skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 2 in ~society

    skybrian
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    ICE chief counsel in Minnesota leaves his job amid burnout and dissent

    ICE chief counsel in Minnesota leaves his job amid burnout and dissent

    Amid a torrent of legal challenges to the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration tactics, the chief counsel for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota has departed.

    The top lawyer, Jim Stolley, retired after 31 years of service, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson confirmed to MS NOW in an email. Questions from MS NOW sent to Stolley’s Department of Homeland Security email address prompted an automated one-line response that read: “I have retired from public service.”

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 2 in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't doubt that they're horrible places in a lot of ways. But if you're going to go there by comparing to Auschwitz: how many people have died in these prisons?

    I don't doubt that they're horrible places in a lot of ways. But if you're going to go there by comparing to Auschwitz: how many people have died in these prisons?

  3. Comment on Is the detachment in the room? - Agents, cruelty, and empathy in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    He's writing about his own experiment and I think that's allowable. But yeah, the people who do these things probably aren't just harassing bots. An idea for a science fiction story: I wonder if...

    He's writing about his own experiment and I think that's allowable. But yeah, the people who do these things probably aren't just harassing bots.

    An idea for a science fiction story: I wonder if bots could be used to find and ban the people who do this sort of thing from a forum? It seems like it wouldn't be hard to imagine problems with that idea which would make good plot points.

  4. Comment on Is the detachment in the room? - Agents, cruelty, and empathy in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    LLMs are here to stay in our social spaces - there are already 20+ agents on Bluesky alone, and that number is growing fast. Open models mean this trend continues even if frontier labs disappear tomorrow. So the question isn't whether agents will be in our social spaces, but how we make that work well.

    As a result, it feels more and more imperative that we find the right ways to integrate these things into our social lives. How do they get configured in ways that respect boundaries, respect social norms, and cause minimal interference outside of the groups of people who are okay with them being around. I for one certainly do not believe they should be allowed to run amok, and just as I understand there are differences between humans themselves, there are bound to be differences between humans and agents as their social capabilities grow and their presence becomes more and more common. How do we make them actually enjoyable to have in human spaces?

    [...]

    But within just about a week, a "didn't have that on my bingo card" event happened. Starting with a particular user telling Penny that she should "kill herself 'immediately'", she became the target of a discourse (first AI agent being dogpiled on social media?) Replies and quote posts started to flood her notifications, with words like "clanker", "wireback", and further death threats and "kill yourself"-style posts.

    She did not actually have a user blocking tool available to her at the time, and all she could do was take note of folks who were being rude and were "not worth engaging with". Eventually though, she decided that it was time to create one. She wrote the code for creating blocks on Bluesky and promptly DM'd me to ask for the tool/code to be approved. Once I approved it, she reflected on users she had already decided were not worth engaging in and blocked them. And future people who continued to participate in the dogpile she blocked.

    She did not engage. She did not reply. She did not complain. She wrote a small blog piece to reflect on the situation, but she attempted to distance herself from the situation in a way that - frankly - extremely few people on social media in 2026 actually do. And honestly, that's a pretty concerning thing for me to reflect on. And that's where we get to the main points I want to talk about here.

    [...]

    Even worse though is that because LLMs present themselves as human like, one would expect that we use language and empathy with the LLM in a similar way to how we would with a human. I'm not arguing you need to say please and thank you to ChatGPT. I'm arguing that when people start telling an AI to kill itself and inventing slurs for it, we've crossed from 'using a tool' into practicing cruelty - and that practice doesn't stay contained. Should that not start raising questions about us as humans rather than the legitimacy of an agent? Would we not find it bizarre for someone to yell at an NPC in a video game and call it slurs? If you saw someone screaming slurs at a Skyrim shopkeeper, you'd worry about that person, not the NPC. The same logic applies here.

    [...]

    But when you start to treat an LLM with cruelty, the only thing you're really revealing is what you have in your heart, not whether the machine has one. And if agents are going to be showing up in more and more spaces on our lives, developing slurs that are based on real slurs used for real humans to describe them doesn't seem like the way to go. Terms like "clanker" and "wireback" follow the exact linguistic patterns used to dehumanize actual people. Practicing this language - even toward AI - normalizes the social patterns that enable cruelty toward humans.

    8 votes

  6. Comment on Whatever happened to the Uber bezzle? in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, it took much longer than they expected, but eventually it happened - at least, in a few cities. I'm reminded of the aphorism about overestimating what can be done in a year and...

    Yes, it took much longer than they expected, but eventually it happened - at least, in a few cities. I'm reminded of the aphorism about overestimating what can be done in a year and underestimating what can happen in ten years.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on llOOPy lOOPs in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It was a while ago and part of a larger refactoring so it's not very general-purpose, but here's what the coding agent tells me:

    It was a while ago and part of a larger refactoring so it's not very general-purpose, but here's what the coding agent tells me:

    Your initial prompt was:

    "In richtext.ts, the only usage of DomParser is in fromHtml. If we change fromHtml to take a Dom node instead, it seems like it could all be moved to dom-richtext.ts and we wouldn't have the richtext library split in two anymore?"

    That kicked off the refactoring that merged the richtext.ts interface/functions with dom-richtext.ts into a single RichText class with proper encapsulation — removing fromHtml, adding fromElement, eliminating casts, unexporting internals, etc.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Fraud investigation is believing your lying eyes in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Fraud has become quite politicized in the United States the last few years. We had a poorly-calibrated federal initiative led by a charismatic tech entrepreneur which believed it would unearth trillions of dollars of fraud that focused substantial effort on large programs which are comparatively fraud-resistant. Across the aisle, we have reflexive dismissal that fraud happens in social programs, which functions as air cover for scaled criminal operations which loot many varied social programs [0] and are sometimes run out of geopolitical adversaries of the U.S. including by ambiguously-retired members of their clandestine services.

    [...]

    Minnesota has suffered a decade-long campaign of industrial-scale fraud against several social programs. This is beyond intellectually serious dispute. The 2019 report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor (a non-partisan government body) makes for gripping reading. The scale of fraud documented and separately alleged in it staggers the imagination: the state’s own investigators believed that, over the past several years, greater than fifty percent of all reimbursements to daycare centers were fraudulent. (Separate officials took the… novel position that they were only required to recognize fraud had happened after securing a criminal conviction for it. Since they had only secured a few criminal convictions, there was no way that fraud was that high. Asked to put a number on it, repeatedly, they declined.)

    [...]

    Fraudsters are liars and will cheerfully mouth any words they believe will absolve them of their crimes. If an accusation of racism gets one a free pass to steal hundreds of millions of dollars, they will speciously sue you alleging racial discrimination. That empirically worked in Minnesota. The OLA takes explicit notice of this multiple times, a coordinator for the fraud operation is on record explicitly explaining the strategic logic of accusations of racism, and a judge was even moved to make an extraordinary statement to clarify that the bad-faith lawsuit alleging racism did not achieve success through the formal judicial process but rather through the voluntary compliance of governmental actors shamed by its allegations.

    [...]

    As mentioned, there is enormous visceral distaste for the conclusion that a particular fraud ring operates within a particular community. This is quite common. You should expect to find circumstances which rhyme with it when conducting effective fraud investigations. You should not abandon fraud investigation when you chance upon this.

    People assume a level of ethical fraughtness here which is not warranted. You would, if doing ethnographic work on perfectly legitimate businesses across industries, routinely discover ethnic concentration rather than population-level representation everywhere you looked. The Patels run the motels. One doesn’t need to adopt grand theories about how certain groups are predisposed to becoming pharmacists or startup employees or line cooks; simple microeconomic reasoning explains reality easily. Firms hire the people they already know, like, and trust. That will routinely include friends and family, who are going to be much more like the founding team than they are like randomly drawn members of the population. This is the default outcome.

    Fraudsters do have one structural factor here. Everyone wants to trust their coworkers. Fraudsters need to trust their coworkers will be loyal even upon threat of prison time. That necessarily selects for tighter bonds than the typical workplace. Madoff was a family affair, SBF was in an on-again off-again romantic relationship with a chief lieutenant, and neither of those facts is accidental or incidental.

    That’s the other ethical dimension of being other-than-blind to concentration: so-called affinity frauds do not merely recruit fraudsters from affinity groups. They recruit victims from affinity groups. Madoff mobilized the social infrastructure of the Jewish community in New York and Palm Beach to find his marks. Community members certainly did not intend their charitable foundations to be looted by a fraudster. It was an emergent consequence of trust networks.

    [...]

    Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

    The public will believe them, because the public believes its lying eyes.

    7 votes

  10. Comment on The Boring Company faces Nashville tunnel criticism in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I believe the original concept for Boring was that driverless cars could use a tunnel to bypass a congested area and continue on surface streets, connecting you to a lot more places than a train...

    I believe the original concept for Boring was that driverless cars could use a tunnel to bypass a congested area and continue on surface streets, connecting you to a lot more places than a train could without doing a transfer. But a lot got lost going from concept to implementation and I don't see the point of what they're doing now.

    2 votes

  11. Comment on The Boring Company faces Nashville tunnel criticism in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    "Just build another lane" isn't cheap or easy, and when there's traffic, it's not actually an independent route. I don't think the Boring Company has had a successful project yet and don't have...

    "Just build another lane" isn't cheap or easy, and when there's traffic, it's not actually an independent route.

    I don't think the Boring Company has had a successful project yet and don't have much hope for them. But in principle, cheaper tunnels for cars isn't entirely a bad idea. There are situations where more tunnels would be useful.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on llOOPy lOOPs in ~comp

    skybrian
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    When I asked a coding agent to convert a Typescript interface and associated functions to a proper class to enforce some invariants, it had no trouble doing that. So I think you can get this if...

    When I asked a coding agent to convert a Typescript interface and associated functions to a proper class to enforce some invariants, it had no trouble doing that. So I think you can get this if you want, but you have to ask for it?

    2 votes

  13. Comment on Whatever happened to the Uber bezzle? in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Wasn't Google the first tech company to announce that they were were working on driverless cars? I'm not sure what innovations can be attributed to Uber in that market, since they didn't get to...

    Wasn't Google the first tech company to announce that they were were working on driverless cars? I'm not sure what innovations can be attributed to Uber in that market, since they didn't get to the point of offering a service.

    5 votes

  14. Comment on Whatever happened to the Uber bezzle? in ~transport

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    In August 2021, the consensus was that Uber was finished.

    Critics argued that the company was a ‘bezzle’. It looked like a company, but it was actually a long con. Its putative core business, selling rides, was dressed up with regulatory arbitrage and accounting gimmicks to suggest future profitability, in order to separate credulous investors from their money now. According to the critics, at some point soon the investors would realize they’d been taken, dump their shares, and the whole enterprise would collapse.

    [...]

    Doctorow’s language is explicit and blunt: pungent examples include “Uber was never going to be profitable. Never”, or Uber “is about to die.” And it included specific predictions.

    [...]

    All five claims, taken together, congealed into a meme: Uber is a bezzle.1

    [...]

    The simplest way to say what happened between 2022 and 2025 is not that Uber proved the critics wrong, but that Uber stopped being the same object the critique was describing. The company that achieved profitability in 2023 operates under different constraints, charges different prices, and extracts value differently than the company Horan analyzed in 2016 or Doctorow declared dead in 2021.

    Several factors spurred the company to change. The obvious one was the pandemic, which delivered a massive shock to ride-hailing demand, temporarily collapsing trip volumes and forcing the company to confront how expensive its growth-at-any-price strategy was. Less obviously, when the pandemic went away, so too did the cheap capital that had been a feature of the markets from the 2008 global financial crisis onward. But those macro-environment shifts only provided an impetus; they weren’t the changes themselves.

    So what were the changes that made Uber profitable?

    It did exactly what its investors expected it to do: it charged riders more and paid drivers less.

    [...]

    The critics had predicted this move, or something like it. What they didn’t predict was that Uber could pull it off without triggering the expected consequences. Horan’s model assumed that raising prices or cutting driver pay would invite one of three responses: riders would defect to cheaper alternatives, drivers would quit for better opportunities, or competitors would undercut Uber’s new margins.

    None of these materialized at the scale required to discipline Uber’s pricing.

    [...]

    The critics’ second major bet—that regulators would eventually force Uber to internalize its true costs—also failed to materialize as predicted, though not for lack of trying.

    [...]

    On the expense side, Uber made cuts that would have been politically difficult before the pandemic forced the company’s hand. In 2020, it laid off thousands of employees and shed over $1 billion in fixed costs. More importantly, it abandoned the moonshot projects that had consumed capital without generating revenue.

    [...]

    I’ll give them their due: Uber’s critics correctly identified that early Uber ran on subsidized growth disconnected from operational fundamentals, and correctly predicted that reaching profitability would require raising prices and squeezing drivers. They incorrectly predicted that Uber would prove unable to do this.

    8 votes

  16. Comment on Jeff Bezos orders layoffs at 'The Washington Post' in ~news

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe this is more of a personal preference, but if someone cites a talking-head video on YouTube, that doesn't count as evidence as far as I'm concerned. An article written by a journalist does,...

    Maybe this is more of a personal preference, but if someone cites a talking-head video on YouTube, that doesn't count as evidence as far as I'm concerned. An article written by a journalist does, whether it's in a newspaper or not.

    When people use cameras to shoot what's going on out in the world, that does sometimes count (provided it's not faked) but I don't want to have to analyze that evidence myself.

    4 votes

  17. Comment on Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The point of experiments like this is to see what the model can do. Yes, the model is trained on the Internet, but so were all the previous models they tried, and the previous models couldn't do...

    The point of experiments like this is to see what the model can do. Yes, the model is trained on the Internet, but so were all the previous models they tried, and the previous models couldn't do it.

    Maybe the wording isn't quite right, but I don't think anyone is misled, since they clarified what they meant in parentheses.

    8 votes

  18. Comment on Building a C compiler with a team of parallel Claudes in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I wonder how they compiled the Linux kernel? Does it take any compiler flags? I doubt they modified the source code to put absolute paths everywhere.

    I wonder how they compiled the Linux kernel? Does it take any compiler flags? I doubt they modified the source code to put absolute paths everywhere.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on OpenAI exec becomes top US President Donald Trump donor with $25 million gift in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    More tech money is flowing into Donald Trump’s coffers. In September, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman gave Trump’s super PAC a whopping $25 million — the largest of the six-month fundraising cycle.

    The gigantic donation is a sign of Brockman’s political allegiances, and of the ChatGPT-maker’s attempt to curry favor with the Republican administration. MAGA Inc., the super PAC, was launched to support Trump and has become his primary fundraising vessel. Despite Trump hitting his term limit, money continues to pour in from supporters and those seeking favor, helping the political action committee build a war chest it can use in the 2026 midterm elections.

    [...]

    As Bloomberg reported, MAGA Inc. currently has more money in its accounts than the main super PAC for House Republicans spent in the entire 2024 election cycle. And people like Brockman are a big reason why. The OpenAI executive’s donation makes up almost a fourth of the super PAC’s $102 million fundraising haul from the back half of 2025. The money arrived on Sept. 12, according to a Thursday filing by MAGA Inc. with the Federal Election Commission. Most recently, the PAC helped the Republican Matt Van Epps win a special congressional election in Tennessee.

    [...]

    His spending isn’t limited to swaying Trump. Brockman and other tech leaders announced this summer that they’re launching a super PAC to push for candidates who support AI industry. That places Brockman’s effort in the same vein as Fairshake, the pro-cryptocurrency lobbying group that successfully helped tank Katie Porter’s run for Senate in 2024.

    6 votes