Why are we doing this again? The current administration established the existing trade deal back during the first term and now they are unhappy with it?
Mostly because Canada is allowing Chinese vehicle imports, which US auto industry is not happy about. There's also some pressure from US video streaming producers and distributors, after Canada expanded regulations for television and movie production into streaming video platforms.
This. It's why "unitary executive" is so attractive - he can extend his tendrils into every nook & cranny of policy (foreign and other) to personally monetize it.
> While President Trump continues to lock in fair and reciprocal trade deals with nearly twenty trading partners across the globe, Canada continues to retaliate against the United States for its efforts to correct trade imbalances and protect American workers, farmers, and businesses.
> Over the past year and a half, only two countries have chosen to retaliate against President Trump’s tariffs rather than negotiate a deal with the United States: The People’s Republic of China and Canada.
Us/Canada had a nice free trade deal signed by the current prez in his first term. Pity said prez is ignoring it. Hasn’t left the agreement, just ignoring it. And nobody bothers to point that out and how he’s breaking us law to do so (ratified treaty).
In Bob Woodward's book on the first Trump presidency, Trump shows a fixation with trade deficits and trade imbalances. His cabinet would try to explain that the US having a trade imbalance with South Korea (one of the topics in the book) was expected, and he had to consider the defense and intelligence agreements as part of that. Trump would not have it – he was described as obsessively focused on the trade imbalance alone, believing it made the US look weak.
White House staff took to sneaking into the Oval Office to remove draft letters and agreements from his desk before he could sign them, so he couldn't ruin trade deals like KORUS or NAFTA over his misgivings. This time around he has obviously learned he should only have yes men in the cabinet.
I've looked at this same problem in an academic environment and have come to conclude that there is no way to reliably detect AI writing using only text. The reason for this is that no detector can take two identical inputs and classify one as synthetic (LLM) and one as organic (Human) and this situation can easily happen at the sentence or even paragraph level. Posed as a question, if a human writes a paragraph that happens to be exactly the same as a paragraph written by an LLM how do you classify that paragraph? There are a finite number of words and a finite way of combining them within an academic setting/field which means that we can't build a perfect classifier with just text. In practice, there are obvious tells and LLM-isms but these also change with time and each model has different tells so that even if a paper is full of LLM like writing we have no way to disambiguate between organic text that appears synthetic or synthetic text that appears organic.
A more interesting question, to me, is looking at a corpus of essays and analyzing how writing has changed with the introduction of LLMs. We can look at changes in vocabulary, linguistic features, style embeddings, regular embeddings, typos, errors, and references over time. When looked at in this way it is clear that academic writing has changed at the population level but what has led the change is harder to track down.
When some closed models are "retired", interestingly we might not even be able to extract all their tells. We'd be limited to people writing about them on forums (where they don't often specify version, and there's a lot of memes and confirmation bias) and I don't know, doing some statistical Bayesian guessing that given the likelihood it's FooGPT 10.5, maybe we should update our beliefs about its characteristics etc.
> There are a finite number of words and a finite way of combining them within an academic setting/field which means that we can't build a perfect classifier with just text.
Maybe for very short phrases, but otherwise I disagree. Phrasing very quickly runs into a combinatorial explosion. In the words of Noam Chomsky, "Virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe."
In my opinion, the difficulty in LLM/human text discrimination isn't that a person might coincidentally write exactly the same text as an LLM would, but rather that 1) LLMs aren't hard locked to a single phrasing (so this is a tougher problem than matching to a single static document, e.g. plagiarism detection) and 2) text has relatively low information density, so you need quite a bit of it to gather enough data to run a statistical test with a reasonably narrow confidence interval.
Lawyers will be fine they will work with legislators to make it illegal for AI to practice law. Then, even if the lawyers job is mostly presenting the work of a legal AI, they will still be employed. Other knowledge workers will need to wisen up and do the same.
Edit: same for any profession that requires professional accreditation: lawyers, doctors, cpas, professional engineers, etc.
Am I understanding correctly that an implication of this is reduced context? since they are streaming by splitting the input into streams the total context is now split amongst those streams and a particular streams context will be shorted to to context/ streams?
This language is so lame 'forward-deployed engineer' oh you mean a software consultant/application engineer?
This entire article is a joke, look at the FDE SaS flywheel diagram: 'The FDE activates the SaS flywheel and then your stock price will 10x!'
Does anyone know of any groups that are organizing and lobbying to get things like this into law? I know about the EFF but they seem to be more focused on documenting and reporting instead of lobbying and getting things passed.
Nice scope!
I had a similar experience with using Claude to automate circuit design/simulation/optimization and found that they are not good at it.
They are surprisingly good at taking raw files and describing what is in them, but they fall apart when trying to do anything other than design the simplest circuit. I think it is because they have no concept of the physics behind a circuit, so they cannot make changes that a designer would make. For optimizing a circuit using, say, an EM simulator, they don't know what to tweak and how to tweak it. In the end, I had to write a script to talk to the simulator and create a config file that specified the bounds of the simulation: step size, optimization algorithm, min, max, etc. Only then could I use an agent to call the script to optimize the circuit.
Yeah, taking the spice list as the starting point works much better, imo. I also prepopulate the CLAUDE.md file with some information like the pinout/pinmux of the MCU otherwise claude might run in circles trying targeting the wrong pin (to be fair that also happens to me, lol).
Propaganda works on people with all levels of 'capacity for reasoning'. No one is immune to it. Also, a feature of good propaganda is that it gets through a persons bullshit filter so that they are not even aware that they are being manipulated. The article points out the current use of Lego propaganda as examples of governments updating their tools so that they get their message across to more people.
This is important because it lets pluralities build from people who are not aware they are being manipulated. Pluralities can lead to majorities and majorities, in a democratic system, create power. All this to say: I don't think those who have fallen for propaganda are living in a world they are satisfied with but instead that they are living in a world they've been told they are satisfied with and a lack of counter narratives have not shown them a better way. Consider that propaganda gets busted out whenever something isn't naturally popular or beneficial to most people, that is why we see propaganda most used around military efforts.
If someone is continuing to put themselves into situations and contexts where they are overloaded with propaganda, then that indicates they lack a core level of discernment
The idea that people cannot have agency while being subjected to propaganda is totally fucking absurd and demonstrably not true
there are millions of examples of people who can discern propaganda and make decisions based on ground truth data
>put themselves into situations and contexts where they are overloaded with propaganda,
Ah, yes, most of us are independently wealthy and have the financial freedom to avoid working in lobbies blasting fox news all day.
Yes, people can have agency if they choose to, most choose not to because it takes a massive fuckton of energy to do so. But you created society all by yourself from first principles right? Oh you didn't.
The thing is, especially in the modern world with so much media everywhere all the time, we are being subjected to propaganda in nearly everything we do. News, advertizing, lifestyle, all are imbued with propaganda. Some of it's obvious to you and you can quickly discount it. Other parts of it are something you've grown up with and you don't even have the first clue that it is propaganda.
Simply put your feeble human mind cannot comprehend nor perceive the ground truth of all reality and therefore we're subject to the biased and filtered information we receive from others.
> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
For sure, there are plenty of such people. They are still very small minority.
Almost everybody I know has a tendency to not overly check the statements that broadly align with their world view, and be dismissive (as propaganda, without doing the work to check the ground truth data) of statements that are contrary.
I have a buddy who is a cop and he tells me that they use AI to write reports and even to check if their reason for pulling someone over will hold up later. As annoying as it is in SW, people using AI outside of SW is much more alarming.
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