yunyun333
2d ago
It would be fairly easy to steal some old medical or industrial radioisotopes for a dirty bomb; it's certainly happened accidentally plenty of times.
If you wanted to make an actual nuke, there was a window post USSR where a motivated group could have theoretically filched some poorly guarded fissile material from their nuclear cities.
When post-Soviet Russia came into being, in 1991, it inherited a sprawling state industry that had provided a full range of nuclear services, including medical science, power generation, and ship propulsion—as well as the world’s largest nuclear-weapons arsenal and, almost coincidentally, the world’s largest inventory of surplus plutonium and HEU, maybe 600 metric tons. The physical plant consisted of several dozen research, production, and storage facilities, and especially of ten fenced and guarded nuclear cities, which housed nearly a million people, yet were nominally so secret that they did not appear on maps. But within a few years the industry was obsolete, unable to adapt to the new Russian economy, and in steep decline. The buildings were in disrepair, and morale was low because people were not being paid enough or on time. Worse, the nuclear stockpiles were apparently being neglected. There were stories of guards abandoning their posts to forage for food, and of sheds containing world-ending supplies of HEU protected by padlock only. The question now, some fifteen years later, is why terrorists or criminals apparently did not then take advantage. One explanation is that they were ignorant, incompetent, and distracted. Another is that the defenses were not as weak as they appeared.
yunyun333
7d ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC487792/
https://studentbriefs.law.gwu.edu/crcl/2024/06/24/dobbs-v-history-part-one-english-common-law/
The word crime harbored important ambiguities as well. For medieval jurists and theologians the Latin “crimen” meant something more akin to sin. Medieval English lawyers used a different word for what we mean today by crime. They used the word “felony.” The difficulty this poses for Alito’s marshalling of the evidence is that there is no tradition, deeply rooted or otherwise, of prosecuting post-quickening abortions as felonies at common law in the medieval period. Penalties for women who terminated their pregnancies post-quickening are spelled out most clearly in medieval penitential manuals, where the offense is treated as a sin to be absolved through penance. And even here it is clear that the underlying sin is the fornication that resulted in pregnancy. Penances imposed for abortions pre-quickening were minor, as they were even for post-quickening abortions for poor women. Some manuals imposed no penance at all on poor women who aborted. More severe penances were reserved for abortions or for neonaticide motived by an effort to conceal fornication or adultery.
yunyun333
7d ago
But compare with abortion. It started off with the morning-after pill, then first-trimester abortion, and before you know it, low-decouplers are correctly intuiting that, if a mother killing a fetus at nine months shouldn't be a hanging crime, why should killing a child at five years be?
English common law allowed abortion before 'quickening' (16-20 weeks, when the fetus's movements can be felt) for centuries, following Church teaching that the fetus was not yet ensouled. So the debate has not been monotonic.
England, like several other commonwealth and European countries, has infanticide law defining a lesser charge for 'mentally disturbed' women who killed their <1 year old babies. This arose because juries were reluctant to hand out the death penalty to poor and desperate unmarried women.
https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/100-years-of-the-infanticide-act
This strikes many Americans as a grave injustice, but it doesn't seem to increase infanticide rates.
yunyun333
9d ago
If it only refuses to explain how to produce extra-strength smallpox 99.99% of the time, that's a problem.
yunyun333
12d ago
Sam Altman may be an amoral alien but most of the people who work there are not.
Why should it be easy to make an LLM act morally 100% of the time? Humans have morality and it's not that hard to get them to do amoral things. And LLMs are very different from human brains.
yunyun333
20d ago
What did you think unions protecting their employees meant? Vibes, papers, essays?
Anyways, an opinion writer winning in arbitration with a private company is hardly the most egregious example of union bullshit.
yunyun333
23d ago
People really hate big tech. Flock has the same problem, though it's much easier to put up a bunch of cameras than build a datacenter. That's all it is.
The anti flock case is more coherent because mass surveillance is a meaningful tradeoff. The water and power concerns are probably not as real.
yunyun333
24d ago
It's a shame, the rector had showed some backbone in standing by his hiring.
Did Judaism end after the Temple was destroyed (twice)? Did Christianity end after all Jesus's OG disciples were dead and buried ("some of you standing here will not taste death...")?
They're perfectly capable of creating new copes. In fact, they'll probably just steal the original: "God has punished us for our degeneracy."
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