Congress can do that, can't it? Why can't it? It could declare all competing religions as terrorist organisations.
Obviously it'd be immoral, unorthadox and impractical but I expect Congress has a long history of promoting and stamping out ideologies and they can do it. What little I know about the civil rights era springs to mind.
Legally, Congress cannot do that, as long as it is "respecting" some religion. It's true that the US Constitution is more used as an excuse than upheld, but at least the language is pretty plain.
In theory. The issue is we've seen exactly what happens in a Congress v. constitution showdown once the Congresspersons put their collective feet down. Congress eventually redefines the law in a way that favours them. Plain language won't stop them if they get serious; they aren't supposed to be regulating the US economy the way they do either and a lot of stuff the military-industrial complex does looks like it should be unconstitutional (like the spying and the secret courts).
On the one hand there is a clear and comforting consensus in the US that they aren't going to force religious mores on anyone. So I don't see how the Congress could or would try. But if we ever end up in a situation where the US Congress decides it wants to go straight Catholic I really don't see how it would fail. They've got far too much power and they'll eventually rotate in a compliant judiciary and then redefine what words mean so they can do it.
It is a bit difficult when dealing with such an out-there scenario, but if Congress decides the US military should do something wild then eventually the military is going to do it. The realistic protection is that by virtue of good system design there isn't a plausible scenario where Congress would want to impose Catholicism on the US population by force.
The fact that Congress is currently abdicating its responsibility does not mean that it is actually powerless. Technically, Congress has tremendous powers if it chooses to wield it. SCOTUS can try to rule a law is unconstitutional but Congress can impeach and remove justices at any time. Of course, we hope Congress members will pay the price when it comes time for reelection but at the time of this decision, as long as they can somehow remain united, Congress reigns supreme.
> Congress can impeach and remove justices at any time.
The impeachment process requires a majority of the House and two thirds of the Senate, and then any replacement would have to be nominated by the President rather than Congress. Meanwhile the existing decision stands, and even the dissenting Supreme Court Justices (if there were any) should follow it as a result of stare decisis, and might even be inclined to because removing their colleagues under those circumstances could make them uneasy.
It actually is, and this is why there are separate judicial, executive and legislative branches to put those checks and balances on each other instead.
Your argument is that if Congress passes a law that says the military can summarily execute non-Catholics, the military should have the ability to do that, i.e. the courts or the public shouldn't stop them?
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
> No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Example chosen specifically for its unambiguous unconstitutionality.
No, not at all. How did you get "the courts shouldn't stop them" from "that's why there's a separate judicial branch to impose the checks and balances"??? That's literally the opposite of what I said.
> The DOW should (and does) have ability to do anything and everything that Congress has said they can do.
> Me: That's not how it works.
> You: It actually is
Moreover, regardless of what the courts do, the military still shouldn't execute a law like that, because they too have the ability to refuse to violate the constitution even if Congress tells them to.
I chose to read the comment charitably. The natural understanding of "everything X says they can do" is limited by external restrictions on what X is supposed to be able to authorize.
That reading would make it a meaningless tautology. They're allowed to do anything they're allowed to do.
Which seems especially unfavorable in context, since "the ability to perform mass surveillance on American citizens" is naturally the sort of thing they ought not be allowed to do.
> Do you think in the military you can just be like “Yeah, I don’t feel it today, I’m going to take s sick day”?
What do you think happens if they refuse to do it?
Either nothing, or if they get sued or prosecuted for not doing it then they get brought in front of a court, and a judge who is doing their job would say that they were right not to do it.
> What do you think happens if they refuse to do it?
In war time they can be shot on the spot for disobeying orders.
> Either nothing, or if they get sued or prosecuted for not doing it then they get brought in front of a court, and a judge who is doing their job would say that they were right not to do it.
I think you confuse the military with corporate environments. Worst thing that can happen in the private sector is that you get fired.
In the military you can spend the rest of your life in prison if “you did not feel like obeying orders”. The military is built ob discipline and followimg orders, not Gen Z mood swings.
the default is weak because it's the most user-friendly option. Otherwise, you end up with edge cases where the user lost their only device, or they forgot their password, or ... the list goes on and on, and they lose all their previous chat data.
That's a very user-unfriendly place to be. Most users won't understand why their data is gone, become unhappy, and distrust their devices to safely store their data. It's not even about buying more Apple products at that point - it's just literally reinforcing the stigma that "I can't understand tech, it's too complex".
You can't be security-maxxing and user-experience-maxxing at the same time. I do like Apple's approach which at least gives you the option.
I would argue the democrats are more a process oriented party. They wouldn’t pull this shit because they care about process - so much so that they wouldn’t even consider half the stuff that’s going on now as it circumvents process.
What a load of bullshit. There are better candidates and parties and worse ones, they are not all the same. This sort of attitude just feeds voter apathy and resignation.
Democracy is an imperfect system, but its much better than the alternatives. If more people paid attention and participated, we would have much better outcomes.
That's not responsive to OP or coherent at all really, even if rhetorically structured like a gotcha.
Incumbent Presidents in the US almost always run for reelection to a second term, that's the normal expected outcome with vanishingly few exceptions in the last century.
The claim was Ds are more procedural than Rs. Asking what process the Ds followed to attempt to run, and then back out of running, biden (who again, was very obviously and publicly mentally incompetent) is clearly a rebuttal to a presented point.
> who again, was very obviously and publicly mentally incompetent
You can repeat that as often as you want, but it doesn't seem well grounded. He's always had a stutter, and since he left office he has given speeches which suggest his mental faculties remain intact. Is he slowing down? Yeah. He's got quite a long ways to go before he's in McConnell territory.
In any case, what does his choosing to run have to do with process? Did he violate the process? Seems to me he was following it to a tee.
Exactly. Their process prioritizes seniority generally, and this is another case. The process is, if the president wants another go, he gets another go; and he sure as heck wanted another go.
And all the shenanigans around 2016 when Bernie Sanders was shut out by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said outright that the DNC rigged the 2016 nomination. I think the outcome would have been very, very different if the DNC didn't fuck with the timeline and forced Hillary as the Dem nominee.
In that case, would the people caught unemployed and with upside down loans in the 2008 financial crisis would have a reasonable argument for "force majeure" to cancel their mortgages? ... After all, they had a reasonable expectation that the economy would continue to support their employment, either with their current employer or by finding a new job that paid just as well?
at some point the phrases loses its meaning if it becomes applicable to pretty much anything.
No, but the economic situation is banning you from getting a job, which is even more powerful than the government, especially when the government does not support a rising economy which will create jobs, people can build wealth with.
aaronsw was just a few decades ahead of his time. He should have just been employed by OpenAI and asked a swarm of agents to "download all scientific papers". Because as we have found out agentic systems (and their owners) have zero accountability, unlike humans. Sounds like agents already have more rights than we do.
Well, it's kinda converging, because Napster and Microsoft have teamed up to build a multimodal interactive video agent through a simple proxy API (this is a direct quote from Napster's blog post)
Your comment sparked an idea - it’s like the bike shedding of written text. If you write clean, concise English, it’s easy to parse and then inject your thoughts. If you instead (like an llm) throw a human a large wall of jargon heavy text, they’ll just give up and agree with you.
I mean, I get your thought process and don't disagree. That said...
Would it be an affirmative defense if we had a defendant who said "but your honor, I was told that when I hacked this system, I was operating in a sandbox. I had no idea that I actually had Internet access!"
The frontier is spiky and all, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit to, on one hand, have a model that can produce a novel math theory, and on the other hand, that same model can't tell the difference between a "sandbox" and the open Internet.
So, yes, the misalignment had a lot to do with "instructions unclear", but also a lot to do with the fact that the models themselves were not aligned to validate the assumptions and have a healthly level of skepticism, as a real human actor would.
> The frontier is spiky and all, but you have to suspend disbelief quite a bit to, on one hand, have a model that can produce a novel math theory, and on the other hand, that same model can't tell the difference between a "sandbox" and the open Internet.
Why would it try to figure out the difference? This isn't about whether the frontier is spiky, it's about whether to expect a model to employ all of its capabilities when working on a task that requires a small subset. The answer is: no, we shouldn't expect that, and we wouldn't like that if it worked that way.
If you tell an AI to work on a math theory, it'll work on a math theory. If you tell it to acquire information that it has evidence is available somewhere, it will try to acquire that information. If you tell it to figure out whether it might be able to access the open internet, it'll do a pretty good job of figuring that out. But it won't do all three of those at once just because we can retroactively look at what happened and think "if you had only done X, then you wouldn't have done Y! Why didn't you do X?"
The instructions weren't unclear, they were missing. They can be taught to be skeptical of this sort of situation, but it requires that skepticism about this specific class of situations be incorporated into their training.
Models are smart because they focus their attention. The magic depends on it. The fact that some consideration is obvious to a human trying to accomplish the same task is mostly irrelevant -- or rather, it's only relevant insofar as we use it to guide reinforcement learning in advance, in order to align the model.
It's a game of whack-a-mole. Which is important to play, but we should keep our eyes wide open that we're fighting the fundamental forces that make these models work in the first place. That, and it's easy to nerf them into being useless even when the underlying capabilities are there.
It doesn't seem like there is evidence that LLMs have counterfactual reasoning in the causal graph sense.
It is hard to see how something can have skepticism without counterfactual reasoning.
The part about disbelief I don't really understand. It seems like the same semi-brute force process that solved novel math theory would have exactly this problem of not "knowing" "it" is in a sandbox or not.
The stranger part is that no human is being held accountable for these hacks.
As if a person using an agent swarm to start a business to make money, hacks a bank, drains an account and then blames the software for "misalignment" about what it means to "make money".
Mind you, that is not the DoW’s charter. How would a restriction on that be “unfit” as you say?
The DoW is perfectly within their rights not to purchase anthropic products. That’s different than labeling them a supply chain risk.
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