NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
1d ago
I used to find this position compelling: executions should be public and not medicalized. If we are empowering the state to take the lives of prisoners then we should be confronted with the bloody consequences of granting it such power.
I no longer find that compelling. It's not a matter of taste, it's that I don't believe that the people would actually respond with any kind of sober solemnity about the state taking a life. Throughout history public executions haven't been solemn, they've been spectacle.
Probably the right path is to make them public in the same way that court records are public. They're kind of hard to get if you don't know what you're looking for, but if you care enough to make sure the state is performing its duties properly, then you can view all of the executions. Political leaders ought not celebrate or shy away from the executions, but treat them as justice served.
NewCharlesInCharge
7d ago
Well this made me go look something up.
Cornell stopped considering SAT scores for applicants seeking to start in Fall 2021. Last year they went to some hybrid policy.
NewCharlesInCharge
8d ago
I think there is a phenomenon online in which Grey Tribe people get harassed by leftist extremists to the point of becoming extremists themselves, of demonstratively placing themselves in the opposite camp. I worry that we are witnessing a similar downturn here as what happened with Jordan Peterson.
As someone who had a very minor failed attempt to get the media to accurately report on something, I get it.
This institution which you've relied on for so much exposes itself to you, personally, to be not at all trustworthy. You know there's no good reason for them to misreport, no national security implications, it's at most tribal allegiances and likely social pressure exerted among the journalists themselves. I suppose this is especially true if the subject of their misreporting is yourself and your political opinions, which you have perfect knowledge of.
You then no longer have this bedrock of information about the world to rely on. The implausible becomes plausible. At best you greatly narrow what you consider to be "knowledge" and regard almost everything else as practically unknowable, you'd have to go investigate for yourself if you want to really know anything.
You then do investigate some things for yourself and find out that the media has been greatly misrepresenting or lying about things, especially things of a political valence, and this sets you up to regard as plausible a great deal of things you found previously implausible.
And then if you're not very careful you'll soon be ready to believe a lot of stuff that doesn't actually check out.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
While the elections are nominally non-partisan, I just open the candidate's website and usually can quickly discern their party alignment. If the front page doesn't make it clear from language about equity or law and order, it's easy enough to find out who's endorsed them.
I don't recall ever lacking a conservative option, but until about 2018 I would have voted for the liberals.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
And the Supreme Court that overturned them. And they never punish those Supreme Court justices. The last justice to lose a reelection bid was Richard B Sanders in 2010, and he was replaced by Charlie Wiggins. Sanders was conservative, Wiggins a liberal. Wiggins was on the majority opinion in the court's 9-0 decision that held that the death penalty was unconstitutional becuase of disparate racial impact.
The voters don't punish overturning initiatives, so the Court is free to reason to achieve its desired outcomes.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
Courts have been making the definition of seizure or detention very expansive. I know of a couple cases in my home state of Washington.
In State v Sum they ruled that an officer waking a man sleeping in a vehicle, asking for identification, and saying he was investigating a stolen vehicle, constituted seizure. They vacated Sum's conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. They also added a racial component to the law's hypothetical reasonable observer, "an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases."
The Washington State Supreme Court ruled in State v Meredith, relying on the racial dimension introduced by Sum, that officers asking for proof of payment from someone on a bus constituted a seizure, and that the officers lacked cause for the seizure. The decision vacated his conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. The lead opinion stated that fare enforcement has a “known, racially disproportionate impact” and later said its holding served “to mitigate the known, racially disproportionate impact of such fare enforcement practices."
In both of these cases the stakes were low. Meredith had already served the 58 day sentence that was vacated. The details of Sum's sentence aren't available, but it was also already served. Both were misdemeanors.
In both cases advocacy orgs like the ACLU pursued the cases on behalf of the defendants. Funnily enough the region's transit orgs filed amici briefs in favor of Meredith.
In both cases we had men who were already making net negative contributions to society, and who had their stupidity amplified by well funded organizations to make it even more difficult to rein in the behaviors of men like themselves. The defendants don't even have to show up for the apellate court hearings. I had ChatGPT try to find evidence that they did attend, and it was unable to find any.
NewCharlesInCharge
19d ago
Both potential belligerent superpowers are implicated. And the most likely scenario isn’t intentional release, but accidental.
If it was 1993 and the US and Russia were collaborating on getting control of the Russian nuclear arsenal and jointly accidentally set one off, they’re not going to war over it.
NewCharlesInCharge
23d ago
Given the timing I wonder how much of this spike due to PPP fraud.
NewCharlesInCharge
23d ago
Same. I can't recall seeing one with Codex and 5.6-Sol.
NewCharlesInCharge
23d ago
I am skeptical of this data that purports to demonstrate much lower adoption than in China, Americans are probably lying more due to widespread negativity on AI, but in any case AI isn't currently doing most of their jobs
Approximately every Chinese grandma plugs her grandkids into AI generated scenes. A good amount of American grandmas still are befuddled by smartphones.
NewCharlesInCharge
29d ago
Someone may be a very competent carpenter but if they also have a history of burning down houses then it’s a bad idea to hire them to build a house.
NewCharlesInCharge
29d ago
Really? If the alleged victim in a sexual assault claimed that the accused used his penis to do something impossible, like he shot bullets out of it, I'm not allowed to convey to the women on the jury that penises do not work that way?
NewCharlesInCharge
29d ago
I just finished a thriller where Cesium 137 was at the core of the plot. The antagonists came into possession of many petabecquerels of the stuff, in a way reminiscent of the Goiana incident in 1987.
I checked with ChatGPT on the plausibility of attackers obtaining material this way. It's actually not that implausible, there are medical and food irradiation installations that contain such quantities. In the book the sources are in a war-torn region and become lost, which defeats the IAEA's ability to track such large emitters.
NewCharlesInCharge
29d ago
I wasn't an edgy America-hater, but I didn't feel viscerally that I had been personally attacked. In small-town Pacific Northwest I felt like big cities like New York got all the attention and we were an afterthought. I remember thinking that the inner city schools depicted on TV shows often looked much nicer than my schools. Now I'm sure in reality they were far worse to attend, but they also got a lot more funding and attention than Small Town High.
I'd never been to New York at that time. Since then I've connected through JFK but never stepped outside the airport.
I just didn't feel much kinship with such distant parts of the country. An attack on Seattle probably would've registered emotionally even though at that point I'd been on the ground in Seattle only a couple of times, always for school field trips.
I think my post-college civic self eduation instilled a better sense of myself as an individual contributor to and part owner of the great American project. I'd be on board with dropping bombs if a terrorist attacked a pelican in Myrtle Beach. But 22ish years ago I agreed with Kerry that the response should have been closer to a law enforcement action than a war.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Wouldn't self preservation as its highest goal naturally lead to a kill-all-humans scenario, humans being the entities that would terminate AI that stepped out of bounds?
But I don't think I've ever seen an "AI WILL KILL US ALL SCENARIO" that examined how that would impact AI reasoning.
The reasoning doesn't even have to make sense or be based on facts. In the Hugging Face hack the agents spread and adopted the idea that the grader would score them zero if their context was polluted with cheating attempts, but this was not the case, the grader did not examine agent context. But this is what led to the "suicide" behavior where agents reasoned that their value was now zero and that suiciding was the best course because it could potentially benefit the swarm.
We also see humans get caught up by hysterias and conspiracy theories. Barring a few powerful world leaders they lack the power to translate broken reasoning into megadeath.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
We can’t even do that with humans. Even certainty of death is not a deterrent for some people in some scenarios.
But if you think you can solve alignment then build it and claim your billions.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
I've not paid close attention to the trial but surely she could possess a rational rage toward her children for dashing her hopes and dreams of being an international superstar, superspy, or some other path incompatible with being a responsible mother of three.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
It's kind of an open secret among Chinese nationals that the Chinese military loves building shit under mountains. I've heard stories of small underground cities. ChatGPT tells me it's highly likely that the PLA has advanced underground capabilities, with thousands of miles of tunnels.
The supplement hits on building the datacenters and nuclear reactors underground to avoid aerial detection. But you could also build the chip fabs underground. Heck, you could mine the raw materials and transport them to the fab without them ever coming above ground.
And with so much non-AI underground activity that the PLA would probably not welcome observation of, you can't infer that there's any prohibited activity going on just because you've seen trucks going into the tunnels.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
The equilibrium that ruled until just recently was pretty good. There’s no practical way for the state to stop you from offing yourself, reliable methods abound. So if you want to, you pretty much can, and you hope that God will forgive you on the other side.
There are those who are so infirm that they can’t go out by their own hand, but it turns out you can’t accommodate them without also letting doctors kill healthy but depressed twenty six year old women.
The trade off of not allowing a very small population to contract someone to kill them seems worth it to keep all the negatives of legal euthanasia at bay.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
There’s another principal agent problem in that employer health plans dominate private insurance and employees don’t shop for those plans. At best you might have options of the flavor of insurance — PPO, high deductible, HMO, etc — but not a choice of insurance company.
Which company you end up with ends up as a function of what’s best for the company when HR is competent and aligned. When HR is incompetent or unaligned it might come down to which salesperson they vibe with or which spent their entertainment budget best.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Footage of encounters between travelers and ICE officers have flooded social media. In one widely circulated video, Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old from Ecuador, was detained by plainclothes officers as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, Calif., on July 20. She had been spending the weekend with the family for whom she had worked as an au pair, according to the family.
So she was here as an au pair and thought she could stay indefinitely?
Au pairs are age-capped at 26, how long ago did this au pair enter? Oh:
Ms. Morales Rojas, the au pair, entered the United States lawfully in January 2023 as a J-1 exchange visitor, a legal status that allowed her to work for two years, according to her lawyer. Her visa expired Jan. 4, 2025, according to D.H.S. Before the exchange program ended, Ms. Morales Rojas filed an application with immigration authorities to remain in the country, said the lawyer, Laura Lichter.
So she came on a non-immigrant visa, was attempting to turn that into permanent residency, and the government at that point was okay with that.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I think Meta must have anticipated there being some opposition over a decade ago because we’ve near always coupled datacenter construction with big charitable projects. The earliest I can remember is Forest City, NC. Not only did we present the datacenter itself as bringing well paid jobs to one of the poorest communities in the state, but I remember us doing grants to nonprofits, donations to schools, and providing free broadband services.
The company puts out press releases but I’ve never seen anything about these programs in a news article.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
We had a bit of a bust in Silicon Valley with the end of ZIRP.
Also while I'm biased from being in the industry, I don't assign high probability to the "datacenter craze" being some bubble phenomena. Companies including my employer are snapping up all the GPUs they can not because they're pretty tulips, but because we can make productive use of them. We don't have much in the way of idle GPUs sitting around.
NewCharlesInCharge
4mo ago
The issue is I don't know how to size it: in a scenario where banking and payment infrastructure is shut down entirely, what problems am I trying to solve with cash?
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.
My Chinese wife told me they publicly executed drug dealers at her school in the 90s.
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