paulsutter

Could this somehow be a scissor statement? This is simple logic, there is no motivation here.

HYPOTHETICALLY let's say your uncle has an 80% chance of having cancer. Do you say that he has cancer? Or would you say it's likely that he has cancer?

"Trump's pathetic attempt at saber rattling" is the truest and fairest statement on the whole affair that I can possibly muster. Which is nothing like threatening to invade. Hilarious and sad, but not frightening.

Email me we could even discuss live! sutter at gmail

Reasonable and true statements:

- "He hinted at use of force" (he did!)

- "I think he's implying the use of force" (you own your thoughts!)

Problematic statements:

- "He IS implying use of force!" is actually just a guess, even if (let's say) it's 80% likely to be true. It's still a guess. It's not something you know.

- "HE THREATENED TO USE FORCE!" you've just promoted your guess into yelling fire in a crowded theater because you're a troll

None of this reasoning applies if you're a cat. For a cat, words and sentences just register as an emotional valence, with no comprehension of what it means to distinguish fact from inference.

If you are a cat, I apologize for misapprehending your lived experience.

The most important observation is that open source matches their business model, which is to provide fine tuning services for enterprises, etc.

That what makes this a (potentially) safer model to build on top of

The hard way was tariffs, you know that.

Now you’re saying he didn’t actually make a threat, but he implied one?

Which means you’re assuming his intent to be whatever makes for the most lurid headline.

Funny that these professional journalists didn’t think to ask to clarify such a monumental possibility. Or maybe the ambiguity was what they wanted all along. And apparently people (such as yourself) just eat it up

It’s not a threat, and yes it’s atrocious statesmanship.

Did he hint at the use of the military? YES

Was that offensive on both sides of the atlantic, inside and outside of diplomatic circles? YES

Did he actually threaten to use the military? NO

Neither his poor statesmanship nor his lack of character change the meaning of the words, I can’t understand why you keep bringing that in.

Yes, he definitely refused to rule out use of military force!

But that really and truly is not a threat to use military force.

Consider the following hypothetical:

- * IF * the questioner had followed up with, "Are you threatening to use military force?" and

- * IF * Trump answered "of course not"....

Would that be a contradiction? Not at all! Because his first statement wasn't a threat.

This is literally strategic ambiguity combined with bad statesmanship. But if you look up any and every time he has been asked whether he would rule out the use of military force, I would expect that in every case he declined to rule it out. Of course he's a buffoon, so he might not have adhered to that correctly.

I agree that Trump is a terrible statesman! Also a buffoon, cad, lout, charlatan, and swindler.

But apparently he never threatened to invade Greenland (assuming thats the best evidence you have)

I'm a member of the grey tribe, and very disappointed with "both" factions right now.

With AI there will always be people who learn more, faster using AI. And there will be people who use AI to avoid learning. When moving abroad, I hope folks will do the former (and the latter as tourists).

When I move back to Japan I'll wear something like Even Realities glasses, and when unknown vocabulary gets used, display that. Personally I think this will help me learn better than before. But let's wait and see!

I'm very hopeful about learning-acceleration tools. Just think what will be possible with Neuralink.

On first reading I assumed you meant the physical laborers would have the stronger social network, and the wealthy would be more isolated (true in my experience). But you may have meant just the opposite!

In fact it's two separate questions because it can go both ways, heavily.

Interesting food for thought, thanks for posting.

From the article:

The new year was only three weeks old and President Trump, after removing Venezuela’s autocratic strongman, had briefly threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark.

Did Trump threaten to seize Greenland? The WSJ links to an article with the quotes below. The quotes reflect sheer buffoonery (as expected), but so far I haven't seen the threat to seize Greenland.

This seems to be the consensus, but its not clear to me that it happened.

From the linked article:

During an hourlong speech at the World Economic Forum, the U.S. president said he wouldn’t deploy the military to take control of Greenland.

It was a stark shift in tone for Trump, who just days earlier had declined to rule out using the military to secure ownership of Greenland and posted an image online of the territory with an American flag plastered across it.

“I don’t have to use force,” he said. “I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”

“We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” Trump said of his desire to acquire Greenland from Denmark. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.”

The right way to age-restrict is for parents to configure certain devices as kids devices, and then it would be easy for any service to know if they are communicating with one of those devices.

This gives parents control, and honestly would work great.

Between $5-10T of the US economy is subject to export controls. Nobody disputes that Mythos is dual-use technology, which means it has been export controlled since the day it was created.

Companies are responsible for demonstrating criteria to export (for example) a nerfed version (Fable) of an export controlled item (Mythos)

Nothing here is novel, unusual, capricious, or … fascisistic.

Interesting trivia: 90% of people don’t know the definition of decimate

While extreme cases are the easiest to imagine, in real life the plaintiff almost always argues to pierce the veil and the defendant always argues the opposite, and both sides earnestly believe that they are right.

One approach is for parents to establish certain devices as “under 18” (or 16 or 13), leaving it up to the judgment of parents.

Human drivers are killing people, not the cars.

Weirdly NYC just blocked Waymo again.

Note to Europeans:

Americans use credit cards and rarely debit cards because here the terms on debit cards are so much worse (for contesting charges, etc), so debit cards never really caught on for anything more than withdrawing cash.

In the US, users of debit cards are assumed to be uncreditworthy, because debit cards in the US have such bad T&C's that poor credit score is the main reason folks use them here.

Right and so they need to work out whether nerfed Mythos is dual use. I doubt that it should be, can’t wait to have it back as soon as possible.

In the near future we may have a flippening where new models appear first on GovCloud (today it’s six months behind)

Dario (of Mythos): "Companies we gave it to said – this is a super weapon. you should have to own a gun license to use it. please don't release this"

Mythos is clearly dual use (and automatically subject to export controls), even if Anthropic didn’t understand what that means.

Yes this administration can be capricious and hyperpartisan. This isn’t one of those cases.

Try Mythos

Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent... Elon Musk is the most absurd example of this

Elon? Grift? Give me a break. He's the greatest true technologist of all time.

I couldn't fine even one other defender in either discussion. Maybe its true that HN has been BlueSky'd and Twitter is the new HN

ps. Great post aside from this

This essay is unfortunate because he isn't addressing the true misunderstanding of politicians like AOC, he's not explaining the consumer surplus (why the world gained 50x more from Google than the founders), and he's not explaining that wealth is craeted not taken.

Politicians spend their lives in one of the purest zero-sum systems in existence. Of course they don't have a gut level understanding of the creation of wealth.

But consumer surplus matters most of all. Imagine the net benefit to consumers of Robotaxi and Optimus (ok, ok, assuming they work, for the doubters in the room). Entrepreneurs capture

$5-10T of the US economy already operates under ITAR or EAR export restrictions, there is nothing novel about this order.

Aerospace, defense, semiconductors, telecom, advanced manufacturing equipment, etc

SpaceX entire operation is under ITAR, because even though their rockets are not weapons, rockets are treated as weapons for export purposes

It’s no big deal. Massive infrastructure, laws, processes, and a whole ecosystem of services providers already exist for ITAR/CMMC/FedRamp controls

When you ask for regulation, you get regulated. Welcome to the real world

What I want is a way to rent a car for an hour or two, so that I can leave shopping items or child seats in the car while making stops around town.

It takes years to adapt fully to new tools, and it takes years for the toolmakers to figure out what the tools need to do

This is all normal. It’s also well worth the time spent learning

The Snowden disclosures revealed that the US was regularly spying on Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, the EU, and the UN. Also of course the CIA was spying on Congress.

One can only imagine that many of these countries were also spying on us in various capacities, albeit with fewer resources. Israel is a bigger concern because they're extremely good at it, but I'm sure it's nothing new.

Even as a SpaceX shareholder I have to say this the right decision, and it's what a person would expect.

NASDAQ has an incentive to offer early entry into the index (they want SpaceX to list on their exchange), whereas S&P has no incentive for early inclusion; it could only increase risk for them. Even if they /wanted/ to add SpaceX early, that could create a precedent with unpredictable consequences.

Since most shareholders I know plan to hold for another 20 years, waiting a year to get into the S&P average seems fine. Congratulations to S&P for sticking to principle.

Very well done. I lived in Japan for years, love Japan deeply, and this essay rang true in many ways.

Two thoughts:

- Japanese management style and processes are probably fruitful ground for understanding how teams of agents should work. H-firms require inspirational leadership, and agents don't need that.

- There is an interesting opportunity to turn Japanese process knowledge into a trainable environment, which of course should be done in such a way to benefit Japan and the Japanese people ("The type of deep process knowledge that has accreted within companies like Kyocera and Toto is almost impossible to replicate")

Historical scandals are finally coming to light now that the AI issue has raised awareness:

- Ernest Hemingway trained his own neurons on Tolstoy, Twain, and Turgenev without ever paying them royalties!

- William Faulkner trained his neurons on Joyce and de Balzac

- George Orwell trained his neurons on Swift, Dickens, and Jack London

- Virginia Woolf trained her neurons on Proust and Chekhov

Now that these historical wrongs have been exposed, it is obvious that some reparations are in order, likely from anyone who has benefited directly or indirectly from these takings!