gentoo

So the solution is to have less ladies in charge? Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?

I think the answer for most people is one of "I wasn't dealt the right hand of cards by fate" and/or "I don't want to spend my life acting like a sociopath and exploiting others for a small chance at great wealth."

Thank you for illustrating another feature of the billionaires' defensive bubble: anyone who dares criticize them from a position of lesser wealth is just "jealous" and their criticism is presumptively invalid.

The human faces of the machine are our only hope. The alternative is, in the short term, a machine face of the machine, whom you can't argue with and who will summarily deny your benefits with no chance of appeal. In the long term, the alternative is no machine at all.

The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.

Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.

See, e.g., the case studies in https://virginia-eubanks.com/automating-inequality/.

Sure, the state has always had theoretical power to do this, but when was the last time something remotely like this actually happened?

The whole reason this is a story is that the government won't just refuse to contract, it will put the equivalent of soft sanctions on the company because Anthropic refuses to contract.

The "disparate impact" test applies mainly in civil rights act litigation, and it's extremely hard to make a case under that theory. It's a three-part test, and showing that a particular policy has a disparate impact on one race is just the first hurdle.

You also have to prove that the party acted with malice: either the policy exists for explicitly racist reasons, or the race-neutral justification is pretextual. If you can do that, you _also_ have to prove that there is a less-discriminatory alternative policy that achieves the same goal.

see, e.g., https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7#C'

It is definitely not de facto illegal to have a racially lopsided student body -- the school might be asked to justify the specific policy or practice that led to that outcome on race-neutral grounds, but saying "GPA and test scores" would be more than enough.

I love this article because I think this is the conversation we should be having. Lots of advertising is harmful, some of it is useful on balance, and some of it is too hard to ban without infringing on other desirable speech. But I do think we should be critically thinking about all advertising and outlawing certain flavors of it.

Billboards let landlords skim extra money by making the public space significantly more hostile to everyone else. Fuck em.

His great transgression, according to Berlin, was to say aloud what everyone knows but no one will admit: multiple ideals cannot be simultaneously attained. We can’t have everything good all at once.

Everyone will admit this. No one honestly believes all virtues are equally and simultaneously attainable. At any given time, certain things must be prioritized.

But some of us believe that it's not a zero-sum game; that "human nature" is not set in stone, and that it is a worthy project to try and engineer conditions which allow more of humanity's virtues to flourish. Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding. He also seems to believe that it's correct to trade individual prosperity for state power and glory.

also, the person who owns the land is often liable for what happens on it, unless the land is owned by the public (a la BLM land).

I think it's that both were websites that catapulted you into truly random, non-targeted interactions -- Omegle with a random person, StumbleUpon with a random site.

how about we build a robust social safety net so that stealing less than $1000 worth of stuff is not the best way to survive

the distinction is real in the model of the turing machine, and it's close to real in many of the machines and programs we've built so far. It's not real in nature, in brains. Code is data and vice versa. A memory is a program that runs and reinforces itself.

Except, now I sell my house. And I come to you and tell you that I'm homeless. Are you going to give me permanent, free housing too?

yes. it probably won't be as nice as something you, a wealthy person, could afford to buy, and it probably won't be exactly where you want to live, but everyone could be guaranteed safe and stable housing without complicated means testing.

you've just recreated Section 8.

Section 8 disqualifies people for all kinds of "character" issues associated with drug use, mental illness, etc. That's a big reason there are so many homeless on the street. I am against means testing, but even that system could be a lot better than it is now.

they should stop spending it on bullshit bandaid solutions and just give people permanent housing. there are a lot of countervailing forces that make that difficult, but conceptually the solution is pretty simple.

advertisers, mostly, displacing the print media who used to do that

if your hate speech filter hits one party harder than the other, that doesn't necessarily mean it is broken

it's funny how whenever a big company does something bad that's actually an example of how socialism is bad

openAI is in the business of releasing impressive tech demos, Google is in the business of providing search results. I would believe that Google is further along towards creating something useful, but they still don't have anything that's better than their existing search product.

good. police should share less data across state lines unless they have very good reason.

all the engineers at an early stage company are "gambling" with exactly the same stakes as the founder. If they fail, they're all out of a job. The founder risks nothing more than that: he's gambling with other people's money. Why should one of those people reap generational wealth while everyone else ends up in the upper-middle class?

I don't think anything about high-performance GPT models is standard, since they are only a couple years old and only a handful of organizations have developed them

what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction

there is a massive difference between a company selling a subscription service and the government using public money to provide free access to everyone with no strings attached

Law enforcement and private surveillance companies are currently investing a ton of effort into using public blockchains (which is most of them) to unmask participants in crypto transactions. At the same time, they're putting more pressure on Coinbase and friends to do aggressive KYC, and Congress keeps considering bills that would effectively outlaw anonymous crypto purchases. It's not going to be the safest way to collect ransoms for long, if it even is today.

Immoral? Debatable.

What is the argument that what they're doing is moral? How is anything about tax avoidance ethical?

I was responding to

The state shouldn't have a say in who gets a job at a private (non owned by state) company.

that's exactly what the Civil Rights Act does. The state has been telling you how you are allowed to make hiring decisions for a while now.

edit:

And here's Strom Thurmond on the Civil Rights Act:

"This bill would take away the rights of individuals and give to government the power to decide who is to be hired, fired and promoted in private businesses."

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/debate-on-the-c...

I'm not sure whether I agree with the CA policy. But this argument against it is extremely unconvincing. It's almost word-for-word what segregationists argued against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

e.g. https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/06/barry-goldwater-decla...

"The two portion so this bill to which I have constantly and consistently voiced objections, and which are of such overriding significance that they are determinative of my vote on the entire measure, are those which would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action in the area of so-called "public accommodations" and in the area of employment--to be precise, Titles II and VII of the bill. I find no constitutional basis for the exercise of Federal regulatory authority in either of these areas; and I believe the attempted usurpation of such power to be a grave threat to the very essence of our basic system of government..."

No, they become the gatekeeper for all adblock features. "low-level" is a meaningless qualifier here.

And if new api features are being requested by adblockers, who is really innovating?

Right now, adblock developers are speaking out, in droves, requesting that they don't remove the API features Chrome already has, and Google is saying "nah."

They are wiping out the current diversity of ad-blocking techniques and saying "This is the way you can build an ad-blocker now." There is also the obvious conflict of interest that many of the ads in question are served by Google in the first place.

It affects every internet-connected device purchased by the federal government. Since states usually handle their own voting, I don't think this applies.