skissane

Fictional erotica portraying fictional children is not CSAM. There is no child abuse taking place as there is no child in the first place.

That’s your definition, but it isn’t the definition many authorities/activists/etc use.

And I’m not defending their definition, merely pointing out it is a real live definition in active use

CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence

This isn't entirely true. In much of the Western world – outside the US – CSAM (or equivalent legal terms such as "child pornography", "child abuse material", "child exploitation material", etc) can include text, drawings, AI-generated imagery, etc, which no child was abused to create, indeed the child depicted in it may be entirely fictional. Canadian law goes so far as to treat material which "advocates or counsels" the commission of CSA as CSAM - which the Supreme Court of Canada insisted (in the 2001 case of R v Sharpe) doesn't include mere political advocacy for its legalisation (as in e.g. the NAMBLA Bulletin), although some will question whether that insistence actually cashes out in practice.

Now, as a father of school-aged children, I find the whole idea of groups like NAMBLA rather abhorrent – but, I'm hesitant about the government making it illegal for people to express abhorrent ideas, because there are likely ideas which you or I hold which somebody out there considers abhorrent.

the Linux kernel doesn't support multithreading. It only supports processes sharing an address space. Which is what most people call threads - but in the kernel, they are just processes that happen to share an address space.

This isn’t really true. It is just that internally, the kernel calls the thread ID “pid” and the process ID “tgid” (“thread group ID”). But the getpid system call returns the “tgid” not the “pid”, and to get the “pid” you need to call gettid (get thread ID). Other kernel interfaces also use the terminology “thread”, e.g. /proc/thread_self, set_tid_address, set_thread_area/get_thread_area, the CLONE_THREAD flag to clone, inter alia

Becoming a sanctioned entity wouldn't count -- if Airbus somehow made the business decision to start selling drones directly to Uyghur slave labor camps in western China and got itself on a list of sanctioned companies even Scaleways couldn't help them.

If the US decided to sanction Airbus, decent odds that the EU would make it illegal for EU businesses to comply with those US sanctions.

Similar to how the US has made it illegal for US firms to comply with Arab League sanctions against Israel

AWS supports billing in multiple currencies: https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/supported-aws-currencies

So how is it a "foot gun" to add XTS as an additional currency, for internal use only?

I presume AWS sets its prices in USD, and then converts them to the other currencies using the relevant exchange rate - the services themselves don't know about UAE dirham, but the billing system does. So XTS just becomes another exchange rate. You could even fix it as 1 XTS = 1 USD, although choosing a different exchange rate than parity is likely to surface more bugs.

Somebody will have said at some point "we should actually have the tests charge money" and somebody else will have said "well we can't have the tests actually charge money, that's a legal/accounting problem, it might even be a crime" and then nobody would have asked what the next best thing was.

If you support multicurrency billing, then have the tests bill a test customer in XTS (ISO 4217 code for test currency).

half of what's remaining has to be saved up for retirement in a place that deeply discriminates against age, you don't have much left to save up for buying a $2M house.

Buying a $2M house is saving for retirement. Owning your own home in retirement is a massive financial win. And if you own a home in an expensive market, you can sell it, buy one in a more affordable market, and then the difference is unlocked retirement savings.

Why do we want a very specific form of safety instead of wanting safety in general?

Because a “very specific form of safety” is a useful tool in achieving “safety in general”

Because a “very specific form of safety” is tractable for a compiler and language runtime to achieve, “safety in general” isn’t

Again, you're trying really really hard to expand the definition of what we're talking about to give Grok a pass and I do not understand why.

From my perspective, you come across as being more focused on making assumptions about other people’s motivations than on precision.

No this was anomalous for an IPO. People were limited to something like 10 shares that they had to pre-order like they were special order trading cards with an order cap as direct recipients of the initial shares.

It all depends on your broker. My Australian broker gave everyone ~40% of their request and refunded the rest (typical Australian practice for IPOs). An American friend put in for >20x as much as I did with his US broker, they gave him nothing and refunded the full amount.

In short there is no opening whatsoever for Pennsylvania German to become a written living literary language.

I wasn’t talking about it becoming a “literary” language

Consider this website - https://www.ujcbg.org/ - it is in Yiddish, but there is nothing “literary” about it, it is simply a news source for the Hasidic community of South Blooming Grove (village next door to Kiryas Joel). It contains articles on topics such as Sabbath rules for property developers and the volunteer fire department.

There’s no great barrier to Amish people using Deitsch for those kinds of purely practical communication purposes. It doesn’t require any advanced education or a standardised orthography. Historically speaking, a “standardised orthography” is something most languages didn’t have (prior to the influence of the printing press/etc)

A starting point could be as simple as one of the English language Amish newspapers deciding to include a section in Deitsch

Ok, then let’s just say CSAM by definition of US law.

“CSAM” isn’t a legal category under US law.

“Child pornography” is a legal category under US law. But, according to the 2002 US Supreme Court case Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (535 U.S. 234), so-called “virtual child pornography” (imagery produced by CGI or AI, not featuring the images of any identifiable real world minors), is (partially) protected [0] by the 1st Amendment, and excluded from the legal definition of “child pornography” in the US. So if “CSAM by definition of US law” you mean “child pornography”, then a lot of the material Grok was (reportedly) producing which people were labelling “CSAM” wasn’t actually CSAM by that definition.

[0] “partially” because it still might be unprotected due to the difficult-to-prosecute obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment, but it is excluded from the scope of the distinct and much easier-to-prosecute child pornography exception

I didn’t say block all illegitimate uses, though. We’re talking very specifically about disabling the production of CSAM

But what is “CSAM”? If by it you mean illegal material-different jurisdictions worldwide have different laws on that topic, so material which is illegal in one jurisdiction can be legal in another.

If a shovel manufacturer was notified numerous times that their shovel was being used for murder and they had the capability to disable using the shovel for murder while retaining all legitimate uses wouldn’t people question why they didn’t do it?

This is impossible-nobody can possibly block all illegitimate uses without also blocking some legitimate ones as collateral damage. Any moderation process (whether automated or human) inevitably has a non-zero false positive rate.

Now, you can argue that some misuse is so harmful, that the cost of false positives is worth it - but that’s a different claim.

This is why the next big language/software ecosystem needs to integrate payments to vendors in their repository system. That way, commercial license management can occur between the ecosystem owners and the corporate customers and all the vendors get paid their fair share.

I don't think this idea is going to go anywhere.

If a package is available for free, on convenient licensing terms, developers will use it.

If you make them pay, many developers will prefer to just build it themselves. Coding agents make that easier than ever.

Buying a package involves a lot more paperwork – it needs to go through procurement – and introduces new risks, e.g. what if the vendor increases their prices

There are potential exceptions – software with really advanced algorithms (e.g. solvers for optimisation problems); safety critical software; software needing regulatory certification (e.g. there are some Australian government APIs they won't let you call unless you've hired an auditor to certify the software you are calling them with, and the relevant government agency has approved the auditor's report) – but those exceptions are relatively rare, and the existing solutions are arguably adequate to handle them

I also think it is different for packaged SaaS applications [0] because there the buyer isn't a developer, it is someone non-technical, and "use a coding agent to build it yourself" isn't within their comfort zone or risk appetite (at least, not yet).

[0] conflict of interest disclaimer: work for a SaaS vendor

Thank you

This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me

It's called, I forgot. Next time I will try to remember.

I had not heard of the Libby (Montana) community before.

But from the description in the article, it is clear they are at the liberalising end of the Amish.

And one thing that almost certainly follows from their liberalisation, is their TFR (Total Fertility Rate) is going to gradually converge with mainstream society – not necessarily with the very low levels associated with the completely secular, but at least with the levels associated with mainstream conservative evangelicalism – modestly above the secular average, a lot lower than the Old Order Amish average.

By contrast, groups at the most conservative end of the Amish–e.g. the Swartzentruber–have a very high TFR, and it seems unlikely it is moderating to any significant degree; and also I'm sure their Pennsylvania Dutch is much healthier as a language.

Comparing Pennsylvania Dutch to Yiddish, I think the fact that Yiddish-speaking Hasidic communities (e.g. Kiryas Joel) use it as a written language, e.g. for their newspapers and community notices, and also a language of instruction in schools, puts Yiddish on a much more secure footing. I wonder why the Amish have never made much effort to write their distinctive language down? As far as I know, there isn't any theological objection, just a cultural habit they've stuck with. (They could keep standard German for their liturgy, just as the Hasidim use Hebrew not Yiddish for theirs.) I wonder if at some point, any of them will realise that investing in their distinctive language would be conducive to their long-term prospects of surviving the forces of assimilation.

I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics

Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

Feels like a distinction without a difference. What is any intelligence but a sum of its knowledge?

In humans, there is a standard distinction between fluid intelligence (ability to solve problems in the absence of background information) and crystallised intelligence (having more facts and learned skills in your head)

The irony is that Claude will help you migrate away from itself

AI is possibly the first product in history that will eagerly help you replace it with one of its competitors.

I think it will make less of a difference than you think.

Do you think people who have 0-2 kids would be signing up to have 10+ if only we could grow babies in vats? I doubt it. By contrast, >10 kids is actually quite common in communities like Kiryas Joel.

Most of the expense of children isn't the physical burden of pregnancy, it is the time and effort and expense in raising them. Making pregnancy easier won't make a huge difference to the birth rate, because for most women the burden of raising the child weighs much more heavily on her mind than the pregnancy itself does. Babies in vats would be an enticing option for wannabe single dads, gay male couples, women with medical issues – but the actual increase in "births" from those groups taking up that option is likely to be relatively modest. And natural biological reproduction is extremely cost efficient, due to millions of years of evolution optimising it – even after growing babies in vats becomes technically feasible, it is going to take a lot longer before it can compete on price with doing it the natural way.

Of course, you could outsource the raising of your kids to AI robot nannies – but, that raises serious concerns about how well-adjusted they'd be, about the ethics – and apart from that, who would want to? Most people want to have kids because they actually want the emotional relationship of being their parent – absent religious conviction pushing them to do otherwise, they'd rather have a few they can invest in as individuals, than a large number with most of the actual work of parenting outsourced to AI.

Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives?

Look at Amy Coney Barrett - Supreme Court justice, before that a constitutional law professor then federal appeals court judge, five biological children plus two adopted, and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic.

I think you’ll find the “women with successful professional careers and >=5 kids” demographic has a strong conservative skew.

No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions.

I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t believe that; the long-term solution is their demographic replacement by people who do.

Any population decline is likely to be temporary; by the 23rd century, I think people will be back to worrying about overpopulation

Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.

I think the confusion is that “fertility” means different things in medicine vs demography

In medicine, fertility is about your ability to have biological offspring, not about whether you personally choose to make use of that ability

In demography, fertility is about how many children people actually have. The completed TFR (total fertility rate) of a population is the lifetime average number of children per a woman.

From a demographic perspective, the vast majority of differences in fertility are due to socioeconomic and cultural factors, medical infertility and the availability of treatments for it makes only a very small difference to overall birth rates

The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left.

I think the right has been evolving higher memetic immunity, which is causing this strategy to become less effective over time.

Increases in homeschooling and private religious schools – school vouchers in the US really help with that. Reduced rates of cross-political friendship, dating and marriage. Increased geographic sorting based on ideology. Social media echo chambers. The "right-wing media ecosystem" (see e.g. Libs of Tiktok) is a lot more engaging than it was 40 years ago. Internet filtering (some religious groups pressure even adults to install it.) Increasing political pressure on universities to moderate their politics reduces their effectiveness at transmitting left-wing politics to students, meanwhile right-leaning alternative tertiary institutions are growing.

Also, odds of political defection is partially determined by personality traits, which are partially genetic. This creates selective pressure to reduce the frequency of defection-promoting alleles in right-leaning populations across generations, which is a genetic rather than memetic factor predicting that conservative retention rates will rise over decades to come. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3125629/ which discusses this with respect to genes for religiosity, which is heavily overlapping with (albeit not quite the same as) political conservatism.

I mean when your IPO is kind of hitting the ground face first, it might be better to concentrate on that than on your hobbies.

It is still trading above the IPO price. It could have gone better, but other IPOs have done significantly worse. It succeeded in turning Musk into the first ever US dollar trillionaire, and while he has lost that status again, he’s not far off winning it back-odds are decent he will, sooner or later; and I doubt anyone else will be joining that club for a while.

I don't see any ethical connection

Trust isn’t about ethics, it is about individual judgement of how much risk some actor poses to your own interests. Trust is context-dependent

There can be unethical actors whom you have good reason to trust, and highly ethical actors whom you have good reason to distrust

And if you don't know which parts were generated by LLM, you can't safely reuse the code.

I speculate this could be a real issue in future copyright infringement lawsuits.

The plaintiff bears the burden of proving that the code they claim is copyrighted by them actually is copyright. If it is known that large parts of it were generated by LLM, they’d need evidence to demonstrate sufficient human input to establish copyrightability. If they’ve kept highly detailed traces of the development process, that could be rather straightforward; if they haven’t, it could be really difficult.

Now, that’s true in the US, which never accepted mere “sweat of the brow” as a basis for copyright; the UK courts have, and most of the Anglosphere follows the UK on this more than the US.

The other factor: when dealing with an (almost) trillion dollar corporation, even if you’ll win the legal argument, they may bankrupt you with legal fees before the argument is ever properly heard.

But I suspect the precedents on this topic are going to be established by lawsuits involving far smaller actors.

(IANAL and I speculate only for myself, not any present, past or future employers.)

It would be hilarious if Musk merged SpaceX and Tesla, and then decided to call the result Twitter