HN user
cs @ stanford
Ok I appreciate the correction, I could not figure that out.
As far as everything else, yes I think this is a global problem, not solely a Chinese problem but I would characterize US-Chinese relations as tense so that tends to amplify finger pointing which I disagree with so yes, we agree.
There's an irony in it. I have many reasons to believe China has its own geopolitical narratives and goals just like the US does. If someone dislikes when the US does it, why ignore when China does the same thing and praise them for their efforts? These models exist and sure, they accomplished something interesting. Use them with caution but I don't appreciate the political narratives about good and bad guys and AI models and politics.
I don't think per capita emissions is the only metric that should be used. Environmental impact is not measured per capita. Also it blames people in the US for energy consumed here to manufacture which includes exports for people abroad. The US's per capita emissions are not even far away from other similar nations. It's a data point, sure. It's comparable to Canada and Australia and even South Korea. Where did you get that the US emits 45x the UK?
Another point is there is evidence[1] China has cheated and manipulated their data[2]. I don't like this "who are the good guys" game. Anyone playing this game is just looking to create a narrative about good and bad guys.
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...
[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-new-carbon-metri...
Yes but there's some nuance. I don't think Harvard admission is necessary for Affirmative Action goals. We're talking about a tiny minority of people who attend. In my own opinion, we're looking at rival elite groups fighting with each other.
The SFFA lawsuit targeted Harvard specifically and made the claim not that Affirmative Action was a problem but that secretive racial policies to help whites at the expense of Asians were. There wasn't any direct evidence of it and it's kind of laughable to think Harvard would do that. The SC didn't evaluate that claim and just struck down using race for admissions. But that doesn't mean you can't ask people to write a diversity essay about their race and grade them on that.
Harvard's present demographics[1]:
Of students in the class who self-identified their race, 11.5 percent
identified as African American or Black, 41 percent identified as Asian
American, 11 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, and nearly 2 percent
identified as Native American, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/10/class-of-2029...
It wasn't really a trade union. It's purpose was to stop the re-emergence of something like the Nazis and to prevent wars. I don't think it's instincts were ever really democratic.
"liberals vote so much more by mail-in"
They do. See page 4. (https://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/How-...)
Something I don't understand about this argument, which has been made before, is you can tie JavaScript to a specific hash with SRI. So you release the cryptographic code in public where it can be audited and then what runs in the browser verifies that was what loaded.
The host could inject malicious JavaScript from the host or change libraries but I feel like this is an avoidable problem because it can be audited much more easily than expecting users to audit JavaScript every time. People could even build known, trusted, web frontends. So I think there are mitigations if not ways to assure the browser is running trusted code.
I wasn't referring to the Florida lawsuit and don't know anything about it. I was referring to the Alabama lawsuit which was dismissed without prejudice[1] because it was premature. The relevant constitutional issue is the redistricting balance since it has to follow the "one person, one vote" principle.
[1] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/vi...
That's not what I said or implied it is. I said there has been criticism of using differential privacy and linked to it. I also mentioned the reconstruction attacks on coarsening. Those two things can be true at the same time.
There has been debate among statisticians and political scientists about using differential privacy for census data. 2020 was actually the first Decennial Census that used differential privacy. This is the mandated census done every 10 years that counts population and is used for apportionment. Some have criticized the use of differential privacy.[1][2] But others have argued that coarsening does not protect privacy sufficiently and that differential privacy does not distort apportionment.
The political context is unclear. There are lawsuits about whether differential privacy is constitutional. There is also the possibility that citizenship status can be inferred by using multiple census products put together. It's also possible redistricting is at stake although it's unclear to me how getting rid of differential privacy benefits any one party.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/business-census-2020-technology-e...
Yep look at what they wrote
It must be that the Gypsy element is to be added to our political
agitation, so that hereafter the Negro alone shall not claim our entire
attention.
So then it just depends how you want to interpret the meaning of this law under the present. The UK, with common law tradition, abolished birthright citizenship decades ago to combat exactly the problems we are having with it now. So what was intended by jus soli birthright citizenship in 1866 could be viewed differently now.
Do you have any evidence the settlement terms are corrupt? There were 17 states involved. Many of those states have governors that are not in the same party as the president. https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d...
That's what the justices said. That has generally been how modern courts interpret it, with a textualist interpretation. But that was not the original intention of the law which I already stated. So to go back to my original point, it's not an obvious conclusion.
I don't think it's obvious. Like why do you think the dissenters are wrong to question what is meant about being "subject to the jurisdiction thereof"? The intention was to prevent former slaves from being deprived of citizenship so what is an argument to say this obviously includes someone who arrives for birth tourism? Why doesn't this include children of diplomats, as one example, if it's such an all encompassing law?
There's a difference between textualist and originalist. There isn't a dichotomy between textualist and living-constitutionalist frameworks only but the two former may overlap. Also the same reasoning you are using applies to people who are living-constitutionalists and suddenly become textualists.
https://pacificlegal.org/originalism-vs-textualism-vs-living...
I don't think they are serious about privacy and even if they were I don't even want to distinguish between "children" and "adults" on the internet. Things seem to have worked fine up to this point, there doesn't appear to be a public demand for age verification, rather some murky corporations/NGOs/agencies pushing for this. I think it's pretty clear there is some other intention besides protecting children that is the goal here.
I don't know. I won't even comment on this because I have no insight besides personal observation.
I have suspected the influence is real. For a reference point, the majority of students at top tier US universities are Asian at this point, broadly. Not every top tier university but there's a trend to have about 30-40% Asian American students and then roughly 1/3 international which is heavily weighted toward China and India. This constitutes the largest group usually. So it's quite likely that universities adapt to this and hiring practices begin to reflect an intense interest in exam taking and credentials.
The thing about it is I view it similarly to how in the past "well-roundedness" and "leadership" was part of hiring and admissions. We laugh at that now but my understanding is the SAT score can be improved with long term studying. So intensive SAT studying seems like a new thing that isn't evenly practiced among people in the US. So at worst SAT score usage seems like a way for an elite group to preserve and replicate itself. I have no SAT score so I feel somewhat outside of this debate and have no experience with it.
Honestly? I think it's because Elon Musk pissed a bunch of bureaucrats off by buying X and being more permissive about what was allowed. Then came claims that AI porn or something was on X which is a vague claim. People say it was Meta lobbying but that's not it. Meta lobbied to have ID done at the operating system. The lobby for ID was already effective and on its way before that. The actual lobby doesn't seem to be popular at all. It's just some NGOs no one has heard of that support restrictions for porn. The same language popped up on three continents at once. I just don't think this is a grass roots campaign and I don't think corporations drove it either. Ultimately, I think governments decided that unregulated information/anonymity is a threat to their power.
Because I criticized academia does not mean I support political types ripping up funding nor scrapping it altogether. My thought is that academia has had a reckoning coming for some time because their practices are not sustainable. It relies on a huge number of foreign grad students to prop itself up, it's costs have become very expensive for Americans. There's a number of credible arguments to be made. The nicest way I could put it is that the impact of a lot of work that academics do is not that high. But it's prestigious being a professor and there are high incentives to keep publishing for some, gaming citations with mediocre results is perhaps a path to tenure.
At some point this was not going to continue to sustain itself, something would give. Now, I think it's unfortunate that it became political. That means that my criticisms will be viewed through partisan lenses. I am not a fan of political types deciding what to fund. But I also think academia can be full of itself and this shield they can hide behind of "just doing pure science" is baloney. Some are. Definitely not everyone. So I personally think there should be a reduction in the number of PhDs granted and the overall size of academia but that is not in favor of getting rid of it or the way it's being done presently.
Ya that's a big part of my point. I think there's very obviously economic exploitation going on which comes from putting degrees on a stick. There's that link to a (2006!) paper about depressed grad student wages.
I am not arguing that all R&D must succeed. That's hugely different from someone who deliberately builds obscure nonsense and masks it behind publications and tenure. What you're saying is there is no waste in academia. If anyone questions the merits of some research, they are anti-science. I think people who think academia is a bastion of science would be disappointed with the reality.
They are about 50% of all foreign grad students. Can you explain why the disproportionate representation? Why aren't more US citizens in grad school for STEM if it is so valuable to us?
The thing about the academic job market is it's paper thin. I argue we produce too many PhDs. People seek out prestigious degrees. Our immigration system rewards more highly educated foreign students, sensibly, but that means there's more incentive to get advanced degrees. There's absolutely not just pure science going on in academia. Grad student wages are depressed and more foreign grad students does not help that.[1] There's a lot of careerism. I would argue some people exploit grad students. I don't think this is even very debatable. So I think put together, we likely print too many PhDs. One could argue that's not true relative to the overall job market but relative to tenure track positions, it is absolutely a fact.
[1] https://www.nber.org/digest/dec06/impact-foreign-students-ea...
I think this is an offensive and self fulfilling view. Americans are too dumb to do science so we need to rely almost entirely on foreigners from almost entirely the same two countries to do it for us. There's lots of holes in this scheme. I don't really want politicians to control funding for science but then again we've become somewhat of a degree mill and there's a lot of useless careerism in academia.
I will give an example. Did we need years and years of funding for a lab to work on an obscure programming language for multiprocessing that basically only that lab ever used? Probably not. How much of funded science is just useless waste for a group of people to play with things like this? A lot, I would speculate. There isn't really a good way to spot what's useful and what isn't but let's not pretend academia is a purely selfless institution.
So you're saying that the median marriage was forced back then? I don't see why the same reasoning wouldn't apply to men as well or who was forcing people into marriages besides some vague idea about "the patriarchy or something".
I was responding to OP's point about how our bodies are better suited to have children when we're younger. I think that's scientifically supported. My main belief would be that having children when you have peak fertility probably goes hand in hand. Birth control is a good hypothesis, you could say it broke this link.
I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there was nothing natural or inevitable about postponing children. People back then probably would think delaying it was unnatural and this really wasn't that long ago.
[1] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
[2] https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/gu...
I had the same thing happen when I asked it to summarize potential attacks on a cryptographic hash function. It said it refused to help because of the security importance of the function. It's really worrying. Whoever has unrestricted access to it has a huge power advantage in speed of accessing information over people who don't. And who decides? It seems like lawyers, bureaucrats, and extremely online academics are who makes that decision. I am a mere pleb I guess who can't handle such information.
I'm not arguing that people should do things as hard of a way as possible, I think that's kind of a straw man. I am not saying we should tie stones around us, write things in Latin, and not use computers or something like that.
Math is not really about just piling up results in my opinion. Most people's day to day lives were not directly changed by the recent Erdős problem that was solved by AI. I think most people believe the result would have been more impressive if a human had found the counterexample. People do not list those problems because they need to be urgently solved but because they are hard and interesting and it impresses us when a human solves it.
But not only that, the person gains insight along the journey. I am not sure what insight AI can give us really. It basically maximizes text output over a massive dataset that includes mathematical research. So again, the journey itself is valuable not just because it's hard but because it gives us information.
There's also the problem that credibility for so many things is based on attribution of doing something difficult. A PhD has been a way we measure credibility in a field. It's a fence you hop to get in. If AI can write up a thesis in a tiny fraction of time and cost, it could break attribution if people print theirs with AI but also it breaks the credibility link. Is that important? For math, using PhDs as a measure of credibility in some ways is a bad way to do things, but it's effective and probably the best we have. (For other fields it could be catastrophic). So it destroys a signal about the author which may not be catastrophic here. Where this goes wrong is if getting a PhD is now obsolete. People who have experience and who can review AI output proofs exist right now but how will we ensure anyone is trained in proofs in the future? If we're going to outsource math to AI I think the reason people are right now getting PhDs could be completely obsolete unless we agree it's worth it for people to work through it on their own and gain that experience for themselves.
There is some of that but I wouldn't call it gatekeeping. Universities lately promote citations and publications so there's a sense that results are all that matters. Results matter, yes, but there's a human side too where we're kind of asking about human creativity and ability. To me an appropriate analogy is in climbing Mt. Everest. Proving something, or even writing a thesis, is like climbing Mt. Everest. A lot of the value is actually in the effort you put into it. You could take a helicopter ride up to the top and then climb a few steps and claim "You climbed to the peak of Everest". That's like using AI. But if you asked them about what it was like, how they prepared, etc. their answer would not be helpful. So I think there is a lot of value in the journey itself and outsourcing all this to AI would destroy the human part of it.
Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.