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Once you have secret courts and secret warrants, secret interpretation of the law seems like a natural, if not necessary, progression.

This is basically it.

Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.


Why can't they? They can redact names of individuals in a case like that. "Oh some person who was married to some other person who works for some agency knows where nukes might be". That's not a risk.

They could even redact larger portions of the case and still release the interpretation in some form.


Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks. For an opinion to be rendered, generally they also attach the case facts which lead to that ruling. Heavy redaction means it becomes almost impossible to use that ruling as precedent but also runs a real risk of exposing state secrets. For example, which judge made the ruling? Well if you get that you can start pulling information about the days the judge was active and a short list of the people the judge was hearing cases for.

All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.

There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.


> Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks.

It's really hard if it is in your interest not to stop accidental information leaks, because it is easier to bulk classify everything and blame this difficulty. There is no incentive to stop accidental leaks if you can always hide everything.


These courts don't have public lists of who was being tried.

The specific location of the court, and even identity if the judge, can be redacted. We don't have to use the case as precedent.


I’ll assume that there’s some fake district we can create in the system to attribute such things to, since normally the courts are in districts which may be too specific on their own.

But the resulting material would be like, (XXXX meaning redactions)

XXXX was accused of XXXX

Tried before judge XXXX in XXXX District court

The evidence was XXXX XXXX XXXX

The witnesses were XXXX XXXX XXXX

They were found (not) guilty

If anything could be unredacted it could potentially (?) be the bare fact that it was about nuclear secrets but you can’t really reveal anything else without giving majorly risky facts to bad actors.

The redactions of every document could require many full-time very security-cleared clerks (or take years to do if understaffed) and is of the highest importance since a single failure to redact, or operational error, may reveal the whole secret thing. Mostly, all the things need redacting, so either whole documents, or everything but the prepositions and articles is redacted.

Since it sounds like the concern here is about the public’s interest in monitoring to make sure no abuses are taking place (which is a value I do share), what part of this aim would be served by a redacted report like this?


ok, so put a disclosure time on ruling. how how much time should pass so that information is non risk anymore? So you know that nukes locations got leaked, so what do you do? do you relocate the base? if not how sure can you be that this information is not accuired by enemies? So if you do not realocate the base you accept that this is acceptable risk. So might be that publishing the ruling is also acceptable?

Sounds like if one desperately wants some sort of excuse, this can be shoehorned to anything and everything. Exactly what 3 letter agencies would say to keep doing whatever nasty dirty unlawful and unconstitutional things they are doing on whims of current set of people in power.

Its still pretty lame and shows vast incompetence on all levels. Maybe I am a bit naive but correct solution is to tackle underlying problems, not just give up because thats what you basically suggest.


A federal court tried to conceal the identity of a judge who has been reprimanded.

Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)


> Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse.

The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".

This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.


This example requires a secret ruling but not a secret interpretation of the law.

Rulings are interpretations of the law.

2 parties bring up what they believe is the legal justification for their position in dispute and a judge rules on which is the correct position. If a party thinks the judge got the ruling wrong (interpreted the law wrong), they object and appeal.


If you look at the history of secret interpretations / rulings, they are more like "retention of communications by the government is a pre-interception act". No specifics, very broad legal definitions of what it means for everyone's communications to be retained (and in this case, probably analyzed by AI systems for risk).

I am the first generation out of a dictatorship, the belief some folks have in their democratic processes always amazes, there is no law when secret courts and secret warrants are a thing.

Yet for some strange reason folks think secret agencies are bound by the same laws as regular police officers.


It is called "the dual state" [0]

At least in nazi Germany, the state was explicitly designed like that. Most people should never come into contact with the prerogative state and spend their lives in the normative state, as capitalism doesn't work well in a prerogative state. You need to believe that punishment doesn't come arbitrarily in order to follow the rules.

But of course, things are very different in the prerogative state, where actions have unclear consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dual_State


From warrantless wiretapping to extra judicial renditions, the US government has been a rogue state for sometime. Now they just have low-grade criminals and racists running the show, buddied up with media owners, O&G and the mic.

I can get the idea that for some cases it can be in the public's interest if specific court hearings are closed, or if it's secret that certain court hearings or entire cases even exist. There is a lot of potential of abuse (and a documented history of abuse), but at least the idea makes sense

But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret


Why would you assume there needs to be a public benefit?

Yeah but they are only targeting bad people, so it's OK.

Everything you ever do will go in a data center. Forever.

Bluffdale.

privacy is a luxury only afforded to the most deserving who clearly are worthy of digital god hood , toil in the mines prole and watch your tongue

Yeah but I don’t use my real name online. /s

It’s a pretty obvious outcome. Attorney-client privilege applies to the executive branch of the government as much as it applies to anyone else, and not just in national security matters.

On purpose? I was using qwen3.8-27b the other day and very quickly ended up burning through half of the context (it has 128k total) pretty quickly. Not because of my directions, but simply because the codebase was very large.

256k seems sweet spot. Even large codebase can be handled you just has to map out areas for agent. Anything past 256k usually exception than norm to be.

At least this my discovery when I did evals on my reviewers skills. 10k LOC is high end for high effort or around 150k context using opus. You can push towards 15k but that’s on max effort with about 400-500k ctx.

Fast models like haiku do not even need 1M ctx in my view


Yeah codebase structure is very important. Admittedly, by large I mean average size but very poorly structured with a spaghetti (and sometimes cyclical) import graph.

Is there a straightforward way to check the current context window usage in the web chat interfaces, btw?

In Claude it used to be the circle on the lower bottom, but now it's a bit more hidden and you have to expand the sidebar.

I don't know, I usually use Pi.

Why though?

I care more about his estate being nationalized. He mixed too much. We can't tell what is his, what is the people's... Just take it all. And his complicit family members too.

Also tear down the ballroom, arch, Kennedy/Trump center, helipad, and much more to make Trump invisible and remove his legacy fully.

Realistically, the worst consequence he will ever face is his name being passed over for naming the next generation of aircraft carriers.

No USS Donald J Trump in our future is the best you can look forward to.


Yeah this is valuable context. He Jerry Brown'd it.

I do think term limits are good, but nonconsecutive 16 years is actually an ok limit IMHO. Maybe not the one I'd prefer for my government, but not necessarily objectively bad for democracy.


I don't like the idea of reelections in general. I think it is generally damaging to democracy. Ideally I would not even add term limits, but they should all be non-consecutive.

Still, as you said, this context is important. Lula left in 2010 and came back in 2022 after having been arrested, freed, and then defeating Jair Bolsonaro, who was the current president and a fierce rival.

That said, I think reelections are actually more damaging in the legislative (and it is not uncommon to have congressmen and senators for 20, 30 years straight).


* Lula did something unusual, which is win in the second round after trailing in the first. This is a first in Brazilian politics, so simple pattern matchers are surprised.

* Turnout. Made all the difference.


I'm not surprised. If you have one terrible candidate, in the first round you can vote for whomever you like. In the second round, however, you need to ensure they lose, so you vote for the opposite party, whomever they might be.

France here might disagree. If you have an overly scattered left wing by voting whomever in the first round... you end up with a macron flavored moron as the sole non far-right option in the second round and have to deal with this shit for the next five years.

Yes, for sure, it's not a serious model. But I've observed exactly this scenario a couple of times, so it tracks well for me.

The only way for the far right to win the second round is to end up against Mélanchon, so what you write is totally in line with what Le Pen would want you to propagate.

There were 10 presidential elections in Brazil after the post-1988 constitutional system, with 2 of those decided in the first round.

8 is a really small sample to consider it as unusual, plus the reversal was not that huge 1.8%


Right, but simpler pattern matchers don't always consider that.q

Lula is neither anti-US, nor is he anti-NATO. He is against a single country having hegemony over the globe, against US meddling in Latin American elections (including with trade policy as of late), and against huge defense budgets.

Why do Americans accept that their democratic country is actively intervening in other countries elections? It's grotesque. The US security establishment has been allowed to run amoc for decades and they have destroyed the values that made the US country that people admired across the world.

The people in charge didn't run on this. Most of the real orchestrators are appointees, anyway. They're about to get a reality check fairly soon. I wouldn't be surprised if Hegseth were sacrificed. Rubio, the real brains behind the operations, will probably hold on somehow.

If Americans elect Rubio after all this, or resoundingly reelect a Republican congress, I think you have a better claim.

Tl;dr they don't accept it, but they keep getting tricked


Have you considered you are reading comments from different people?

Cs students I've talked to work on real software projects as part of their coursework. It is definitely not all theory.

The software projects you work on as coursework just give you the shallowest possible mechanical introduction on how to put together working code, and their point is almost always to demostrate some underlying theory like networking or distributed systems or graphics or whatever has been understood. It's not to pretend to produce anything viable in a commercial sense or please any imagined customer or market.

Even the ones that are ostensibly under software engineering courses where you might even work in a group, it's about as far away from working on a real software project in a company with (or without) customers and capital on the line etc as can be imagined. Probably even open source would be a closer approximation / better practice at this.

And all of this is a good thing and is the point. It's a sandbox, for you to play around, mess up, 'waste time' and learn. No company is going to really give you this sandbox in the same way, nor should they. They're paying you, you're not paying them.


He seriously asked for 8% of revenue? What a massive dolt. Most businesses don't even have a profit margin that high.

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