acgourley

If it was up to me, I'd implement a soul bound identity layer, upon which its trivial to make an actually private communication of a) your preferences and b) your status as a citizen who has not already broadcast your preferences - such that there is a legible commons of aggregate positions known to be held by real people by not known to be held by specific people. I haven't thought about this as deeply as it requires though, I know others have pointed out you need an economic aspect (e.g. quadratic voting) to understand not just the direction of everyones preferences but the weight and thus relative importance of them.

It's a good question. I prefer longer term questions about more fundamental beliefs, as that's what coalitions can form around. It also opens the door to solutions which take longer (more likely to work). Specifically, as an American, I advocate for a robust polling regime well before the primaries to encourage more popular candidates and slates to emerge.

I believe you're saying "Information is power and it can be used by an adversary to the people to outmaneuver them."

True, but that's not the only party which can use this. The people themselves can use it to build better coalitions and to hold representatives accountable for acting against their will.

This conditional is true, but there is a related one: If we want our representatives to outmaneuver the electorate on behalf of donors, they must have an accurate understanding of what their electorate is paying attention to, and what they are not.

Surfacing understanding of the electorates beliefs and desires is good but double edged. I think we can balance it out with yet other strategies and don't agree with GP's cynicism here but it's worth taking on directly.

I hear you, I think on balance it's good which is why I'm working on it. It makes elite opinion legible and helps detect organized disinformation dark matter. It's not like the intelligence and advertising markets needs help from me about how to surveil downwards.

I mostly agree, I still read and enjoyed it but part of me kept snagging on the fx and wishing it was way way turned down.

Very cool.

I'm working on a similar project for contemporary political opinion media. Every podcast, blog, oped, or show cut into little pieces with the structure, speaker, quotes and nouns pulled out and cross-referenced. I bring it up because I wonder if this kind of heavy-weight preprocessing is worth bringing to historical documents as well. It would be much more expensive, initially, but afterwards allows questions get answered even cheaper than they are in your current system. It may be worth collecting interested parties and co-investing in the structured parsing.

Also modern transcription and historical document scanning have a similar shaped problem - dealing with misspelled words and trying to infer their corrections from context.

Has anyone bounced these kinds of Agents.md through practical benchmarks?

keywords are a start but not enough imo - consider a concept subscription such as "any of my political representatives making statements about firearm control"

Lots of bashing here so I feel compelled to say my piece that GoPros, despite their flaws, are still the best action camera in the market for many people, including me. They have a powerful set of customizations simple not possible on the their competitors via the Labs firmware. Not that DJI couldn't do that if they wanted to, but to this day, they don't.

This is going to happen, but it's too expensive for your LLM to do the scanning, and instead someone needs to build and maintain the index while allowing other people to subscribe to concepts. The problem is no one has sorted out the embedding space this all lives in.

I disagree, their findings should generalize to the frontier. Even if the latest can deal with the extra complexity, it stands to reason it will take more tokens to do less. This could be a useful insight into the next generation of evals.

I think you can do it without any biometrics at all, although using it as a second factor could make it smoother.

I'd propose the primary factor is social - when a child is born there is a recorded attestation from the family and care providers about the minting of a new soul. When keys are compromised you similarly seek attestations from your social network (or social worker) that you need to furnish a new key.

The network could be attacked by literal force, blackmail, or deception, but it's very expensive compared the defense (strong legal punishment for attempts to subvert the network)

That last part is why I think the state has to do it, not technologists. There has to be a strong legal and cultural immune system in place to defend the network.

I think it would make the web MORE anonymous, not less!

The reason it's hard to boot up a secure social network (such as Signal) is the handshake for (re)identifying people. Signal makes a ton of conceits here (the UX essentially asks people to assume phone numbers are securely held) in the name of low friction and it's why they grew so fast. The "real" secure social networks are essentially too difficult to get real adoption because they don't make these conceits around phone numbers, and demand real key exchanges.

But if you had a L1 set of private and public keys the government works to maintain and defend, the L2 social networks like Signal (or banks, or markets, whatever) can do this cheap and easily.

Let me try anyway (maybe I'm a masochist)

First I'll say the government already has an ID system with a backdoor they mandate you use (your federal social security ID and state ID). The backdoor isn't very interesting because anyone with your ID in hand also has it.

So how about this:

1. State assigns citizens an ID at birth 2. State allows citizens to submit a public key along with their ID at any time 3. Citizens can go to their bank / private social network / whatever and say "this is my public key, you can use it to sign messages to me, and you can verify someone a) alive and b) a citizen of $state is reading it (from here you can bootstrap whatever protocol you want) 4. The state<>citizen network established in (2) is constantly under attack as stealing someones private key valuable so you also need a legal and technical framework to defend it

The protocol for submitting private keys and defending it from attack is a much longer post, I'm convinced there are ways to do it that drastically favor defense over offense, but that's not the point here.

Our question is can a government force it's way into the protocol you bootstrapped on top

How would they?

1. They could reset your public key to one they control the secret to, and then impersonate you digitally to break into your bank or social network. However I don't think they could do this secretly (the key update would necessarily be publically visible), so it's not really a back door. They can already do this with a search warrant. And if you're paranoid you can bootstrap your secondary cryptographic networks with multiple factors. So, this is on net more secure for you.

2. They could try to recover your secret key by force or warrant - but again not a back door.

I think the real concern isn't backdooring it's blacklisting, if this system becomes the L1 for every L2 crytographic interaction, they can practically remove your ability to freely transact. But that's a political problem you address with political means, I'm convinced from a technical perspective this is more secure and far cheaper for everyone.

It's so obvious to me states need to create a soul bound identity system, replace social security numbers with it, and then let everyone else use cryptography on top of that (which is now cheap when you don't care about sybil attacks) to do private stuff.

Everytime I've asked a model to write it's Agents/Claude file it's been pretty bad actually, are you sure writing these files is actually in distribution right now?

> they need a corresponding level of enforcement

Yes 100%, that's why the government needs to offer it, make tampering a serious offense, and dynamically defend its integrity from attackers.

> incorruptible AGI

Not a lot of alpha in planning for scenarios where we get that

Yeah one reason I think the government has to offer this is usability. While you can imagine a purely p2p protocol between cypherpunks, for everyone else there needs to be a way to social workers, DMV staff, etc can deal with edge cases (such as your id being stolen and needing a reset). Furthermore it helps if it's super illegal to tamper with this network (consider how rare check fraud is, despite being easy).

Yes that's the idea, once you have the soul-bound eID the ZK part is trivial, but the eID with the guarantees I outlined is not at all trivial.

Sorry the term of art is really soulbound identity right now, I use POS but it's less common. Definitions vary but I say a useful system must allow people to endorse statements with evidence they are a) alive b) not able to be represented by more than one identity (id is linked to your entire soul, not a persona or facet of your being) c) a kind of socially recognized person (human in the expected case)

and then layer on citizenship on top if you want to use this for polling, voting, etc.

We really need proof of soul systems to exist, extended to also have a proof of citizenship. While the proof of soul systems can plausible be done in a decentralized manner, proof of citizenship is much harder, and in my opinion this is one of (the few) things the government should really do.

Some friends just made this: https://www.congressionalrag.com/ - they need help from anyone interested, especially around pulling in more data sources.

This is not obvious to me! For example, if you locked me in a room with no information inputs, over time I may still become more intelligent by your measures. Through play and reflection I can prune, reconcile and generate. I need compute to do this, but not necessarily more knowledge.

Bank of America has started refusing to let me transfer to the new Chase account for Wise US, saying their account has been flagged for fraud.

Exactly. I think people want to be treated like owners more than they want an obtuse legal status of being an owner. In other words, a seat at the table when strategic objectives are being defined is what will make them act like owners, not a RSPA document.

This analysis has been done several times. To the best of my knowledge, even the covid policy contrarians don't see a a problem with its obvious conclusions. Here, let me google that for you: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

I'd use it for basic process automation, airtable data IO, triggering marketing campaigns or slack bots, etc.

It's a heavy weight feature request but if I could lean on it in the way I lean on Prefect.io now for spinning up cloud workers on demand I'd use it for a lot more.

Whoops - added it. Thanks!