Fnord

there's a geographical rule that's usually shortened to "rivers don't fork because rivers erode. when a river temporarily forks, one flow becomes weaker and deposits sediment, which means less water flows through it, which strengthens the other, and this snowballs until it all becomes one flow again" which is basically true, but leaves out enough nuance that people like to bring up bifurcation, confluence, and deltas as exceptions to it

the nile has a lot of things that kinda look like they run counter to that rule, and if someone didn't take the time to explain why deltas seem to fork like that, or why the nile delta is exceptional and interesting among deltas, it'd look like a magic bullet you could drop on the table in bad faith to prove everyone in the room except for you is an idiot (which is why people usually post it)

Specifically, what is meant by that is that two rivers can flow downstream into a single larger river, but a single river will not flow downstream into two separate smaller rivers except in special circumstances. What the pedantic world-building forums are doing is calling specifically the second one "forking", but in reality the joining place for the first one (and/or one of the rivers doing the joining) is still often called a fork.

“These safeguards prevent foreign adversaries from using our most capable models in ways that pose severe safety risks. The US and its allies hold an edge in frontier chips and the highly optimized software that runs them at full potential,” the company said in a statement to WIRED. “These safeguards ensure Claude isn't used to erode that advantage—by optimizing chips developed by those adversaries, for example.”

and now Anthropic's noncitizen employees can't use Mythos! Which isn't to say that there is a direct causal link there or that Anthropic is responsible for the Trump administration's actions, but one might hope that it would make Anthropic warier of that kind of framing in the future.

Anthropic was just trying to get ahead of the curve on the issue - it is going to happen, best be at the table when it does so we can have a voice. It isn't like OpenAI opposes all regulation themselves either; they are opposing state-level efforts at regulation by backed federal-level regulations, and have gone in almost entirely on the "national security" angle. Because they have to! This is a done deal.

Well, there is one thing...

Posting my result for posterity's sake, but one drawback with this quiz-and-compass approach is that it can't really account for personal uncertainty in the outcome space. I genuinely don't know whether capabilities will level off at the point where we get "Global GDP keeps growing at 3% per annum, yawn" or it dramatically changes absolutely everything. This in turn leads directly into my assessment of AI risk: it could be sci-fi nonsense or we could be dead already; it all depends where we are on the sigmoid and a priori I can't see that— the nature of exponentials and sigmoids is that tiny changes in initial conditions lead to wildly different outcomes. Both seem obviously possible to me, and my only firm epistemic commitment is that I disavow anyone who's sure it's one or the other. Capability agnosticism, I guess.

“These safeguards prevent foreign adversaries from using our most capable models in ways that pose severe safety risks. The US and its allies hold an edge in frontier chips and the highly optimized software that runs them at full potential,” the company said in a statement to WIRED. “These safeguards ensure Claude isn't used to erode that advantage—by optimizing chips developed by those adversaries, for example.”

and now Anthropic's noncitizen employees can't use Mythos! Which isn't to say that there is a direct causal link there or that Anthropic is responsible for the Trump administration's actions, but one might hope that it would make Anthropic warier of that kind of framing in the future.

Anthropic was just trying to get ahead of the curve on the issue - it is going to happen, best be at the table when it does so we can have a voice. It isn't like OpenAI opposes all regulation themselves either; they are opposing state-level efforts at regulation by backed federal-level regulations, and have gone in almost entirely on the "national security" angle. Because they have to! This is a done deal.

Well, there is one thing...

In "social media vs education" discourse, there is a tension between the macro data not really showing any large declines in student learning & minimal benefits from things like cell phone bans, and the more anecdotal/smaller survey data of people telling you the kids in the classroom have really changed. I don't actually think you should toss out the personal experiences, that is being naive, while I think "oh the test scores are all corrupted by declining standards" narrative is equally naive - so what is the story?

The squaring of this circle is that when people talk about their student learning changing, it is almost always about books. They aren't unable to understand instructions, they can do math fine (again mild declines sure), people are taking calculus and chemistry and playing piano just like they always did. What has shifted is that people's attention span for reading books is vanishing, to the point where school districts are giving up on even assigning summer reading and shifting assessments to short form reading assignments. This cycle is just extremely hard to break because books are the one thing you can't "internalize" into the classroom - you can't ask them to sit in the room and read a book during an exam - and cheating the assignment is universal and free. Kids always wanted to skim their summer reading, but skimming, Cliff Notes, "asking a friend", those were all work and sometimes just an approximation of doing the reading anyway.

Now you just google/claude the answer to any of your homework questions about a book, you don't need even crack the (pdf's) spine. And of course the entire backdrop culture has shifted to either short form text or fully audiovisual content, so you don't care much about the object-level skill anyway. The bottom has dropped out on the incentives & value for many students.

But the rub is that this hasn't impacted learning all that much. The Kids Can't Read Bleak House, yes, but they were never great at that and it wasn't that related to other skills. "The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone" concept was just too limited; there are a lot of different whetstones out there. The test scores are doing fine, people's skills in the workforce are holding up, none of the "breakpoints" of someone's personal trajectory are flashing red. And of course many people do still read books! We have no shortage of historians because they were always a particular type of person anyway. Books aren't going away; their market share of global attention is just shrinking.

Are there consequences for this beyond the personal, though? Yes, individuals can still learn to be nurse practitioners and marketing analysts just fine, but is the ~body politic of the nation~ or whatever suffering from an endemic shallowness in its comprehension of itself? Maybe! I don't think that idea is crazy, actually, though it is a much more complicated story with many moving parts. But it is one that sits primarily outside the education system; school was never a particularly effective vaccine against "disenlightenment", and if the internet has done anything it has neutered the power of formal institutions to be that force.

It is sad that we aren't making progress, that learning isn't really improving and is actually getting worse. We both A: thought we were gonna keep better at this, and B: there definitely was some bogus pedagogy movements in this era causing damage. But these are changes that are within the normal range. If you compare what these test say, to the tone of pieces like "The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books", I think the claim "there is a gap here in understanding between the two sides" holds up well. And that is the gap I am talking about - if you want to just talk about the test scores in isolation from the narrative, then it can be a different conversation.

In "social media vs education" discourse, there is a tension between the macro data not really showing any large declines in student learning & minimal benefits from things like cell phone bans, and the more anecdotal/smaller survey data of people telling you the kids in the classroom have really changed. I don't actually think you should toss out the personal experiences, that is being naive, while I think "oh the test scores are all corrupted by declining standards" narrative is equally naive - so what is the story?

The squaring of this circle is that when people talk about their student learning changing, it is almost always about books. They aren't unable to understand instructions, they can do math fine (again mild declines sure), people are taking calculus and chemistry and playing piano just like they always did. What has shifted is that people's attention span for reading books is vanishing, to the point where school districts are giving up on even assigning summer reading and shifting assessments to short form reading assignments. This cycle is just extremely hard to break because books are the one thing you can't "internalize" into the classroom - you can't ask them to sit in the room and read a book during an exam - and cheating the assignment is universal and free. Kids always wanted to skim their summer reading, but skimming, Cliff Notes, "asking a friend", those were all work and sometimes just an approximation of doing the reading anyway.

Now you just google/claude the answer to any of your homework questions about a book, you don't need even crack the (pdf's) spine. And of course the entire backdrop culture has shifted to either short form text or fully audiovisual content, so you don't care much about the object-level skill anyway. The bottom has dropped out on the incentives & value for many students.

But the rub is that this hasn't impacted learning all that much. The Kids Can't Read Bleak House, yes, but they were never great at that and it wasn't that related to other skills. "The mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone" concept was just too limited; there are a lot of different whetstones out there. The test scores are doing fine, people's skills in the workforce are holding up, none of the "breakpoints" of someone's personal trajectory are flashing red. And of course many people do still read books! We have no shortage of historians because they were always a particular type of person anyway. Books aren't going away; their market share of global attention is just shrinking.

Are there consequences for this beyond the personal, though? Yes, individuals can still learn to be nurse practitioners and marketing analysts just fine, but is the ~body politic of the nation~ or whatever suffering from an endemic shallowness in its comprehension of itself? Maybe! I don't think that idea is crazy, actually, though it is a much more complicated story with many moving parts. But it is one that sits primarily outside the education system; school was never a particularly effective vaccine against "disenlightenment", and if the internet has done anything it has neutered the power of formal institutions to be that force.

Trump-IRS settlement 'forever' bars audits into tax claims for Trump and his family

Can...can he do that?? Is that allowed?? "As part of a settlement, you can't investigate me for future crimes", that seems like something that wouldn't be on the table!

Federal law prohibits the president, vice president and other executive officers from instructing the I.R.S. to start or stop specific audits. But that broad prohibition appears to include a carve out for the attorney general.

Like, if this were a normal law, there would be no problem interpreting the president telling the AG to stop an audit as legally equivalent to the prohibited act of the President telling the IRS to stop an audit. "I didn't do it, I told my subordinate to do it or I'd fire them" is not a defense that will ever save a private company CEO.