Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.
My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem.
The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed.
Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger.
So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.
"I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events.
"Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation."
They only dropped the case because he hid for so long. He still did it, bro.
Generalization from few examples is something transformers are bad at. They memorize outright. This is probably in part the objective, but humans have multiple readings of something they see, so generalization.
Transformers can also become confused be texts that no humans become confused by. I wrote some stories that I've used as test material, where I deliberately refuse to say who is speaking, or whose perspective we see, but where it is obvious to a human who it must be, and LLMs can make huge screwups in those texts. Mixing up an old guy with a young guy who he, when he was a similar age, was similar to, mixing up a kid with the kid's mother, that sort of thing.
I think the first part has no know solution. The second part is probably solvable, but not with a transformer-- maybe if they could make notes or output reasoning traces during prefill.
The profits of AI will itself will probably be small though. Most of the benefits of the extreme scenarios will probably accrue to normal capital owners-- basically, the useless landowner.
Consequently things like "Sovereign AI dividends" and the like won't matter in the extreme cases. Profits on a scale that matters for society AI itself will only be a thing in an intermediate scenario which will probably only be real for an incredibly short time.
Morally I agree, but since there's probably a lot of LLM text in the training data, distilling on another model will probably make your model copy the values encoded into the other model as well, even in cases where you only distill on value-neutral stuff.
By copying their programming style, you'll move the model towards that way of writing, which will move the model towards the values expressed in those documents.
I feel that Deepseek v4 got so claudified at the end that it was like Claude.
Here in Sweden the murder of Salwan Momika makes me feel that states wanting to limit the anonymity of protesters must take rather great care to protect their rights.
This, I think must involve at least two things: strong laws protecting against creating any kind of registry of people who have participated, or who are likely to sympathize with any particular kind of protest, exceptions in cases where it there is a possibility of retaliation against protesters and that the police take care to actually protect protesters who are targeted because of their participation of protests, so that cases like Momika's murder do not happen again.
I really can't comprehend wanting to enforce this kind of thing at the EU level. It's not like they can't pass this locally if they want it, and leave it to others to have other rules.
I think it's much more interesting to deal with the algorithms, etc. I agree with that bit about not leaning on parental consent though.
> It's not like they can't pass this locally if they want it
It wouldn't be the first time an unpopular or downright malicious law got pushed upstream:
- Data Retention Directive (UK)
- Press publishers' right (Germany, Spain)
- PNR Directive (UK, France)
- Chat control (Spain + few others)
- Mandatory fingerprints on national ID cards (Germany)
Personally, I really struggle to act on this as a voter, because at least in my country, EU works as a retirement home for washed politicans who then go to work with their hand already raised, usually against my interests. Given how widely unpopular some of these laws are, I suspect this might be a widespread issue.
So, the problem in this case is that there's no gain for the country building the datacentre.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity consumed". And projects should be judged on that basis, with projects below a certain threshold either being disallowed or being forced to pay more per megawatt of power consumed on that basis. It shouldn't just be based on some vague intuition, that is largely a product of the virality of the arguments that circulate on social media platforms (like this one).
I'd err on the side of allowing development until a proper regulatory process can be implemented or unless there's a concrete reason to prevent it. If allocating scarce electricity resources to an AI-compete facility prevents the building of a steel plant, that would be a reason worth considering it. But there would need to be a concrete trade-off, not just a default assumption that the effect is net negative on account of the industry that the project falls under.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
As a Swede, I can't read the Emil books because of fremdscham for the parents from those scenes where Emil feels the need to run to the carpentry shed.
The farmer class could actually be like this, before we banned it, even though she tries to write about it in a comical way, but it was always a low class thing to punish ones children and to read stories where it happens is basically intolerable at least to me.
Astrid Lindgren probably knew this though. She isn't some idiot who puts this in as comic relief, it's comic but there's a serious and intolerable feel to it too. She knows she's portraying something bad and she intends for us readers to sit with the dissonance-- the low class going-to-punish-his-children aspect, the family's love for Emil, that book in which his mother writes down what he does, that Emil is well-meaning, that everything goes well in the end and that the adult Emil becomes a nämndeman, etc.
Astrid Lindgren is one of the scariest Swedish authors because of her deliberate careful and nuanced use of moral dissonance. She's scarier than Willem Fredrik Hermans.
Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.
His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.
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