There's no room for subtlety in public discourse, but ya absolutist moral philosophies almost never stand up to scrutiny. If only things could be so simple.
I've concluded that there is no universal moral framework. You have to be comfortable with the fact that your perspective is just one of many, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for, it just also means you might be subjected to others' moral frameworks if yours conflicts with theirs. Pretty unsatisfying, but I don't think an alternative conclusion exists that is sound.
I agree that the apocalyptic messaging about mythos is eye-rolling, but the thesis of the article that "the moat is the system, not the model" is weird because the point is that the model is the whole system. A little Bash loop that just tells the model to "look at this file" for every file is clearly not a "moat" of a system
Is it, though? In a way: yes. But look at where the focus of LLMs has gone: agentic frameworks. Yet, we see all of the models continually being compared against benchmarks that can easily be gamed by the model itelf [0].
There's no great way to garner the quality / efficacy of something non-deterministic that you can't trust, at least not currently. And I wouldn't be surprised that the providers haven't known that their LLMs could possibly be cheating for a while now.
On one hand they're saying: these models are so apocalyptic if everyone had them, and then on the other hand showcasing how their models are sweeping the floor on benchmarks. So which is it? Personally I don't believe any of these companies at this point, especially when they make claims that are non-public and wrapped in NDAs that benefit their bottom line.
While I agree this is true of coding, there are other domains and paradigms in which the loop is more involved than a bash loop.
Realizing this fact explains:
1. why software development is first to get disrupted by AI
2. other domains that are easily loopable like contract review are also quite easy to deploy AI into, so you get all these "AI for Law" running around doing essentially the same thing
3. domains that are not easily loopable are much harder to figure out leading people to believe AI can't be useful, when in fact it's a failure of the application layer
I've often wondered what would happen if a president explicitly offers to pardon anybody who murders members of Congress. Would they settle on reigning in the pardon power with an amendment?
We're sort of already there. A lot of the Jan 6 rioters were openly trying to murder congressmen. The fact they weren't successful isn't super reassuring.
Nothing would happen, because SCOTUS decided to grant the president immunity for any crime committed in their official function, which would be the case here. It would literally be possible for the president to order congress killed, offer an automatic pardon to anyone carrying out this order, and establish a monarchy.
This single ruling will haunt the United States for the rest of its existence.
Trump was never found immune for that. We was just reelected before the prosecution could run it's course, and the DOJ never prosecutes a sitting president.
Presumably the suit could resume once Trump steps down, but it might be wise for his democratic successor to offer him a pardon for the sake of an orderly transition
> it might be wise for his democratic successor to offer him a pardon for the sake of an orderly transition
Oh absolutely not. Any democratic successor that did such a thing would face such an immense backlash from the democratic and centrist voting base that it would effectively throw their entire term away. No, most of the democrats see the pardoning of Nixon as a grave error and want to see justice for what has been done this term.
My wondering is more about how Congress would react, because something like this could conceivably bring together the 75% consensus required for a constitutional amendment.
And I think even this supreme Court would agree that murdering Congress doesn't count as an official act.
It will be interesting to watch what comes next, if there will be next. But people die of natural causes and otherwise anyway.
Will it be the same a-lot-of-empty-talk-from-democrats like after first trump's term, or actually some concrete action? Clearly if next president would be democrat he can do some nice revenge and rebalance, maybe petty but maybe necessary. I would expect republicans do the usual crappy move of sticking with theirs regardless of crimes committed, any actual morals are an afterthought.
Its so weird to watch from outside, illogical, deeply flawed, unfair, and pretty weak system when it comes to handling unscrupulous sociopaths.
All bad is good for some things in hindsight, world desperately needs more decoupling from US. Petrodollars, swift and so on. Compared to this, judging by pure actions, chinese may seem saint in comparison
The Democrats literally tried like 6 different ways to get Trump in jail, and arrested and jailed many of his supporters and even some of his administration. I highly doubt that the majority of the voting public which elected Trump will sit idle for any sort of unjust retribution to the current administration.
This is genuinely hilarious. I guess you haven't been paying attention but "sitting idle during injustice" is all that Trump supporters do.
No, his base is already collapsing. He overextended with Iran, sent gas prices up, and as a direct result has finally started to bleed support from the know-nothings. I doubt Trump himself will ever face justice for his many crimes - he is likely to die of old age first - but the rest of the administration? Knives are out. They'll be back in prison just like happened in 2020 and 2021, and all those "dedicated supporters" will do nothing because the people who form this administration are petty, uninteresting people who were specifically chosen because they are not popular.
I don't agree with your prediction, the interesting thing is now, perhaps, we can actually wager on the outcomes, I wonder if there is anything on prediction markets about administration officials going to jail.
The idea that his support is collapsing is also pretty misstated. Yes, there's a lot of people that don't fully agree with Iran and other things, but that's a far cry from backing his ops.
I also think you are missing the shift in politics at all the lower levels to align with the current administration. Outside of the deepest wealthy Democrat areas, and even in some of those, the general position of local politicians and officials is moving towards the sort of nationalist populist attitude Trump has curated.
The same is also pervasive among state and federal government institutions with limited exception.
And of course that's all only IF Democrats win big in 2028 which is a far from guaranteed outcome.
> I highly doubt that the majority of the voting public which elected Trump will sit idle for any sort of unjust retribution to the current administration.
Is this a threat, or…?
“Let our guy do whatever he wants or we’ll try to murder Congress and fuck up the economy and start some more wars”?
“Don’t you dare jail us for insurrection or we’ll insurrect even harder”?
It's just an assessment of the general political outlook. Anyone that thinks the public would tolerate some sort of widespread anti-Trump retribution is living deep in some sort of bubble. Most likely a small, wealthy, liberal one. They literally tried that last time and it resulted in an even more resounding Trump victory than 2016. The majority of the politically active people align with Trump. The old standby of Democrats win when more people vote is no longer true. The majority of the non-voting public aligns much more strongly with current "conservative" values than anything the left is currently offering.
This is one of those things where I’d love to get on board with the popular view but I haven’t found evidence that anything beyond a sit in was intended and the arguments seem to be floating in air if you follow them down to their root. But I haven’t done that much research so I’d appreciate if you could share what makes you think this, thanks!
I'm a leftist, and a Democrat by necessity (not by choice) and I would be fine if the power of pardon was removed for Presidents who share my ideology. I would rather have working separation of powers and reform the justice system than give one person carte blanche power to nullify it based on their whim.
Not everyone making a political argument is engaging in cynical tribalism. Believe it or not, some people do actually believe in things.
when you have only two choices and you have to be quite insane to choose one of them, you are, for all intents and purposes, forced to choose the other side (same argument works for left and right if you hear someone say they are forced to be what they are politically)
I never claimed that anyone forced me to become a Democrat.
I support them at the national level because they're the least evil of the two and exactly two relevant options available, and the one which at least gives lip service to progressive values. But that is still like supporting Mussolini over Hitler. Locally I vote third party when I have a chance.
And I live in Texas so none of my votes matter anyway.
You claimed that you had no choice but to become a Democrat. If that wasn't caused by coercion, then it certainly was a choice.
If I claimed that I had no choice but to become a Republican, I would be justifiably laughed at (even by fellow Republicans). Political views and affiliations are certainly choices.
Anyone can claim that their opinion is the only sane one.
>You claimed that you had no choice but to become a Democrat. If that wasn't caused by coercion, then it certainly was a choice.
I explained my choice. Choosing the lesser evil is a choice. I don't think anyone in this thread besides you is getting hung up on this, and I don't know why you're being so aggressively pedantic. It's weird.
My (leftist) opinion is that we don't give enough pardons. By the time people get out of prison, their lives are pretty much wrecked. We should have a lot more clemency and compassion. That's what the pardon is for.
If that means a ton of literal insurrectionists go free, that's fine with me. We elected someone precisely to do that. It's on the voters if we elected someone who was literally treasonous himself.
I hope the insurrectionists take the opportunity to get on with their lives. I gather that quite a few have already been banned for other crimes, and that's too bad.
I don't want prison to be vengeance. I want prison to make us all safer. I'd like the President to take a lot of leeway in finding people who are going to be productive citizens if they were given that gift.
You would probably consider me to your right, but I'm right there with you. Prison should be protective: we lock up people from whom the rest of us will not be safe unless they are segregated. Ideally it is also rehabilitatative, and once (if!) prisoners will be safe and productive members of society there is no point to keeping them locked up.
If there are other methods short of prison that can render law-breakers harmless - such as restrictions on certain activities and occupations - then those should be pursued first.
The ghost of this philosophy, however attenuated, can be seen in systems of pardon and parole.
I acknowledge that a desire for retribution - to punish the evil-doer; make them suffer for what they've done - is a strong impulse (I feel it myself!), deeply imbedded in our tribal psyches, but it should be fought, not indulged.
This seems to me to be the only moral basis for a system of justice and incarceration, though I have no idea how to nudge a society towards this model. Some northern European countries approach it.
(In fact, I may well be nearer to your position than my description implies. I use the term "leftist" because I hate the way the term is applied to anyone who isn't a Republican. My beliefs, in the Clinton/Obama range, are "leftist" only if one is dumb enough to believe what one hears on Fox News.)
You sound like you are advocating for commutation, not pardons. Commutation lowers the penalty given to a criminal by executive decree (which the president can also do) A pardon makes it so the conviction never happened.
No, it doesn’t erase the conviction, it “forgives” you from the perspective of the government. Commutation ends the punitive aspect of the conviction.
I have a somewhat distant relative who was pardoned after being over-prosecuted by a zealous DA. They were a victim of a felony who did something in response that could have been charged as anything from a citation/violation to a felony, the DA’s discretion was to choose the harshest possible resolution.
They still have a hard time getting work because the conviction must be reported.
Thanks, I had misunderstood. It eliminates the legal consequences of conviction (unlike commutation) which is similar in a lot of ways, but it doesn't erase the conviction from the records.
I think they are both generally ok, but also somewhat sketchy. I don't see them as much different from Clinton's pardons, Fords or Andrew Johnson's Christmas day pardons for confederate soldiers.
People in the conservative ecosystem are very much up in arms about the pardon of Hunter Biden.
Like most things in MAGAland, these matters are framed in a certain way, and all nuance is eliminated. The irony of being upset about Biden while being a cheerleader for Don Jr is lost.
I think you totally proved my point. Both conservatives and liberals will almost always look at pardons by a president from their own party much differently than those by a president from the other party.
I don’t think so. I was pretty much raised in a family that was staunch Democrats and in a few cases even party officials at the local level.
I was pretty young and not really caring, but I recall them being unhappy about Clinton’s last minute pardons as they were obviously compromised. I recall conversations about the Gerald Ford pardon of Nixon that happened around the context of Scooter Libby and there was an acceptance that that was more of the grist of politics than anything.
I don’t recall any president in my memory proposing pardons in advance to people blatantly breaking the law. When I was younger, republicans were almost solemnly committed to the “rule of law”. That changed in the last 20 years. This president is very tellingly an admirer of Andrew Jackson, who was in most measurement a disaster, as is this admin.
Personally, I live my life fairly “conservatively”, but have more progressive politics with some “exceptions” for the modern sense of the word. I respect those who disagree with my point of view, but am not tolerant of disdain for the law, basic fairness and society.
Every CLI can be expressed as an API and vice versa. Thus every skill can be expressed as an MCP server and vice versa. Any argument about the technical or practical merits of one over the other is willfully ignoring the fact that you can always use exactly the same patterns in one vs. the other.
So it's really all about availability or preference. Personally, I don't think we needed a whole new standard with all its complexities and inevitable future breaking changes etc.
It still makes more sense to directly regulate the thing that actually matters. People don't really care about the presence of a DC in their state. They care about the effect it might have on energy prices and potentially the effect it might have on public land use. You can always regulate the electricity market and public land use directly, instead of regulating the construction of data centers which is more of a second-order effect.
These approaches might very well result in the same outcome: fewer DCs, but it leaves the details up to dynamic market forces.
When you're shopping for a paid product, you're generally trying to minimize your costs (while balancing quality). When you're donating to a free product, you're actually trying to maximize the effectiveness of your donation. If you were simply trying to minimize your cost/benefit ratio, you would donate nothing. Clearly there is a totally different mentality at play.
Consider it also from the recipient's perspective. Their benefactors are more likely to donate more money when they believe it will be put to good use. It's a complicated messaging problem, but being vague is probably not in your best interest.
I've concluded that there is no universal moral framework. You have to be comfortable with the fact that your perspective is just one of many, but that doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for, it just also means you might be subjected to others' moral frameworks if yours conflicts with theirs. Pretty unsatisfying, but I don't think an alternative conclusion exists that is sound.
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