baryphonic

(American here.)

I don't think I'd support a ban if ByteDance was a European company or Indian or South Korean or Japanese. China is a unique threat given the totalitarian turn they've taken over the past decade combined with the fact that no Chinese company is truly private in its day-to-day operations. All Chinese companies must have CCP influence as a matter of Chinese policy. It would be like if T-Mobile (the US mobile division of Deutsche Telekom) was required to have the influence of the German government including the monitoring and reporting of phone calls to senior party officials.

>>Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes

Keynes was the leading economist of the 20th century. He has some ideas I think are dubious, and his followers have doubled down (I still can't believe people believe in fiscal multipliers greater than 1). Nevertheless, it would be an incredible cheap shot to label Keynes a "eugenicist" when criticizing his economic theories.

2006 was peak "Great Moderation," where there hadn't been any serious financial crises since the 80s. The consensus wisdom was that many of the policies of the 80s & 90s, particularly around inflation and reducing uncertainty, had made financial crises almost obsolete.

It seems dark today given that we know the outcome, but I'm sure at the time, Comic Sans seemed appropriate for a set of tools that they thought likely would never be used. Or maybe it indicates a certain hubris undone within about 18 months.

Each compiled executable has a one-to-one relation with its source code, which has an author (except for LLM code and/or infinite monkeys). Thus compiled executables are derivative works.

There is an argument also that LLMs are derivative works of the training data, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to, though clearly there's a difference and lots of ambiguity about which contributions to which weights correspond to any particular source work.

Again IANAL, and this is my opinion based on reading the law & precedents. Consult a real copyright attorney for real advice.

Going a step further, weights, i.e. coefficients, aren't produced by a person at all – they're produced by machine algorithms. Because a human did not create the weights, the weights have no author. Thus they are ineligible for copyright in the first place and are in the public domain. Whether the model architecture is copyrightable is more of an open question, but I think a solid argument could be that the model architecture is simply a mathematical expression – albeit a complex one –, though Python or other source code is almost certainly copyrighted. But I imagine clean-room methods could avoid problems there, and with much less effort than most software.

IANAL, but I have serious doubts about the applicability of current copyright law to existing AI models. I imagine the courts will decide the same.

> Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it).

This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that information in a public space?

We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong assumptions.

> Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line).

Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your product if advertising is illegal? The base case would seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews." How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of mouth to even work.

s/defaults/segfaults/ # stupid autocorrect

I fail to see how this parade of horribles will happen. Under the Chevron regime, any random person could still sue, and provided that the lawsuit survived an initial motion to dismiss, then any questions involving an administrative agency policy would defer to that agency's interpretation of their own policy and the law authorizing that policy.

The only change now is that the agency will have to demonstrate to an independent Article III court that its policy is correct and compatible with the authorizing law. Stare decisis will still control the lower courts once new precedents are set, and people will have meaningful appeals again.

There might be some disruption in the short term, but in a decade or two, I expect the new normal will be fine, but with the benefit that people can meaningfully appeal self-aggrandizing administrative state rulings.

Galileo also couldn't explain the lack of an observed parallax effect between opposite seasons given the ideas about optics at the time.

When Kepler's model arrived, it was so much better at predicting the positions of all planets except Mercury than any previous model that it was clearly superior. Galileo's was bad at predicting and just contradicted the accepted observations of the day.

IMO Galileo should be better remembered for objects of different masses falling at the same rate and the original idea that all motion is relative (when observing from an internal frame).

I find this bizarre as well. The EU Parliament has no initiative, possessing only the power to approve or veto legislation proposed by the Commission. And then when they occasionally exercise their veto power, the Commission can just resubmit substantially the same legislation as before, as is happening here.

This also means the Parliament has no independent power to repeal previous law that it might have regretted passing. It must again wait for the Commission to propose repeal. I can count how many times an unelected administrative bureaucracy has proposed removing its own power on zero hands.

The whole thing strikes me as a sham democracy.

Not to be too pedantic, but ALJs are technically Article I judges (or more precisely judges over Article I tribunals). The Constitution lists two different sources of judicial power, the first in Article I section 8 and the second in Article III. Article III courts have judges with life tenure, protection of salaries and are subject to review only by other Article III appeals courts including the Supreme Court. Article I courts have judges with fixed terms of office, and Congress can cut their salaries. All Article I courts are subject to review by Article III courts.

There's an open controversy about how much deference the Article I courts in administrative agencies are owed by Article III courts, arising mostly from Chevron v NRDC. That decision requires Article III courts to defer to Article I courts' interpretations of their statutes and even their administrative rules except in extreme circumstances. Several justices on the Supreme Court find Chevron deference problematic, but it currently is the law of the land.

I wonder how this AI interprets customers who express anger and frustration through sarcasm

I guess Big Pharma was better at using lobbying dollars than Big Mask.

Interesting. I liked the 1Password 6 UI, was frustrated with 1Password 7 and have been loving 1Password 8 so far. Version 7 seemed really clunky when I needed to do certain workflows.

I tend to be anti-regulation unless the benefits of the regulation can be justified above and beyond laissez-faire, which in practice makes me quite anti-regulatory with some notable exceptions like the FAA.

I think the root of this problem is that private equity managers often have no skin in the game and tend to fail upward. It would be one thing if a private equity manager had a record of taking a company private, streamlining it and making it sustainable for decades to come. Even with the human cost of that, it's preferable to a company going prompt bankrupt. But too many managers seem to take these things private and then run them straight into the ground. Toys'R'Us, for instance, or Red Lobster as quoted in the article. In the latter's case, the management tried boneheaded promotions like "unlimited shrimp," which would be a bad idea even in a zero interest rate world.

I'd propose instead some sort of mandatory filing on the part of private equity managers that is publicly accessible and searchable and shows the track record of a private equity manager, with links to all of the other managers they've worked with. Then, when a PE investor proposes to take a company private, they're required by the SEC to demonstrate that their management isn't tainted by a chain of incompetence.

Who knows if that would work, but it might increase the skin in the game somewhat. The status quo seems to be HBS grads performing with mediocrity at best and having no real accountability.