The difference with humans is that you can incentivize them to try and do the right thing via money. Humans are error-prone and slow, but they don't have an alignment problem, and the types of mistakes they'll make are pretty much understood. There are entire programming languages designed to minimize those types of mistakes.

The types of mistakes LLMs will make are failures of alignment, that is, basically unpredictable. They could fuck up anything. Where a human fucks up by introducing a crash, the LLM fucks up by just not solving the problem you asked it to solve.

It will happen less and less as they get better and better, but as the volume of software output keeps growing, it will happen with a consistent defect rate. And we won't be able to catch it prior to shipping, because humans won't be able to review all the code or verify all the tests.

I don't think anyone's started taking this seriously yet.

That's not completely true; even if the tiny blob of cells is a person, bodily autonomy matters because there is no other situation where we force one person to use their body to keep another person alive.

Like the state cannot hook you up to a blood transfusion machine (or whatever), plug you into some guy who needs your blood, and then keep you there. And you cannot be prosecuted for murder for denying a life-saving blood transfusion to some guy who needs your blood. That's somewhat analogous to pregnancy.

> bodily autonomy matters because there is no other situation where we force one person to use their body to keep another person alive

The state will however happily violate bodily autonomy to achieve much lesser goals, like putting needles in you for blood tests or to literally kill you.

Keeping another person alive is arguably one of the more worthy goals.

> That's somewhat analogous to pregnancy.

The comparison goes in the right direction, but it's not quite there. Your examples are all about inaction, while terminating pregnancy generally requires action.

> The state will however happily violate bodily autonomy to achieve much lesser goals, like putting needles in you for blood tests or to literally kill you.

Be that as it may, it does not and cannot force you to donate your organs or blood, even as a condition of incarceration.

> The comparison goes in the right direction, but it's not quite there. Your examples are all about inaction, while terminating pregnancy generally requires action.

Not quite true. If you were hooked up to a blood transfusion machine, you'd have to unhook yourself. Maybe a better scenario would be a dialysis machine that connected one human to another human's kidney.

The dependent being cannot have autonomy by definition. The woman in the case of an abortion is denying the embryo autonomy, she's refusing to support the dependency.

>At that point it's about what we owe other people.

Who is “we” in this statement? The “owed” amount seems to be entirely paid by considerably less than half the population.

A Kantian framework does not graft onto “women must bring pregnancies to term because they owe it to them,” doubly so when it’s not conclusively a person. You keep asking people to respect that opinion yet leave zero room anywhere for people who think it isn’t a person.

I also don’t appreciate that you are arguing on behalf of a group you are clearly in agreement with yet your phrasing avoids committing to the stance. You present yourself like you’re just giving them due consideration and respect but you only give that side these graces.

By what framework does one grant or deny personhood to any genetically distinct, living human? Should age and location even apply?

Vast majority of abortions are for convenience because women have been brainwashed into self-destructive tendencies, not life-saving.

I don't think we can get rid of heap memory, but I do think we can get rid of a shared heap.

Isn't a shared heap pretty much the difference between multithreading and multiprocessing? Won't it turn every form of thread synchronization into a remote procedure call?

Like it or not, the other team get to play lawyer too. Flock's argument is almost certainly along the lines of "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it. Why is a camera any different?"

We know why it's different of course: scale. But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.

We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.

> "If we had police officers stationed at all these intersections writing down license plate numbers, no one would bat an eye at it."

This is literally the definition of a police dragnet.

>We know why it's different of course: scale. But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.

If we're doing the whole "the other team get to play lawyer too" thing, your logic can become dangerous when applied to other issues. For example, almost no one had the ability to protect their communication and personal files from warrants when the laws regarding that sort of thing were written and computers have now made that trivial. Would people here treat that as a valid argument against end-to-end encryption?

> For example, almost no one had the ability to protect their communication and personal files from warrants when the laws regarding that sort of thing were written...

Pardon? We know that encryption was used at least as far back as the days of Julius Caesar. [0] Clever kids and adults have almost certainly been making their own ciphers since the invention of written language, and their own conlangs since the invention of verbal language.

I expect that -in the US- one could not be compelled to provide the decryption methods for one's papers and journals to the cops back in the 1700s just like cannot be compelled to provide one's passphrase to decrypt one's encrypted data today. Both are really obviously testimony, which cannot be legally compelled. [1]

[0] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher>

[1] ...abuse of contempt of court charges notwithstanding...

Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted. I didn’t claim that encryption was historically impossible in the same way the original comment didn't claim that it’s impossible for a cop to just sit around and watch a public road. The original point was about scale and the scale (and strength) of encryption available today was not possible for most people until the advent of computers.

When the constitution was written correspondance (papers and effects) was physical and you could destroy it. It was not kept for years in a "oh it's deleted but that's just a flag, until we need the space it's still there" on some other party's servers like it is today.

> Maybe you skipped over the "almost no one" aspect of that section you quoted.

Nope! These methods were available to everyone who was literate as well as anyone who either maintained oral traditions describing how to perform them or just decided to make up a language for fun. Maybe you're forgetting that our ancestors were generally just as smart as we are today.

> The original point was about scale and the scale (and strength) of encryption available today was not possible for most people until the advent of computers.

This is completely irrelevant. Why? Cops have access to computers that can brute-force most everyday ciphers that would have been cooked up in the 1700s. The just outcome is for non-cops to have access to those same computers to create and use ciphers that restore the ability to keep one's private communications safe from the eyes of the police back to what it was hundreds of years ago.

This just outcome is -incidentally- what we have today because of a lot of tireless, difficult, thankless, ongoing work by some absolute heroes starting most visibly in the 1990s and continuing through today.

As a bonus, none of this has anything to do with the establishment of dragnet surveillance systems built and operated by private companies that are defacto acting as agents of The State. Dragnet surveillance is -at minimum- plainly antisocial and has no place in any civil society.

EPN3D's point stands despite your complaints: the only reason that the illegality of these dragnet surveillance systems wasn't immediately obvious to the courts is because the US Constitution doesn't explicitly mention that courts must always consider the expanded scale of what enhanced technology makes possible, so courts are very slow to incorporate it into their decision making process. Judges and lawyers rely heavily on tradition, so this slowness is only natural.

You are arguing against no one. The "almost" indicated an admission it was possible. No one was accusing people in the past of being stupid. My point was about the practicality of it. Or to rephrase the same idea, what percentage of human communication do you think was encrypted in the 18th century compared to today?

That's why it works as an analogy to mass surveillance. Surveillance was always possible, but now it is scaled up so a much higher percentage of our activity is surveilled. The commonality is that computers made these two things much easier to do. The purpose of my comment was to show that's not inherently good or bad by showing one example of when that's viewed as good and another when it's viewed as bad.

> But there was never a general principle about scale and automation articulated in the Constitution because it just wasn't a thing to worry about in the 1700s.

> We're left to hope that courts agree that just because something is okay for one police officer in one place to do, that doesn't mean the police department can perform that same task a thousand times in a thousand places with a thousand machines and still have it be okay.

There are multiple court cases that have done this exactly this. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States are the ones you want.

I'm reminded of Jeff Dean's maxim "Plan for 10x growth, but somewhere along the line to 100x, you are going to need an entirely different architecture, because the bottlenecks shift."

We've had certain areas of technology get 5-6 orders of magnitude more efficient, which shifts the bottlenecks and introduces new possible abuses. Government hasn't caught up. The last time this happened (with the industrial revolution), we had 3 major waves of wars between 1861-1945 that finally refactored the governments of the world into a working state. I'm hoping this time around can be less bloody, but I don't have very high hopes.

We used to call second hand information "circumstantial", and it couldn't be used against you. If the officer sitting in court didn't personally see it, then it didn't happen.

Or did Law and Order lie to us?

Circumstantial evidence is certainly sufficient to convict in most (if not all) US jurisdictions.

Since you mentioned secondhand information, I think you might be thinking of hearsay.

Yes I was absolutely thinking of hearsay, thank you.

There are also several exceptions to the hearsay rule.

… and certain evidence that would otherwise be hearsay is often deemed non-hearsay by rule or statute!

I wasn’t aware CCTV was ever called circumstantial. At which point does the principal end? Are forensics circumstantial because a police officer wasn’t there when the material was deposited?

Maybe this is me being naive?

Being in an area is circumstantial.

Not only are you wrong, you are mixing up court evidence and police investigation.

Your fingerprint at a crime scene or DNA on a victim is circumstantial evidence. It is weaker evidence in court than hard evidence, but still valid.

This circumstantial evidence is more than sufficient to search your house or car and find a body (hard evidence).

Law and Order lied to us. Courts run on circumstantial evidence. A lot of cases turn on it.

For criminal law, prosecutors have to prove beyond reasonable doubt. If they have a gun, search history for "how to kill someone and get away with it", blood in their car, and someone that's been missing for an extended period of time. They can and have gotten convictions based on that. Hans Reiser was convicted under pretty much those circumstances.

Your example evidence set is actually quite robust by US justice system standards. There are countless cases of innocent people getting sentenced to death for e.g. being the one to report the murder, often in the face of strong circumstantial counter evidence.

Law and order lied to you. Circumstantial evidence can be enough for a conviction, provided that all the evidence adds up to enough to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. And it can certainly provide a reasonable suspicion for a traffic stop.

Law and Order absolutely lied to you, in many ways. Video evidence is absolutely evidence. Also, the threshold for a traffic stop is very low. “I thought I saw something on a camera” absolutely meets the limit for a traffic stop.

Law and Order lied in many ways, but calling out evidence for being circumstantial isn’t one of them. “Circumstantial” doesn’t mean it doesn’t count, but it does discount its evidentiary strength.

>We know why it's different of course: scale

I think it's more about abstraction. If someone is standing on the street corner taking down your plate number, you know they're likely up to no good. If there's a camera on the street corner, it may bother me, but the vast majority of people just go "eh".

There was a case exactly like this, and the ruling was literally "just because you could post officers next to the suspects house 24/7 and record their comings and going, doesn't mean that using illegal survailence to record their movement is the same". It has been tried in court and lost.

I would definitely bat an eye at cops acting like human flock cameras. That sounds like an incredible waste of resources.

In the several years it will take to resolve, the one side will get to do what they want and the other will not.

Flock has no power vs the commerce clause. Congress just has to use it.

laws are a tacit agreement between the people and government that is all.

RTO mandates should just be treated as a constructive dismissal and make you eligible for unemployment benefits -- not to mention raising the employer's unemployment insurance rate.

It already is treated as a constructive dismissal for employees for which remote work was a defined benefit or condition of the job (this is assumed if the employee works outside of the metropolitan area of the company). This has been discussed to death outside of the tech community for almost 6 years.

Yeah. When I was hired by AWS, I was told that I would always be remote. And then RTO happened.

Fortunately, I was able to exit to a new job elsewhere before I got hit by the requirement to be co-located with my management, which would have forced me to pay for my own move from Austin, TX to the Washington, DC area. Not to mention the expense of having to also move my wife there, our whole household, etc….

AMEN!

Literally the argument math teachers make about calculators.

That doesn't mean that they're wrong. You can take a look at early 20th century literature to see the sorts of mental math humans (especially humans employed as "computers") were capable of.

Even further back, you can take a look at how good human memory was in oral-tradition, preliterate cultures. All of those extremely long poems had to be memorized by bards, skalds, griots, etc.

And math teachers have been correct. So, if anything, that suggests that the parent post is also correct.

Are you asserting that children's math abilities have fallen? I don't think we are far enough past COVID to know the current trend, but math scores were not in general decline prior to 2020.

In my view, modern mathematics curricula are an improvement over rote-learning Euclid, and calculators are a useful tool.

Kids are allowed calculators only in quite limited amounts and special situations. At least where I see in real life.

I haven't been to elementary school recently, but I'm pretty sure kids are still taught to perform arithmetic in their head / manually before they're taught how to use calculators.

You should see what passes for what knowledge and skills a kid needs to graduate these days. It's sad.

Evidence for that is Apple. The one company that didn't go on a hiring binge during the Covid years is also the only company not doing mass layoffs. What a curious coincidence.

AI is providing a cover story for incompetent executive management decisions at firms worth trillions of dollars. I'm not saying anything about how useful or not useful AI will actually be, but it's clear that these geniuses funded a bunch of dead-end projects chasing fool's gold, and then they needed to free up capital to get in on what could be an actual gold rush.

Whether you qualify for a public defender varies by state. It might be that while yes, hiring a lawyer would destroy her financially, she has the assets to afford it. In which case, depending on your local laws, the court might be fine saying she has to get her own lawyer.

Yeah entirely possible that GLP-1s are the closest thing to exercise in a pill.

Exercise does not result in loss of lean mass unless done at a severe deficit. If someone has a low baseline of lean mass, exercise usually boosts it even when a person is in a deficit, but if they are in a surplus, the lean mass boost is more significant.

GLP-1s don't.

I think you're mostly right, but there's nuance. Modern society has basically made the penalty for certain genetic traits way more severe because calories are so easy to access. In the past, if you had a genetic predisposition to over-eating, it wasn't going to really catch up with you due to overall scarcity.

But now? You pay a very heavy price because you can very cheaply get your entire daily supply of calories in a single meal.

And don't forget, a lot of these people are set up for failure by their parents. The number of overweight children I see is staggering. These kids are almost certain to spend their lives being overweight or obese because of what their parents feed them. A drug that helps someone overcome that is a very good thing.