And that they’ve observed that once groups reach a certain size, it’s inevitable that the group contains at least one asshole.

It’s like the fable of the scorpion and the frog. It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to cross the river. It just means that you need a more complex plan than just carrying the scorpion across on your back.

It’s the nature of humanity that in any reasonably sized group, there are always a few assholes.

There was cooperation, sure. There was also a lot of killing.

It’s not just human nature, even chimps kill chimps from other groups who stray into the wrong territory.

It’s not just “distinct from stealing”, it’s not even vaguely related to stealing.

Depriving someone of their property is the main thing that makes stealing wrong. If I steal your fishing pole, presumably you’re not mad that I’m now able to fish. You’re mad that you are not able to fish because you don’t have a fishing pole anymore.

With intellectual property, the offence is now that I’m able to do something I wasn’t previously able to do, even if you’re still able to do what you did before. Now you can still fish, but I’m also able to fish, and the government told you that you had the right to determine who was able to fish, and I’m fishing without your permission, so I’m violating your rights.

There’s a debate to be had about whether or not copyright, patents, trademarks, etc. are good for society. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re only good if the copyright term is under 4 years, and if it’s over 4 years it’s bad for society. Maybe that threshold isn’t 4 years but 4 centuries. The main thing is that you can’t think about it the way you think about stealing.

Copyright.

Sure, they’re reasonable requests. They’re things that he should have looked at before letting spicy autocomplete loose on production.

If I put a supposedly trained monkey into a tractor’s cabin and had it try to do farm work, I don’t think people should be listening to my ideas about what kinds of skills monkeys should be taught before they’re assigned farm work. I think people should be laughing at me and calling me an idiot for assuming a monkey could do farm work.

Crane bullet points five things that need to change as the AI industry scales faster than it builds a worthwhile safety architecture. Specifics he calls for include; stricter confirmations, scopable API tokens, proper backups, simple recovery procedures, and AI agents existing within proper guardrails.

“I hooked up spicy autocomplete to our production systems and it nuked them. What have I learned from this? Here are some bullet points for how the spicy autocomplete industry needs to do better.”

About 9 years ago, I was on unemployment. To keep my benefits I needed to apply to X companies per week. It didn’t matter if any of those applications led to interviews or not. If every application was successful, the number of interviews that resulted was exhausting. As a result, I applied to some jobs on purpose that I knew would reject me just to keep the number of interviews manageable.

One job I applied for that I knew would reject me was Palantir. They definitely wanted someone with my skills, so I had to make it clear that I was a bad fit with my cover letter. I made a cover letter that matched the things they claimed to believe in their mission statement, etc. But, I did it while talking about how personal privacy was critical, how openness and transparency was important for a functioning society, etc. Despite my perfect match of skills to the job description, they didn’t even follow up.

All that to say, even 9 years ago it was absolutely obvious what kind of company Palantir was, and anybody who works there now either had no morals, or knew that they were being paid to put those morals to the side in exchange for an enormous pay package.

Rights are rights until they are outlawed. So you can’t justify making a law to take away someones rights because after the law they will be criminals.

Exactly. People have a right to murder other people, until the damn government trampled all over their rights by making it illegal!

“Rights” are just things that aren’t outlawed. Do you have a right to commit murder, and are upset that the government has outlawed it?

If a law is passed making what they’re doing illegal and they continue to do it, then they are committing a crime.

SHOCK POLL!

Right, that’s how it works.

A blanket ban is much more reasonable in the UK where health care is publicly funded than in some place like the US. Someone may think they deserve the right to smoke if they feel like it, but that doesn’t go well with the idea that someone should also get healthcare for free when their bad decision results in the natural health consequences.

Banning something that’s highly addictive is almost certainly going to lead to a black market. But, maybe that’s better than the alternative? It doesn’t sound like it though. Australia’s cigarette black market has not only resulted in black market cigarettes, it has also resulted in gang wars over territory to sell those illegal cigarettes.

It seems to me like high taxes are a better idea. If someone wants to kill themselves slowly and inconvenience anybody around them while they indulge their disgusting addiction, make them pay everybody for that privilege. But, if it’s just super high taxes, that’s also going to result in a black market. Apparently in the UK nearly 90% of the cost of a cigarette is taxes already. Maybe they could have an effect with different tax levels for different ways of obtaining cigarettes. For example, a convenience store could have the highest tax rates, serving people who were truly desperate. Or, you could order from a heavily regulated delivery retailer that would deliver a monthly supply. Maybe a low-ish tax rate if you were ordering only 20 cigarettes per month through this site, and a high rate if you were ordering 60+, but not as high as the corner store rate. That would encourage people to keep their consumption low, and discourage them from buying extra cigarettes on top of their regular monthly supply.

A ban doesn’t sound like it will work. In particular a ban that only affects some people based on a lottery on when they were born. Especially if that lottery means they’ll never legally be able to do something that someone born days earlier who might be part of their friend group can legally do. I don’t think that’s ever going to work out. If they wanted to ramp up the age, it would make sense to either make it slower or faster. If it were slower, (like, people born in 2008 could legally start smoking at 20, 2010 -> 21, 2011 -> 22, etc.) then people might decide to follow the law and then realize that they don’t actually want to smoke when their year comes up. Or make it faster so at first it’s people born in 2008 and after who can’t legally smoke, then people born in 2005 or earlier, then 2000 or earlier. If you’re a smoker and you want to avoid that ban, you’ll know it’s coming and have time to try to quit before your year rolls around. Then it’s not just generation 2008 that has fewer rights, it’s just that their year came up first.

Plenty of people make their own bullets/shells

For very, very small definitions of “plenty”.

Thanks again for finding it.

Nice. I searched for similar things but didn’t include “pdf”, so that must have helped.

That’s excellent. A perfect summary of his (alleged) flaws. Where did you find the original?

a concise list of 17 easy-to-read sentences

It would be nice to actually see those sentences. But, I can’t even find this filing that apparently contains those 17 bullet points.

Country music started to suck not when it became political, there was always political country music. It started to suck when it became the refuge for conservatives and no other viewpoints were allowed.

But there was a real hunger in a lot of parts of America for representation, and country music did offer a landscape that was talking a lot about old-fashioned values.

…

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that country radio, which remains very corporate, does have a lock on who can become a superstar and who cannot. And so, if you get sort of an organized fan backlash against a musician over their politics. their career is done. And the most – the high-profile example of that that people will be familiar with is what happened to the Dixie Chicks during the Iraq War.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-country-music-went-conservative

Country music from before 1970 can be good. There are occasionally things post 1970 that are also good, but they’re much harder to find because it has become a style of music that caters to conservatives, and they expect it to glorify their values.