mjburgess

Constantly. Bns/tk/month easily. Large scale, all frontier models. Lots of writing tasks.

They seem to be getting better at the O(paragraph) level reporting on technical updates.

They're not yet at O(pages), and certainly no where near O(book).

This presumes an LLM has something to say. The reason the text doesnt make much sense, is because it doesnt. It isnt "on topic" because it has no topic to be on. Sentences go on, are joined irrelevantly, and so on because theyre sampled from a distribution of "possibly relevant sentences". They aren't being addressed to a reader (whose mind is being modelled), on a topic the writer wishes to express.

Communication expresses an understanding. LLMs arent communicating.

LLMs generate code well enough. Code has no natural language semantics. Programming's condition of satisfaction is that the machine executes correctly. The condition of satisfaction of communication is that the communication expresses what there is to be communicated.

In the limit where an LLM is trained to repoduce an exmplar of communication, it seems as if it does so. In that limit, LLMs can reporduce anything.

If frontier labs wanted to improve "LLMs for communication" they would pay for reasoning traces to be produced which reproduced the thought process of writers/speakers thinking about their audiences. Rarely do such traces exist in prior datasets .

I guess they are saying people argue/comment in bad faith. That they don't really mean what they say, and at least, they say it not to discuss it but for some hidden agenda.

The problem is that outside of "where's my keys? what are we having for lunch?", most language is a symptom of people's agendas. Its a rarefied elite environment that takes things literally, and acts in good faith.

I don't think this is psychopathic, as much as we're apes -- and speaking literally and in good faith about relatively abstract topics takes a considerable amount of training and is, in general, psychologically fragile (ie., its easy to be tilted).

Right, so you agree that the Irish were classified as white. And that presumably, 'white' entails nor means as such 'white superiority' and presumably that 'white' all along was in reference to a european lineage and the american 'white' diasopara is a european one from the start.

Then you agree with me. And all US law which ever mentioned 'white'.

The people in the 90s who invented the idea that the "irish werent white" are trying to advance an theory of 'whteiness' which is completely contrary to these views. They are doing so because it allows them to equivocate whiteness with white supremacy, and to turn 'white' into a theory of superiority.

If you agree with me that the Irish were always white, and that white at the time and since is a theory of european lineage -- then you disagree with this 1990s revisionist history. You agree that 'white' is an ancestory, and that intra-white class and ethnic divisions exist, and that its common place for white people to have more contempt for other white people than often for black, and so on.

The pseudoscientific sociologists who lie about the history of race, and lend some stolen valour to american irish to burinsh their oppresion as 'racial' -- may seem to be on the side of someone, but they are not. They contrive a theory of race, and culture, which makes 'white' evil by making it mean a kind of cultural superiority and it is no coincidence why.

With this definition of 'whiteness' they then need to go back and pretend the irish were not white, because it would reveal the lie at the heart of their project. The irish were always white. 'White' does not mean, nor has it ever, "the mere supremacy of some particular group"

as all of your quotes show

The claim that areas that receive less immigration are more anti-immigration isnt true. It is only true of absolute numbers, *not* rates of change. Areas with higher 1st/2nd-derivatives give the highest push back:

The type and character of the immigration matters, and the areas which are lower populations have greater impact from a smaller number of immigrants.

Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK: https://youtu.be/HLRWGSLn0RY?is=_jEkmF5MYmdY2NrY -- you'll note a small number of african immigrants harassing women, and some with visibly under-age girls.

You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own. Of course, if you continue to call it "racist" and deliberately misunderstand the mass democractic antagonism to immigration in all western countries since mass immigration was ever a thing -- then you will just produce the current administration.

Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades. He's how extreme a majority of US voters were prepared to go in order for someone to do something.

What's wrong? I don't think i've made any non-empirical claims.

The 1790 law forbids naturalization of non-whites. Irish were naturalized. QED. There's no debate here.

The idea that "whiteness" was understood in 1790 as some kind of "social category of prestige" is mad, and patently ahistorical. It's also empirically demonstrably false. It should also be obviously false if you think about it for a few seconds: did 18th race-realists, basically all western people, who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one, and 'black' another -- think that the irish weren't white?

Do you have any evidence that contemporaries of irish catholics thought that they irish werent white?

If they werent white, they wouldnt have been allowed to naturalize at all, as the law forbad non-white naturalization

Yes, this isnt true. It's from a 1995 book and just invents a history.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 includes "white" as a legal category, quoting, "That any Alien being a free white person..." at that time, and in subsequent acts explicitly the "free white person" eligibility language included European immigrants.

The idea that "whiteness" is a mere sociological category is ahistorical invention of what was a fringe part of sociology, now "whiteness studies", and its mostly "not even pseudoscience". These "studies" speak passively of "what whiteness is" as if sociologists of this type are in some sort of telepathic mental conversation with the 18th century.

Foruntely, this particularly claim about irishness and whiteness has a factual interpretation, so its trivial to show it is false. The european diaspora into america was always "white", and this is trivial to show in 1790 let alone afterwards. "White" refers to the family of european ancestries which 'look white' and this is written into the text of early american law, let alone the ordinary meaning of the word

EDIT, since this is downvoted, here you go:

Irish naturalised throughout the late 18th, 19th centuries explicitly under this 1790 law which limited naturalization to "free white persons". QED. There's no actual debate here. This "irish werent white" idea is a mid-90s invention.

See, eg., at the heights of alleged anti-irish sentiment,

> United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923): ... The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person,’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them.

When it was irish, they were white. And when it was poles in the UK, likewise.

Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.

I'd say its more like the creation of power tools. Many people are now capable of DIY. Many cannot carve stone masonry. Many still work on construction sites. Many help people with their DIY and post-DIY disasters. Some still create ironwork and stone masonry.

Its not yet clear to me that blacksmith software engineers that quickly learn DIY tools, arent going to be in greater demand. Nor even, capable of commanding higher salaries. Perhaps fewer will exist, but they will transact with more end customers because their rate of production will increase -- and so, be richer still.

Its my view, incidentlly, that far fewer programmers ought exist. If you think about the last decade or two of the industry, and the rise of massive low-quality bootcamps -- imv we had an seng bubble. It isnt clear to me that we arent lower than a pre-bubble baseline.

The ability to automate the reinforcement of "working code" within LLM training means software is a mostly unique case where "good enough correctness" can be done at scale. LLMs are text generation machines, code is text, cli is text: only commands on computers are the kinds of text whose correctness is automated.

Its unclear what other jobs have a billion experts to-hand to grade LLM outputs. Its also unclear what other jobs would even benefit from such a thing.

For most others, it seems LLMs are basically tutors and mentors which existed anyway.

> I watched numerous YouTube videos and read many social media posts and blog posts by programmers about a profound sense of alienation, loss of human dignity, and anger over stolen independence.

Yes, it's funny to see programmers of all people, uber-technologists, shoot "i'm walking around in the woods videos" decrying the end of human civilisation merely because one specific craft practice is being automated.

AI isnt taking 'human creativity' away, this is an incredibly parochial and self-interested take. Its taking human creativity, as expressed in certain 20th C. crafts, away. Just as textile art has gone, and we don't have lace everywhere any more -- so it goes, that handcrafted programming goes to.

Engineers are those people who do that to human civilisation. That's always been the job. Replace people with machines. So it goes.

A primary way academia sells "impact" of research is through moral outrage. Since academic impact, ought in most cases, be relatively fringe and internal to academic priorities -- the demand from society/government to contrive some means to assess its value has lead to an explosion of "morality washing" connecting some topic of investigation to some assumed moral value society is supposed to have.

Of course, academia then engineers those very moral values in order to pre-sell this moral impact. And since the academy has been constructed as the ethical handmaiden of liberalism -- inventing its political and ethical legitimacy, training its elite -- the language of its moral outrage and impact is that of contemporary liberalism.

It seems one quarter are eligible. The target reduction is presumably much less.

Under GDPR a fair amount is illegal

> I was not aware that

Well, that's strange. That's not something people in Hollywood are unaware of -- many things killed it, but california liberalism certainly nailed the coffins of the celebrity class

Now "california liberalism" is that manner of virtue-insanity which equates dissent from it own values with fascism -- an era of European mass murder. Having failed to censor, then control, the mass media (incl. public internet), we're now in "insane social persecution" mode again.

You may want to catch up on what has happened

Sure, mass censorship by a tech elite captured by a wave of liberal identity politics in california has nothing to do with the right wing cultural backlash.

Being censored from expressing the view that gender is principally a product of sex, or dissenting from state polices of vaccination, or being in revulsion at mass media (liked by mainstream demographics) being hijacked on the alter of fringe "representation". These have had no effect. None.

This hasnt caused everything from the election from a far-right US president to the collapse of the western video games industry, hollywood and the western media ecosystem. A total sucide of western soft and hard power "isn't" something the US has just done in revenge against californian liberalism.

The obliviousness, and arrogance here is, I guess, in keeping with that very same californian liberalism which has "done no wrong" -- other than demanded a world-wide internet echo chambre which reflects only its own values on pain of mass censorship. Values rare even in the US, let alone amongst the whole west, and the 8bn people on the planet.

Californian liberalism is one of the principle causes of the far-right backlash you're addressing.

Slaves were a solution to two problems: 1) the lack of industrial automation; 2) winning wars being better served by enslavement than death.

Humans are a territorial kind of ape that is always pushing to expand, principally for security and then for prosperity. The industrial revolution enabled such expansion to most efficiently without enslavement. Nothing, morally, changed. No one has ever really thought such expansion morally good -- only that it is better that we survive/prosper than die off. And in the end, our shared prosperity usually leads -- when taken to the fullest extent -- in a general empire of prosperity for all. Dominion, in the end, aims towards to more prosperity for more people.

As for ritual human sacrifice -- we still engage in such behaviours, which are in general called "scapegoating". Now located on social media. These behaviours allow for group cohesion by purging dissenters from the group, related again to our nature above.

For western culture, the ritual physical sacrifice of human life roughly ended in the days of the OT. But it continued across the world up until today, where there are still societies with large populations engaged in it. Principally where there is an undeveloped justice system.

It's doubtful many think ritual human sacrifice, of any kind, is moral. Rather they think it necessary for group cohesion -- and better our group is cohesive, dominate, and then prosper.

The material logic of prosperity and security is domination, and insofar as material circumstances require violent domination, so they require it. And require it they often do.

There's a considerable amount of "logic" in it -- what is considered permissible in society is given by the material conditions that society lives in and the tradeoffs inherent therein. Permissibility, as separate from reflective morality (which doesnt clearly change very much), doesnt change by fashion.

Keypunch operators were overwhelmingly women, but skilled programming was never substantially female. The obsolescence of "secretarial programming" (ie., retyping, keypunching, etc.) is the principle cause of the gender shift. Gender ratio in "formal programming" has always been ~4:1 M:F, including today.

Given now ~two decades of affirmative action for women getting into technology, and many high-status "professional industries" now dominated by women, the idea that the best explanation of this ratio is 70s/80s culture is implausible.

What we have seen, instead, is that as women are more free to choose professions the percentage of women's involvement drops.

I guess we can evaluate this claim by looking at profit margins. In industries with thin margins (eg., retail often has 1-2%) then there is significant competitive pressure. There we would not see "spare labour" because it would be competed-away.

In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.

I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.

That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.

Of that class of book, the game is to pretend to have read it. A little like quoting a play having read a book of quotes.

I mean I'm sure you're aware that Renee Good drove a car into an ICE agent, and even if for some reason you don't believe that, you cannot deny she had driven to the area of an enforcement operation in order to disrupt it. The same goes for Alex P. who was likewise on the scene of an enforcement operation. I believe in one or both cases, iirc, the illegal immigrants were engaged in child slavery.

ICE have guns because the people they are aiming to deport are often violent and have guns themselves. Apprehending a person without permission to be in the country is an inherently dangerous activity because without the use of any force at all, none would comply with the request to leave. That request has already been issued.

I don't know what you think large-scale child slavery operations are like, but you'd want the people detaining those involved to have guns I imagine. Likewise, sits of law enforcement operations are not places that you can protest -- the act of "disrupting" criminal enforcement procedures is itself a crime -- for obvious reasons. You cannot just murder someone, then every time an officer comes to arrest you, arrange for your neighbors to "protest" an arrest.

Political protest is a crime when "protestors" commit crimes. All protestors you've mentioned were committing crimes as soon as they entered an enforcement operations, that's called obstruction.

> reasoned responses to a Fascist.

You havent offered any reasons at all. You're using emotionally escalating language which justifies arbitrary violent action by people you agree with, in order to disrupt activities of the state which have a many-decades long bipartisian popular democratic mandate; and have been going on in the present form, for decades. You're seeking to justify the use of domestic terrorism to undermine the legitimacy of democratically legitimated government policies because you disagree with them.

Deporting a person to their country of origin is not a punishment. They are citizens of the country they are being returned to. At any given time 70-80% of pretty much all western states agree with a much harsher immigration enforcement that is ever actually enacted by states themselves. Mass immigration has always taken place against the democratic wishes of vast majorities of people. The removal of people without permission to be here, to the place they have permission to be, is not an attack on that person.

By emotionally white-washing acts of domestic terrorism you are creating a situation in which "protestors" are encouraged to get themselves killed in actions against the state. You do not have a hecker's veto on immigration policy, and nothing you do will give you one. The attitude you are taking here i just getting people killed LARPing matyrs for people who, in the end, are not being punished, theyre being deported.

> Whether an officer has reasonable suspicion depends on the totality of the circumstances ... Here, those circumstances include: that there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area; that those individuals tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work; that those individuals often work in certain kinds of jobs, such as day labor, landscaping, agriculture, and construction, that do not require paperwork and are therefore especially attractive to illegal immigrants; and that many of those illegally in the Los Angeles area come from Mexico or Central America and do not speak much English.

> You don't need to murder someone to remove a heckler

And what if you do?

Are you saying that you cannot conceive of a situation in which a person who disagrees with immigration law would deliberately place themselves in a position in which the only way of removing them from a enforcement situation is killing them?

This is strange given the number of domestic terrorism incidents. Consider, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/8-convicted-of-terrorism...

> A demonstrator who shot and wounded a police officer outside a Texas immigration center

There is no case, to my knowledge, of ICE killing anyone who hasnt voluntarily placed themselves in the middle of an enforcement situation. And more so, there are many uncontroversial cases of the attempted murder of ICE officers (see, eg. the above).

The problem with your position is that it hands complete control over the existence of the immigration system to those who are willing to engage in domestic terrorism. I assume this isnt an accident, and you're well aware that "violence" here isnt "required" -- but it is caused by activists whose political project is to use violence against ICE officers.

Giving domestic terrorists a veto over government legislation is presumably not a position you wish to defend. Or if it is, be aware that quite a lot of historical domestic terrorism was right wing, and under the same principles, so it would be again.

> "A lot of mexicans are working on that house over there, let's arrest them and see whose a citizen".

> what this administration is doing which is arresting everyone that looks a little mexican

If they were doing that, how could there only be 36 cases?

Again, you arent even engaging with the reality of the situation.

There is no argument. Your position is that it is possible for there to be an immigration enforcement procedure which never accidentally detains a US citizen for any length of time.

I don't think that such a thing is possible, for any effective enforcement procedure. I think all effective procedures of any kind, which exist in the real world, have an error rate. And error rates, for any real procedure, are never zero. And all government policy, which incidentally here arises from overwhelming democratic support, exists in the real world.

If you want to say A) "the only permissible enforcement procedure is one which is error free" and B) "such an enforcement procedure is possible" then I deny both premises. If you are saying something else: what's your allowed error rate?

My arguments against A, B i've already given. To accept A is to say that the government has arbitrarily high costs for either: 1) perfect enforcement or no borders: ie., if such a perfect procedure is possible, its costs are arbitrarily high (how does one in every possible case, spend arbitarily long amount of time, in arbitary situations, determining if a person is a US citzien? flawlessly ); or 2) if it isn't, then a borderless country which raises taxes and has social systems thereby awards all people within travel distance benefits from these.

As for B) this follows, a priori, from a claim that all real-world processes have error rates. To be more specific: immigration enforcement is a social process involving: people, human judgement, a wide vareity of unusual situations, and so on. At each stage there are signficant rates of error which follow from this.

Right, so you assume (and conclude) the possibility and necessity of a perfect enforcement procedure which will never detain a US citizen.

At this point, I dont think i'm talking to a person offering arguments in good faith. Nothing you've said advances or clarifies how such a procedure could be enacted, and your replies are simply restatements of your assumption.

"Innocent until proven guilty" doesnt apply to arrest. It only means that you're to be given timely recourse to challenge arrest, not that you cannot be arrested or detained. For obvious reasons.

> These are all tasks for the state to do before arresting someone.

There were certainly done in the case of these 36. That isnt the issue. The issue is that there are some non-zero pool of US citizens, who associate with non-US citizens illegally in the country, who cannot readily prove their citizenship. Since they are present with illegal immigrants, and are reasonably suspected of being one, they are reasonably detained.

> There's almost no way it couldn't be improved.

This indicates you aren't aware of the issues involved.

No one thinks its a good thing for US citizens to be mistakenly detained. The onus is on people who agree that there should be some level of immigration enforcement to explain how a perfect process avoids 100% of all such cases.

If you dont want immigration enforcement, that's a clearer position. Then the question is: what does the US owe to non-citizens who have build nothing, and paid nothing? If the answer is "nothing" you've got a lot of homelesssness, medical, etc. issues to address --- if your answer is "something" then you've got 8bn people on the planet, and the question is: how much?