wlxd
5mo ago
Beyond that, what factors would you include?
I explained it in the next sentence after wondering if you’re not trying to pull a fast one. Are you sure you aren’t?
Prison statistics in my country do not go that far back, unfortunately. The oldest statistics are only from 2000, but the cost per prisoner is almost the exact same when you account for inflation.
OK, where is it? I’m having a hard time believing that your costs are an order of magnitude higher than everyone else’s.
Beyond prison conditions, I would guess other factors like guard salary and construction are almost certainly higher as well (based on things in the rest of the country).
A typical inmate to officer ration in US prison is somewhere between 5 and 12. Let’s take the lowest figure. You spend $75k on correctional officer salary (actually your country almost certainly spends much less than that), which is $15k per prisoner. You’re left with $135k per prisoner per year. What could possibly cost that much?
wlxd
6mo ago
It’s only hard if the drones are autonomous. With piloted drones, the operator is broadcasting his position out in the open.
wlxd
6mo ago
Two years in, she’s still unmarried, childless, and does not even have a partner. (I checked out of curiosity after browsing my old comments and finding this one with explicit prediction).
wlxd
1mo ago
You are trying to imply that in that world, lives of regular innocent people would be ruined, and I just don’t think that this is the case. This is how law enforcement actually worked in US before 1960s, before Miranda, Brady etc. Crime rate back then was much lower, largely because cops harassed no-gooders in the exact way you consider scary and atrocious.
To put it simply, for me the precondition for discussing whether police power are excessive is low crime rate. I worry less about excessive police power than about excessive criminal powers. I worry less about a cop being able to intimidate and search me at will than about a hoodlum being able to intimidate and attack me at will. Only when I have nothing to fear from criminals, I will start thinking about fearing cops.
wlxd
1mo ago
You are not arguing against how this law would be typically applied (because obviously police cannot search a typical person every time he steps out of his home), but against some extreme overapplication, highly unlikely in practice.
I don’t think it is a particularly strong objection, given that we already have plenty of laws today that, if applied to such extreme degree, would be just as annoying, they just are never used like that.
For an explicit example: if you operate any radio station (including CB radio, so that’s not limited to holders of amateur radio license), you are legally obligated to allow FCC employees to inspect your radio station. They don’t even need any sort of warrant. They just show up at your door, and you must let them in, under risk of penalties. Theoretically, they could reinspect you every 3 hours. In practice, this just never happens.
The point is that the government that feels that it’s fine to inspect or search you every 3 hours is not the kind of a government that would be prevented from doing so should the words on the paper said it couldn’t. Tyranny is about the government desiring and executing its abilities to keep inspecting and searching normal people continuously, not about their legal ability to do so.
wlxd
2mo ago
I think where we disagree is that this particular error was incompetence of such degree as to be a violation of due process (all but conceded by the government anyway)
No: this was a violation of Garcia’s right, but it was not a due process violation. Whether error is egregious or not is orthogonal to whether it’s a due process violation.
and that violations of this kind (ignorance of a duly entered legal order that they had a legal duty to know about) are the kind of things that can be prevented.
Most of them, certainly. My point is that there is a trade off here between error rate and your effectiveness. The more efforts you take to prevent any and all errors, the harder it will be to actually get the job done. Democrats understand this very well: that’s how they effectively banished almost all of death penalty in US. That’s why I oppose excessive concern for due process, because I know that it’s not principled stance, but rather instrumental, only to achieve a specific nefarious political purpose.
One doesn't need to think that every error can be prevented to believe that such a glaringly obvious one can be.
Yes, but even so, the glaringly obvious mistakes will nevertheless occasionally happen, and sometimes there will be little legal remedy available too. I’m willing to consider proposals to make errors less likely, but only if they are paired with proposals to make the whole process faster and more effective. Of course, Democrats won’t entertain deals like that.
wlxd
4mo ago
They marry legal immigrants present in the US or marry foreigners outside the US.
You missed one option, that is, they marry illegal immigrants, but otherwise this my point: all family based immigration is downstream of previous immigration events.
Yes, legal immigration.
This is only true in the most literal sense, as illegal immigrants are not eligible for petitioning for family based immigration, but overall it misses my point: US citizens can and do petition for family based immigration for their illegally present parents, spouses, and siblings. There is a whole legal industry for that, just search Google for “green card for undocumented parents”, you’ll find many immigration law companies adveritising their services. If your spouse, parent or sibling did not enter unlawfully, but eg. overstayed their visa, there is hardly any legal issue preventing adjusting their status. Even if you entered unlawfully, all you need to do is sneak out of US, and then pretend you’ve never been here illegally; perfectly viable for many illegals who haven’t generated federal record of their presence.
You've provided no evidence of this.
Sorry, do you actually believe that people who enter or stay illegally are a complete dead end from family based immigration purposes, or are you just asking for evidence this to be obnoxious? The existence of the legal industry dedicated to legalizing parents and spouses is evidence. You can find many businesses that help with that in Google.
wlxd
4mo ago
They are being sponsored by US citizens or permanent residents.
OK, and how exactly do you think US citizens come about to have foreign family? Again, think it through. These US citizens are almost universally downstream of some relatively recent immigration event. They either became naturalized citizens, or were born to immigrants. People who were born to two American-born parents are highly unlikely to have any foreign family that they could even consider getting in here.
So, basically all family based immigration is downstream of recent immigration. If you ignore the family based legal immigration, then legal immigration has been absolutely overwhelmed by illegal immigration for many years now.
What I am arguing here is that large chunk, if not a majority of legal family based immigration is downstream of some illegal immigration event that happened in recent history. For example, US citizen born to illegal parents, or formerly illegal aliens who legalized their presence in some way (and there are ways to do it for quite a lot of people).
Therefore, when you say that
that the type of immigration that will be paused under this administration - asylum claims from people entering through the southern border (…) - is a fraction of the overall immigration growth since the 60s.
You are missing the forest for trees: yes, family based chain migration have brought more people here than fake asylum claimants, but the point is that fake asylum claimants will cause more family based migration in future, so reducing the former also reduces the latter.
wlxd
4mo ago
You say:
Anyone who worked for xAI would be a fool to take this offer because you are massively lowballing them.
You also say:
It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing.
How can I be lowballing them when their stock is literally worthless? Can you make up your mind?
I linked twitter salaries in the above thread. Everything in the Bay is talked about in the TC range because it sounds more impressive.
No, you quoted an article that was citing figures from job postings. Those figures are not there to sound impressive, they’re there to satisfy legal requirements California imposes on job postings.
wlxd
4mo ago
To quote myself again (and to respond to /u/2rafa)
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing that Grok 3.0 does in fact do all of this with the Johnny Cash song. All I'm saying is that it could.
All I'm arguing here is that "Grok couldn't have done that, because the answer came very fast, and speech transcription is slow" is a completely invalid argument, and I also argued that implementing this feature wouldn't require Grok developers to do anything special, because it would have came out of multimodality combined with internet search. I'm not saying that Grok actually does all of this (and I'm leaning towards thinking that it doesn't). My purpose here is to clear your misconceptions as to how the technology works, and what is possible.
wlxd
4mo ago
In case it wasn’t clear: it took 67 seconds to transcribe an entire 171 seconds long song on my home CPU. You don’t have to wait for it to finish either: it produces output as it goes. It takes less than 20 seconds to process the entire song on my 9 year old gamer GPU. It would take less than half a second on a single H100. On 5 H100s, transcribing the entire song would take less time that it would take you to blink an eye. X AI reportedly has 100,000 of H100s.
But it doesn't, and the fact that it responded instantly is evidence of that.
How is it any evidence? Responding to the question is at least an order of magnitude more computationally demanding task than transcribing the entire song.
Do you really think Grok is spending resources (mostly dev time, really) to add features allowing the model to answer weird questions about song lyrics?
That’s the amazing thing about multimodal LLMs: they wouldn’t even have to add any special feature, with multimodality you get it for free. For a multimodal LLM model that is trained on sound tokens as well as on text tokens, understanding the words in a song, and analyzing accents etc is literally the same task as answering text questions. When you ask Grok a question, it searches web, fetches websites, and processes the contents. Fetching and processing song is, again, exactly the same task to the multimodal LLM as processing text.
wlxd
4mo ago
You clearly don't actually understand how equity works. It obviously is worth something, because investors are paying billions of dollars for it. Being public or private only has indirect effect on how much stock is worth.
Going public provides easy liquidity, which is good, especially to small stockholders, but private companies of the size we are talking about also usually provide liquidity options to stockholders. SpaceX, for example, had a tender offer a couple months ago. This event allows individual SpaceX stock holders to sell their holdings to institutional investors, in case you don't understand what that is.
To put it in more concrete terms: I'd happily go to any of these X AI employees, and buy whatever they vest in a year for $10,000. This offer establishes that their stock is worth something. (I'm not just making a point, this offer is 100% serious: if you work for X AI, feel free to DM me, I'm open to negotiations even).
However this says 188k - 440k
These figures only include cash compensation, and they are a very reasonable range for cash part of the comp for between junior and staff levels.
I image the 440k is for for Senior and Staff engineers, Like 2-3 on that whole team
There are around 40 people in the photo. I bet you that at least 10 of them are seniors or above.
wlxd
4mo ago
A typical use of cancer funds is a grant where you GMO some bacteria to produce some protein, which you then concentrate, crystallize, then do some X-ray crystallography to analyze its structure. What does it have to do with cancer? Oh right, that protein may lead to a cancer drug, maybe. But, you know, it might also lead to AIDS drug! Who knows.
wlxd
5mo ago
First, disparate impact doctrine has nothing to do with it. At best you could argue that it’s related to equal protection.
More importantly, this is a fully general arguments against any laws. Why prohibit theft if it’s just a bludgeon when the your political opponents are the ones controlling law enforcement?
wlxd
5mo ago
I doubt that, mostly because I don’t believe that the promiscuous party boy gays that use condoms use them 100% of the time.
wlxd
7mo ago
Private tier 1s and state schools is enough to provide education. Rest is mostly credential signaling.
wlxd
16d ago
I am not worried about my daughters getting pregnant as teenagers by itself. I would be overjoyed to have grandchildren while I’m still young and energetic. What worries me is them getting pregnant with inappropriate man. But, then again, I think it’s less bad when it happens when they’re teenagers than when they’re 30+. They still have a chance (though, of course, much reduced) to put their life together with someone more appropriate. When it happens to you while you’re middle aged, the pool of appropriate men that are interested in you is really tiny.
wlxd
3mo ago
The fruit from the poisonous tree doctrine as applied in the US is pretty stupid. It is beyond retarded that good faith procedural errors can allow obviously guilty men go free. Most of the rest of the world does not have it, or does not have it to the same extent as US does.
wlxd
4mo ago
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what multi modality is.
The LLMs are not trained on text corpora. They are trained on tokens. These tokens are just numbers. The training process is good at finding patterns in the numbers they are fed, and predicting subsequent numbers.
Where do the numbers come from? Well, in text only LLMs, there is a tokenizer stage that takes text input and translates it into string of numbers. These numbers don’t directly correspond to individual letters or words, and so LLMs never really see those. This is why, for example, they had trouble telling how many rs are in strawberry, because what you’re asking them is how many rs are in 2645, 675, 15717 (this is the tokenization of Strawberry). It’s actually pretty magical that they manage to figure out that there are any rs in these numbers at all, that they are able to learn detokenization.
So how about different modalities? Well, these are represented as just different tokens, different numbers. For us humans some numbers represent image fragments, some represent sound snippets, and some represent pieces of text. For a multimodal LLM though, it’s all the same, it’s all just numbers. When you train them, you feed text, images, and sounds directly into the model (after tokenizing), you don’t do anything like “first transcribe sound to text through some different model and then feed it as text”. The sounds are never mapped 1-1 to English tokens, they are mapped 1-1 to sound tokens, which is just a different set of numbers than those representing Unicode text.
Because of this, for an LLM, not only sounds and words are intercompatible, but in fact there is literally no difference between the two on a technical level. There is of course a difference on a semantic level: for example, it learns quickly that text and sound tokens never mix, because it’s never fed training data that’s intermingled sound and text. Instead, after sound comes another sound (eg response to a dialogue) or a bunch of text (a transcription). But, to a model, there is no fundamental difference between text and sound and image.
wlxd
4mo ago
Think of it this way: the point of even purely text-based LLMs is not to understand text per se, but rather to understand concepts, ideas, and meaning. The text itself is just a medium through which these are conveyed. The same is true about voice modality: we do not care about the pressure waveforms, but rather about what is being conveyed by these. Transcribing them to words and digesting them as word tokens is lossy, you lose tone, tempo, background, etc. Training on audio is going to make your model perform better, not only on audio, but likely also when dealing with just text. It's similar to how models pretrained on lots of computer code work much better at non code related tasks.
wlxd
5mo ago
In my country it costs about $150000 per year to keep someone in prison.
So spend less on that, it’s not hard. There is no reason it has to cost this much. I can guarantee you that 70 years ago, it didn’t cost (inflation adjusted) $150k. I strongly suspect that the main reason it does is because pro-criminal activists demand certain things that jack up the cost, and then use that to argue that prisons are too expensive.
Can you explain?
I explained in next sentence: comparing prison cost to damage of a single theft that resulted in the conviction is clearly wrong and misleading.
wlxd
1mo ago
Do you genuinely not understand it? The beauty of the lawn lies in its neatness and uniformity. Random weeds in random places break that uniformity. The result does not good even when the dandelions flower (which is a relatively small fraction of the year).
Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.
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