R&D cost.
Then Amazon apparently came along and pointed out that it was possible to jailbreak Fable to perform Mythos-like cybersecurity tasks... If they can figure it out, so can China. And any capability they can use, they can distill.
The real gigachad move here would be for the US gov to buy out all of the Fable/Mythos tokens for the next year or two and get any national guardsman who can write hello world in Python to red team government systems and critical infrastructure. This is an area where kicking the can down the road by a year or two could have a lot of value in terms of preventing future comprises.
odd_primes
4mo ago
I'd legitimately be embarrassed if I were a "cybersecurity expert" who started out in the early 2000s and my Wikipedia page didn't have a single CVE on it.
Sure she probably qualifies as a cybersecurity policy expert or something, since it sounds like that's what she has actually been doing for the last 20 years. It's just a bit cringe when policy people or managers still cling to the hacker aesthetic.
Also HackerOne is a grift where they convinced companies to pay them money to avoid having to deal with infinite Indians submitting terrible bug reports. The service they offer is basically a spam filter. It's widely disliked because they offshored the review process... also to India. There is an entire industry on the subcontinent of submitting and rejecting bogus vulnerability reports. I for one can't wait for Mythos to nuke this entire system.
odd_primes
4mo ago
Yeah it's pretty ridiculous, especially considering how he claimed provocation on that basis:
He claimed that they started to make "cheeky remarks" and one called him a "(expletive) migrant."
odd_primes
4mo ago
We have a conclusion to the "Braveheart" saga, precipitated by a viral video of a Scottish girl defending herself by waving a knife and axe at a man filming her. This incident was discussed in multiple comment threads, with @ArjinFerman summarizing the discourse here.
Per the BBC reporting on the court case:
A man has been found guilty of making sexual remarks to a group of girls aged between 12 and 14 in Dundee before grabbing and pushing one of them to the ground.
The court heard that Belov had said "hello sexy, I'll show you a good time" to the girls while walking past them in the Lochee area of the city.
After one of the girls called him a creep, he had returned to confront the group and called his sister, who arrived shortly afterwards and assaulted one of the girls.
His sister has also been convicted, in what appears to be a complete legal victory for the Scottish girls.
odd_primes
4mo ago
It's a mistake to take fee lists like that at face value. This is a market where, due to its questionable legality, it's pretty hard to do price discovery. Clients aren't revealing how much they actually pay, and service providers have an incentive to signal that they are in-demand and high-value, because that's how they attract high-end clients. The whole thing is opaque and vibes-based.
odd_primes
4mo ago
This seems like a pretty easy fix - just require markets to clearly state the window during which they will consider information for resolution. The issue here was that it did not state one way or the other up front whether information after May 31st would count. This should be clear and explicit in the rules. Or maybe they will come up with a boilerplate formula and adopt that wording for most events, to avoid the confusion caused by the variance in rules and wordings.
There needs to be some sort of cutoff for practical reasons. Otherwise you'd have people coping and trying to delay resolution in the hopes that some new information would come to light any day now to flip the outcome.
odd_primes
4mo ago
"It’s very clear science, evidence-based conclusions that the brain isn’t fully developed in young men until roughly around the age of the mid 20s,” Borrello said.
Hasn't this been pretty thoroughly repudiated by more recent studies? Yet it seems to live on in legal activism circles and anti-drug PSAs.
odd_primes
5mo ago
Not surprised they avoided the entire topic of race-based jury nullification, which seems to have become more frequent post-BLM. Out of curiosity I tried digging up some stats on the prevalence of the phenomenon (eg. conviction rate of black defendants if they have a majority/plurality black jury) but everything seems to reference a single study from Florida, which of course claimed that white jurors are the only biased ones.
odd_primes
5mo ago
The BLS has an interesting piece on household computer ownership in the 1990s broken down by education level and race. The overall rate went from 15% in 1990 to 35% in 1997, but households headed by a college graduate went from 23% to 56%. It didn't take long for it to become a majority though - that was around the year 2000.
odd_primes
5mo ago
What's the Indian education system like in terms of academic integrity? I was a TA in college and Indian international students were disproportionately getting in trouble for plagiarism, handing in identical assignments, or trying to cheat on exams. A common excuse was "this is a cultural difference, this was allowed (explicitly or tacitly) in India". With all the weight for admissions being placed on one entry exam, is there genuinely just a more cavalier attitude about cheating on other work, since its perceived as busywork that doesn't matter?
Actually digging into this a bit further, there have apparently been major NEET cheating scandals in 2024 and this year. I suppose with so much of a student'a academic (and therefore economic) future riding on one test, there is a lot of incentive for it. American admissions criteria might be less legible, but they are at least less vulnerable to being gamed by cheating on a single test.
odd_primes
5mo ago
On one occasion, he said, he was held down, stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.
Another possibility consistent with the victim's statement that doesn't require "trained rape dogs" - they easy could have had the dog jump on him and then penetrated him with some other object. The guy tied up, blindfolded, and panicking is going to have no ability to tell the difference. Letting him believe he was raped by a dog would still be incredibly degrading and traumatizing.
odd_primes
5mo ago
The Israeli military uses dogs pretty extensively, this is well documented by non-controversial sources. In the context of a large detention center run by the Israeli military, I'd imagine they are particularly useful to search for contraband like drugs, or to incapacitate combative detainees in a non-lethal manner.
This seems like it could easily be a case of "assholes taking the opportunity to do sadistic shit" especially because they know the Muslim perception of dogs, and therefore it would be even more humiliating and degrading than other forms of sexual assault.
odd_primes
5mo ago
Okay, I'll be more precise - Israel is not a recognized nuclear weapon state ratifier or acceder under the NPT, but still possesses nuclear weapons. That puts them in the same category as North Korea, which followed the agreed-upon withdrawal procedure and is also not bound by the NPT.
Like a lot of infrastructure, it's dual use. Iran is a sovereign nation and can spend money on whatever it believes is in its strategic interest, as long as it abides by its international commitments.
That begs the question though, if Iran has been trying to develop nuclear weapons for decades, why don't they have them already?
From Iran's perspective, they are next door to a hostile nuclear power with illegal nuclear weapons. Iran knows that they won't get the same special dispensation from the international community, so they have to try to ride the line of maintaining some form of deterrent without ending up as an international pariah like North Korea. Historically that has meant having a robust civilian nuclear program, and then using their degree of further enrichment as a bargaining chip. That was the whole point of JCPOA - Iran's breakout time would be regulated through limits on enriched uranium stockpiles and centrifuges in exchange for diplomatic normalization and sanctions relief. These sorts of negotiations have been going on for decades with no prospect of Iran actually producing nukes, despite Israel's constant claims to the contrary. That's my understanding of Joe Kent's statement about IC reporting - he was saying that there was no indication that Iran was planning to break this holding pattern and try to actually produce a nuclear weapon.
From a game theory perspective a way to think about this I suppose is that they are deliberately giving away the information that they are incapable of performing a first strike, but maintaining the potential capability for a delayed second strike. That adds significantly more risk to an Israeli first strike without incurring the full diplomatic consequences of having nuclear weapons. The issue is that the potential for nukes in weeks/months is not the same as having nukes ready to launch - I highly doubt they would have risked a decapitation strike on Iran's top leadership if there was the prospect of immediate nuclear retaliation.
From America's perspective the old status quo was fine - or arguably even beneficial because it discouraged Israel from doing anything too disruptive. The American interest here is essentially just "don't fuck with the oil supply" and by that metric, this conflict is a complete own-goal.
odd_primes
5mo ago
Yeah, there's no way that strike on Iran's top leadership would have been approved if they had nuclear weapons. Blowing up the top layers of the chain of command is too risky when you don't know who's going to end up with the launch codes, and what they are going to do with them. Just the existence of nuclear weapons alone is a powerful deterrent to regime change attempts.
odd_primes
5mo ago
There seems to be no evidence that human to human infection is something the virus is really capable of, and even if this is a strain that mutated to do that, it also doesn't spread through the air.
Scientists are pretty sure the Andes strain is capable of human to human transmission. It's not particularly transmissible though since it requires either transfer of bodily fluids or exposure to respiratory droplets. A cruise ship with lots of people in close, prolonged contact is probably the worst case for transmission which would explain the mini cluster of cases.
Last I had heard, they thought the patient zero was a Dutch birdwatcher who visited a rodent-infested landfill with his wife.
This probably won't blow up into a global pandemic, but it's novel, scary (50% fatality rate), and like you said, people still have COVID trauma. Maybe the coverage is a bit overblown but I don't think it has been too egregious. Eg. Some of the cruise ship passengers exposed hopped on airplanes immediately after disembarking, which is another great enclosed space for human to human transmission... It's possible we might see cases pop up elsewhere if any of those passengers were infectious at the time.
odd_primes
5mo ago
It seems like everyone (except the victim) basically got what they wanted here. The defendant got a very lenient deal, the prosecutors are making a show of protesting but still get to count this as a successful conviction for their stats, and the state of California can use a limited prison spot on a criminal who poses an actual danger to the public. It's not like this guy is going to make a habit of murder by megaphone. It's hard to muster up much outrage when this was a one in a million unlucky outcome from a typical scuffle at a protest.
odd_primes
5mo ago
Canada did that after a high-profile sexual assault case imploded during trial thanks to the defense catching the accusers lying and colluding behind the scenes to coordinate their testimony. The solution, to prevent such an embarrassment going forward, was to hold mandatory pre-trial hearings where the defense is forced to lay all their cards on the table ahead of time if they want records admitted as evidence, making it even easier for accusers to tailor their testimony.
odd_primes
5mo ago
It's more of an acknowledgement of the reality in the US. You can't remove guns from the dialogue tree of those most likely to be a problem - criminals who ignore gun laws. Making it legally harder to carry only impacts the law-abiding segment of the population, who very rarely instigate incidents.
odd_primes
6mo ago
I don't think the falsity is hard to prove here. Opening a bank account for an entity that does not exist must involve making a false statement somewhere, especially given the giant stack of forms banks make you sign to do anything.
odd_primes
6mo ago
I largely agree with your argument regarding the wire fraud charges, it seems like quite an uphill battle.
After doing a bit of googling I found some model jury instructions for the bank fraud charges though, and there does not appear to be any requirement for it to be a loan. The criteria are simply:
First, the defendant [made a false statement or report] [willfully overvalued any land, property or security] to a federally insured [specify institution]; Second, the defendant made the false statement or report to the [specify institution] knowing it was false; and Third, the defendant did so for the purpose of influencing in any way the action of the [specify institution]. It is not necessary, however, to prove that the [specify institution] involved was, in fact, influenced or misled, or that [specify institution] was exposed to a risk of loss. What must be proved is that the defendant intended to influence the [specify institution] by the false statement.
1 and 2 are met, and 3 is met because opening a bank account is an action, and the false statement was intended to mislead the bank into opening an account it otherwise would not have opened.
Maybe this is interpreted differently in Alabama, but those Ninth Circuit jury instructions make it seem like a slam dunk.
odd_primes
6mo ago
That was kind of doomed from the start with a DC jury. In this case they were able to file in Alabama, which should have a more level playing field.
And then you boot up a game and get a smurf, afker, and a Brazilian in the same match and remember why you quit...
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