He is an equal opportunity a-hole, though my personal feeling is that he looks up to Putin, and wants to be like him
Some things he has done that Putin is probably not fond of:
Javelins in his first term, I believe that was the time the us supplied military weapons to Ukraine. These weapons made a big impact during the invasion
Tried to get Europe off of Russia gas, making very public warnings about depending on Russia. This was first term
Tried to get Europe to invest heavily in thru military, first and second term
Syria, Iran and Venezuela, all allies of Russia, especially Iran for military technology and Venezuela as part of its shadow fleet.
Strongly disagree. If you look into the details, you'll find he never actually intentionally hurt Russia.
>Javelins in his first term, I believe that was the time the us supplied military weapons to Ukraine.
Trump was always reluctant about it and actually got himself into yet another impeachment inquiry for withholding part of this congressional aid package, because Zelenskyy did not want to investigate Hunter Biden. He wasn't able to overcome congress, but he did manage to limit Javelin use for western Ukraine only, were Russia was not active back then.
>Tried to get Europe off of Russia gas
That goes into the aforementioned category of things he said but never acted on. Russia caused Europe to actually move away from Russian gas in the end.
>Tried to get Europe to invest heavily in thru military
Same category and same answer. Could also be seen as his start of dismantling NATO from the inside, which seems to have been his (and ofc. Putin's) ultimate goal from the very beginning - which in turn dates back all the way to the 1980s, when Trump bought anti-NATO advertising in the New York Times after visiting Russia. So it's not even that far fetched to accuse him (or his handlers) of long term schemes.
>Syria
The US had troops there for a veeeery long time, but rarely threw hands with the regime under any US admin. After all, this was mostly about curbing IS. Putin apparently never really cared about Syria in the end either. They were just an alternate location for a warm water Navy port to them, which became obsolete once they took over Crimea. Assad got to feel that pretty hard.
>Iran
They were allied, but Iran actually started going against Russia in 2023 because Putin supported the UAE claim on the Strait of Hormuz. It's all been downhill since then and the eventual US military strike was definitely pro-Israel, not anti-Russia.
>and Venezuela
They literally halted the immediate seizure after one of those "shadow fleet" ships suddenly displayed a Russian Flag. This was always more about hurting Venezuela and they explicitly tried to handle Russia with appeasement.
>Sanctions
Not sure what you mean here. Safe for one pointless act on oil companies that were already heavily sanctioned, all relevant sanctions came under the Biden admin. He famously did not put tariffs on Russia, despite putting them on basically every other country in the world (allied or not).
They probably mean people like Robert Malone [1], who - despite being well accomplished in a related field - spread verifiably wrong information about vaccines on social media during the pandemic. There are many people like him who showed past accomplishments in a related field, but were totally out of their depth when interviewed about covid on the Joe Rogan podcast or similar.
Yet in officialdom, that kind of thing was perfectly acceptable. In Scotland we had a dentist running Covid lockdown, which is ironic since public dental services were decimated by it and never recovered.
The problem in big companies is that as a developer, you are usually several layers of people removed from the people actually using the product. Yes you can take ownership and implement unit tests and integration tests and e2e tests in your pipeline, to ensure the product works exactly as you intended. But that doesn't mean it works as management or marketing or the actual user intended.
Anthropic doesn't have any realtime multimodal audio models available, they just use STT and TTS models slapped on top of Claude. So they are currently the worst provider if you actually want to use voice communication.
I think Anthropic currently has a slight edge for coding, but this is changing constantly with every new model. For business applications, where tool calling and multi-modality matter a lot, OpenAI is and always has been superior. Only recently Google started to put some small dents in their moat. OpenAI also has the best platform, but less because it is good and more because Google and Anthropic are truly dismal in every regard when it comes to devx. I also feel like Google has accrued an edge in hard-core science, but that is just a personal feeling and I haven't seen any hard data on this yet.
These probability shifts would only account for the final output layer (which may also have some shift), but I expect the largest shift to be in the activations in the intermediate latent space. There are a bunch of papers out there that try to get some offset vector using PCA or similar to tune certain model behaviours like vulgarity or friendlyness. You don't even need much data for this as long as your examples capture the essence of the difference well. I'm pretty certain you could do this with "historicalness" too, but projecting it into the future by turning the "contemporaryness" knob way up probably won't yield an accurate result. There are too many outside influences on language that won't be captured in historical trends.
On whether this accounts only the final output layer -- once the first token is generated (i.e. selected according to the modified sampling procedure), and assuming a different token is selected compared to standard sampling, then all layers of the model would be affected during generation of subsequent tokens.
This way it wouldn't be much better than instructing the model to elicit a particular behaviour using the system prompt. Limiting tokens to a subset of outputs is already common (and mathematically equivalent to a large shift in the output vector), e.g. for structured outputs, but it doesn't change the actual world representation inside the model. It would also be very sensitive to your input prompt to do it this way.
>However, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Trump v. United States (2024) that all presidents have absolute criminal immunity for official acts under core constitutional powers, presumptive immunity for other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts.
I think future law philosophers and historians will cite this as an example of how immunity should not work. If the president can break any law as long as he is doing it as the president in an official manner (for example by signing an executive order), nothing can stop him from having all his political enemies arrested, exiled or straight-up murdered. So there is literally only the goodwill of one single person keeping the US from becoming a fascist dictatorship.
According to the constitution, impeachment is literally for treason, bribery, high crimes or other serious misdemeanours. But the SC basically said it fundamentally can not be treason, bribery, a high crime or any misdemeanour if he did something in his role as president. So the whole process has become stale.
Ultimately, the Senate decides on whether to convict/remove for impeachment. The SC does not decide it. Sure, I imagine the Senate would generally want to broadly stay in agreement with the SC, but they don't have any obligation to do so.
At least that is my understanding; I'm not a lawyer or constitutional scholar :)
That's not how it works - in the case of impeachment the Senate holds a trial, and they are allowed to use their own definitions of treason, bribery, etc. The Supreme Court is in charge of what the regular courts do and can make rulings that bind them, but they can't bind Congress in the same way. After all, the justices of the supreme court are also subject to the impeachment process like the President is and it'd be weird if they could make rules about how that works.
You added the adjective "serious" to misdemeanors, which is not in the Constitution. The "high" in "high crimes and misdemeanors" means crimes and misdemeanors committed by high officials, not crimes and misdemeanors that are extreme.
The constitution actually doesn't really say anything about what misdemeanours are applicable in this case. This part has been shaped over time in congress, similar to how common law is shaped by courts.
If I understand you correctly, then if a President's cabinet (high officials) break the law the President can be impeached. Which makes sense to me. It places accountability on the President to pick trust worthy people and to immediately get rid of them if they break the law (to lessen the chances they'd be impeached for not doing something about it and insuring they are prosecuted).
"For official acts under core constitutional powers". Arresting all his political enemies is not a core constitutional power (still less having them executed).
Everyone is spinning this as "total immunity". It's not. At least, it's not worded that way.
What's actually going to happen is that, the first time someone tries to prosecute it, it's going to go all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court, as it is constituted at that time, will judge whether the action in question was an official act under core constitutional powers. Until then, we don't actually know what that line looks like. I suspect it's going to be less blanket than everyone seems to be assuming... but we will see.
If they are accused of crimes, then arresting people is not just a power but a mandate. If they just so happen to be his political enemies, that does not make them exempt.
If he happens to be dumb enough to say "Arrest Chuck Schumer without charge because I don't like him", then maybe the court might see that as outside his powers. But he has been accusing his political enemies of crimes for years; he'd only have to pick one of them and have them arrested for it.
We don't make Presidents justify their actions as core powers. If we believe that he ordered an unjustifiable arrest, the burden of proof would be on us.
Let's say, hypothetically, that the president was taking tariff revenue and transferring it into a Trump-owned bank account rather than into the Treasury. Yeah, you'd have to prove it. But that would absolutely be outside the scope of his legitimate presidential power.
In real life, it wouldn't be that simple. There would be a veil of plausibility, and so it would be harder to prove. But I claim that he can still be prosecuted. He has the presumption that what he does is within the scope of his office; the burden of proof is very much on the prosecution. But he does not have complete immunity.
Complete, no. But the combination of the expansive powers given to him by the court, and the difficulties of burden of proof, means that it's hard to imagine him being successfully prosecuted for just about anything.
I think that includes persecution of political opponents. Maybe not for a capital offense, though I wouldn't be so sure. Treason is poorly defined and has capital consequences.
It’s conditional immunity: the Roberts court is openly an instrument of Republican power, but they knew there was a good chance that the Democrats would win an election and so the ruling was carefully crafted to allow them to pick the opposite outcome if a Democrat were accused of abuse of power.
You can see a similar play at work with the unprecedented use of the shadow docket to prevent lower courts from restraining the executive branch without having to take credit for positions which are highly dubious from a constitutional standpoint. If the political tides shift, they can quietly unblock the lower court’s ruling and pretend they hadn’t deliberately given this administration a window of opportunity without creating a permanent precedent empowering a future Democratic administration.
Yup, I really hoped that it might not get this bad, but the Roberts court is basically doing what the Federalist society has been aiming towards for the past 40-50 years, and it's very very sad for all of the US (longterm, this benefits absolutely no-one except autocrats).
Arresting all his political enemies is not a core constitutional power
Unless he leaves a smoking gun in the vein of a note saying "kill this guy I don't like" -- and perhaps not even then -- nothing will happen.
What he will do is... what he is already doing. What every dictator for hundreds of years has done. His enemies will be persecuted and prosecuted under the guise of legal action: tax fraud, national security, whatever. The sort of compromat that exists, or can be fabricated to exist, for every single person on Earth.
To even have a hope of stopping Trump (or any other POTUS) there would have to be clear proof of malicious intent completely divorced from his job duties, and you'd need a Congress or Supreme Court that gave half a shit about opposing him.
>I think future law philosophers and historians will cite this as an example of how immunity should not work. If the president can break any law as long as he is doing it as the president in an official manner (for example by signing an executive order), nothing can stop him from having all his political enemies arrested, exiled or straight-up murdered.
This is not true.
The framework defines how to interpret the law. If the president were to do as you say, the subesequent criminal case (brought by federal or state authorities) would interpret those actions in the standard judicial process. If a jury were to determine that the president was acting in the interest of himself, then the president does not get immunity.
>If the president can break any law as long as he is doing it as the president
This is a hyperbolic misreading of the court's decision. The president was only cleared to act with impunity with the DOJ, as the department is part of the executive branch. For the other issues revolving around election interference, the court actually invited the case to be reheard - the prosecutors though must make a case that the illegal interference wasn't related to his duties as a president.
That said, I don't know why there has been a huge failure to re-litigate this issue. The previous administration could have followed up but never did - and I fear it was done out of a terrible political miscalculation.
Doesn't it also imply that the US Gov was doing something illegal. If the President is immune if doing something official, then the government was doing something officially illegal.
Even Bush/Cheney went through the motions of coming up with a legal reasoning for torture. Even Bush got Congressional approval for military actions.
This president is off the rails not even trying to have even a flimsy cover of legality.
> This president is off the rails not even trying to have even a flimsy cover of legality.
Rather he has a nerve to declare US War powers act illegal and threatened, abused, and yelled at those 5 republican senators who voted with democrats. Wild times!!
> > This president is off the rails not even trying to have even a flimsy cover of legality.
The problem is Trump but also he's a symptom of a larger problem.
Left and right are so at odds with each other that all the reforms that a modern country would have to undertake in order to have less traumatic and less 'winner take all' elections not only weren't undertaken like they were in other countries, but the odds of actually happening are close to 0% ever since 2016
To be honest, what could congress even do given what the supreme court has said? If Trump went full Hitler and decided to burn down the Capitol and have everyone in it killed who doesn't do his bidding, he couldn't even be held accountable by them in theory.
Yeah, "theoretically" is doing a lot of work there. Removal requires a 2/3 majority of the Senate, which is absolutely neverfuckinghappening in a 2-party system.
That is actually the case in most fields outside of maybe clinical chemistry and such, where Deming became famous for explaining it (despite not even inventing the method). Ordinary least squares originated in astronomy, where people tried to predict movement of celestial objects. Timing a planet's position was never an issue (in fact time is defined by celestian position), but getting the actual position of a planet was.
Total least squares regression also is highly non-trivial because you usually don't measure the same dimension on both axes. So you can't just add up errors, because the fit will be dependent on the scale you chose. Deming skirts around this problem by using the ratio of variances of errors (division also works for different units), but that is rarely known well. Deming works best when the measurement method for both dependent and independent variable is the same (for example when you regress serum levels against one another), meaning the ratio is simply one. Which of course implies that they have the same unit. So you don't run into the scale-invariance issues, which you would in most natural science fields.
There is a 1000+ km long front of active combat in Europe right now. A front where European shells and Russian ones are getting exchanged. Where F-16s fight Su-35s. And then we have things like the Russian cargo ship with nuclear materials that got sunk by a high-end torpedo. Just because shells aren't yet raining down on Berlin, it doesn't mean this war isn't kinetic.
Ukraine isn’t part of the EU, or historically part of the ‘European’ sphere (really meaning Western European). It’s historically been part of Russia. Or if you go back far enough, Russia was part of Ukraine.
It doesn’t completely negate your point, and anyone who isn’t seeing the writing on the wall is being willfully ignorant aka Chamberlain.
But culturally this is also a very different situation from France, Germany, England, Spain, or even Greece being shelled.
Which is also why people are so ‘meh’ on it, practically, and it’s taking so long to respond.
I don't see anything in your comment that would even argue with my point, much less negate it. That history lesson on Europe itself is pretty pointless, because if you go back a bit further you'd find much of Ukraine having been ruled by the Habsburgs - i.e. Austria. It doesn't get more European than that. And that short period of time where the Russians/Soviets ruled basically serves as Putin's propaganda reason for this war. That certainly doesn't belong here either.
Ukraine literally used to rule the land now known as Russia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27]. Kyiv used to be the capital. I think you have your history confused, and your 'what is propaganda or not' reversed.
They are basically two brothers with a long history, with Russia having recently been on top - after previously being on the bottom - but then going bankrupt - and now trying to bully it's way back to being on top again.
Either way, they aren't France, Germany, England, Spain, etc. and have wildly different history. Ukraine isn't part of the EU or NATO (and in fact, the possibility they might eventually be is a big driver of what Russia is now doing).
Got to get that bullying in before it's too late, after all.
I already told you why that is not just wrong, it misses the point. It also doesn't help if you want to switch this whole historical legitimation propaganda to the other side, because it is meaningless anyway. We are not living in 19th or 15th or 10th century Europe anymore. Ukraine lies in Europe by any remotely recent definition and it has an actual kinetic front line. End of story. Everything else is malevolent political propaganda.
You should really go and read up on some geography, this is become embarrassing for you. Or spew your russian propaganda elsewhere, because if you are serious you have outed yourself now.
>It’s when you are older and/or accustomed to some kind of physical training, that you really noticeably benefit from resistance training.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm asking because that is a bold statement given the (almost non-) existing literature on pro athlete hypertophy. Especially since athletes in almost every sport don't even care about hypertrophy - unless you talk about pro bodybuilding. And there you have tons of pharmacological interventions, so it's not really easy to paint a picture either. I don't know a single good study performed on a significant set of tested natural bodybuilders regarding hypertrophy.
Studies like this are also aimed at couch potatoes, because that is the normal population, so the results will be applicable to most people, which in turn is important when you want to get funding for your research. In that sense it also doesn't matter that these people will not have reached their full neuromuscular connection compared to actual weightlifters, because most people haven't either. So the results are still relevant. Usually when scientists sell this kind of research to grant departments, they try to provide a benefit to geriatric or otherwise medically impaired people, so that existing treatments may be improved. Studying muscle building itself just for the sake of it in gymbros is not a good strategy unless you want to spend your own money. And this stuff quickly gets very expensive if you want to do it right.
It all depends on the actual numbers. Consider this simplified example: If you are offered a deal that requires you to lay down 10 billion today and it has a 5% chance to pay out 150 billion tomorrow, your accountants will tell you not to take this deal because your expected return is -2.5 billion. But if you can offset 3 billion in cost to the tax payer, your expected return suddenly becomes $500 million, making it a good deal that you should take every time.
I get that this example is simplified, but doesn’t the maths here change drastically when the 5% changes by even a few percentage points? The error bars on Openais chance of succes are obviously huge, so why would this be attractive to accountants?
That's why you have armies of accountants rating stuff like this all day long. I'm sure they could show you a highly detailed risk analysis. You also don't count on any specific deal working, you count on the overall statistics being in your favour. That's literally how venture capital works.
(I think) I get how venture capital works, my point is that the bullish story for openAI has them literally restructuring the global economy. It seems strange to me that people are making bets with relatively slim profit margins (an average of 500m on a 10b investment in your example) on such volatile and unpredictable events.
What if your 10B investment encourages others to invest 50B and much of that makes it back to you indirectly via selling more of your core business?
I may be way off, but to me it seems like the AI bubble is largely a way to siphon money from institutional investors to the tech industry (and try to get away with it by proxying the investments) based on a volatile and unpredictable promise?
AI has a lot lower bar to clear to upend the tech industry compared to the global economy. Not being in on AI is an existential risk for these companies.
The existential risk is in companies smoking the AI crackpipe that sama (begging your pardon) handed them, thinking it feels great and then projecting[1] that every investment will hit like the first, and continuing to buy the <EXPLETIVE> crack that they can't afford, and they investors can't afford, and their clients can't afford, their vendors can't afford, the grid can't afford, the planet can't afford, the American people can't afford, and sama[2] can't afford, _because it's <EXPLETIVE> crack_!
The wise will shut up and take the win on the slop com bubble.
This reminds me of the scene in Margin Call [1] when the analyst discovers that their assumptions for the risk of highly leveraged positions are inaccurate.
I'm pretty the armies of accountants would have rated it higher if the cashflow was positive than negative. Negative can't be good even while accounting for taxes.
This applies to any spending Microsoft does. What does it have to do with OpenAI?
Also, classifying business expenses as "cost to the tax payer" seems less than useful, unless you are a proponent of simply taxing gross receipts. Which has its merits, but then the discussion is about taxing gross receipts versus income with at least some deductible expenses, not anything to do with OpenAI.
Those 150 billion will be taxable at the same (hypothetically 30%) tax rate, reducing the expected return by 45bn * 5% chance. The expected return is still negative; all this bet does is shift tax liabilities in time, which admittedly would matter to some people who subscribe to short-termism.
I guess to truly calculate it you need to estimate how long it will take to get the ROI (i.e. reach the point where you need to pay taxes on the 150billion). And add back what you can earn by investing the money you didn't have to pay taxes on. I'm not sure what the magnificent 7 can expect as a ROI on invested money though, given that they tend to have enough cash to invest anyways and just pay out dividends.
Thank you, that made perfect sense and in a very simple (simplified but relevant) way. Besides the idea that such risks get aggregated over a portfolio, I can also imagine how the raw numbers flipping from - to + may be useful to paint as acceptable to accounting a bet you want to take anyway for strategic reasons.
I guess the reasoning assumes that you have multiple eggs in your basket. A 95% chance of failure is bad if you're pinning the whole business on it, but if you have a variety of 5% chance deals, then it can make sense to pursue them, which is basically what venture capitalists do.
> A 95% chance of failure is bad if you're pinning the whole business on it, but if you have a variety of 5% chance deals, then it can make sense to pursue them
This is only true if the probability distributions for the values of the individual deals are rather uncorrelated (or even better: stochastically mostly independent).
I don’t really see what’s relevant about crypto nonsense in this context. We are really talking about the overall economy especially in the tech sector.
Even if every cryptocurrency becomes worthless overnight, that doesn’t represent the market going to zero.
I see you’ve edited your comment with more doom and gloom. It’s easy to view everything as a bubble when you’re in a negative mental space.
> a) collapse of the real estate bubble, especially commercial real estate;
Any proof of this bubble? Housing construction continues to lag demand. Offices are largely RTO and Covid-era remote jobs are basically legacy and grandfathered. Every remote employee I know who was laid off in the past couple years had to get a hybrid/in-person job. You can’t just assume 2008 is going to happen again without some real data that shows real estate instability. Where are the poorly qualified borrowers?
> b) the ongoing IT crash that is only just getting started;
That’s one industry of many. One specific industry struggling doesn’t mean much.
> c) whatever damage the (current, red-flavored) orangutan in the White House manages to accomplish in his 3+ remaining years of hell;
Lame duck presidency, he can’t crash shit. Congress will be unfriendly next year and already isn’t even very supportive within his own party.
> d) fear of looming war;
In what universe is any impending war impacting the American economy? You mean the one where defense contractors are hiring and the US is selling weapons to the nations who are doing the fighting?
> e) economic fallout from COVID which is still ongoing and expanding (hint--many destroyed businesses and people out of work);
You are gonna need to explain this one and back this up with some numbers that make sense.
> f) a thousand other icebergs, minefields, and financial hazards confronting us in the near future?
Sounds like internal anxiety demons that are not tangible.
Look, I’m in full agreement that AI will face some kind of correction or crash, but predicting once in a century catastrophe is a losing game.
Venture capitalists never take on a single deal. The same way you shouldn't put all your life savings into one stock, even if it has a 90% chance of working out. That's not how any of this stuff works.
You cannot just scale down the numbers and pretend like the world around you doesn't exist. There isn't much I'll do with 1 dollar. There's a shitload Microsoft could do with 10 000 000 000 dollars.
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