I don't think I'd support a ban if ByteDance was a European company or Indian or South Korean or Japanese. China is a unique threat given the totalitarian turn they've taken over the past decade combined with the fact that no Chinese company is truly private in its day-to-day operations. All Chinese companies must have CCP influence as a matter of Chinese policy. It would be like if T-Mobile (the US mobile division of Deutsche Telekom) was required to have the influence of the German government including the monitoring and reporting of phone calls to senior party officials.
>>Fisher became founding Chairman of the University of Cambridge Eugenics Society, whose other founding members included John Maynard Keynes
Keynes was the leading economist of the 20th century. He has some ideas I think are dubious, and his followers have doubled down (I still can't believe people believe in fiscal multipliers greater than 1). Nevertheless, it would be an incredible cheap shot to label Keynes a "eugenicist" when criticizing his economic theories.
Just in case, I think the comment you are responding to doesn't doubt the great utility of Fisher's contributions to statistics, but specifically to the suggestion that Fisher wasn't very much of an eugenicist.
2006 was peak "Great Moderation," where there hadn't been any serious financial crises since the 80s. The consensus wisdom was that many of the policies of the 80s & 90s, particularly around inflation and reducing uncertainty, had made financial crises almost obsolete.
It seems dark today given that we know the outcome, but I'm sure at the time, Comic Sans seemed appropriate for a set of tools that they thought likely would never be used. Or maybe it indicates a certain hubris undone within about 18 months.
Going a step further, weights, i.e. coefficients, aren't produced by a person at all – they're produced by machine algorithms. Because a human did not create the weights, the weights have no author. Thus they are ineligible for copyright in the first place and are in the public domain. Whether the model architecture is copyrightable is more of an open question, but I think a solid argument could be that the model architecture is simply a mathematical expression – albeit a complex one –, though Python or other source code is almost certainly copyrighted. But I imagine clean-room methods could avoid problems there, and with much less effort than most software.
IANAL, but I have serious doubts about the applicability of current copyright law to existing AI models. I imagine the courts will decide the same.
Each compiled executable has a one-to-one relation with its source code, which has an author (except for LLM code and/or infinite monkeys). Thus compiled executables are derivative works.
There is an argument also that LLMs are derivative works of the training data, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to, though clearly there's a difference and lots of ambiguity about which contributions to which weights correspond to any particular source work.
Again IANAL, and this is my opinion based on reading the law & precedents. Consult a real copyright attorney for real advice.
> Its literally manipulation of those who have money to spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in extreme cases it goes directly against it).
This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that information in a public space?
We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong assumptions.
> Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep the interference away but save you tons of money and time down the line).
Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your product if advertising is illegal? The base case would seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews." How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of mouth to even work.
> This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd concede that some ads contain truthful information. Like there exists at least one ad that is true.
Conversely, I find this a weak claim. If most major uses of something are negative, one minor positive use does not trump the negative.
And even if a billboard is 100% factual, that does not necessarily means it’s a net positive to have constant visual pollution for something you may not even buy.
I fail to see how this parade of horribles will happen. Under the Chevron regime, any random person could still sue, and provided that the lawsuit survived an initial motion to dismiss, then any questions involving an administrative agency policy would defer to that agency's interpretation of their own policy and the law authorizing that policy.
The only change now is that the agency will have to demonstrate to an independent Article III court that its policy is correct and compatible with the authorizing law. Stare decisis will still control the lower courts once new precedents are set, and people will have meaningful appeals again.
There might be some disruption in the short term, but in a decade or two, I expect the new normal will be fine, but with the benefit that people can meaningfully appeal self-aggrandizing administrative state rulings.
Galileo also couldn't explain the lack of an observed parallax effect between opposite seasons given the ideas about optics at the time.
When Kepler's model arrived, it was so much better at predicting the positions of all planets except Mercury than any previous model that it was clearly superior. Galileo's was bad at predicting and just contradicted the accepted observations of the day.
IMO Galileo should be better remembered for objects of different masses falling at the same rate and the original idea that all motion is relative (when observing from an internal frame).
> Galileo also couldn't explain the lack of an observed parallax effect between opposite seasons given the ideas about optics at the time.
That's not entirely correct. The lack of parallax was explained by the stars being far away; the problem with that explanation is that Brahe had measured the apparent stellar diameter of stars, which implied that for the stars to be as big as they appear to be to us, they would have to be far, far larger... which violates the underlying Copernican principle that the sun is but a normal star.
The Copernican model was heliocentric, surely? It placed the sun motionless at the centre of the universe. That makes the sun anything but a normal star.
The copernican principle is separate from the model. Basically it says that our position in the universe is random - we don't exist at the center of the universe.
"Hermann Bondi named the principle after Copernicus in the mid-20th century, although the principle itself dates back to the 16th-17th century paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic system, which placed Earth at the center of the universe. Copernicus proposed that the motion of the planets could be explained by reference to an assumption that the Sun is centrally located and stationary in contrast to the geocentrism. "
"Hermann Bondi named the principle after Copernicus in the mid-20th century, although the principle itself dates back to the 16th-17th century paradigm shift away from the Ptolemaic system, which placed Earth at the center of the universe... Copernicus himself was mainly motivated by technical dissatisfaction with the earlier system and not by support for any mediocrity principle."
Copernicus' solar-system model is entirely separable from any assumptions about star size distribution, and the latter was apparently not a concern of his (nor do I recall seeing anything to the contrary elsewhere.)
On account of this separability, the mediocrity principle cannot be used to eliminate heliocentric models of the solar system from consideration, at least unless there's good evidence for it.
Nevertheless, the presumed huge size of the stars was seen as more or less of a problem (depending on which way one leaned on the heliocentricity issue), but it turned out that the apparent size of the stars was merely an artifact created by diffraction (the Airy disk) [1], making it possible to hold both that the sun is well within the range of stellar sizes and that other stars are far enough away that their parallax is difficult to observe.
That sort of makes sense but the comment I replied to was still mistaken in linking the 20th century "Copernican principle" to debates in the time of Galileo.
IMO calling something so greatly at odds with Copernicus's model the "Copernican principle" is misleading (if not outright nonsensical) and explains why the commentor I corrected confused the two. What a good idea to name something completely at odds with Copernicus's view of the universe after him.
Its like "Gell-Mann amnesia" but without the humour or self awareness.
I find this bizarre as well. The EU Parliament has no initiative, possessing only the power to approve or veto legislation proposed by the Commission. And then when they occasionally exercise their veto power, the Commission can just resubmit substantially the same legislation as before, as is happening here.
This also means the Parliament has no independent power to repeal previous law that it might have regretted passing. It must again wait for the Commission to propose repeal. I can count how many times an unelected administrative bureaucracy has proposed removing its own power on zero hands.
Then again, I am, personally, split: The standards, and process, to become a part of this technocratic body that is the EU are very high, and they will (ostensibly) select amongst the best candidates ...
... might this "technocracy" be an option in today's age of political mediocrity and populism?
Not to be too pedantic, but ALJs are technically Article I judges (or more precisely judges over Article I tribunals). The Constitution lists two different sources of judicial power, the first in Article I section 8 and the second in Article III. Article III courts have judges with life tenure, protection of salaries and are subject to review only by other Article III appeals courts including the Supreme Court. Article I courts have judges with fixed terms of office, and Congress can cut their salaries. All Article I courts are subject to review by Article III courts.
There's an open controversy about how much deference the Article I courts in administrative agencies are owed by Article III courts, arising mostly from Chevron v NRDC. That decision requires Article III courts to defer to Article I courts' interpretations of their statutes and even their administrative rules except in extreme circumstances. Several justices on the Supreme Court find Chevron deference problematic, but it currently is the law of the land.
I don't think I'd support a ban if ByteDance was a European company or Indian or South Korean or Japanese. China is a unique threat given the totalitarian turn they've taken over the past decade combined with the fact that no Chinese company is truly private in its day-to-day operations. All Chinese companies must have CCP influence as a matter of Chinese policy. It would be like if T-Mobile (the US mobile division of Deutsche Telekom) was required to have the influence of the German government including the monitoring and reporting of phone calls to senior party officials.