If you think those are fishing boats you don't know very much about fishing. Those are dope haulers. The question of whether dope haulers deserve a .mil missile is separate from establishing exactly what those boats are and exactly what they are doing — something I think anyone with half a brain inwardly knows even if they maintain otherwise in public forums like this one.
What you think is going on in other people's brains, partial or not, is inaccurate. This is generally true for pretty much everyone, but especially in a case like yours where you seem utterly convinced that you know.
I do not know what is on those boats, and neither do you. Neither of us will ever find out, because they were sunk before any actual facts could be verified. This is precisely why we have due process.
In the scheme of things, I am much more worried about a well-armed force committing extrajudicial killings than I am "some dudes who might have drugs". The fact that you seem very concerned about the latter and are totes cool with the former is... concerning, to say the least.
I do appreciate you posting your sources, so thanks for that.
I hope you have half as much care and concern for the victims of the drugs smuggled into this country as you do for drug smugglers, alleged or not.
> This is precisely why we have due process
> a well-armed force committing extrajudicial killings
What process is due foreign drug smugglers operating outside of U.S. jurisdiction? It's a military operation. Did you want Osama bin Laden to receive his day in court, as well, instead of being shot in his sleep by a well-armed force?
"Due process" has been perverted in recent years in the Anglosphere to mean "infinite process, with no end result". Process for process's sake, because a lot of people's livelihoods depend on participating in and perpetuating that process; and zero recourse for taxpayers who want some semblance of results for their tax dollars.
Think about that statement. How are you defining 'victim' in this case? From what I can see, 'victim' here roughly equates to 'willing purchaser of goods'.
I believe in Freedom as a fundamental right - 'freedom' in this context being 'whatever you want to do that doesn't unduly impact anyone else'. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, well, it's your foot - have fun with that. This concept that the 'Drug War' is something that we've ever done for the benefit of our people is laughable.
Even running on the assumption that 'drugs're bad, mmkay?', there are still holes big enough to drive a truckload of opioids and vodka through (both legal substances that have each put more folks in the ground than all controlled substances combined [0][1]). So if we are protecting the poor helpless confused masses from themselves, why is it that we have decided to let them kill themselves with those particular things? What makes the legal stuff special? The concept is ridiculous at it's face.
> It's a military operation.
I must have missed the declaration of war congress approved on 'unknown and unaffiliated watercraft'.
> Anglosphere
wut.
> taxpayers who want some semblance of results for their tax dollars
As a taxpayer, I am unhappy with these results. I would like to return them, please.
> Due process" has been perverted in recent years in the Anglosphere to mean "infinite process, with no end result
Seems preferable to fascist thugs illegally assaulting or arresting random people on the streets. Extrajudicial killing inside U.S. soil are probably not far off either. Unfortunately people like you will be cheering that as well..
Or you truly see no issue with governments having the right to arbitrarily execute people with no oversight whatsoever?
I'm responding directly to a post on using subterfuge to pretend to be fishermen, and further addressing the oft-stated opinion that fishing boats are being targeted.
They aren't bothering pretending to be fishermen, and also stating my personal opinion that most people saying they are fishing boats know they're not (and thus are being dishonest). Those are separate points than fighting drug trafficking with missile strikes.
You know what? Fair point. I can't necessarily talk for anyone else, but I will say that I have a tendency to be extra critical where state power is being abused. I served, and in my Army, we knew to our bones that our mandate was to protect the American people from foreign threat of violence, not as a police force. Not then and not ever. Posse comitatus wasn't the law of the land - it was a commandment from the highest authority.
So I suppose I jumped on with a little more haste than a sharing of opinions warrants. Sorry about that - this stuff gets me very hot under the collar.
If I step back and take another look at it, well - I'm still not ready to make a judgement as to what those boats were doing. There's not enough information - even taking the profiling argument into account. There are people who live as digital nomads on the sea just because they like to. Those boats might have been smuggling something other than drugs, like people (who might have any number of reasons to be on it - from human trafficking to refugees). There may be reasons that people have for taking a boat of that shape out that I am unaware of. Irrespective of the use of force, there is simply not enough data to come to a reasonably certain conclusion.
My time in service was spent as part of an IO unit - we would never have advised action on the data that's available here. The Risk factors are simply too broad and too deep.
I don't know much about those boats, but I know they did not have fishing gear on board. Nor were they a luxury yacht. By process of elimination we can assume they are hauling cargo. Most cargo is concerned about fuel efficiency and so would not have that much power for the size of boat (most cargo is on large ships so much bigger engines, but for the size smaller and slower).
I don't know what they were doing, but they didn't match the typical profile of legal things people do. No sign of fishing, no sign of luxury, no sign of water skies...
Due process would still be good, but we know a lot already without that.
I suspect that if Venezuela, or any other country, started killing Americans in international waters because they suspected they were committing a crime you guys will be singing another song. Due process would be absolutely necessary.
I don't know much about these cases but is anyone from that country coming forward to media and saying their spouse was killed on the ship? Is there anyone who is claiming it was a mistake from that country?
I looked at the video, there was no fishing equipment on board. You are not going to drop a line over the side of the board when you are ocean fishing. You either have a large rod that wasn't on the boat, or you have a net with winches and other equipment needed to handle a large net. Nobody's boat looks like that if they are planning on fishing. (they also didn't have any evidence of space to stow some of the equipment).
Who said kill everyone? I was responding to a post about using subterfuge to pretend to be a fisherman. Deception is a personal and professional interest of mine so I responded.
Determining what the boats are and what they are doing is a separate (but related) topic than determining whether or not they deserve being blown up. Some people who are reading these words hold that these are fishermen, not traffickers, and I feel that is either a dishonest statement or those people aren't very clueful.
The problem is that Venn diagram of those two categories is very much overlapping.
Fish aren't biting and the mortgage payment is due? Many fisherman in that scenario will move a little cargo without asking too many questions (here in the US and Europe too). And narcotraffickers aren't exactly known for being experienced seamen. For the most part they hire and/or coerce civilian captains to move their cargo.
I'm not necessarily disputing that the boats could have been moving drugs, I'm disputing that the crew would be hardened criminals, and not mostly down-on-their-luck civilians with few other options to make a living (in the midst of Venezuela's economic collapse).
Define "allowed", esp. whom it is doing the allowing.
Any and all current international treaties are visibly toothless these days. Russia invades Ukraine and the UN shrugs while they say "hey, cut it out!". Israel colonizes parts of Gaza that it has specifically agreed not to colonize and the response is the same. The US commits a war crime with it's morning cuppa and every time the international community sorta whistles and heel-turns hoping that they're not interesting enough to be next.
The problem is that IOT have any kind of effective enforcement mechanism, you have to have the bigger stick, and we've just allowed countries to do nothing but build bigger sticks since the 40s.
It's a fair question. I was only able to rabbithole on this for so long before realizing I had to get back to work, but if anyone wants to continue the search here's the most relevant document I was able to find. It's dense and very legalese:
From what I was able to gather, there are a lot of holes in the convention that are large enough to drive a gunboat through. What I mean is, in the places where a clause might say something like "don't indiscriminately sink ships", it will also say "unless effects of criminal activity extend to sovereign land" or something like that. This is vague enough that your lawyers could grind the wheels of justice to a halt on the premise that "we are protecting our citizens from all that dangerous cocaine" or whatever.
Frankly, I wonder what changed between when we were putting the stuff in cola sold on shelves and now that it justifies batrillions of dollars fighting an unwinnable war to suppress.
Probably a bit of a 'baby with the bathwater' situation here. At almost no point has that institution been a net positive - at times snooping on 'political dissidents' (like MLK Jr.), and at others bungling cases so bad they become moments of national shame (Ruby Ridge).
You're never going to get a system with a clandestine domestic service running ethically for long, esp. not with qualified immunity. It's simply too attractive to dumb psychopaths with delusions of grandeur and concurrently not of interest to people with a strong sense of community or morals.
> At almost no point has that institution been a net positive
Hard to measure, isn't it. In the eyes of the millions of americans who have at some point in their life been victims or related to or friends of victims of some kind of serious crime, the FBI has often times been helpful and/or the prospect of being caught has been a deterrent for crimes.
You contrast that with all the bad that has come from there, of which there is surely plenty, but how come you claim thay the bad obviously must outweigh the good?
You're right that I'm taking a bit of a shortcut - my assessment is based on what I know to be true in both directions, the things they've done right versus the things they've done wrong. The CARD program, stopping the times square bomber, Don C. Miller, Zazi versus COINTELPRO, Stingray, MLK, Ruby Ridge, basically everything J Edgar Hoover ever touched (like the Palmer Raids), Steven Hatfill and Brandon Mayfield.
If you ask me, I'd trade the good for enduring the bad.
My shortcut is admittedly a sloppy heuristic (because what else do you have for unknowns like this); for the unmeasurable effects, my bet is that they skew roughly the same as the measurables. For every serial killer who thought twice, there have probably been many political activists who have also thought twice. The deterrent effect cuts both ways if your actions cut both ways. We also know about enough falsely accused / imprisoned that we can assume we ain't figured them all out. For every family that feels safer with the FBI around, there are families that feel less safe, because people "like them" have been framed, murdered, snooped on, suppressed, and criminalized.
So yeah, it is hard to measure - but not impossible to come to a conclusion, as far as I'm concerned.
Another way to look at it is this; if you're going to hand the mandate of violence and skullduggery to an institution, you should be damn sure that they have standards and practices that solidly enforce competence and ethics - and even considering the good, we know pretty conclusively that they have failed in this regard. I don't want to play russian roulette with law enforcement - they should get it right almost all of the time or step aside so someone who knows what they're doing can handle it.
If you choose to engage law enforcement personnel, it's "thank god, some extra protection" (hopefully!), but if there is a situation where law enforcement personnel engage you, it's either "huh?" or "oh fuck". This isn't different for the FBI than for local or state-level police.
If some law enforcement personnel show up that you didn't invite, they could be there for a large number of reasons. How worried you'll be depends on how likely you think they are to do what they're supposed to do instead of what they're not.
If they're canvassing for witnesses, are they going to charge through your yard and shoot your dog? If they're investigating someone else, how likely are they to try to come up with something unreasonable to charge you with for leverage and then make you plead it down to a penalty that still isn't zero in exchange for giving them information you might not even have and would then be forced to choose between fabricating to get the deal and "not cooperating" and getting a serious prison sentence?
If someone is attempting to SWAT you, how likely are they to ascertain the situation instead of shooting first and asking questions later?
If their investigation has led them to you for some reason even though you're innocent, do you expect them to care about the truth or just railroad you?
If you hear the name of a particular law enforcement agency unexpectedly when you don't have any reason to think you've done anything wrong and your instinct still has to be "oh fuck" then they're bad at their jobs.
I think most people would have essentially the same reaction to either FBI or state/local police showing up at their door with "[Police|FBI], open up!", and it depends more on whether they believe they've done something illegal than the reputation of the agency. This was my disagreement with GP(stavros).
Depending on how you expect the reader to answer all your questions, we could still be in full agreement, but my sense is that you're asking them rhetorically?
You can ask the same questions about a local law enforcement agency but the answers won't be the same for every one of them.
And then in terms of literal sentiment, most people aren't familiar with any given local law enforcement agency because there are so many of them, so they wouldn't know what to think, and some of them are quite bad. But the knowledge of the average person it isn't really the point.
Suppose you actually were familiar with the record of whatever specific agency just showed up. If you would still have to think "oh fuck" then they suck.
If this was true, the Miranda rights would read something like “anything you say will be used to obtain justice” rather than “anything you say can and WILL be used AGAINST you.” The police and justice system are never your friend. They are always your adversary, and should be treated as such. Under a different regime, they could be your ally if you’re innocent, (and this is the case in many countries) but in the US, they are always hostile to everyone, including innocent people. Even if individuals in that system don’t fancy themselves in that light.
I engaged law enforcement personnel as the victim of a violent (unarmed) home invasion robbery by people I knew. What did they do? Debate whether I should have been arrested instead on a technicality. That would look good for their stats, right? At least the criminals had to repay 90% of my lawyer's fees.
I assume that’s why the original argument is that it’s not been a net positive. I.e. the assumption is that lots of work can be good and necessary, while even more that is evil and excessive can end up with a net negative.
Anticorruption work is good and necessary. If the FBI's work was any good, they would be investigating the funding of the destruction of the White House, or AIPAC and Qatari influence in DC, not Comey and Obama. Right now, they are working for Evil.
Or the Trump coin crypto rugpull and money laundering scheme. Or the open insider trading. Or the $400 million jet "gifted" from Qatar. This year has been one grift after another.
I already live there because the only enforcement that happens is trying to extract money from poor people to fund the local court and cops. Pulling over every car coming down a particular road and trying to charge them with DUIs for smoking weed 8 hours beforehand does not make me safer, it just makes me late for work and is used to justify tax increases on me to further fund the bogus drug war.
This thread is about the FBI, yet you're referencing strawman arguments about DUI checkpoints from local police. Do you have any experience with crimes against children?
US law enforcement "clears" about 1 in 4 robberies and more than 1 in 3 aggravated assaults/batteries, and similar numbers for other crimes. On average, a criminal's career is 3 serious crimes. You can imagine how much awesomer your life would have been if they were able to run uncaught for years and years. But you won't because you have "net negative" bullshit blocking your vision.
Now compare that to that to US peer countries like throughout most of Europe or Australia and see that the US has piss poor clearance rates for crimes. Along with the US having far higher crime rates in general on par with countries that lack stable governance.
Despite topping the world with incarcerations and arrests and law enforcement funding, the US is not a particularly safe place, so obviously US law enforcement isn't focused on safety and justice, which leaves the monetary factor.
If you arrest someone for a drug crime and get a plea deal out of them they get jail fees, processing fees, court minimum fees plus any additional court costs, probation costs and fees, multiple "X state specialty tax fee", plus kickbacks from the mandatory court ordered drug/anger/traffic class, cost of drug test fees, etc. If you arrest someone from murder and imprison them for life, sure you can claim to charge them those fees, but they will never be free of prison to ever pay them. So it should be no surprise that cops are incentivized to go for easy drug charges from non-dangerous citizens that puts money in their pockets over actual dangerous criminals who will only reduce department revenue.
typical bootlicker mentality; all criticism of state violence is rejected out of hand because the idea that power can and should be held to a higher standard is anathema to the authoritarian mindset.
I'm sure police (when they aren't fighting over jurisdictional issues) find it helpful, that doesn't mean that it's helpful for the population, especially when it (and police generally) are used as a tool for domestic influence operations and to basically shunt some people aside in the name of business and landowners.
> The model has no concept of truth—only of plausibility.
This is such an important problem to solve, and it feels soluble. Perhaps a layer with heavily biased weights, trained on carefully curated definitional data. If we could train in a sense of truth - even a small one - many of the hallucinatory patterns disappear.
Hats off to the curl maintainers. You are the xkcd jenga block at the base.
I am assuming that millions of dollars have already been spent trying to get LLMs to hallucinate less.
Even if Problems feel soluble, they often aren't. You might have to invent an entirely new paradigm of text generation to solve the hallucination problem. Or it could be the Collatz Conjecture of LLMs, that it "feels" so possible, but you never really get there.
Fusion will at best have a few dozen sales once it's commercially viable and then take decades to realise, but you can sell AI stuff to millions of customers for $20 / month each and do it today.
The "fact database" is the old AI solution, e.g. Cycorp; it doesn't quite work either. Knowing what is true is a really hard, unsolved problem in philosophy, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem . The secret to modern AI is just to skip that and replace unsolvable epistemology with "LGTM", then sell it to investors.
There are some things that we can define as "definitely true as close as makes no difference" in the context of an LLM:
- dictionary definitions
- stable apis for specific versions of software
- mathematical proofs
- anything else that is true by definition rather than evidence-based
(i realize that some of these are not actually as stable over time as they might seem, but they ought to do good enough with the pace that we train new models at).
If you even just had an MOE component whose only job was verifying validity against this dataset in chain-of-thought I bet you'd get some mileage out of it.
Truth comes from being able to test your assertions. Without that they remain in the realm of plausibility. You can't get from plausibility to truth with better training data, you need to give LLMs better tools to test the truth of their plausible statements before spewing them to the user (and train the models to use them, obviously. But that's not the hard part).
Your mindset absolutely has an influence on outcomes - how you come off to other people influences how they react to you and treat you. How you look at a problem influences whether you decide to engage with it, and how.
This exists in a gradient space - some things are more readily influenced in this way, others are not, a few are (nearly) completely untouched.
Existence, that is - the Universe, is a complex system. We know at least a few things about those:
- they behave in unintuitive ways. Attempting to predict the behavior of a complex system has an inverse relationship with the granularity and specificity of the prediction.
- the behavior of the whole is unrepresentable in the behavior of the constituent parts (you cannot drive an axle to work, unless it is part of a car)
- they are very resilient against attempts at control, but more susceptible to influence
- they can exhibit features like recursion, inertia, and attraction. Each of these has specific consequences for the behavior of the whole.
The relationship between outlook and outcome is bidirectional - one influences the other and vice versa. This structure has a high chance to exhibit recursive reinforcement, which is why I think we're used to seeing very optimistic and very pessimistic outlooks, with not so many 'middle-of-the-road' types. It does provide a lever to push, however, if one has the fortitude to push through the failures on the way to that tipping point.
Whenever I hear arguments about LLM hallucination, this is my first thought. Like, I already can't trust the lion's share of information in news, social media, (insert human-created content here). Sometimes because of abject disinformation, frequently just because humans are experts at being wrong.
At least with the LLM (for now) I know it's not trying to sell me bunkum or convince me to vote a particular way. Mostly.
I do expect this state of affairs to last at least until next wednesday.
You know, I had a think about that the other day - I believe that the volume of bad information might remain stable, while the shape changes. There are some things that LLMs are actually better at than the random mix of human-created data, on average. Subjects that are inherently political or skewed because of a small subset of very vocal and biased outliers. The LM tends to smooth some of those bumps out, and in some places (not all) this flattens out the rougher edges.
I don't think it necessarily bears repeating the plethora of ways in which LMs get stuff wrong, esp. considering the context of this conversation. It's vast.
As things develop, I expect that LMs will become more like the current zeitgeist as the effects that have influenced news and other media make their way into the models. They'll get better at smoothing in some areas (mostly technical or dry domains that aren't juicy targets) and worse in others (I expect to see more biased training and more hardcore censorship/steering in future).
Although, recursive reinforcement (LMs training on LM output) might undo any of the smoothing we see. It's really hard to tell - these systems are complex and very highly interconnected with many other complex systems.
This is a great moment to share a link or some other source of verisimilitude.
Also no one uses "dope" anymore - don't forget to migrate, we're on Reagan v3.0 now.