lsanders

Perhaps one common theme in the objections you find more compelling is that existing systems of accountability are unprepared to effectively allocate responsibility for outcomes that are (at least partially) generated by AI?

My answer to that question would not quite be a categorical yes or no.  For example, there’s a difference between a manually taken selfie and a complete raw security camera feed.

But I do agree this is straying from the original topic a bit.  Since the top-post use case is explicitly one where you’ve already decided you’re not comfortable posting the original photo publicly, I feel like the general acceptability of posting photos is mostly irrelevant here?  I think a more on-point justification would be talking about why it’s more acceptable ... (read more)

Tiny typo: Indiana is IN, not IA. (Apparently there once was a Bloomington in Iowa, but that now-uninhabited locale was neither on your itinerary nor plausibly ever <7 hours of legal driving from Pittsburgh PA.)

Ah, that’s probably a better process than our house’s trick of having two separate MA EZPass accounts simultaneously associated with the same car in order to get a second transponder I can use when I rent.  (Our way makes it hard to predict which account gets billed in the rare occasion that they have to fall back to the license plate because a transponder read for the double-associated car fails.)

My sample size is not huge, but personally I’ve never had a problem with associating mine with a rental using the timestamps of my rental contract and indicating that the car is a rental.

Fair enough, although I put a little less weight on the undesirable precedent because I think that precedent is already largely being set today. (Once we have precedents for regulating specific functionality of both operating systems and individual websites, I feel like it’s only technically correct to say that the case for similar regulation in browsers is unresolved.)

Also, the current legal standard just says that websites must give users a choice about the cookies; it doesn’t seem to say what the mechanism for that choice must be. The interpretation t... (read more)

In theory, yes. Do you have particular knowledge that things would likely play out as such if the regulations permitted, or are you reasoning that this is likely without special knowledge? If the former, then I’d want to update my views accordingly. But if it’s the latter, then I don’t really see a likely path for your regulatory proposal to meaningfully shift the market in any way other than market competition forcing all major browsers to implement the feature, in which case it doesn’t practically matter whether the implementation requirement has legal weight.

Once you’re willing to mandate browser features to bolster privacy between multiple users on the same device, I’d get rid of website-implemented cookie banners altogether (at least for this purpose) and make the browser mandate more robust instead.  I could see this as a browser preference with three mandated states (and perhaps an option for browsers to introduce additional options alongside these if they identify that a different tradeoff is worthwhile for many of their users):

• Single user mode:  this browser (or browser profile) is only used by

Good to know, thanks!

(And thanks in particular for linking to the original text — while your excerpt is suggestive, the meaning of “similar device” isn’t entirely clear without seeing that the surrounding paragraph is focused on preserving privacy between multiple users who share a single web-browsing device.  I feel like that is still a valid concern today and a reasonable reason for regulations to treat client-side storage slightly differently from server-side storage, even though it’s not most people‘s top privacy concern on the web these days and even though this directive doesn’t resolve that concern very effectively at all.)

(I'd love to see the regulations changed here: there's no reason to single out storing data on the client for special treatment…)

I haven’t personally needed to pay super close attention to the e-Privacy regulations but I thought they exclusively focused on cookies as a specific technology?  The web has client-side data storage that is not cookies, and cookies are more privacy invasive than simple client-side storage because they’re also automatically transmitted to the server on every matching request without any further interaction from either the us... (read more)

Yeah.  Other folks have already mentioned that the degree of enforcement leeway in the U.S. increased when the federal government made artifically-lower speed limits a requirement of federal highway funding in the 1970s.  Which I can’t confirm or refute, but does make sense: I imagine that some states who disagreed with the change might have grudgingly set the formal limits in line with the federal policy, and then simply used lax enforcement to allow the speeds that they preferred all along.  I have noticed that it’s often seemed politicall... (read more)

Probably not, since some U.S. states do post minimum (fair-weather) speeds on Interstate highways.  Section 2.2 of this paper includes a slightly dated map indicating the minimum speeds in each state (where applicable).

Personally, I’m more familiar with folks creating entirely new nonprofit media outlets to focus on reporting in an area that they believe to deserve better coverage (many of which then seek to partner with traditional publishers on specific projects once they have a demonstrated body of work), rather than directly funding that coverage at an existing paper.

I think Religion News Service is basically an older representative of this approximate model, and topic-focused non-profit journalism organizations like this seem to be popping up more frequently as trad... (read more)

(Back in 2017 I asked for examples of risk from AI, and didn't like any of them all that much. Today, "someone asks an LLM how to kill everyone and it walks them through creating a pandemic" seems pretty plausible.)

My impression from the 2017 post is that concerns were framed as “superintelligence risk” at the time.  The intended meaning of that term wasn’t captured in the old post, but it’s not clear to me that an LLM answering questions about how to create a pandemic qualifies as superintelligence?

This contrast seems mostly aligned with my long-stan... (read more)

I will be morbidly amused if this market resolves true because McHenry ultimately schedules a vote to decide whether he can schedule other business, and then the plurality result is that he cannot.

Jeff touched on this, but I want to underline the point more strongly:  How do the sharing platforms themselves (Reddit / YouTube / etc) exist without ads?  To be clear, I’m no fan of the audience-distorting incentives of ads… but the infrastructure for free content isn’t exactly free, either, and we need to pay for that somehow or else that otherwise-funded content doesn’t get distributed (and then the lack of distribution inherently prevents donation / patronage models from working).  I’m having trouble seeing another realistic way for tha... (read more)

As a foster-only parent in Massachusetts, I think I have much more interaction with DCF than most parents, albeit from a rather different angle.

In general, the parents’ concern here seems overblown to me — my perception is that DCF case workers will pretty much always start by talking to parents about their concerns if at all possible, and that they’re wildly unlikely to take any punitive action if a conversation about DCF’s expectations is enough to correct (from their perspective) the family’s behavior. If nothing else, the institutional incentives are ... (read more)

It’s not clear to me that putting effort into enforcing existing regulations is more feasible for many of the folks advocating assault rifle bans, nor is it clear to me that it’s a significantly higher impact approach.

Re: feasibility — Your examples of folks advocating additional legislation are federal and state politicians, while my impression is that most handgun enforcement actions in the U.S. traditionally rely on law enforcement agencies at more local levels.  Thus, it’s not clear that the folks pushing such policies are in as good a position to... (read more)

Fair enough.  Thanks for the conversation!

Okay, so you‘re defining the problem as groups transmitting too little information?  Then I think a natural first step when thinking about the problem is to determine an upper bound on how much information can be effectively transmitted.  My intuition is that the realistic answer for many recipients would turn out to be “not a lot more than is already being transmitted”.  If I’m right about that (which is a big “if”), then we might not need much thinking beyond that point to rule out this particular framing of the problem as intractable.

For that distinction to be relevant, individuals need to be able to distinguish whether a particular conclusion of the group is groupthink or whether it’s principled.

If the information being propagated in both cases is primarily the judgment, how does the individual group member determine which judgments are based on real reasons vs not?  If the premise is that this very communication style is the problem, then how does one fix that without re-creating much of the original burden on the individual that our group-level coordination was trying to avoid?... (read more)