I play original bluegrass and traditional music - sometimes along with tech talks and live coding - at technology conferences.
My professional focus (and thus, the lyrical and other content I create) is mostly on cryptography, distributed systems, wikis and anarchic collaboration, home automation and off-grid life, gaming, homeschooling, and free range parenting.
I contribute to several open source projects.
On a hobby-but-with-some-rigor level, I sometimes study urban planning, epidemiology, quantum mechanics (and/or ways in which QFT may be the wrong way to explain the standard model), aviation / ATC, neurochemistry, amateur radio, culinary arts, and hymnology. I also enjoy learning new instruments (currently working on mandolin).
Some of you have hung out on my school bus - I love having guests. :-)
My basic belief: Peace and justice in the world are not only conceptually attainable, but inevitable by dint of the evolution of the internet. I pray for compassion and understanding in these transitional times.
My new record, Vowel Sounds: https://justinholmes.com/music/vowel-sounds/
We can set some rasterization floor, such as like 3 minutes or something, and live with that.
Correcting for a 3-minute offset every few millenia seems easier than trying to understand all this minutia about wobble and aquifer management and whatever else goes into a leap second.
> So you're against any sort of intellectual property?
I observe that the universe in which I live doesn't seem to include the concept of intellectual property, and that there is quite a lot of misery and confusion that arises from efforts to shoehorn it in.
Of course, but my point is: Monsanto is obviously incorrect. It's plain to see. Plants grow without permission. Bytes flow without permission. Ideas propagate without permission.
All this silliness to create a huge complicated regime to pretend that these things are "property" in the same sense as your underwear is just so obviously childish, incoherent, and inconsistent with reality.
It's just a really elaborate gown purported to be worn by the manifestly naked emperor.
...and none does. You can grow and sell any peach you want; the tree has no sense of the childish tantrums of the state over its bounty.
This is a strong and obvious indications that the laws and statues as presented by the state are not in fact the actual underlying modes under which society operates.
Fortunately, we don't need a policy solution or to convince already-bought-and-paid-for-lawmakers to side with justice over profits.
Solutions for liberating media of all kinds, from P2P file sharing to DRM-stripping, have roundly and soundly outpaced all this other corporate knowledge control nonsense at every turn since the invention of the printing press.
All we need to do is make the simple choice to stop recognizing ownership of ideas (and thus, bytes) as a conceptually coherent phenomenon, and carry on.
I'm a full-time professional bluegrass musician, and like most of my peers, I release all of my material DRM-free. I invite you to get my new record from IPFS or Bit Torrent, and to pin/seed/encourage your friends to steal it also:
Of course you don't have a right to murder anyone.
If someone is pointing a gun at you, I don't think the matter of whether you can justly defend yourself turns on who their employer is. The idea that you have to pause and figure out, "Hmmm, does this person collect a paycheck from an entity that claims to be a sovereign state?" is the ludicrous part, to me.
As I say, I hate that they did this, and that they shot this dude. He didn't deserve that. It sucks all around. But their underlying impetus - to disrupt a violent criminal organization which has proved difficult to reign in - is indeed something we need to figure a peaceful solution to, and it's not obvious what that is.
I don't approve of the violence apparently planned and carried out by these people, even though their cause was seemingly just.
However, we can't afford to let the government's position dictate the particulars of all the facts here.
The theory that the fireworks were lit to "bring out first responders" is just that - a theory, from the government's lawyers.
The undisputed facts are that these people were working to disrupt an ICE facility, which is to say a facility of a lawless, criminal organization which, given its placement entirely outside any constitutional limitations, renders it, at least at a moral/ethical layer, ineligible for any sort of civic protections of its property or activities. A third party, who was employed by a police department, then aimed a firearm at these people, and one of them fired, in apparent self-defense at this person who was training a firearm on them. Again, I hate that they shot this dude who was just going his job. But it's certainly not tantamount to attempting a premeditated mruder.
All of this 'moving zines' business is downstream of this basic fact pattern. I'm not willing to buy the government's advocacy that this was a crime to society in the first place, so I certainly don't have any ruffled feathers about moving zines.
When the state brings its lawless armed kidnappers to heel and follows its own rules with the unrelenting strictness befitting a nation of laws and not of men, then we can talk about whether those same laws can be applied to persons attempting to disrupt its activities.
> It will naturally die down as the legitimate ones are fixed.
Seems like we're already in the middle of this phase, but rather than dying down, the 'reports' have just gotten more noisy and obtuse, making it more difficult to establish the actual degree of threat / attack vector.
Your extreme example of a policy regarding distribution of heroin is far from perfect, but also far better than prohibition, which has visited upon the world more death, disease, crime, and cartel enrichment than perhaps any other policy in history.
But surely we can do better than either of these extremes.
Well, taking the example in the article about a formal verification to determine whether a regex is for a collection of phone numbers or countries, and if a country is specified as "America", to formally verify whether that means North America or all Americas including the Caribbean:
A regex which "properly" determines this in a witness/formal verification model is subject to the same sorts of political distinctions and nuances, right down to subjective interpretation of which nation-states are legitimate, etc, that participation in warfare/predation/injustice are.
If the USA says that Cuba is part of the USA, and the rest of the Western Hemisphere says it's not, then the formal verification is necessarily matching the prompt intention to a social and political milieu, which, while subjective, is still cognizable and subject to introspection and, in some cases, a type of consensus.
It seems similarly possible to formally verify that results do or do not meet similar subjective-but-cognizable criteria: does the result trigger engagement of weapons systems? Does it they implicate borders in a way that diminishes the sovereignty of a people? (which, like the regex example, have subjective but cognizable nuances)? Does the result serve to enrich (a perhaps pre-supplied) list of criminals/cartels/contractors/war profiteers? All of these seem like similar problems to the regex example.
I don't disagree with your high-level contention that powerful dual-use technology can always cut through the good and evil in each of us. But I think that's precisely the point of searching for formally-verifiable spec-elucidation. If it were obvious from the outset whether or not a particular word represents the same of a nation-state widely regarded as sovereign, or whether an action was or was not an act of war, then we'd not need AI (let alone formal verification of a prompt-result match) in the first place.
> This is also why we do not believe PICK becomes less useful as models improve. Better models do not make user intent more articulate — asked for “a regex matching countries of North America”, a more capable model still cannot tell you whether you want the Caribbean included, or where you want to stop heading south. Better models produce better candidates, faster — which shifts user effort precisely toward the work PICK is built to support.
> This is also why PICK can usefully fail. Sometimes none of the model’s candidates is right, and PICK ends with zero survivors. Under the spec-elucidation reading, that outcome means: the commitments you made through classification could not be satisfied by anything the model produced. Better to know than to ship the regex anyway.
Zooming out (but only a little) from the impetus to formalize a commitment to a particular class of result candidate (what the author here is calling "spec elucidation"), we can also imagine this same evolution of concerns being applied in order to cause what we currently term "AI safety" into something more like "AI ethics".
For example, if we can elucidate the specifications for things like peace and justice to ensure that the class of results is formally verified as non-participation in war (or perhaps, further in the future, non-participation in state activities whatsoever), we may be able to throw cold water on all the vitriolic arguments about model capabilities and which need to be banned or delayed lest we accelerate the apocalypse (or whatever is actually on the mind of the ban-this-model constituency).
I like how the author ends tersely with:
> If you have a formal language with the closure properties above — we suspect you would be surprised how many do — we would very much like to hear from you.
That's certainly not me, but I bet it's true that it's somebody.
Sure; I don't mean to suggest undoing basic physics.
But there are plenty of ways (and plenty more each day) in which human and AI collaboration can fill power vacuums that don't require pseudo-sovereignty over huge landmasses or monopolies on the legitimate initiation of violence.
Although I agree that ICE block and its various sibling apps and spinoffs are important and do accomplish something meaningful, it's certainly not a "fake thing" that many of the world's foremost experts on the relevant topics were censored with regard to epidemic response.
Facebook's treatment of the BMJ investigation of the unblinding of the Pfizer trial (which of course, turned out to be spot-on) was absolutely shocking, and is just one of the many instances of "ICE block-level" censorship.
Obviously censorship of both the location of ICE agents (or other terrorist threats bearing state decals) and censorship of discourse over the science of respiratory pathogens has been awful; I don't recall anyone here on HN cheerleading either of them.
In fact, it seems to me that you've chosen precisely two areas between which a palpable bridge exists, contradicting the two-party zeitgeist.
HN, for all its many flaws, is one of the few places where important evidence such as the diamond princess dataset and the cochrane review of evidence of mask (in)efficacy received robust discussion and, seemingly, resulted in changed minds.
Likewise, I don't recall anyone but a few trolls suggesting that Apple's assistance to ICE in covering its tracks was a legitimate exercise of state (to the extent that pressure was a factor) or corporate (to the extent that it created market esteem) pressure.
I love people, including you.
I play original bluegrass and traditional music - sometimes along with tech talks and live coding - at technology conferences.
My professional focus (and thus, the lyrical and other content I create) is mostly on cryptography, distributed systems, wikis and anarchic collaboration, home automation and off-grid life, gaming, homeschooling, and free range parenting.
I contribute to several open source projects.
On a hobby-but-with-some-rigor level, I sometimes study urban planning, epidemiology, quantum mechanics (and/or ways in which QFT may be the wrong way to explain the standard model), aviation / ATC, neurochemistry, amateur radio, culinary arts, and hymnology. I also enjoy learning new instruments (currently working on mandolin).
Some of you have hung out on my school bus - I love having guests. :-)
My basic belief: Peace and justice in the world are not only conceptually attainable, but inevitable by dint of the evolution of the internet. I pray for compassion and understanding in these transitional times.
My new record, Vowel Sounds: https://justinholmes.com/music/vowel-sounds/
justinholmes.com