jMyles

I feel like I'm asking for peace on earth.

FWIW, this is not an unreasonable ask either.

I get that artists aren't paid enough, but it's better than the $0 they get from piracy.

No it's not. We'd _much_ rather you steal our music if it means we are part of a free, permissionless, seeking-to-be-comprehensive library of the traditions of humankind.

We don't give a fuck about whether you get our music according to the prescribed notions of some particular state or corporation.

I'm a bluegrasser, so maybe my lens is pretty shifted (given that our tradition is one of passing on copyright-unencumbered tunes from time immemorial). But this view is very widespead - essentially universal - in bluegrass. There's a reason that every IBMA and bluegrass grammy has gone to a drm-free record the past bunch of years.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

Surely it's strange to use the term "long covid" to describe the effects of only one covid, when at least four others have been circulating for decades or more and have been causing similar effects?

It's possible.

I think a darker possibility also looms: that there is ongoing astroturfing across the internet in defense of what turned out to be ludicrous policies.

In real life, there seem to be so few people who stand by lockdowns in the face of all the data that's now available. Vanishingly few serious epidemiologists continue to contend that lockdowns were helpful. All five of the big five medical schools have published multiple papers concluding that lockdowns were more harmful than helpful.

So what, are these people just chronically online and uninformed? I mean, we're on HN, where there's typically a more informed and data-driven conversation. What makes this topic different?

...there have been dozens and dozens of published papers and now a whole conference on this topic. If you seriously haven't considered (let alone heard about) this, a simple google scholar search could have remedied this in the time it took you to comment that you "are not sure".

Here's a talk from the Collateral Global conference (there are several other talks that address the intersection of labor, lockdowns, and profit motives): https://collateralglobal.org/article/panel-2-the-impact-of-c...

Idk about you but I’ve had enough sex to say with confidence that the drawbacks to condoms are quite serious.

Heh well of course I don't deny that there's a dramatic decrease in pleasure. But I don't think that's on the same order as the mortality / morbidity that comes from a mishandled pandemic.

If only by “measurable” you set a bar to mean that we would require a parallel universe where no lockdowns were in place, especially in the cold-weather, low sunlight climates.

Not at all - there are plenty enough data to draw solid conclusions, as many reputable scientists have. And while it's true that many places in the world that eschewed lockdowns were tropical and have less developed economies, there was also a wide variety of policies in place in temperate regions, from the many parts of the USA which closed schools for a year, to the many more moderate policies in Europe, to Sweden, which had no lockdown at all.

I believe the data available are sufficient to draw a conclusion, and I think it's beyond dispute that, if you do find the data to be sufficient, the only plausible conclusion is that lockdowns were associated with increased incidence of adverse outcomes, with no measurable benefit.

Not only did lockdowns not prevent spread of the virus, but they increased spread between generations within households, which in turn was a direct cause of morbidity and mortality.

I understand if the argument is about civic duty or something, but on the actual data, I just don't think there's remaining room for reasonable dispute. It's clear.

Sure, but when data did become available (eg, the diamond princess dataset), most reasonable scientists changed their minds. The policies however did not change, and instead continued down a non-evidentiary path.

The preventative effects of condoms are impressive, while the drawbacks (both first- and second-order) are relatively small.

Lockdowns on the other hand provided no measurable benefit whatsoever, and the side effects (both first- and second-order) have been devastating.

This is an unserious comparison.

Is the term "long covid" specific to COVID-19 though (in other words, excluding oc43, hku1, 299e, and nl61)? Or does it mean "long coronavirus disease", including all covids?

I see it being used both ways.

The evidence suggests you are incorrect; parts of the world without lockdowns did not observe increased adverse outcomes.

I thought this was 100% settled at this point?

In constitutional / jurisdictional / legal terms, perhaps not.

In forming consensus about the philosophical underpinnings of the rights we have with respect to the emerging internet? I think so.

Is there a first amendment implication? Second? Both?

We can set some rasterization floor, such as like 3 minutes or something, and live with that.

Correcting for a 3-minute offset every few millenia seems easier than trying to understand all this minutia about wobble and aquifer management and whatever else goes into a leap second.

Oh I wish I was home, mama

where the bluegrass grows

where the right to repair

is made plain!

What a time for Poe's law.

This doesn't seem at all unlikely to me. I think we sometimes forget the ease (in terms of scale and cost) of standing up a massive astroturfing campaign.

That said, I don't think this particular comment has the flavor, tone, or message I'd expect, and it does seem to be a genuine HN poster.

So you're against any sort of intellectual property?

I observe that the universe in which I live doesn't seem to include the concept of intellectual property, and that there is quite a lot of misery and confusion that arises from efforts to shoehorn it in.

Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission.

All this silliness to create a huge complicated regime to pretend that these things are "property" in the same sense as your underwear is just so obviously childish, incoherent, and inconsistent with reality.

It's just a really elaborate gown purported to be worn by the manifestly naked emperor.

...and none does. You can grow and sell any peach you want; the tree has no sense of the childish tantrums of the state over its bounty.

This is a strong and obvious indications that the laws and statues as presented by the state are not in fact the actual underlying modes under which society operates.

Fortunately, we don't need a policy solution or to convince already-bought-and-paid-for-lawmakers to side with justice over profits.

Solutions for liberating media of all kinds, from P2P file sharing to DRM-stripping, have roundly and soundly outpaced all this other corporate knowledge control nonsense at every turn since the invention of the printing press.

All we need to do is make the simple choice to stop recognizing ownership of ideas (and thus, bytes) as a conceptually coherent phenomenon, and carry on.

I'm a full-time professional bluegrass musician, and like most of my peers, I release all of my material DRM-free. I invite you to get my new record from IPFS or Bit Torrent, and to pin/seed/encourage your friends to steal it also:

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Release:QmUWtV7fG1K9pM5TQSf5c38v...

Of course you don't have a right to murder anyone.

If someone is pointing a gun at you, I don't think the matter of whether you can justly defend yourself turns on who their employer is. The idea that you have to pause and figure out, "Hmmm, does this person collect a paycheck from an entity that claims to be a sovereign state?" is the ludicrous part, to me.

As I say, I hate that they did this, and that they shot this dude. He didn't deserve that. It sucks all around. But their underlying impetus - to disrupt a violent criminal organization which has proved difficult to reign in - is indeed something we need to figure a peaceful solution to, and it's not obvious what that is.

I don't approve of the violence apparently planned and carried out by these people, even though their cause was seemingly just.

However, we can't afford to let the government's position dictate the particulars of all the facts here.

The theory that the fireworks were lit to "bring out first responders" is just that - a theory, from the government's lawyers.

The undisputed facts are that these people were working to disrupt an ICE facility, which is to say a facility of a lawless, criminal organization which, given its placement entirely outside any constitutional limitations, renders it, at least at a moral/ethical layer, ineligible for any sort of civic protections of its property or activities. A third party, who was employed by a police department, then aimed a firearm at these people, and one of them fired, in apparent self-defense at this person who was training a firearm on them. Again, I hate that they shot this dude who was just going his job. But it's certainly not tantamount to attempting a premeditated mruder.

All of this 'moving zines' business is downstream of this basic fact pattern. I'm not willing to buy the government's advocacy that this was a crime to society in the first place, so I certainly don't have any ruffled feathers about moving zines.

When the state brings its lawless armed kidnappers to heel and follows its own rules with the unrelenting strictness befitting a nation of laws and not of men, then we can talk about whether those same laws can be applied to persons attempting to disrupt its activities.

Being aware that he was moving the zines to obstruct a federal felony investigation is surely relevant. Intent is an important aspect of crime.

...maybe to the so-called Department of Justice, but not in any moral sense.

If their wallet address is available on the internet, that's an easily solved problem.

It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed.

Seems like we're already in the middle of this phase, but rather than dying down, the 'reports' have just gotten more noisy and obtuse, making it more difficult to establish the actual degree of threat / attack vector.

I don't think research papers normally come with a simple portable way for others to rerun the calculations.

...which, for situations where a readable/narrated test suite is entirely possible, is awful.

Your extreme example of a policy regarding distribution of heroin is far from perfect, but also far better than prohibition, which has visited upon the world more death, disease, crime, and cartel enrichment than perhaps any other policy in history.

But surely we can do better than either of these extremes.

Well, taking the example in the article about a formal verification to determine whether a regex is for a collection of phone numbers or countries, and if a country is specified as "America", to formally verify whether that means North America or all Americas including the Caribbean:

A regex which "properly" determines this in a witness/formal verification model is subject to the same sorts of political distinctions and nuances, right down to subjective interpretation of which nation-states are legitimate, etc, that participation in warfare/predation/injustice are.

If the USA says that Cuba is part of the USA, and the rest of the Western Hemisphere says it's not, then the formal verification is necessarily matching the prompt intention to a social and political milieu, which, while subjective, is still cognizable and subject to introspection and, in some cases, a type of consensus.

It seems similarly possible to formally verify that results do or do not meet similar subjective-but-cognizable criteria: does the result trigger engagement of weapons systems? Does it they implicate borders in a way that diminishes the sovereignty of a people? (which, like the regex example, have subjective but cognizable nuances)? Does the result serve to enrich (a perhaps pre-supplied) list of criminals/cartels/contractors/war profiteers? All of these seem like similar problems to the regex example.

I don't disagree with your high-level contention that powerful dual-use technology can always cut through the good and evil in each of us. But I think that's precisely the point of searching for formally-verifiable spec-elucidation. If it were obvious from the outset whether or not a particular word represents the same of a nation-state widely regarded as sovereign, or whether an action was or was not an act of war, then we'd not need AI (let alone formal verification of a prompt-result match) in the first place.

The author addresses this point as well:

This is also why we do not believe PICK becomes less useful as models improve. Better models do not make user intent more articulate — asked for “a regex matching countries of North America”, a more capable model still cannot tell you whether you want the Caribbean included, or where you want to stop heading south. Better models produce better candidates, faster — which shifts user effort precisely toward the work PICK is built to support.

This is also why PICK can usefully fail. Sometimes none of the model’s candidates is right, and PICK ends with zero survivors. Under the spec-elucidation reading, that outcome means: the commitments you made through classification could not be satisfied by anything the model produced. Better to know than to ship the regex anyway.

Zooming out (but only a little) from the impetus to formalize a commitment to a particular class of result candidate (what the author here is calling "spec elucidation"), we can also imagine this same evolution of concerns being applied in order to cause what we currently term "AI safety" into something more like "AI ethics".

For example, if we can elucidate the specifications for things like peace and justice to ensure that the class of results is formally verified as non-participation in war (or perhaps, further in the future, non-participation in state activities whatsoever), we may be able to throw cold water on all the vitriolic arguments about model capabilities and which need to be banned or delayed lest we accelerate the apocalypse (or whatever is actually on the mind of the ban-this-model constituency).

I like how the author ends tersely with:

If you have a formal language with the closure properties above — we suspect you would be surprised how many do — we would very much like to hear from you.

That's certainly not me, but I bet it's true that it's somebody.