I know your comment is about the absurdity of such a thing, and maybe the stupidity of the administration, but for the readers at home:
Fentanyl is actually a very simple molecule. The way it's (and other drugs) production is controlled is by controlling and monitoring the precursor chemicals. So if someone goes out and buys a lot of proprionyl chloride, they will pop up on the DEA's list.
This is a much more sane thing to do than hemming and hawing about how dangerous the AI chatbot is and placing yourself into a position superiority over your users, pretending you know better than them, assuming that you must protect them from certain knowledge for their own good, etc, etc.
And? Computers are dual-use. Cars are dual-use. Telephones are dual-use. Freeze-dried chicken is dual-use.
Single-use, i.e. military only technology is actually pretty rare.
> This kind of posture is simply not tenable as frontier intelligence increases.
I reject the corpo speak that tries to brand these things as being "intelligent." They can be useful. But a language model cannot conjure a weapons platform from the ether no matter how "intelligent" it is.
Having a chatbot that talks to you about synthetic biology or nuclear physics is just not the same as being equipped to develop biological weapons or atomic bombs.
None of this will happen in the "neighbors backyard." You are exaggerating the threats to "democracy" while simultaneously invoking democracy to limit freedom of information. The suggestion that somehow the bad guys will get nukes if we let people access information is just absurd.
Society at large is not concerned about whether someone asks the chatbot about organic chemistry. They are concerned that they will be de-facto forced to interact with some shitty automated system to get by in life, like having to pass an AI-powered ATS to get a job.
They are tired of the hype and tired of idiots like Amodei being elevated to heights of power and influence. They are concerned that the things they love are being devalued. But they don't give a fuck if I ask an AI about genetically modifying viruses. This is a pet issue among some of the AI safety crowd.
So, yes, I am 100% fine with PRC-backed labs distilling Anthropic's models. I do not care about Anthropic. They have demonstrated that they are not on my side, and that they are at best ambivalent about actually empowering their users. I'm not a fan of the PRC either, but their distance makes them far less of a threat to me than companies like Anthropic and my own government.
Lisp is a family of languages. They share a common ancestry. That family is larger than Common Lisp, although Common Lisp is might be the last living descendant. While there are common traits among members of the family (parenthesized notation, certain special forms, symbol names), the presence of these traits does not itself define the family any more than having fins implies that an animal must be a member of the fish family.
A language is not only its syntax, but also it's semantics. Lisp is not just parentheses or even 'homoiconicity.' In addition to the surface syntax, there is a shared cultural understanding of what certain symbols mean, how they fit together into a system, what a symbol even is, and so on.
Given that, while there is some surface resemblance to lisp, it's plainly obvious to me that Clojure does not belong in that family. This is not a dig at Clojure! Clojure makes a lot of people happy and productive, and that's great. It's my third favorite language on the JVM. But when you take a closer look at some very core design decisions made in Clojure you'll find that they depart strongly enough from all the other languages in the Lisp family that it belongs to a distinct language family. A few of them:
- Reader doesn't intern symbols
- EQUAL symbols aren't EQ
- Introduction of vars
- Cons doesn't cons
- No numeric tower
- Backquote behavior
These things don't necessarily come up in day-to-day programming, so it might seem like quibbling, but these are fairly central differences in meaning.
I think it's sensible to consider "Clojures" as a distinct language family. Rhere are languages like Fennel and Hy that are clearly Clojures, and I'm sure there will be more.
Since there are other decent dynlangs out there, the benefits are less about the surface language aspect, and more about the process of getting to a solution. These are the system aspects of lisp that enable an incremental development workflow with a lightning-fast feedback loop. While there are important language features that support this, it's ultimately a "whole is more than the sum of its parts" effect.
I'd recommend checking out videos of people developing systems in lisp. Off the top of my head:
If you are interested in machine learning, check out Gabor Melis's library: https://github.com/melisgl/mgl. It's not an area I'm super familiar with, so I can't speak to it's feature set, but I believe he used it to win a machine learning competition some years ago.
I don't think anyone's written a transformer or diffusion model with it, could be a fun challenge.
lmao, brilliant scientist Elon Musk is NOT. A closer comparison would be general Groves, someone who can get the team and resources in place so the work can get done.
I don't think that's at question in this case. It was decided in Massachusetts v. EPA that EPA is required to make that determination itself. Three years after that decision, EPA basically answered "we think it is."
The court isn't bringing any of that up in this opinion. They are looking only at whether Congress specifically delegated EPA the power to regulate emissions by means of "generation shifting". The majority opinion was "no, they didn't."
Isn't it a good thing that armed citizens and the professional warrior caste like police and military -- who are also really just other citizens -- work together?
If you are asking why the glorious revolution hasn't happened despite having an armed to the teeth peasantry, then the answer is simple: the peasants are still getting their bread and circuses.
Right, right. Guns are absolutely about power. What is interesting to me about this difference between us is that I really, really want people to have that power: I think it is very important that regular people have this "violent potential" as you put it. Having the potential is obviously not the same as deploying it, but having it still matters very much.
Most people are good, trustworthy, and deserving of this power. A few people are not, but taking power away from regular people really won't do so much to help them. In fact, at the end of the day, all it does is force them to become like children, dependent on someone else -- or really, a special class of person, since people absolutely should work together -- for their own security.
"Society" is really nothing more than these people: those that choose "cooperate". It's not the same thing as the "political system" or even the "rule or law". Some people choose "defect", and view the cooperators as prey. Correct me if I misunderstand, but it seems to me, that out of fear of defectors, you want to take power from cooperators and give it to a sanctioned, "regulated" class of people. Presumably because you think you would be safer.
I think you can imagine why this would be ill-considered. If you are concerned about "equality", it's hard for me to imagine a more unequal state. We've basically arrived again at a medieval distinction between peasants, warriors, and priests. Who keeps your warriors in check? The unarmed peasants? The priests with their "regulations"? I'm guessing you are more of a priestly type. I would caution you, your magic is not as strong as you think it is, and it doesn't seem to work at all on the bandits.
It's a bad idea to dox gun owners, but I personally would be very pleased to learn that my neighbors are well armed. I already know a lot of them are. Perhaps you would not be. But if not, consider that you might need better neighbors or maybe a better relationship with them.
Tether has the veneer of bank equity from the balance sheet "attestations" it publishes, but I think a better analogy would be that tether issues casino chips for the decentralized casino that encompasses the tether-based offshore exchanges and defi universe.
There isn't any real visibility into the balance sheet, but I'd guess most of the "collateral" boils down to margin loans issued at the exchanges, and since the house has the edge on those platforms, their ship stays afloat.