skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Gander social launching on Canada Day in ~tech
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkMan with same name as U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan is eligible for Alaska’s primary ballot, judge rules …Man with same name as U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan is eligible for Alaska’s primary ballot, judge rules
Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews’ ruling overturns a June 15 decision by Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher to disqualify the challenger and keep him off the primary ballot. Matthews’ ruling can be appealed to the state Supreme Court.
Attorneys for the state have said Tuesday is the deadline for a final ruling so that ballots for the Aug. 18 primary can be printed.
The judge ruled that the Division’s decision to exclude Dan J. Sullivan because his candidacy was not “in good faith” was not based on the Constitution, Alaska law or the Division’s own regulations. The retired teacher from the small fishing community of Petersburg filed to challenge the incumbent.
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The challenger Sullivan has said that sharing a name and party affiliation with the incumbent gave him “an instant megaphone.” But the 69-year-old retired teacher and former U.S. Forest Service employee said he had considered a run for some time and had grown frustrated with the senator.
He initially was certified on the state’s candidate list as Dan J. Sullivan, with the senator listed as Dan S. Sullivan and identified as the incumbent
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIt depends what hype you were listening to. It's supposed to be pretty good.It depends what hype you were listening to. It's supposed to be pretty good.
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Comment on Base Power brings cheap batteries to residents in power-starved PJM in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
PJM Interconnection, which serves 67 million people across 13 states from the mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, has become a poster child for how not to keep up with soaring energy demand. Startup Base Power is taking a whack at that problem by installing a network of unusually large home batteries in one corner of that regional grid.
Starting today, the first 2,000 customers in Illinois utility ComEd’s territory who sign up with Base Power can get a 40-kilowatt-hour home backup battery for just $95 up front. Subsequent customers will pay $295, still a mere sliver of the $10,000 or more that a backup-capable home battery normally costs. All these customers will then buy retail electricity from Base Power at a 25% discount to the prevailing ComEd rate, which was 10.4 cents per kilowatt-hour this summer. Customers sign a 12-year battery agreement, but can pay a $500 deinstallation fee if they want out early.
This business model gives customers in Chicagoland more options for cheap and resilient power while also giving Base Power the rights to operate the battery fleet in response to broader market dynamics. Base Power will be adding capacity in the northwesternmost territory of the constrained regional grid, but its unique model allows it to avoid PJM’s ossified procedures for expanding large-scale grid production.
“We are deploying capacity behind the meter at the residential home, where an interconnection already exists, so we don’t wait in the interconnection queue,” said Base Power’s founder and CEO Zach Dell. “There’s some work around that, but it’s certainly less onerous and much faster than the large-load interconnection queue.”
PJM famously hosts the densest corridor of data centers, in northern Virginia, but the AI buildout has taken off in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania as well. While hyperscalers stare down yearslong waitlists for new gas turbines to meet their colossal power needs, Base Power can install miniature power plants every day, which add up over time.
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Several layers of policy and regulation made Illinois the right entry point for Base Power in PJM. The state allows retail competition, so Base Power can sell power directly to customers. However, it still has to get permission from a wires utility to hook up the batteries to the distribution grid, and ComEd stood out as a partner.
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Base Power will also tap into a new Illinois policy to encourage virtual power plants that was created by the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act, which became law in January. Starting this summer, battery customers can receive a rebate if they install a battery and agree to discharge it to the grid for multiple hours during the evening peak on a certain number of summer nights. It’s a simple way to ensure that the batteries make themselves useful, and Base Power will apply that rebate to support its very low pricing.
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Base Power brings cheap batteries to residents in power-starved PJM
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Comment on Pre-modern armies for worldbuilders, part III: paying for it in ~humanities.history
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Now I should be clear here: dealing with costs in non-monetary ways doesn’t make those costs go away. Someone, somehow has to bear the costs, regardless of if the state pays in grain or coin or tax remission or simply makes someone do it for free (in the latter case, the forced laborer is bearing the costs). In all of these cases, labor still has to be taken out of the civilian economy and it has to be subsisted while it does something military in purpose, be that soldiering itself or providing for military capital. Just because something isn’t paid for in money does not make it ‘free.’
However, it is also the case that the cash revenues of many states are both really complex and often quite limited. The thing to understand is that these are generally traditional polities with tax regimes that are also customary and traditional, which is to say that the ruler often has very limited latitude to simply change the system without triggering intense resistance. As a result, rulers often focus on developing revenues in the areas where they do have substantial latitude, even if those areas are smaller parts of the overall economy (remember: most of the economy is in farming).
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A lot of tax systems, when one looks closely at them, have these sorts of quirks. Roman taxes were, for instance, divided into two categories: tributum (a property tax based on land) and the vectigalia, which covered a wide variety of state revenues from things like renting state owned land or state monopolies (as on silver mining). Rates of tributum outside of Italy (where the tax wasn’t collected after the 160s, since the whole point of having an empire is to make someone else pay taxes) were often set by truly ancient tradition, with the Romans generally preferring (for reasons of local stability) to preserve whatever taxes existed before they conquered a region, merely redirecting them to the Roman treasury (the aerarium Saturni). But that too might mean that while Roman revenues could be vast, they could also be remarkably inflexible as changing tax rates on a region was a breach of tradition which could provoke instability (and was ‘being a bad emperor’ to boot!). The workaround of all of this was the emperor’s private purse: property of successive emperors becoming a parallel form of revenue called the fiscus (the word for a household’s private money supply, literally a box of cash in the house), which at least notionally could be a bit more flexible.
In short, these state revenues tend to be messy, complicated and idiosyncratic, the product of generational layers of both innovation and stubborn tradition. But even as an economy grows, state revenues may stay stubbornly static.
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When the state shifts an expense downward to individuals or communities, we say that the cost is devolved on to them. Devolution is thus a strategy for shifting costs off of the state balance sheet and given the above discussion, you may already be able to see the value: for a polity that has a lot of economic activity happening which (because of low administrative capacity, sticky traditions or a lack of coinage-based economics) it cannot effectively tax, devolution provides a means of shifting military costs directly onto those economics actors.
In historically-inspired or fantasy worldbuilding, this is a strategy that is often both neglected and unintentionally evoked. It is neglected in that it is rarely explicitly placed as part of the system: no one says, “oh, the town guards have to buy their own equipment” and generally the town guards never look as motley as they ought if that were the case. On the other hand, the basic nature of the ‘adventuring party’ involves a lot of devolved costs: the state needs monster hunters, but it expects those hunters to equip and supply themselves and often doesn’t do much to pay them (though part of this is ‘payment in loot,’ discussed below). But cost devolution was very common and worked on both smaller and larger scales.
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That said, the recruitment principle matters a fair bit here. You can compel farmers to reach into their own resources a little bit, but if you want them to really dig deep for a war effort, they need to motivated by something beyond compulsion. Systems that devolve heavy infantry service – which demands a considerable investment in armor – are generally entitlement-principle recruitment systems. We see this with the hoplite armies of ancient Greece, the citizen-militia armies of the Roman Republic and also the heavy infantry militias of many medieval towns: what gets these men to work harder in order to afford to be able to shell out for that expensive equipment is the fact that their status in the community and their political position in the community are connected to it. Polities that are unwilling to devolve any political power to the commons are going to struggle to get the commons to buy expensive equipment or be highly motivated on the battlefield.
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Taking loot, meanwhile, was an expected part of nearly all pre-modern warfare and so the promise of loot was a regular inducement for service. What I want to note here is that the promise of loot was almost never sufficient inducement: it was very rare for armies to serve only for loot. Instead, promises of loot were layered on top of other recruitment principles: loot and pay, loot and social status, loot and a role in the community. And that should make sense for two reasons. First, loot is never guaranteed, it requires winning, which generally only one side is going to do. Indemnities – which unlike loot, flow entirely to the state, rather than at least partially to individual soldiers – require winning the war and imposing a peace and again, only one side is generally in a position to impose indemnities (and often neither side is!).
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This is something, I will note, that RPG-economies (both table top and computer) get quite wrong. The problem is three-fold on the one hand, these games invariably underestimate the cost of simply subsisting even a small adventuring party. Food and basic clothing consume quite a lot of resources in a pre-modern context, but that would be irritating to players and so it is often ignored or the cost reduced massively. Second, the loot gained is often over-valued, with itemization systems that fail to take into account that an old, busted hauberk pulled off of a corpse is not going to command the same market value as a shiny new one, freshly crafted to order.
But most importantly, these economies fall apart because they assume an insane amount of fighting and an absurd ‘win rate.’ Recall that, for an aged hoplite, having been in three battles was quite a respectable number even in a very violent period in ancient Greece. By contrast, your typical Dungeons and Dragons adventuring party has been in three battles before they unlock their subclass features at level 3. Moreover, most of the combatants on the losing side of a battle typically flee. In a battle between two armies of 10,000 men, we might expect the winning army to have lost around 500 men (5%) and the losing army to have lost perhaps 1,500 (15%), so that is 9,500 survivors splitting the loot of 1,500 fallen (2,000 even if they’re willing to rob dead comrades). So while your D&D party or Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord company sustains itself by splitting the loot of dozens of foes for every party member, in an actual army, you’re lucky to get your ~1/6ths share of a fallen foe.4 Loot is still a factor, but one cannot expect to run an army on it, long-term.
That said, loot distribution can have interesting distorting effects even if it isn’t enough to relieve the whole burden of running an army. Loot is a high-variance sort of thing: many soldiers get none, but some soldiers, if they are lucky to be on the right campaign, might get a great deal, potentially enough to alter their social position and status. Again, this simply cannot happen to everyone in a society, but it can happen to select individuals. Some of Alexander’s soldiers did get rich off of his conquests and certainly some Romans did too, although it is worth noting that in most societies, the structure of power channels looted wealth upwards: most of it ends up in the hands of the elite (as was certainly the case for both of those examples). Often this was institutionalized, with the proceeds of conquest being distributed in shares based on rank, with higher ranks getting a larger slice of the pie.
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Pre-modern armies for worldbuilders, part III: paying for it
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThe way they exaggerate a talking point about a possible loan guarantee into a “asking for a bailout” shows why they’re not to be trusted. At the same time, I don’t see why someone at OpenAI...The way they exaggerate a talking point about a possible loan guarantee into a “asking for a bailout” shows why they’re not to be trusted.
At the same time, I don’t see why someone at OpenAI thought that could possibly happen.
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThe stated goal of having only a limited release of Mythos was to allow defenders to patch security bugs in important software before attackers get a chance to exploit them. I think that still...The stated goal of having only a limited release of Mythos was to allow defenders to patch security bugs in important software before attackers get a chance to exploit them. I think that still applies?
I suppose you can twist that into “have access before competitors do” but it depends on what kind of competition you mean. We shouldn’t want to be neutral about the arms race between patching security bugs and exploiting them.
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentNobody's asking for a bailout. Why bring that up?Nobody's asking for a bailout. Why bring that up?
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Comment on US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
The US government Friday lifted its block on Anthropic’s powerful Claude Mythos 5 AI model, allowing the company to release it to more than 100 US institutions, including major companies and government agencies.
The decision, in a letter sent Friday afternoon to Anthropic, is a major de-escalation in the confrontation between the Trump Administration and one of the world’s most valuable private companies. Two weeks ago the administration imposed export controls on Mythos, leading to a shut down of the model and its cousin Fable 5 after warnings from Amazon and other companies that they could be “jailbroken” for malicious purposes.
The letter is silent on Fable 5, a weaker version of Mythos that was briefly the most powerful AI model widely available to consumers. People close to the talks said they are moving toward releasing Fable as well, though that timeline is unclear.
“I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to Anthropic’s chief compute officer Tom Brown Friday, citing “significant progress” in the intense, daily talks between the government and the company since the block went into effect.
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Under the new Anthropic arrangement, “a license will no longer be required to export, reexport, or in-country transfer (including deemed exports and reexports) the Claude Mythos 5 Model to entities identified in Annex A to this letter and their foreign national employees, or to Anthropic’s foreign national employees.”
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US releases powerful Anthropic model Mythos to some US companies
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Comment on The White House now determines which customers can access new AI models in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI posted a better article.I posted a better article.
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Comment on OpenAI says the US government will vet users of its latest AI model in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
OpenAI said in a Friday blog post announcing its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.6, that the government would initially approve who gets access to the new release while AI companies and the administration work out a longer-term plan for regulation on the sector.
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The latest moves underline rapid changes in the Trump administration’s AI policy. President Donald Trump returned to office promising a hands-off approach to the industry and decried attempts by the Biden administration to create safety standards for new AI models. But after the recent appearance of systems capable of finding security vulnerabilities in software spooked officials in Washington and around the world, the White House changed its position.
“In a matter of weeks, U.S. federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque,” Dean Ball, a former Trump AI adviser, wrote in a social media post Friday. Ball announced last week he will join OpenAI next month to work on policy.
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OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman made clear that he did not welcome the additional federal oversight. “I just dont like the idea of the government picking the customers,” he wrote Friday in a post on X. “Confident we will get to a better place.”
An OpenAI blog post on the arrangement said: “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default. It keeps the best tools from users, developers, enterprises, cyber defenders, and global partners who need them.”
“We are taking this short-term step because we believe it is the strongest path to broader availability in the coming weeks,” the blog post said.
OpenAI said that Sol was its most powerful AI model yet and showed improvements in coding and cybersecurity tasks. Only companies approved by the government will get access. There is no process for individual users to get access to the new model. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
The administration signed off on a list of companies OpenAI asked to be allowed access to Sol but excluded a handful of entities located outside of the United States, a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic information. Another White House official said the government was working with AI labs to develop a long-term approach for addressing the challenges of getting the technology out to more users.
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OpenAI says the US government will vet users of its latest AI model
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThis seems like saying that if someone didn't declare "I'm against slavery" in their social media profile then they must be for it. That's not fair. We assume normal people are against slavery,...This seems like saying that if someone didn't declare "I'm against slavery" in their social media profile then they must be for it. That's not fair. We assume normal people are against slavery, and they don't have to say so explicitly. (And putting "I'm against slavery" in your profile might even seem a little suspicious, because it's answering a question nobody asked.)
If it actually came up in an interview or something, I assume they'd know what to say.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentI think we can make a distinction between people being worried that AI research might result in something that could be enslaved and wanting that. There many things we could legitimately worry...I think we can make a distinction between people being worried that AI research might result in something that could be enslaved and wanting that.
There many things we could legitimately worry about. AI researchers can worry about these things too. We are all influenced by science fiction.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThe point of AI is to automate things without slavery. People are worried that AI research might result in something that’s equivalent to slavery. But I don’t think anyone considers this a good...The point of AI is to automate things without slavery. People are worried that AI research might result in something that’s equivalent to slavery. But I don’t think anyone considers this a good outcome and I think making up lies that people want slavery is malicious.
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Comment on No, artificial intelligence is not conscious in ~tech
skybrian LinkI thought this bit was interesting: I think this gets into the nature of evidence and the fact that generative AI alone usually creates fiction, not evidence. To have evidence, we need provenance,...I thought this bit was interesting:
Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real? My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake. I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.
I think this gets into the nature of evidence and the fact that generative AI alone usually creates fiction, not evidence. To have evidence, we need provenance, some kind of connection between something in the real world and the output we’re looking at. What sort of provenance can there be for an AI chatbot?
There is a form of provenance that goes through the weights. For example, Wikipedia is somewhat accurate, has a lot of facts, and LLM’s are trained on Wikipedia. So, we do get some real-world facts in LLM output, but this is lossy and somewhat out of date.
This is now routinely supplemented by web searches. I normally use ChatGPT in “Thinking” mode and it does many web searches and combines the results. So one form of provenance is that ChatGPT tells me things based on what it found in web searches. This is only as good as the web pages it found, but the same would be true if I did the research myself. (I’d like to think I would be less gullible, though.)
A third way is through a coding agent’s tool calls. It runs various commands and uses tool output to infer things about source code and how the software behaves. This is a good source of truth about computer systems.
On the other hand, mathematical reasoning is not really evidence-based. A proof is valid if the theorems follow from the axioms. If a work of fiction has a valid proof in it, the proof is still valid even though the story is made up.
I think this is true of reasoning in general, which is why I’m willing to call AI output genuine reasoning even though there’s nothing in the generator that looks like consciousness. The reasoning isn’t the evidence. It’s the combination of various forms of evidence to get a result.
Since most reasoning is informal, it can generate wrong answers, which is why we need to have other ways to check it. When a coding agent runs, it generates plenty of wrong answers, but it checks them and goes off in a different direction based on what it discovers. Reasoning doesn’t need to be perfect to count as reasoning.
I’m wondering if Gander uses regular PDS’s that interoperate with Bluesky. There’s no technical information that I was able to find. If you have an account, does your account have a dtd? Do tools like pdsls work with it?
Gander claims to use AT Proto and to somehow make sure your data stays in Canada, but both can’t be true if it participates in AT Proto in the normal way, because PDS’s are public and designed to be replicated without asking permission. (Bluesky is designing a new protocol called Spaces to allow more privacy.)