wmorgan

Not just you! Very popular position, not as popular as rule of law but we don't have to choose one or the other. Let's just go ahead and make it a crime, right away.

Religion is not at all axiomatic. Sometimes, it’s pure deontology. Sometimes, it’s a search through scripture to justify whatever are the prevailing ethics of the society it finds itself in. In either case, it's hundreds, or thousands, of rules/wisdom/guidance/???, often pairwise contradictory, and one does one's best to fit a desired course of action to them.

The world’s largest faith has racked up 2,000 years of discussion and they still can't muster more than a 60/40 split on the death penalty.

An interesting test for kids that I stumbled upon. I’ll play them the audio of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, when we’re the car or whatever. So all the gags in that TV special are visual. Nevertheless my kids go nuts laughing from the back seat, at the right parts. What we’re all listening to is just instrumental, but they’re seeing all the gags. I wonder if you tried it with a kid with aphantasia. Would they laugh?

Yeah, if the hospital is part of an HMO, it wouldn't even be legal. The ACA sets a floor on medical loss ratio.

Why not? Lasker said, “when you see a good move, look for a better one.” That was tree pruning advice for an implicit search.

It’s talking about how you can type

  def frobQux(Qux qux, int radians) {

And it goes and reads your code and suggests a reasonable way to frob a qux a certain number of radians. Which is at the same time (a) pretty useful!, (b) fairly new, we’ve only been able to do this since 2023 or so, but (c) also not that hard by 2026 standards because capabilities have advanced so much in the last three years.

Yeah, it’s hard to reconcile the assertions by the author, that he has contributed in a "disciplined" way to his 401(k), and he’s 41, and he doesn’t think his savings will replace his income. The S&P 500’s total return over the past twenty years has been around 11%, annualized. That’s on track to millions, maybe even tens of millions for him by retirement age.

Maybe he's nervous comparing the top-line number in his retirement account to his expected expenses, but (a) he's got 25 years of compounding ahead, and (b) anything else he manages to save in the meantime -- including on his mortgage -- is going to help as well.

FYI a tertiary source aggregates both primary and secondary sources. When you read the plot summary of a movie on Wikipedia, for example, that summary cites a primary source, that is the movie itself. It's allowed to cite primary sources but there's guidance on how to be careful about it.

Illicit means maybe against the law but definitely against the rules, for example an illicit affair. The word for against the law is illegal, from Latin, or unlawful, from Germanic. I guess the Germanic cousin of "illicit" would be "forbidden."

Kalshi is in fact more strict, both defining and punishing insider trading, than CFTC/DOJ. Kalshi is perfectly happy to hand out bans and fines for activity the government doesn't care about. Every Kalshi market has a button on it, "report insider trading" which I'm sure is clicked a zillion times a day by gamblers who are upset they lost.

The reason they do these things is that their first priority is to keep the gamblers happy, and the gamblers hate to think they got cheated.

This just gestures at the meta-problem with prediction markets, who pays for the alpha? With stocks, companies generate returns to capital. With commodities, there are buyers and sellers of the underlying. But there is very little economic usefulness about most prediction markets, especially by volume. The only way to get enough users to justify the effort to figure out accurate prices, is to turn it into an entertainment product. And in an entertainment product, if the customer doesn't like X, then you crack down on X.

Brandenburg v. Ohio was decided in favor of the appellant. As I suspected, there are no cases of a US court interpreting your theory of the law on 18 USC 111.

Is that your theory, or is there case law that backs it up? From what I saw the bounds on 18 USC 111 are quite narrow indeed: I found a case where the defendant _fired at federal agents with his shotgun_, and the appeals court threw it out because the jury was incorrectly instructed that they could use the fact that he shot at them when considering he misled them afterwards. But actually, the jury was not allowed to do that. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/199...

18 USC 111 does not apply here. Forcible action is an element. The action doesn’t have to be itself the use of force; it’s sufficient that a threat being some action that causes an officer to reasonably fear bodily harm. But obviously the actions we’re talking about on this subthread fall well short of that definition. If they didn't the law would be unconstitutional.

Those other two laws seem like an even weirder fit for the fact pattern in this subthread.

The military is German, not British. Eisenhower, Nimitz, Oppenheimer. Operation Paperclip. The maneuver tactics you see in Band of Brothers were copied from the Prussians — that is going back to the 1870s. Patton’s speech to the Third Army is the least British speech imaginable; if Rudyard Kipling heard it then he would have exploded. USMC has a web page basically apologizing for being so German: https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/why-the-german-example/

Everybody grew up among, and got their culture from, lots of different kinds of people. You are right about the culture of Massachusetts, where I live. It’s a special place, but it’s a counterexample to your point. MA has one of the highest rates of foreign-born population in the country, and it has been that way for a long time. When I was growing up, there was a big influx of people from China. Today it’s India. A couple of generations ago, Italy/Ireland/Poland. “Eat to live, don’t live to eat” my mother told me, but her mom was born in Germany and her dad was Irish. Massachusetts — by the way also consistently one of the most Catholic states — shows you can have the Puritan culture without the Puritans.

Untrusted userspace is exactly right. I’d expect these approaches to help on the margin but the authors oversell their point using words like “guarantee.”

Control tool access like OSes enforce file permissions: I understand it’s a metaphor, but also isn’t the track record of OSes here pretty bad?

Check whether the agent is allowed to use the booking tool: so a web browser? Isn’t a browser a pretty powerful general-purpose tool, which by the way could also expose the agent to, like, a jailbreak?

> As such, security researchers have to devise new mitigations to prevent AI models taking adversarial actions even with the virtual machine constraints.

An understated reminder that yes, we really ought to solve alignment.

This analysis would seem to exonerate even Pat Buchanan, who by the 1990s had learned to couch all his rhetoric in terms of culture rather than race.

> I think God made all people good. But if we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, which group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?

Nevertheless, his comments drew contemporary accusations of racism. So how modern are we talking about? This was well-trod discourse in 1992.

Buchanan and Vance had every possible culture to draw from to make their points, but they reached for Zulus and Haitians, two nations of Black people whose most famous historical event is a somewhat-successful war against White people. It strains credulity that this messaging is not fine-tuned to the electorate.

This so-called traditional definition returns too many false negatives. It would exclude, for example, the inflammatory newspapers of the Jim Crow era. Americans learned with tragic regularity in the Post-Reconstruction era why spreading racial rumors is so reckless. It doesn’t matter to the moral calculus that the rumors were "truthy." The norm against expressing racial prejudice predates the most recent party realignment; it's amply represented in WW2 training materials. This is not a new thing.

Concerns about reputation, too, as well as general friction. I used to do the menus for my dad's restaurant, which was always a big hassle first of all with the typesetting and going to the printers and everything, and then also it was such a struggle to get him to go up on prices. He'd just rather undercharge a little bit and make less money than be known as the guy in town who sold the "expensive" burgers.

The boring answer is meetings. Chapter 3 of High Output Management has a great treatment on the topic, and it covers both middle management and the executive level, including a timetable from one of Andy Grove's days. Here is a quote where he summarizes:

> As you can see, in a typical day of mine one can count some twenty-five separate activities in which I participated, mostly information-gathering and - giving, but also decision-making and nudging. You can also see that some two thirds of my time was spent in a meeting of one kind or another. Before you are horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities -- information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting? The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities.

Thanks again for responding. You gave me a lot to think about. It seems like there isn’t much daylight between our positions, and in any case I’m sure nobody else is reading, so I’ll wrap it up here for any future spelunkers.

I think I’m on solid ground asserting that it’s common knowledge that most proofs have errors. The reason is that professional mathematicians tell us so. Here’s Terry Tao: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/advice-on-writing-papers/proo.... Notice how Tao acknowledges that papers “full of errors” are sometimes not corrected before publication. What does that mean for proofs which have only one minor error, and referees less exacting than Terry Tao?

Chapter 7 of Simon Singh’s book on Fermat’s Last Theorem is also illustrative (Singh liberally quotes from his sources directly so there is no question about what the mathematicians thought). After Wiles submitted his manuscript to Inventiones Mathematicae, the referees began finding mistakes almost immediately and were in constant communication with Wiles to get them corrected. Wiles worked on his proof for seven years; nobody thought there was anything wrong with his manuscript having a lot of errors. How probable is it that we found every error in the Wiles proof?

Here’s a good MathOverflow question on the topic: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/338607/why-doesnt-mathema.... Lots of good responses, and links. What stands out to me is that none of the top answers say “that’s just not true.” Instead those answers about why math proofs “work” even though they’re not completely, rigorously, “correct.”

My big point is that in math, some mistakes are trivial, and others are serious. The job of determining which is which is a job for humans — as you point out! — because it’s a topic for conference talks. But in programming, humans don’t decide how serious a mistake is — the computer does, by what it does. Typo in a code comment? No worries. Typo in a variable name? Broken program. If you abbreviate Norway to NOR in your YAML file, that’s cool. Abbreviate it to NO, and there goes your afternoon (because YAML translates NO to false). It’s the capriciousness, not the difficulty, that separates how people learn the two fields.

Debuggers, code review, and testing environments are primarily professional tools — they aren’t used by learners. By the time a learner of programming gets those tools, the damage is already done; they’re already weirdos, conditioned to accept the output of the computer no matter how capricious, and rewrite their code however it takes to get their programs to work, even if it doesn’t “make sense.”

> I'm sure if you even have an example of such not-fixed-error, you have absolutely no idea how it was treated later by the scientific community.

I don’t know what you’re trying to assert. I’m part of the scientific community. Yes, I’ve written code based on proofs that turned out to have flaws, and then I went and updated the code. The most fun one to talk about would be this one from 2006: https://research.google/blog/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-n...

Anyway thanks again for reading. I had a lot of fun writing up these comments & reading what folks and had to say.

I thought this thread was dead, and the topic is cursed besides that, but since this comment is obliquely referencing mine, I’ll post this: the two most prestigious white-collar fields are medicine and law, which both used to be more male-centric than programming ever was, and in those fields we see a steady upward trend of participation by women over the past few decades.

I've only talked to 0.001% of programmers. But of them, in my experience, they tend to not look into your eyes when they talk to you. I’m a programmer, and I got a lot worse about eye contact around the same time I really got into programming. If the software developers you work with all make good eye contact, I'm sure I won't convince you that devs are any different, except to say --

All professions affect the body differently! My dad is a chef. He's got the rounded shoulders and the chubby fingers of a chef. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Gordon Ramsay -- they have all got the same "look," because they spent so much time hovering over a cutting board. My dad makes fun of my "skinny little fingers." What I'm saying is that programmers get the same kind of thing, but on their minds.

I don’t have any axe to grind. I’m as certain that women and men are equally as smart, as I am that programmers aren’t any smarter than any other white-collar profession. But something is making undergraduate women drop CS 101, but that didn't also make them drop pre-law in the 90s, or pre-med in the 80s, even in the face of CS compensation approximately doubling in the mid-late 2010s.

Thanks for responding. Here’s what I mean about proofs. I learned how to do them in college, and in the early classes we got a lot of leeway on grading, and then as we moved up they expected more and more rigor. But it was still a conversation, like if I got dinged a few points on an exam question, I could take it to my professor and make my argument that my proof was valid, and I might get a point or two back. The proof-as-mathematical-object either exists or does not, but deciding whether my answer pointed to that proof was a social exercise.

Professional mathematicians also cut either other some slack. Most proofs published today have small errors — typographical, skipped steps, etc — and those bugs are never fixed. Despite the bugs, we’re confident in the results, and that confidence is a product of social consensus.

On the other hand, also in college, I had my programming classes, where I would turn in my code and they ran it through a test harness, and my grade was the number of tests that passed. So, if there was a syntax error, I got a 0. This was brutally harsh to the good students who attended every class, took notes, and studied, but who did not conform their minds to writing code. But that’s how we learn programming, because the compiler doesn’t care about intentions and “almost” is worth nothing.

Alan Perlis said “programming is an unnatural act.” It’s not harder than other jobs — in many ways it’s easier — but it’s much weirder, and it makes you weird. Professional programmers write bugs, constantly: why can’t they just write the code, without the bugs? Because our minds aren’t built that way.

Math proofs only need to convince other people. Programs need to convince a compiler. If compilers were people and you talked to them for the first time, the only reasonable response would be to call them assholes and find new friends. The field of mathematics doesn’t have an equivalent of the “Norway Problem.”

Here’s my theory. Learning how to write code causes damage to the mind, particularly in the area of how you relate to other people. When we’re learning to code, men and women both notice this happening, but men care less. Women, on the other hand, tend to think, “this is bad and I should stop.”

It’s hard to become a programmer without becoming a weirdo in the process, and women have a lot more to lose by becoming weirdos. If we knew how to learn programming without the mind damage -- if we could figure out how to allow learners to skip the “coal face” of spending long hours into the night talking to a compiler -- then that would solve the gender imbalance.

Just my theory. For a good long stretch I thought the explanation was that tech compensation wasn't actually all that great compared to what women could earn in other fields, and then the explosive comp growth of the mid-late 2010s happened and I've been wondering about what is the problem ever since.

You can have those things without written language; they weren't hunter-gatherers. I don't know what building you're talking about, but as far as I know the Brits didn't have any building nearly that tall in 1700. The Brits didn't have a steam engine in 1700. The Brits recognized, in 1700, that the Indians were people just as much as themselves. This argument of yours projects onto the past an opinion that nobody actually held.

In addition to what the other commenter said, the Indians in 1700 Virginia weren't hunter-gatherers. They had farms, money, laws, and government. To the extent that the colonizing English didn't think of them as "the same," well, they felt the same way about the Irish, who are also European.

Here’s my opinion:

1. In the US, we tried to make alcohol illegal, and failed so abjectly that nobody wants to try that again.

2. There’s a decent argument to be made, that in a counterfactual world where alcohol hadn’t been discovered yet, that if we invented it today we would immediately label it so obviously harmful that it should be banned. But we don’t live in that world.

3. While it’s hard to discuss whether this or that individual psychoactive drug should be legal, it’s relatively easier to evaluate whether they’re more or less harmful than alcohol. For example, coffee: clearly less; heroin: clearly more.

4. Besides the fact that prohibition failed, everyone sort of likes freedom? Like, yes, there must be limits, but those limits should be so much on the far side of what ordinary people consider acceptable that they never even have to think, “will the government let me do this?” That seems like a good guiding principle.

5. So here is the Schelling point: everything less harmful than, up to and including alcohol, should be legal, and everything more harmful should be illegal.

6. Like most Schelling points, the results favored by this rule are arbitrary, but the reason we ought to stick to it is not that it’s a good rule per se, but rather that it’s a rule which is easier to find agreement on.

So everything less harmful than alcohol should be legal, and everything more harmful should be banned. Thanks for reading. Have fun, everyone!

I suppose it's a matter of opinion. I would not have guessed that your list of US states governed “to spec” would include Idaho and Montana (weaker municipalities? Not sure), but not Massachusetts or Rhode Island (New England towns).

I'd only reiterate that if the question is whether there can be high-trust societies with a lot of local self-governance, that also have a lot of immigration, then Massachusetts proves that the answer is yes.

I live in one of those New England towns where everyone piles into the gym at the high school to argue about whether we really need a new fire engine. It’s not clear to me who you think lives here, but from what I can see it’s mostly Irish, Italian, Polish, and Indian. To meet someone whose four grandparents were born here is rare. Something like 30% of the population of Massachusetts was born in another country. Whatever else happened in history to make it this way, it sure wasn’t keeping out immigrants.

The Godfather is famously popular with Italian Americans, to a degree that was newsworthy in 1972 and people still write think pieces about it today. My cousin on the Italian side of the family started a Godfather-themed sandwich shop in Saugus, where he was out-competed by the existing Goodfellas-themed sandwich shop in Saugus. Italian Americans love The Godfather like Irish Americans love the Dropkick Murphys.