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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The rationale is that the powers aren’t unchecked, but that the check for official constitutionally listed acts of the president is Congress, not the courts.

    Article 48 gave the presidentisl office the power to unilaterally bypass the legislature.
    This supreme Court ruling delineates the line between the individual and the office with regards to the judicial system, not the relationship between the office and the other branches like article 48 did.
    Rather than granting new powers or preventing restraint of the executive branch, it purely limits the consequences the individual can face out of office.
    The concept of presidential immunity existed prior to this case.

    The ruling essentially listed three categories and their immunity status with regards to the courts. In my opinion, two of them are reasonable and the third shouldn’t exist.

    It’s reasonable to me to say you cannot sue the president for vetoing a bill, or criminally prosecute the president for commanding the military. The constitution says the president can do those things, and that the check on presidential power is congressional acts including impeachment. The office of the president or the government as a whole may be prosecuted, and Congress and the courts can hammer out the exact meaning of the core powers, but the individual is only liable if Congress uses their power to assert that something was definitely not a valid presidential act.

    It’s reasonable to me to say that being the president doesn’t grant you broad immunity for non-president things. The president does not have the constitutional authority to drink and drive, so if they do they’re just a person subject to criminal prosecution.

    It’s unreasonable to me to say that in areas where the president acts officially, but their authority is shared with Congress or an inherent power of the office that they might not have immunity depending on how it impacts the role of the president.
    It’s weird to say it, but in this case I agree more with Coney Barrett that the more appropriate test is to see if the law applies to the official act and then determine if in this case it would interfere with a delineated core power.

    In her own separate concurrence, Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the majority “that the Constitution prohibits Congress from criminalizing a President’s exercise” of his core constitutional powers and “closely related conduct.” But she would have courts approach the question of immunity for other official acts differently, by focusing first on whether the criminal law under which a former president is charged applies to his official acts and, if so, whether prosecuting the former president would interfere with his constitutional authority.

    Applying that principle to the facts of this case, she suggested that at least some of the conduct that serves as the basis for the charges against Trump – such as his request that the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives hold a special session about election fraud claims – would not be immune. “The President,” she concluded, “has no authority over state legislatures or their leadership, so it is hard to see how prosecuting him for crimes committed when dealing with the Arizona House Speaker would unconstitutionally intrude on executive power.”

    https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/07/justices-rule-trump-has-some-immunity-from-prosecution/

    I ultimately think that it would have been better to say that the president (individual) cannot be criminally prosecuted for exercising specifically enumerated constitutional powers unless Congress has impeached and removed from office and send it back to the lower court. They’re perfectly capable of deciding if a particular act was an executive overreach or not on a case by case basis, and the fact that this has never happened before is a pretty solid argument against needing to worry about a “chilling effect” on the exercise of presidential power. The president should be chilled, it’s practically in the constitution. Any power not given to the government is reserved to the people, clearly implying that the constitution should be read as stingy with power to the government, and generous with rights to the people. The president, as a member of the government, should be encouraged to worry about wandering around in legal grey areas.



  • Oh, it’s totally freedom of speech. But freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to broadcast your speech on public property without exception.

    If they hung the banner on their house or private property, there would be nothing to be done to stop them.
    But you can’t hang a banner from the governments property without their permission, which must be given in a manner impartial to the content on the banner beyond any compelling interests like “no hanging very distracting banners where it could cause accidents”.

    They didn’t ask, so they can have their banner removed just as though they hung it from the flagpole in front of the courthouse.

    They’re being prosecuted because a racial component to a crime is an aggravating factor that makes it more appealing to prosecutors.
    So their claim is entirely correct: they’re being prosecuted because their crime was minor but made worse by being racist. We’ve already decided that it’s reasonable for the government to be particularly harsh on racist crimes because it singles out a type of behavior that’s particularly harmful to society.




  • CEOs of companies that are adjacent to technology desperately want to ensure that their company isn’t seen as “outdated”, almost more than they want to actually not be outdated.

    So when a technology comes that everyone in tech leadership is saying is the bestest, they want to make sure everyone knows they’re totally with it, whatever the cool kids are talking about.

    Hype train goes chugga chugga.

    As the hype train slows, they still need to be onboard, but they set expectations based on what their people are actually telling them.

    So this is the CEO yelling to do something, and then the news slowly percolating back from the tech people that they can, but only a handful of projects can do so in a way that makes sense, has impact, and doesn’t disrupt a timeline or budget in a way that requires shareholder disclosure.



  • Oh, to me it just doesn’t remotely look like they’re interested in surveillance type stuff or significant analytics.

    We’re already seeing growing commercial interest in using LLMs for stuff like replacing graphic designers, which is folly in my opinion, or for building better gateways and interpretive tools for existing knowledge based or complex UIs, which could potentially have some merit.

    Chat gpt isn’t the type of model that’s helpful for surveillance because while it could tell you what’s happening in a picture, it can’t look at a billion sets of tagged gps coordinates and tell you which one is doing some shenanigans, or look at every bit of video footage from an area and tell you which times depict certain behaviors.

    Looking to make OpenAI, who seem to me to be very clearly making a play for business to business knowledge management AI as a service, into a wannabe player for ominous government work seems like a stretch when we already have very clear cut cases of the AI companies that are doing exactly that and even more. Like, Palantirs advertisements openly boast about how they can help your drone kill people more accurately.

    I just don’t think we need to make OpenAI into Palantir when we already have Palantir, and OpenAI has their own distinct brand of shit they’re trying to bring into the world.

    Google doesn’t benefit by selling their data, they benefit by selling conclusions from their data, or by being able to use the data effectively. If they sell it, people can use the data as often as they want. If they sell the conclusions or impact, they can charge each time.
    While the FBI does sometimes buy aggregated location data, they can more easily subpoena the data if they have a specific need, and the NSA can do that without it even being public, directly from the phone company.
    The biggest customer doesn’t need to pay, so targeting them for sales doesn’t fit, whereas knowing where you are and where you go so they can charge Arby’s $2 to get you to buy some cheese beef is a solid, recurring revenue stream.

    It’s a boring dystopia where the second largest surveillance system on the planet is largely focused on giving soap companies an incremental edge in targeted freshness.



  • Yes, neither of us is responsible for hiring someone for the OpenAI board of directors, making anything we think speculation.

    I suppose you could dismiss any thought or reasoning behind an argument for a belief as “reasons” to try to minimize them, but it’s kind of a weak argument position. You might consider instead justifying your beliefs, or saying why you disagree instead of just “yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man”.



  • Those aren’t contradictory. The Feds have an enormous budget for security, even just “traditional” security like everyone else uses for their systems, and not the “offensive security” we think of when we think “Federal security agencies”. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Cisco will change products, build out large infrastructure, or even share the source code for their systems to persuade the feds to spend their money. They’ll do this because they have products that are valuable to the Feds in general, like AWS, or because they already have security products and services that are demonstrably valuable to the civil security sector.

    OpenAI does not have a security product, they have a security problem. The same security problem as everyone else, that the NSA is in large part responsible for managing for significant parts of the government.
    The government certainly has interest in AI technology, but OpenAI has productized their solutions with a different focus. They’ve already bought what everyone thinks OpenAI wants to build from Palantir.

    So while it’s entirely possible that they are making a play to try to get those lines of communication to government decision makers for sales purposes, it seems more likely that they’re aiming to leverage “the guy who oversaw implementation of security protocol for military and key government services is now overseeing implementation of our security protocols, aren’t we secure and able to be trusted with your sensitive corporate data”.
    If they were aiming for security productization and getting ties for that side of things, someone like Krebs would be more suitable, since CISA is a bit more well positioned for those ties to turn into early information about product recommendations and such.

    So yeah, both of those statements are true. This is a non-event with bad optics if you’re looking for it to be bad.




  • I don’t think I implied that we couldn’t leave, or even that we shouldn’t. I said that Cuba’s not going to get us to leave by asserting that the agreement was never valid, because that’s just going to get the response of “yes it is”. For better or worse nations negotiate backed with weapons, and a power imbalance is inevitable.
    It’s not even a matter of right or wrong, just reality. Few would argue that the Japanese constitution is illegitimate and that power should rightly devolve back to the Empire of Japan.

    You have some misapprehensions about the embargo of Cuba. It’s sometimes called a blockade for rhetorical effect, but it’s not actually a blockade.
    It’s not “enforced” from Guantanamo bay, it’s enforced by civil penalties levied by the Treasury department on US entities and their subsidiaries, and to a limited extent by the department of state through threats of potential trade or diplomatic consequences.

    Cuba can and does trade with other nations, including US allies, and even the US. The harm the embargo does is via sharply limiting the availability of the lines of credit smaller nations rely on for continuing development of their infrastructure, not by literally preventing boats full of food from landing. Additional harm is done by denying them access to the largest convenient trading partner in the region for non-food, non-medical (embargo terms have excluded those items for decades) trades which further harms their economy by denying them a reliable cash influx their neighbors rely on, as well as making imports more expensive through sheer transport distance.

    Justified or not, and regardless of poor negotiating position, refusal to engage in a dialogue is not helping Cuba’s position.
    They have their own ideological motivations for refusing to engage. Even a tacit acknowledgement that maybe they shouldn’t have nationalized the assets of US companies without compensation would get them a lot of negotiation credit, and it costs them nothing, except for the ideological factors. The US doesn’t get much out of it, and $6 billion 1959 can be written off fairly easily for the PR win.

    One side doesn’t need to budge, and the other one refuses, and they both have their reasons. I believe that was the point OP was going for.


  • That’s not the case, you just need to be able to make an outbound connection.

    The minutiae of how certbot works or if that specific person actually did it right or wrong is kind of aside the point of my “intended to be funny but seemingly was not” comment about how sometimes the easiest solution to implement is the one you remember, even if it’s overkill for the immediate problem.


  • It’s a bit of a non-story, beyond basic press release fodder.

    In addition to it’s role as “digital panopticon”, they also have a legitimate role in cyber security assurance, and they’re perfectly good at it. The guy in question was the head of both the worlds largest surveillance entity, but also the world’s largest cyber security entity.
    Opinions on the organization aside, that’s solid experience managing a security organization.
    If open AI wants to make the case that they take security seriously, former head of the NSA, Cyber command and central security service as well as department director at a university and trustee at another university who has a couple masters degrees isn’t a bad way to try to send that message.

    Other comments said open AI is the biggest scraping entity on the planet, but that pretty handily goes to Google, or more likely to the actual NSA, given the whole “digital panopticon” thing and “Google can’t fisa warrant the phone company”.

    Joining boards so they can write memos to the CEO/dean/regent/chancellor is just what former high ranking government people do. The job aggressively selects for overactive Leslie Knope types who can’t sit still and feel the need to keep contributing, for good or bad, in whatever way they think is important.

    If the US wanted to influence open AI in some way, they’d just pay them. The Feds budget is big enough that bigger companies will absolutely prostrate themselves for a sample of it. Or if they just wanted influence, they’d… pay them.
    They wouldn’t do anything weird with retired or “retired” officers when a pile of money is much easier and less ambiguous.

    At worst it’s open AI trying to buy some access to the security apparatus to get contracts. Seems less likely to me, since I don’t actually think they have anything valuable for that sector.




  • This is confusing to me, because the point of the request seems to be “get a certificate”, not “get a self signed certificate generated by running the openssl command”. If you know how to get the result, it doesn’t really matter if you remembered offhand the shitty way or the overkill way.

    Is it really more helpful to say “I remember how to do this, but let me lookup a different way that doesn’t use the tools I’m familiar with”?