I agree with your sentiment but not your conclusion. They don't want this administration specifically to have gatekeeping authority, what they want is any administration to say that they are gatekeeping, so that they can regulate the competition out of existence. Of course the actual checks and balances will be near pointless in effect, but expensive to implement nonetheless.
Of course the actual checks and balances will be near pointless in effect
My concern is that they won't be pointless in effect. Make no mistake: if Amodei has his way, possession of unvetted model weights will be treated like possession of CSAM is today. And at the same time Amodei calls for that, others are calling for the deployment of technical measures that will make it easier to enforce such laws.
All to the sound of thunderous applause on "Hacker News."
They could have fled for any number of reasons- that doesn't mean that they aren't exactly in sync with the culture they are coming from. And even if they aren't in sync with the culture they are fleeing- they very likely still hold radically different values than you.
I met a man from Afghanistan sometime last year, however, once we got past the introductions and realized we shared things in common- he opened up to me and began trying to make me realize the value of Sharia law in America, and how much better it would be here if it became the cultural norm.
That makes perfect sense. But clearly Switzerland, unlike America, barely has any proponents of Sharia-like Biblical law. This is a large cause of misunderstanding in threads like these by fellow Americans. Because the US has very similar people at home, it just looks like "potentially a little more of something there's already lots of, they'll never outgrow that existing group anyway, what are they even complaining about".
My point is not actually "potentially a little more of something there's already lots of," but rather that the shittiness of people is not well correlated with what country they're from. I'm sure Switzerland has plenty of shitty locals, even if it might manifest in a different way.
The reason I'm not afraid of Afghan refugees moving in isn't because I think their love of Sharia law will be drowned out by my other neighbors' love of Christian Sharia, but because I don't think it's particularly likely they're going to love government-imposed Sharia law in the first place.
>but rather that the shittiness of people is not well correlated with what country they're from.
Would you say it even doesn't correlate in the US with what church they go to?
Whether they go to a Fundamentalist Baptist church or are Quakers? I find that hard to imagine to be true in a meaningful way. And if it can be, then it can also hold for villages, cities and countries.
>I'm sure Switzerland has plenty of shitty locals, even if it might manifest in a different way.
The way it manifests is incredibly important and cannot be waved away. That's an entire half of what makes up the issue.
As far as their desirability as neighbors, I have no idea how it correlates to church membership. I mostly don’t know what churches, if any, my neighbors go to. The old Trump-loving Catholics who used to live next door were fine neighbors. I don’t know the religious proclivities of anyone else in the neighborhood that I can think of.
Sharia law is quite big! So big that I'm fairly certain that there is at least one aspect of Sharia law that you would agree with, even if (as it sounds like) you are overall against. If you accept that, you can have a honest discussion of the merits and detriments.
I find it's best to break these things down and discuss them individually (or discuss how multiple rules combine to produce a particular effect, as the case may be): then it's easier to tease out which arguments are honest ("I genuinely think X is better, for Y reasons") and dishonest ("I think X is better for Y reasons, but I believe you'll find Z more persuasive, so I'll say Z"). There's also a phenomenon where people attribute beneficial (or detrimental) properties to one, visible part of a system, when they're really due to another: consider the arguments about capitalism versus communism, which are rarely actually about economic policy, and are more often about other (on the face of it, unrelated) policies of the state: your interlocutor might realise this after detailed discussion, if that is what is going on, when otherwise they might have gone their whole life without noticing the misattribution (as many people do).
Cultural exchange can be mutually-beneficial, even if you both go away thinking "wow, that other guy was an idiot".
Yes, I'm well aware of how big it is, and of course there are aspects of it that I do agree with. What I came away from the conversation with was "wow, this other guy has zero understanding of how important individual liberties are in the United States"
MAGA has split hard. it's now MIGA vs AF. With MIGA being mostly boomer evangelicals and AF being younger, either outright fuentes antisemites or just anti Zionists that lean right. There is a huge astroturfing campaign to make it seem like MAGA is unanimously pro netanyahu, but it's simply fake.
It's premature to say it has split. MAGA always had multiple factions, and Trump has historically been excellent at keeping them in line. (See: Arab Americans in Michigan voting for Trump.)
To the extent we're seeing any meanginful splits, it's in independents splitting from the GOP. Not MAGA splitting in any meangingful way. (Trump's recent primary wins show this.)
That's very reductionist, and itself a kind of right-wing (authoritarian) idea - all politicians are corrupt so there is no meaningful way to change things.
Indeed. Aside from being extraordinarily intellectually lazy, bothsidesing actually enables corruption by failing to identify it, or failing to distinguish degrees of corruption that are so severe as to be more differences in kind than differences in degree. And thus in the U.S. we get Trump and his entire cabinet, Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Federalist Society, the Kochs, money pouring into elections via Citizens United courtesy of John Roberts, and much of the rest of the GOP political apparatus ... in large part a result of people staying home or voting 3rd party because their "principles" didn't let them vote for "the lesser of two evils".
It's not intellectually lazy, it's being intellectually tired.
Both parties only every get anything done in this country when it comes to voting to restrict our rights. Ideologically, I'm slightly right leaning. My primary value is individual rights are more important. But if I could, I would vote for Ron Wyden(D) despite the fact that I disagree with many of his positions, he's still one of the few that has a spine to oppose things like the federal spying apparatus.
I just don't see the point of investing myself in caring when 98 percent of our reps just really don't care and only focus on manufacturing outrage around wedge issues that they can't or won't actually address so that they can keep their jobs and continue to accrue massive amounts of wealth from lobbying and insider trading. We get Trump because the system is so thoroughly broken on both sides and enough people are frustrated the point that they are "protest" voting.
I can understand it's tiring. But, as someone who was born in totalitarian regime - you still have plenty opportunities to change things in the U.S. Many U.S. states have direct democracy, which is unique in vast majority of the world. You still have free media. You can influence primaries of the two parties.
I don't think people are "protest" voting. You're the one protest voting - by not voting at all. You should ask yourself, why they bother, when you do not.
The system does not allow good candidates to make it through to a vote. (When it does, they are quickly either ejected or “brought in” to the system.)
There are other, more effective ways to vote than at the ballot box. Money, time, voice (depending on your reach), protest, direct action can all have a greater impact.
IMHO building parallel systems is the most important thing right now, as the primary political system is entering a period of crisis that it may not survive. Parallel systems, especially strong local systems, have a long and successful history.
> The system does not allow good candidates to make it through to a vote.
This simply isn't true. What is true is that there's a strong bias which makes it harder, but hyperbole is a form of lying.
> There are other, more effective ways to vote than at the ballot box. Money, time, voice (depending on your reach), protest, direct action can all have a greater impact.
False dichotomy/strawman ... no one said there aren't ... and many of these ways affect who wins elections.
Perhaps that's in part a cause of the former in your case ... but you aren't everyone and I was referring to bothsidesing generally.
> I just don't see the point of investing myself in caring when 98 percent of our reps just really don't care and only focus on manufacturing outrage around wedge issues that they can't or won't actually address so that they can keep their jobs and continue to accrue massive amounts of wealth from lobbying and insider trading.
More intellectual laziness, as well as intellectual dishonesty, offering ignorant simplistic but oh so handy explanations and excuses.
> We get Trump because the system is so thoroughly broken on both sides and enough people are frustrated the point that they are "protest" voting.
This is another fine example of such intellectual laziness. People who actually put in the effort to understand politics know how simplistic this is.
Since you're so tired and don't care, I won't respond further.
I don't think it's just you or your age, per your pre-internet comment. People that grew up in this just don't understand why they're overwhelmed. And I don't think they're even aware of what their missing out on in terms of focus or mental acuity.
Good point. I do have context and self awareness that it all seems unhealthy. Feels like a common sense evaluation to me but I can’t properly place myself in a younger generations experience.
Productive in which ways? I wouldn't be producing value for the society right, because AI would be doing that. But I could be doing things for my physical/mental health, right?
Other things could be just satisfying own curiosity, sports, hobbies, video games, films, books, shows. Kind of like being able to be child again?
I've found that for super large but simple refactors, codex and Claude struggle and will just quietly stop doing what you asked it if it's a long running task.
I actually had better luck asking codex to write temporary sed scripts based on the requirements then apply them.
AI helped me shop for some bits and tools that I needed to do my rear differential and brake fluid, and after some nudging, I also got it to do price comparisons for the tools I needed. saved me a lot of time to walk into each store with an exact list on the bits that I needed. And time with getting exactly the tool I needed without overspending.
I previously would have spent this time opening up 4 tabs on three diff hardware store sites, and an additional tab to pull up the relevant car forums for tips and advice. Which I ended up doing anyways, as well as some YouTube videos because I don't trust the results. But it still saved me a ton of time investigating and weighing out options as a decent aggregator of info.
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