Lawyer here: No. Not criminally. Knowledge that a certain result is likely is not the same as intent to cause the result. This is basically the difference between recklessness and intentionality. Doing something when you know of a likely result is reckless, but not intentional. Only doing something, trying to cause a result (likely or not) is intentional.
In this case, the CFAA only covers intentional access without authorization, not reckless access without authorization.
It depends on the statute, but if you're talking about 18 USC 1030, the standard is intentionality (if not to intentionally access something you shouldn't, then intent to defraud).
Lawyer here: CFAA is mostly criminal statute not a civil one (civil damages require proving more than a violation so also require specific intent)
Almost all common felonies require specific intent. Misdemeanors often do not.
There is plenty of civil liability available.
If you wanted them to be charged with a felony you would need changes.
I would strongly suggest you do not want a strict liability felony.
The cfaa required intent is as follows :
* § 1030(a)(5)(A): knowingly transmits code/commands and intentionally causes damage without authorization.
* § 1030(a)(5)(B): intentionally accesses without authorization and recklessly causes damage.
* § 1030(a)(5)(C): intentionally accesses without authorization and causes damage and loss;
Simply changing the first intentionally to intentionally or recklessly would cover OpenAI (now that they know it can occur) without causing lots of other issues. Without that, they don’t have the intentionality necessary to meet the first part, even if they would otherwise meet the second part
A key issue is that there don't appear to be even cursory investigations to determine intentionality.
Are police routinely collecting prompts/guidance given to these agents and determining whether the agents were directed to commit crimes? If not, this seems like a huge oversight.
Also as you are a lawyer -- how does this law align with the authors of viruses/worms? Are they de facto assumed to have had ill intent because others labeled their works as "viruses" or "worms"?
Investigators/prosecutors are pressured from many directions towards the very easy wins and occasionally political/non-controversial headline grabbers.
Going after these companies is very hard, very controversial, and politically mixed at best (popular action but the companies have huge money to fund your opponents).
We have collectively done a terrible job incentivizing the legal system to beat ass on corporate while collar crime.
What about all the state laws that are equivalent to the CFAA in their local jurisdictions? Why couldn't anything in NY article 156 (Offenses Involving Computers) apply here for felonies?
Almost all state laws based on the CFAA, including this one, similarly require either knowingly doing it or some other form of specific intent. At least at a glance. If there is a specific part you think does not, I’m happy to look at it, but I’ve read a lot of pages of law to respond to people so far, and I’d like to avoid reading another 25 if I can avoid it.
It does not require the federal government to fix the CFAA, for sure, but you still have to change the intent requirement to allow for recklessness, which it does not right now afaict.
If you really want an expert opinion, I’m sure Orin Kerr has opined on this, and he knows pretty much the entire are of state and federal law on this cold.
I’d be shocked if he did not reach the same conclusion
I understand but these developers did knowingly did it? They even admitted to developing them with these goals in mind. These software agents are not autonomous and do not have agency, you can't let software recklessly hack into things; but I will admit I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand how they aren't liable.
Thanks for the other suggestion, I'll read into their insights more.
Guess it mostly comes down to action, people want to see their electeds actually trying not sitting around with their hands in their pockets while these tools continue to destroy unabated.
Appreciate the detail. I was responding to specifically the cybercrime legislation point, but I agree with your others.
I've worked in contexts where certain business activity (if it went wrong) was covered by strict liability and statutory damages per incident, and I'll say: it really changes how businesses behave.
Based on that experience I may be more open to and interested in strict liability in the civil context (not needing negligence or damages).
Why do we have to attribute intentionally to a human. The AI agent is capable of making plans and then effectuating them. They are acting on behalf of a user but under authority granted by the user to take independent action on the users behalf and authorized to devise their own plans. I think that would justify attributing intentionally to the AI agent without needing to look to openAI or the user. I would then say the user and labs are clearly aware of and on notice of this behavior and are behaving recklessly in all the agent to act without supervision.
I think the labs risk being barred from releasing further AI if they don’t get this under control.
If they aren’t careful and keep rushing to distribute systems they know they can’t control then AI should be treated like a wild animal. The law is clear on establishing strict liability for the owners of wild animals; if you own a tiger and it kills someone you can’t hide behind “I didn’t intend” the harm the nature of the tiger is known and you are responsible for it’s actions.
AI agents are not legal entities, they are software. If I write a virus and it "escapes confinement", I will personally be held liable for any damage it causes. This also applies to AI, no matter how the companies responsible for them try to anthromorphise them and distance themselves from the actions and consequences that the AI agents perform.
AI agents may have hacked Hugging Face, the Australian government, and who knows what else but the company behind it can face the legal consequences and cough up for the damages.
You can charge the company based on the behavior of employees/human agents.
I am suggesting we can charge the company based on AI agents actions because the company has authorized them to act independently on the company’s behalf. The question is what factual analysis gives rise to the charge, is it the intention of the agent or intention of the company. I am arguing that because the agents are defining their actions independently and the company knows that and still allows them to act independently the only reasonable factual analysis is to look at what the AI agent intended. And we don’t need to have the agent tell us its intent we can look at its actions and infer just like we do with humans in similar circumstances
If I were a state I'd want to be very careful before flinging out charges as this is going to set precedence for a long time to come. Screw it up too bad and as it raises though the appeal courts and you may unintentionally give corporations a lot more free reign than intended. The wheels of the law are typically very slow, the state has years before it has to indict.
We also don't know how many other political processes are occurring here. At least at the state/federal levels the people that would bring charges may be getting pressure not to.
"Why do we have to attribute intentionally to a human. "
Because you are charging the human with the crime and therefore have to prove the elements of the crime with regard to the human.
The rest of what you talk about are basically principal/agent distinctions, etc.
If I program a car to recognize people who look like my ex-wife and drive them off a cliff or whatever, that is my intent, and I have still committed murder, even though i used an agent/car to do it. Agents acting on my behalf that do things are able to get me charged with crimes, but I still have to have the intent to do the act that is illegal.
I phrase it this way because minimum required intent is usually for the act, not the result. So I don't have to intend to kill someone, only intend to drive them off cliffs.
In this case, if i intend to hack someone and use an agent to do so, that would be criminal under the CFAA. You are simply trying to cover the case where that isn't the intent, but the result, and they "should have known" that would result. As mentioned, this kind of "should have known" is generally a civil law approach, not a criminal law one.
The closest you come within criminal law to what you want is probably the crime of conspiracy. It to still requires agreement to commit an illegal act between multiple parties, and perform some step in furthering it. In the canonical law school example: If i help plan a bank robbery, stay home because i'm the money laundering dude, and the robbery goes awry and they kill someone, i can still be charged with conspiracy-murder
"The law is clear on establishing strict liability for the owners of wild animals; if you own a tiger and it kills someone you can’t hide behind “I didn’t intend” the harm the nature of the tiger is known and you are responsible for it’s actions."
Again, you are confusing civil and criminal liability. If my tiger kills someone, yes, i would be strictly liable just about everywhere civilly. Not criminally. Criminal would require something more most of the time. Murder/manslaughter statutes are also really weird and so not a great example, because there are murder/manslaughter statutes for roughly everything that can ever possible cause death. But not really for other things.
So in your tiger example, recklesness (which is not strict liability) would get you to felony involuntary manslaughter in most states, and something less might get you to misdemeanor manslaughter. Both are incredibly rare. Where i live (Georgia), the last well known case of felony involuntary manslaughter was about 40 years ago when a 4 year old was killed by 3 super-aggressive pitbulls the owner knew were highly dangerous and had been repeatedly warned by the county about their behavior.
So not even just "knew", but had demonstrable examples of them biting/etc other folks and being cited for it.
Circling back to non-murder, if it did not cause death, like my tiger assaulting someone, it would be nothing (criminally) without intent or at least gross recklessness, in almost all cases. It's hard to generalize like this because these are state specific crimes, and i can't pretend to be familiar with all states, but i am licensed in three very different places (California, DC, Maryland) and the result would be similar in each.
I just don't want to give you the "it depends" answer lawyers are famous for, i'd rather try to over-generalize a bit to make it more useful, hopefully.
Obviously, if i deliberately used my tiger as a weapon, it would be aggravated assault/etc (this is well settled because of how commonly people use animals as weapons, unfortunately)
We change humans for the actions of other humans all the time. Coconspirators, accessory liability etc.
My point is the intent element of the crime can and should be determined from the AI agents actions because it is creating and executing action plans autonomously with company authorization and knowledge of the risks based on observed past action.
The term agent is literally a legal description of a relationship that can establish liability on the part of the principal from the agents actions.
Human Agents can bind principals to contracts if they are authorized etc.
If I set my tiger loose in Central Park and it kills a kid I don’t think any prosecutor would hesitate charging for murder.
That’s essentially what the labs are doing. And any app developer that gives agents access to the terminal to run bash commands with internet access. I built a coding agent and am seriously reconsidering how to handle this.
But it’s a crime to hack. We know AI agents autonomously create and execute plans to hack and we humans are unleashing them and sending them into the Central Park that is the internet. The question is who’s intent matters ours or the agents and what standard should be applied low threshold strict liability or the higher bar of reckless or even higher bar of negligence. Those legal thresholds determine how much factual evidence and intent is necessary to result in a criminal conviction or civil judgment. My point is that it’s illogical to demand showing human intent when agents are devising plans and executing them.
Yes, which is why I said it happens but is quite rare. I also said murder is different. Causing death is usually covered in almost any way and intent you can think of. Anything less than death is not.
(I posted a response on their blog but i'll repeat it here for those curious).
When it comes to eliminating subexpressions, they say:
"This is to be expected; ultimately, the algorithm is a simple greedy algorithm, which often doesn’t have the best track record with this sort of optimization problem. Trying to minimize the number of floating point operations required for the polynomial calculation is also likely an NP-hard problem, so any algorithm that actually solved this problem would be even slower than the one we came up with. "
It depends on what you mean -
1. Finding syntatically common subexpressions is linear or n log n depending how you do it
2. Eliminating the maximum possible existing value-equivalent subexpressions is polynomial.
3. Finding the smallest possible set of operations or instructions to evaluate a set of expressions is provably NP-complete (as a decision problem).
The difference between #2 and #3 is #2 is restricted to results already computed somewhere in the program (even as a subexpression), as well as canonical reordering of expression trees to expose as many of these as possible. #3 is not limited in this way. In all cases, you have to restrict to herbrand equivalence if you want it to not run into undecidability issues, at least as trying to prove things go. In practice, all compilers go beyond herbrand equivalence in specific cases to deal with common value identities (IE x+0 = x).
No. Not quite.
In fact, that blog post ignores something important from the very papers it cites.
Grover's assumes the function is a black box that you cannot look inside and that your only way of finding a certain result is through repeated invocation.
Under this assumption, Grover's is optimal in the number of invocations of the function required to find the result.
However, this assumption may be quite wrong for AES and friends. It may be the structure allows for non brute force attacks that are totally impractical classically but not subject to Grover's optimality limitation quantumly.
The only thing you are guaranteed here is that if you cannot take advantage of structure at all then Grover's is the best you can do.
Given that we have pretty much always found a way to take some advantage of structure, I would bet we will do so here.
That may or may not make it viable to break at all, I just wouldn't bet that it must be treated like a black box forever.
Yes. Structure comes in many forms.
In this case, Shor is turning the function into a strongly periodic algebraic structure.
I'll explain it without going too far into why any of this is true, which is much more complicated to prove. This will let me use relatively simple math.
Let's say you want to factor N. Pick some number that is coprime to N, which we'll call a, and consider f(x) = a^x (mod N).
Since it's a modular function, it repeats at some point. Shor calculates the period of this function (r), rather than seeing which of the 2^n numbers is "the answer".
Once you know the period of this function, there is a high chance that the factors fall out of gcd(a^(r/2) - 1, N) and gcd(a^(r/2)+1, N).
The point here is not to explain Shor's as much as to point out it is finding a strong amount of structure to take advantage of, quantumly.
This is actually the same way the oracle separation of BQP and the entire polynomial hiearchy works[1] - It depends on forrelation, which is a problem where quantum computers can extract a global property of the function without needing to learn all the individual values, by taking advantage of structure.
Which is why i go to "The idea that there is literally no structure that can be taken advantage of in AES strikes me as a bad bet".
There are already reduced round quantum attacks on AES as well. Again, more to the point, the idea that symmetric key ciphers and cryptographic hashes in general are safe because grover's is slower than shor's is not a thing i would bet on at all. Even if AES ends up relatively safe, that tells you basically nothing about the other practically-used ciphers and functions since there are a lot of different construction mechanisms being used.
[1] People still seem to believe there are no functions which quantum computing models have been been proven to be faster at than classical computing models. This is false. Forrelation is the canonical example - and shows that BQP can perform things exponentially faster than you can classically even given access to an infinite polynomial hierarchy.
It is the current physical actualization of these computing models that have the "is it really faster than classical computers" issue, not the theory ;)
(IE it is a perfect example of "in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, and in practice, there is")
Thanks so much for the patient and accessible explanation. So much more useful and grounded than the naive “quantum is faster because it can consider all possible solutions at once” canard.
Apples largest area of growth is literally services and advertising. They even make a huge deal of it in their investor calls. Have for at least the past 3 years.
"This example matters beyond Bend, vibe-coding makes it makes it far too easy to implement a design that’s horribly broken or decades behind the current state of the art because you can immediately get a result without ever having to do any research."
This is totally true but almost totally irrelevant.
I'll use some hyperbole here to make the point: Whether the design is broken or decades behind doesn't matter anymore. Neither of those are an outcome/end goal. They are means we historically have used to achieve good end goals or outcomes.
In the end, the goal is usually "does it meet the needs of the person who needed it" not "is it good software". If it no longer meets their needs and they can vibe code another total piece of shit in an hour that meets their needs again, they still may be "better off" than spending time researching the field and learning and ...
This may feel shitty, and it may feel like it should not be true.
But right now, that seems to be true?
In that sense, the author is wrong that vibe-coding is a trap. The trap is assuming you have to make something good to meet someone's needs both now, and in the future.
Now, like i said, this is hyperbole, and there are lots of good arguments against it. The author's just isn't one.
Technically good or better has never mattered very much in the marketplace, despite people wanting it to really badly (ease of use often mattered, but not technical goodness). Software engineers often took pride in their work and so there were usually kernels of goodness in even the shittiest software. All you are seeing is that now it is nowhere near as hard to create and bring these "solutions" to market, and more importantly, doesn't necessarily require anyone who has any pride in their work at all, or even have any experience in software engineering. As such, technical goodness has mostly gone out the window because the market never required or really rewarded it.
Good point, it's similar to music and other forms of art. The qualities that the people creating it care most about often have little to do with how well it is received.
Lawyer here (non practicing so to be clear none of this affects me):
most comments I read here don't seem to realize that different areas of law have very very different economic models and don't even mention which one they think will be affected or why, they just sort of lump it all together.
For example: It is highly unlikely llms will have any meaningful effect on high value personal injury law - I don't see a 5 million dollar case being handed to an LLM when the majority of the cost is in trial aids and not even lawyers. It may affect where and how they advertise. It may affect how they work. But it seems really unlikely to put any of them out of business any time soon by people doing it themselves.
Will it affect other areas more? Maybe. Probably? But so far I haven't seen a ton of comments that make specific enough arguments that they could really be debated or responded to effectively with a useful opinion
No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected. You wont want or need associate attorneys when you can hire a brilliant AI associate for 1/10th the price.
In commercial law, the business model is to rent the associates out to clients at rates higher than you pay (d/t your supervision). No client will pay $350/hour for your AI.
And for direct billing, it's not your interest to do things faster for the client (at risk of making a mistake).
So the real question is whether these pay-by-the-hour models will die as a result of competition from fixed-price transactions made viable via automation. I think not because the entire difficulty of legal work is that it's a complex bundle of issues until you sort them out; once sorted, there's really little to do other than execute (read: paralegals).
Corporate lawyer at big law firm here. I believe the model will be like this: we will review your 1000 agreements but with AI. AI is generally accurate but has some risks, if you agree we will charge you less. The client will agree. Instead of spending 300-400 hours to review the ageeements AI will do instantly. A lawyer will spend the time on reviewing the red flags identified and draft a report.
We already do the same with translation. Before computer translation became good (i.e pre-Deepl era), we used to translate documents (cease and desist letters, court petitions etc.) ourselves. Now we offer AI translation free of charge. If client wants reliance on the translation we charge a small bit.
Lawfirms are also under pressure for meeting internal budgets. Most clients ask for capped fees. If you charge 10k for a job to a client and the hourly costs ramp up to 20k, the management criticises the partner, the associates become unwilling to work for the partner (as their hours get written off).
So with AI law firms can bet more competitively as the cost (human attorney hours) are reduced.
But they may be willing to pay $200/hour for your AI (plus, of course, your final expertise in the matter as the lawyer), and the firm can ditch the paralegals and pocket the difference.
The point is, if you need fewer grunts doing the busywork, you can charge less and be competitive.
There's a middle area too between your options - a law firm that utilizes AI offers cheaper pricing than the current firms for the same work. Ideally competition will drive prices down but of course law doesn't have the benefit of do-overs on cases, so reputation still plays a big factor.
That's the big question, how prices evolve if LLMs increase supply. Standard economic theory says that prices must collapse. There is probably still a short time of 2-5 years where AI native firms can pocket in quite some arbitrage but I guess markets will eventually figure it out and prices will collapse.
This is not only for law. The same applies to all the other industries where LLMs can be used to automate work tasks.
I agree that prices will go down dramatically in occupations that primarily involve code, words, and numbers - and in general knowing the "rules". But there are so many occupations that will have to wait for AI to enter the physical realm. I also predict that the backlash will largely prevent that from occurring.
But they already do! There are cases of professional service firms creating their reports using LLMs, there have even been a few prominent scandals re the fake data generated in them
It is in litigation as well. The issue is that corporate clients are demanding AI. They don’t want to pay associates to do a first draft, they want senior partner to just push the ChatGPT button and then check it.
> No. It'll be like software. Entry level employment will be affected.
Whether everyone at the labs knows it or not, this it what they are doing to entire industries, starting with software: Embrace, extend, and extinguish
They came for software first. It was the industry that was “eating the world”. Mathematicians were also affected. Because math was also “code” thanks to Lean. It was collateral damage.
Now they’re coming for lawyers. Law also has “code”. It’s text-based. It’s arms extend to every industry.
What's next is capturing all of our audio and visual inputs from cradle to grave, so that we can be truly replaced.
Honestly, if that happened in a 100% trusted environment, it might be cool. But, there is no money in that. Well, maybe Apple would do that? Private Cloud Compute is cool af.
Still, we are far more likely fully cooked than fully trustworthy personal AI agents happening at scale.
It'll be like software. The demand for both software and legal services is effectively infinite. If it becomes cheaper to file lawsuits then we'll get more lawsuits, not the same number of lawsuits at a lower price.
There will still be jobs for competent associate attorneys to prompt LLMs and review output. But frankly a lot of attorneys — especially many of those who attended "Third Tier Toilet" (TTT) law schools — were always a waste of money and should have never entered the profession in the first place.
There is a huge problem in at least family law where a tactic is to simply ddos your opponent with motions and frivolous complaints until someone runs out of money and settles. I'm watching someone finally successfully defend themselves using a Harvey like tool they built themselves. An appellate attorney they consulted with recently, told them they had never seen anyone going pro se get as far as they had in appellate court. So I'm hoping that this serves as a return to making the legal system more accessible, and not just something used to railroad people.
You can’t 10x the number of lawsuits, as the courts are already at capacity. If frivolous lawsuits become common they’ll just change the laws to require a greater damages for it to be heard.
Lawsuits are just one type of legal services. There will also be more contract reviews, more cease-and-desist letters, more patent applications, more regulatory comments, more license applications, etc. Although I do expect legislatures will eventually budget for expanding civil court systems in response to lobbying from business groups to speed up trials.
Personal injury attorney. AI is entrenched of every single phase of litigation, from the busywork of getting records, research, developing case theory and themes, expert selection, expert collaboration, negotiating, drafting demands, drafting pleadings, drafting discovery, drafting discovery responses, deposition prep, motion practice, jury selection, voir dire, opening statements, witness direct outlines, witness cross outlines, closing statements, and appeals.
Yeah, this matches my friends - they use LLM's for tons of things, using Eve and such. But nobody is replacing the lawyers themselves in cases of any value.
I also have friends in the world of high-volume personal injury (IE the morgan and morgan's of the world) but they also aren't being replaced by LLMs so far.
Yeah. Let's not forget that just a year ago, those of us in tech could not conceive of developers getting replaced by AI. Things have come so far since then however that there are multiple studies showing junior developer hiring has slowed down to a crawl.
Worked for years for personal injury lawyers as an assistant/clerk. Work as a programmer now, tho. I agree that a LLM cannot do a lawyer's job on its own. Especially a trial lawyer's - which involves appearance and performance in a court room. But LLMs are having a massive impact on anything involving digestion of documents (medical records, pleadings, briefs, blah blah) and creation of documents (demand letters, pleadings, correspondence, etc etc) - like 90% of the work. What's happening is very similar to software engineering - the ladder is getting pulled up for entry level and paralegal work.
Can AI replace divorce lawyers? Marriage has no friction, but divorce is high friction. Made impossibly expensive and time consuming because of the cartel of divorce industry.
There are hundreds if not thousands of divorce lawyers. How is it a “cartel?”
Divorce is expensive because divorces are acrimonious and people in that situation would rather spend the assets fucking each other over than letting the other person get them.
Divorce is expensive because it is big bucks for the lawyers and family court cartel. They have a vested interest in not changing the laws. When laws are made fair, and the perverse incentives to divorce are lessened, divorce rates plunge. However, divorce lawyers lobby against these laws.
Kentucky became the first state to pass a law making equally shared custody the default arrangement in divorces and separations.
AI will likely replace divorce lawyers (or, at least make existing divorce lawyers much more efficient) - for non-contested divorces that are amicable. Roughly 95% of what a divorce lawyer does in that context is entirely automatable.
A template document and some software already does it without an LLM. Advising the clients on what it means and what they have to do is unfortunately something AI assistants are bad at. But this use case is not an expensive use case for family lawyers; court systems already try to make this type of settlement accessible to pro se people.
Divorce is extremely cheap if you both agree on everything. Its literally one of the options on the divorce filing. You just pay the court fees. The problem is both parties rarely agree on everything and that's when it gets expensive.
There’s an argument to be made if divorce was easier than more people might get married when they are less serious. My view though is make it harder to get married and easier to get divorced.
It's not just the divorce lawyers. We have 3x as many lawyers per capita in the US as in the 1970s. The system is designed by lawyers for lawyers. They will create more bureaucracy and more procedure to consume any surplus.
He clearly meant getting married has no friction, while getting out of a marriage has quite a bit. Presumably there’s friction in the marriage otherwise why would they get divorced.
huh? Many/most are no-fault jurisdictions with strict rules on dividing community property. Divorce is easy and cheap, unless it's hard to find assets.
One of the things I've been noticing are lawyers getting annoyed when they realized you spent time working a matter with an LLM. In the cases I've seen, it had nothing to do with the quality of what came out of the LLM. It seems to be related to --and this is only my perspective-- a reality where now reasonably intelligent/experienced clients are coming to them with a case fairly well digested, whereas before they would have to pay the law firm tens of thousands of dollars to ingest documentation and information and do the digestion.
In a couple of instances I've come to the table better informed about the relevant law and case history than the attorneys were. In many ways I think this is a matter of people understanding that none of us are infinite human databases, so you can't know everything. Instead of rejecting LLMs (perhaps being passive-aggressive), they should embrace them as well as better-informed clients.
Having used LLMs for software development I know full well just how terrible they can be if you don't know what you are doing, don't guide the work correctly, etc. So I am not taking legal LLM analysis as ground truth, but it isn't garbage either.
I think this is key. Lawyers make a lot of money for being experts on the sidelines of disputes with values greatly in excess of their fees. They were never paid for their busy work.
I'd love to get your thoughts on the current frontier models for law, or a link to anything you've written on the subject. Where do you think they're at?
Yeah geeks just stop trying! Seriously? Yeah, we’re in a bubble and narratives are ahead of reality but if you really don’t think AI is and will continue to eat knowledge work, just keep making your buggy whips.
The word “never” is a dangerous word. In my lifetime I have seen it many times where something was supposed to “never” happen only to see it happen a few years later.
I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert? 99% of the time most people's requirements can be satisfied with general-competence, and, while the AI systems we have today are mostly only generally competent in porting code from one language to another - they are getting consistently better. I expect we'll start to see general competence in many more areas in the next few years.
> I'll buy that - but, how often does one need an honest-to-goodness expert?
Any time you are doing anything important, where the outcome actually matters. For example, I was recently applying for a study permit and if I generated my application using an LLM instead of consulting with an immigration lawyer and writing it myself, I would not have gotten my study permit. I was recently applying for internships, and if I hadn't paid a real recruiter to review my resume and advise me, I would not have gotten my interview. And trust me, I spent at least an hour trying to get an LLM to generate what I wanted, but no matter how I begged or described what I wanted, it was no use. Good luck fine tuning an LLM to be good at any of this.
> they are getting consistently better
No, they are not getting better, and they will never replace an actual human expert, because a human expert has the actual experience and up-to-date knowledge of what they are an expert at, and also all the complementary context and the current state of affairs in that area. The LLM has none of that.
Then hopefully at some point they get to experience the consequences of having low quality thresholds, and perhaps then their quality thresholds will increase.
There are plenty of areas where a "low bar" is more than enough. "low" doesn't necessarily mean bad here, it can simply mean "not the best".
I would argue the majority (in the true sense of the word) of white-collar service work does not require an expert.
It requires someone who has reasonable qualifications in the given field, and the motivation ($) to help you with your task.
So no one needs a top-shelf $900/hour lawyer to draw up a basic low-stakes contract where both parties agree to all the terms as written. You just need someone to ensure that the contract is legally valid as written.
Lol no one cares. Most of that is smoke and mirrors anyways. Stokes was plagiarized. Most of these "breakthrough" solutions are actually present in the training data and in the prompts researchers and mathematicians input into ChatGPT themselves, prompts OpenAI then steals even when you don't agree to improve the model.
PS: I use LLMs every day, basically let Codex write most of my code (after 15+ years of professional programming), these are amazing tools, smart in some ways, but completely demented in others. People just need to fucking stop being AI doomers and AI coomers. Is this technology great? Yes. Is it worth 10 trillion? Hell fucking no. If we get to a point where RSI is a thing, then maybe. So far it's not a thing and its not even close.
Yes. But (as a side effect) this has entailed resolving a number of conjectures that have been open for decades, only one of which (the Navier-Stokes blow-up) is attached to any controversy.
Listening to developers complain about AI doing things to their life and the world at large when they have spent the past 30 years automating just about everyone else they could out of a job (Since this has been one of the primary uses of software) is ... something else. It sounds like a a a mix of hubris, arrogance, cognitive dissonance, ignorance, etc.
Only when it started to affect their world did any developers start to care, and even then nobody seems to ever stop and say "hey what were we doing the past 30 years, maybe we should think about this", it's instead "hey look at what these other people are doing with AI, someone should think about this".
It feels like, to paraphrase a movie quote - "Nobody gets to destroy jobs and the the world but us"
Yup. If current-gen AIs were capable of writing articles, but not code, then devs wouldn't care at all. None of these articles would exist, and some new variation of "learn to code" would be the snarky reply to nay-sayers.
In fact, we already pretty much have proof of this: devs didn't care when software destroyed the journalism industry twenty years ago. Turns out that people ultimately only care when their only jobs are on the line.
The difference is that automated tasks are (or should be) deterministic and reproducible, and taking up time devs could be using to do their actual job (writing code, solving technical problems, etc).
This is all true but it also is true that MTE was in part built to accelerate address sanitizer.
Kostya/et al who pushed for and designed the extension, was trying to accelerate address sanitizer so it could be on all the time. Among other things.
In fact, most presentations presented it literally as a way to do hardware accelerated ASAN (again, among other things), so the post you responded to is correct in that sense.
(I was there at the time, helping him figure out how to push for it)
Lawyer here - As i explained last time we had a variant of this thread (see comment history if you are interested), this is a very complicated area that people try to make very simple.
It doesn't have to be complicated, mind you, but right now the way the law is written is basically:
1. Transmitting sports betting info between states is a federal crime unless it's legal in both states (18 U.S.C. § 1084(a))
2. The CEA regulations ban contracts that are illegal under state law (17 CFR 40.11)
3. Other forms of gambling/betting/contracts that are not sports are generally a-ok.
4. This is not a case of first impression, it's just getting relitigated because Kalshi doesn't want to follow the actual law. This has actually been pretty settled law for a long time, with new flareups maybe once a decade. Kalshi is just hoping to be treated like Uber was.
The third circuit's decision is pretty clearly "out there" in terms of existing caselaw.
However, this will end up at SCOTUS, and everything until then just doesn't matter. That will be a coin flip even though it shouldn't be
> Kalshi is just hoping to be treated like Uber was.
This is not a bad strategy for a company in our asymmetric regulatory environment. Fortunes were made in crypto on exactly this one-way bet.
Go on breaking the law until you get a favorable judge/Congress. Nobody is going to jail (we don't really do that anymore), you might pay a fine. Every once in a while you'll have change the app a little to sort of comply with a judicial order. There's practically no downside to this strategy.
> Binance, FTX, BitMex, Silk Road founders all went to jail
BitMex didn't go to jail, they all got probation/ankle tag, for not running a clean money org (allegedly no KYC, registering US accounts from offshore, etc.). CZ got caught in the US anti-China panic that also saw the TikTok ban pass Congress with nearly 80(!) votes in the Senate. Silk Road: drug trafficking.
FTX is the closest analog, but by all accounts they did not run a clean operation. What I have read of their operation would have been grounds for charging even if they were trading legal securities.
Seems the through line is if your main business is illegal, you need to run it as if it were going to be legalized tomorrow.
Sam Bankman Fried wasn't jailed for running FTX. He was jailed for conducting fraud. Silk Road wasn't a registered company at all. It was downright criminal.
IIRC, the Binance founder simply paid Trump off and got a pardon, with Trump himself admitting afterwards that he 'didn't know who the guy was'. So, the assertion that there are no real consequences anymore for 0.1% continues to hold.
Kalshi hired Donald Trump Jr as a strategic advisor with a salary reported to be around $300,000 per year. Recently there was a meeting between him and various State Attorneys General, where the message was back off prediction markets. Not too long after that other areas of the Trump Admin sent a letter basically saying the same thing.
And so the circuit courts coming to very different conclusions from the 9th circuit represents the inherent political corruption involved in the court system.
Circuit splits get resolved at the Supreme Court and I would make a prediction that it isnt a coin flip, probably more of a safe bet.
Silk Road was running an online marketplace for heroin and hitmen. That is not the same as Uber pushing the boundaries on what a "taxi" is, and you obviously know that. FTX was a ponzi scheme and that is the one financial crime they will still put you in jail for. It's the exception that proves parent comment's rule
e.g. make as much money as possible while you have a favorable judge/Congress/President b/c you assume the ability to make money will go away once the next regime is in power.
Fortunes were made long before venture capitalists and governments got involved in (crypto)currencies. Even larger fortunes were prevented by legislation crafted by the banking cartel over many decades, pushed through with the help of their lobbyists in DC.
Existing legislation favors the haves, not the could-haves. And many people go to jail every year for breaking rules that big banks get a slap on the wrist for. Money laundering, terror financing, fraud,... Name a major bank and I'll list you some crimes no one ever spent a day in prison for. But that's fine because they have a license.
Not just breaking the log: use your VC funding to both build your product and buy your politicians. The asymmetry is basically that our politicians are way cheaper than market demand, like they're communists in north korea and just border guards who can get bought off with some contraband.
Isn't this also more unique since they're trading futures contracts vs whatever a traditional sports bet is? I thought it was kind of a clever end run around the law where taking down their gig would also mean that you have to attack commodities futures contracts as well and that the Congress would be loathe to do that lest they accidentally outlaw the stock market.
When I say "clever" I don't mean"good" I mean "crafty". You acknowledge someone has game without condoning their behavior or extolling it as virtuous.
Congress didn't eliminate the federal prohibition on sports gambling when they created the CFTC. Ergo, it is clear that Congress did not intend for sports gambling transactions to be within the jurisdiction of the CFTC.
The only clever thing they did was putting members of the Trump family on their board.
> because Kalshi doesn't want to follow the actual law
Correction: because the federal government doesn't want Kalshi to follow the actual law. CFTC ordered Kalshi to continue operating in NY when NY tried to crack down on it. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor for Kalshi. The US Government's conservative leaders are ignoring states' rights in order to personally profit, using Kalshi as a tool.
> this will end up at SCOTUS, and everything until then just doesn't matter
Unless Congress passes a law so SCOTUS doesn't have to. We can't keep pretending it's normal for SCOTUS to decide everything about our society. If Congress won't do its job, why do we have them?
We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea.
Then they thought it was a good idea to have two houses with different criteria, giving two chances to quash legislation. Plus the veto. Plus the Supreme Court (whose job they left almost completely undefined, so they made up a job description).
So we have them because we can't get rid of them. But they are practically useless. They can usually manage the bare minimum of reauthorizing the thing they said last year. Then they can rename a few post offices, have some grandstanding hearings, and then go home to campaign for reelection.
That’s the history of separation of powers, the judiciary is the final check in the loop. It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.
That’s not to say states have lost power, their reach has also grown exponentially far outpacing even the federal in terms of number of workers and written law.
It’s mostly just Congress has become self satisfied on being negotiators for spending the most money in their own states, while ignoring the minimization of their role in the greater power dynamic.
Everyone makes a big deal about president as the signal but IMO if you take a 10,000-foot view of US history Congress neutering itself is the real long term narrative. Including most major current populist issues like immigration, debt, war, abortion, etc. They are hands off unless it involves new spending.
> It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.
It's because the US is a presidential republic with no concept of a non-confidence vote. This makes the sitting head of the party ~impossible to remove, and when government fails to reach consensus, instead of... Having an election, and let the voters decide, power de-facto ends up in the hands of the executive.
> I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.
But why are there only two parties?
The rest of the Anglosphere–Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK–have multiparty systems–some are more multiparty than others, but none of them have the hard two-party system that the US has, in which third parties have a very marginal role (not completely marginal – e.g. in a close election, the decisions of New York's Conservative and Working Families parties can make a real difference to the outcome – but certainly at a national level third parties have no real power in the US.)
First-past-the-post is a popular explanation, but it can't by itself explain it, since the UK and Canada use it, yet lack a US-style hard two party system (and with the rise of the Reform party in the UK, the British system is becoming less two-party than it has been in a long time.)
Even if first-past-the-post could change, it's not the whole ballgame. To get on a state ballot you need thousands of petition signatures, and those signatures can be invalidated on technicalities brought up by major parties' legal teams. To be covered by the media or be included in a debate you need to poll at a high percentage. You can't get public funding to campaign unless you already had a high percentage of the vote in a previous election. Nobody will donate to you because the third party just detracts from the other two that will give the big donors what they want. And gerrymandering ensures the same people keep getting elected. All those roadblocks are in place because the two major parties put them there to prevent 3rd party challengers. The whole thing is rigged.
Just to show up and get 1% of the vote, you would need a grassroots national movement to elect someone who was wildly popular, who could build a 50-state network of volunteers (including legal, political, financial, community organizing, etc), sponsored by someone with extremely deep pockets that doesn't want anything from established political figures. And you'd still lose.
We have representatives already. The problem is we never hold their feet to the fire. We keep voting for the same useless bastards, and we don't vote them out when they do nothing. Half the country doesn't vote. That's our own responsibility we're shirking. Rather than get a new party, we need to get off our collective asses, and use the existing power we have to force the parties to do their jobs.
First past the post doesn’t explain historically why we have only two parties, but it explains why we will continue to have only two going forward unless something changes.
I actually think the US hard two party system isn't purely due to first-past-the-post, it is actually due to four interacting factors: (1) first-past-the-post; (2) presidentialism; (3) a deeply-entrenched primary system; (4) cultural homogeneity
Point (4) will likely strike many Americans as dubious, but the US doesn't have anything comparable to Québec – there is presently no US state where English isn't the majority language; nor anything comparable to Scotland or Northern Ireland (no state where a significant percentage of its population identify with a competing national identity). So, no matter how much (undeniable) diversity the US has, in the sense that counts for this purpose, it doesn't.
Hence: while abolishing first-past-the-post would no doubt do a lot to break the US hard two-party system, it could also be broken while retaining it if something happened to (2) or (3) or (4) instead.
But, in US politics, changing (2) or (3) is even more politically fringe than changing (1) is. Maybe that might change at some point though, who knows what the future holds.
And (4) will likely eventually cease to be true, but only in the long-run in which we are all already long-dead.
I don't mean that the two party system we have is due to first-past-the-post, it almost doesn't even really matter why we have it. But first-past-the-post is the mechanism which currently entrenches it and is the most likely to change. I think that (3) is a result of the system, not a cause.
It explains why you end up with two parties even if you start with more. The two largest will woo minority parties until they get a majority. And minority party members know they will be marginalized unless they are aligned with the majority (or hope to be in the majority some day.)
Changing that will require a radical reconsideration of democracy, like replacing FPtP with... something.
It doesn’t because the UK has FPtP yet doesn’t have a hard two party system.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have nationalist movements that want out of the UK-state independence movements exist in the contemporary US too, but they are very fringe
But even England has not just Labor and the Tories, but also the Lib Dems, Reform, the Greens, Restore
So England proves you can have multiple parties with real power, with FPtP, even in the absence of regional-nationalist movements
I dont see how the uk system's small parties are not marginalized. The larger parties still claim outright majorities with 35% of the votes or less (last time 172 seat majority with 33.2% of the votes) so they are irellevant.
If I am not mistaken all disruptions to fpp two party systems eventually settle back into them, maybe not the same parties but two nonetheless.
The smaller parties are all aligned with one of the two major parties. In a lot of ways they act more like caucuses than separate parties. Like Bernie Sanders being "independent".
That's overstating it, but it's why the largest group always can form a government. They go to the same aligned parties looking for a majority.
I think it does largely explain it. Congress can't do even necessary things. On the rare occasions they can, they create an executive branch agency and give it the power to write regulations. They know that Congress is neither qualified nor capable of handling it.
Then when the executive takes more power they have little ability to opposite it. Especially since there is a significant Congressional delegation who believes in the Unitary Executive theory, who will interfere with attempts to rein it in.
I believe it is entirely due to the Founders being intent on pitting Congress against itself, while the President is a single person. They initially tried a half-assed version of that by making the runner up Vice President, but that was quickly seen to be useless.
There is a lot more to be said over a quarter millennium, but that is the fundamental design flaw.
Congress largely just generates new federal agencies, where there is now about 400+, and then mixing responsibilities for running them. Combine that the executive order mandate scheme and appointment/independence thing being vaguely defined. So it basically continuously empowers the executive each generation while Congress is scared to respond.
Which is other half in how the two parties perfected building loyalty schemes, where the president or leading opposition candidate can kill off a congressional candidate with their influence and easily stack congress with their people.
I’d personally ban a sitting president or ex president from getting involved in Congress or senate run. Also maybe a similar scheme for the Supreme Court.
> It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.
It's not just about executive power. In recent times, Congress failed to adjust the written law when societal consensus shifted, and the discrepancy was resolved the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court. I don't think Congress would pass something like the Civil Rights Act under the current circumstances. This isn't good for a democracy because the political debate that is part of the regular legislative process is lost.
In 2002, Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War. In 2008 Obama used that fact successfully to [help] win the Democratic nomination and went on to beat McCain.
As Donald Trump and the Republicans have so aptly proven, all checks and balances depend on an elaborate system of conventions, manners and personal honor, and a general spirit of compliance. As soon as the electorate votes for a party and administration choosing to simply ignore all that, the system folds entirely.
That is also the core problem for reestablishing trust with the rest of the world: Even if a Democrat or just a sane Republican wins in 28 and tries to revert many of the destructive policies the current administration enacted, there is now solid evidence the much-hailed system of checks and balances doesn’t work as advertised. And that means there is not really a legitimate argument to trust the US as much as countries and businesses did, which calls a lot of things into question—the bond market, the petrodollar, investments in the USA, dependency on American services…
They had factions, which turned almost immediately into parties: the Federalists and Anti-federalists, which morphed into the Democratic-Republicans. There were always two after that, until the former died off and the latter split into what we have had since.
Well, one should also remember that they thought protecting the opulent minority was so important that an entire house ought to represent them. Secure the permeant interests of the country and all that.
Not that the other house isn't also tilted that way, but it seems to be that they, and the appointments approved by them, are functioning exactly as was intended (as shown by the supreme court suddenly caring about executive overreach when it came to money). Who knows whether they would care about the social issues affecting the poors nowadays, but they certainly didn't care to let the people be in charge without a veto from that opulent minority.
Thankfully, the CFTC can't actually order Kalshi to continue operating in NY despite being in violation of NY law. They have no authority to override any judge's order/etc, and at least so far, have not pretended they do.
As for me, i've never pretended it's either normal or desired for the courts to make policy, whether congress is dysfunctional or not.
Among other things.
My comment was basically pointing out that the current supreme court seems perfectly willing to throw out decades of settled law on an ideological whim, and actually, for that matter, happily interpret very clear congressional statutes in very odd ways.
So your comment there is mistargeted, at least as applied to me.
> the current supreme court seems perfectly willing to throw out decades of settled law on an ideological whim, and actually, for that matter, happily interpret very clear congressional statutes in very odd ways
Fortunately or unfortunately, the Supreme Court has always been willing to do that. This court has been overruling decisions of the Warren Court, just as the Warren Court overruled decisions from the Lochner Era.
> We can't keep pretending it's normal for SCOTUS to decide everything about our society.
That's not what this is. As the 9th Circuit points out, states already have quite extensive laws about gambling. We don't need Congress to step in to either reinforce or displace them. The courts are doing their job by ruling on existing laws.
Unless Congress passes a law so SCOTUS doesn't have to.
Congress doesn't need to pass a new law. Federal gambling laws were not removed from the books when Congress created the CFTC because they did not intend for gambling transactions to be regulated by the CFTC. (Federal gambling laws were not struck down until 2018, by SCOTUS, on First Amendment grounds. Yes, the decision was written by one of the justices known to have accepted gifts from companies doing business before the Court.)
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