AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology -- one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond

Indeed!

If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing

No, it would not be. I want more people's lives — my own included — improved by those developments. And I want it yesterday.

Imagine Wright brothers sabotaging airplane-development, because it would allow people to travel too far too fast? Or the early automakers fretting over "implications" of using internal combustion engines for personal vehicles — because millions of grooms and coachmen would lose their jobs?.. Electric lamp? Wow, nice — but what about the candle-makers?

I don't need 4,304 sensors, cameras, touch screens and other do-dads. Give me a good stereo, AC/heat KNOBS, BUTTONS, DIALS.

The poster is a troll, and I completely disagree with the framing that Thomas is some devout defender of the Constitution, but there is actually a point here. The point was highlighted by Justice Sotomayor in the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter.

The TL;DR is that we've been pretty egregiously violating the Constitution's separation of powers for a century, and everyone has just quietly agreed to look away. We've been looking away for very good reasons, and what we really *ought* to do is amend the Constitution, because this is an area where the Constitution's 18th-century design does not work for the 20th (or 21st) century reality.

The longer explanation:

The Constitution sets up a strict separation of powers. Only the legislature can make laws. Only the executive has the wherewithal to enforce the laws. Only the judiciary can interpret the laws, and their constitutionality. Each serves as a check on the others. The president can veto legislation. The legislature can refuse to fund the executive's initiatives. The judiciary can invalidate laws and issue orders to the executive... but the judges have to be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. It's solid partitioning of power, designed to prevent the monarchical abuses the founders were familiar with, abuses that occur when one man (or woman, or small group) has the power to make the laws, enforce the laws and interpret the laws.

Very nice. But it doesn't work in the modern world.

The reason is that the US is much, much bigger and the world is vastly more complicated than it was in the 18th century. Regulations need to have a level of detail and sophistication that just isn't feasible for generalist legislators, and we don't want to leave the drafting of regulations to lobbyists. What we need is government experts in focused areas (fisheries, energy, mineral policy, telecommunications, etc.) whose full-time job is understanding the minutiae. Then lawmakers can write laws providing broad guidelines for the experts, who study the issues, write the regulations, subject them to rounds of public review and then enact them.

On the judicial side, the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, remain the final line for adjudication, but they're designed to grind very finely, which means they grind very slowly, and at great cost, especially since judges are also generalists so the litigants need to educate them on the detailed issues. To make enforcement of the detailed regulations practicable, we also need, effectively, specialist judges. The way we've handled that is by authorizing the same federal agencies who make the regulations to adjudicate their application.

Oops. Does this sound like we've lumped lawmaking, law enforcement and adjudication all together inside the federal agencies (in the executive branch), in clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, directly defeating the founders' work in dividing them up, re-enabling tyranny?

The letter, definitely. The spirit... not exactly. The other thing we did was to divide those powers up not by category (rulemaking, enforcement, judging) but by subject matter. So while each agency holds great power over its little fiefdom, that power is limited in the aggregate because the potential fisheries tyrant is completely separate from the potential telecoms tyrant. This limits the total power of each and prevents them from getting so big they can't be slapped down.

Unless it doesn't.

This scheme only works if those agencies are independent within the executive branch. And they cannot be independent if the president is free to fire anyone in the executive branch at will, which is what Slaughter is all about. If the president can fire anyone, then the whole of the executive is subject to his will, which means all of those subject-matter-isolated threads of power get gathered up into a single pair of hands.

And if that happens, we're back to monarchy. An elected monarch, perhaps. And possibly with a limited term, and with a few gross checks on power, slow and uncertain in application. But we have a single person with the power to control nearly all of the federal government's power to make, enforce and adjudicate the law, relegating the formal legislative and judicial bodies to backstop positions, generally unable to act fast enough to prevent tyrannical abuses.

So... what we ought to have done is to have amended the constitution to bake the independence of the executive branch agencies into the system. Or, we ought to have created parallel legislative and judicial sub-branches so that each area had its major functions isolated within the Constitutional framework.

This wouldn't have been difficult in the case of the judiciary, though we'd probably have had to create a different hiring process for the thousands of low-level adjudicators required -- going through presidential appointment and Senate confirmation for all of them would be impractical. But on the legislative side, we'd have needed a Constitutional amendment to enable the massive numerical expansion of the legislature necessary for all of the expert rulemaking roles, and those people would also need an entirely different hiring process. Voting on all of them would be impractical.

But fixing the problem correctly in either of those ways was hard, while just ignoring the issue was easy. And ignoring it worked fine for a while. We saw the first potential issues with Nixon, and ever since Nixon almost every succeeding occupant of the White House has chipped away at agency independence. Until Trump 2.0 when we have a president who has smashed a battering ram through all of the norms that maintained it, and is trying to get judicial blessing (the Slaughter case).

If you think the presidential immunity ruling was bad, that's nothing compared to what will be unleashed if SCOTUS finds fully in Trump's favor in Slaughter. We'll have a king with the power to (among many, many other things) unilaterally direct the imposition and enforcement of regulations that impose hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on telecoms companies. In this case, for what I think is a good reason. But whether it's a good reason won't matter if the president wants to do something for a bad reason, he'll have the power.

Particularly dangerous is the combination of:

1. The immunity ruling, plus
2. Absolute authority over the executive branch, plus
3. The unlimited pardon power.

The president can order anything at all done, federal employees will have to do it or be fired, and if it's a crime (a) the president is immune and (b) he can pardon everyone who does his dirty work.

I think the final backstop of impeachment and conviction by the legislative houses is likely to remain in that case as the only real limitation on presidential power. For the conservatives who think this is a good thing, they should think really hard about what a president AOC who decides to fully use the power of the Unitary Executive might do.

Fully-decentralized trust systems just don't work. PGP failed primarily for this reason, while SSL Certificate Authority system succeeded -- which shows that you don't need perfect centralization, a federation can do it, but the federation has to contain a sufficiently small set of authorities that it's practical for those who need to trust them to do so. The SSL analogy is useful in another way, too. Note that end-users don't know or care about CAs, they only have to trust their browser; the browser authors package the list of trusted root CAs, and they're moderately well-positioned to make those trust decisions on their users' behalf (the certificate transparency log is another layer, a global, fully-decentralized oversight mechanism -- but I don't see an obvious analogue for caller ID).

Applying this structure to caller ID trust, the most obvious points of control are the network operators first and phone makers second. Clearly the MNOs should be taking responsibility. They each know the accuracy of the IDs originating in their networks, and they are in a good position to validate the trustworthiness of IDs from outside their networks. Ideally, they should probably just refuse to forward an ID from a network that doesn't commit to anti-spoofing.

However, they're not doing that, and they're not going to do that, and we all know why: It's more profitable for them to permit spoofing.

One possible market-driven solution to this would be if some sufficiently-large networks decided that consumers cared enough about caller ID accuracy to make it a selling point for their services, committing to send only trustworthy IDs, either because they know the origin within their own network, or because the ID came from another operator who made the same pledge. My guess is that this would require renegotiation of interconnection agreements, but it could be done. More importantly, it would require users to care enough about caller ID spoofing to be willing to switch networks to get away from it. I don't know if that's in the cards.

So, what about the phone makers? They're in the next-best position... and Google by itself can put a big dent in caller ID spoofing globally. If Apple does the same thing between their devices, and then if they collaborate with Google (not an outlandish idea; Google and Apple often collaborate on technical standards), they could ensure that any call originating from a mobile phone provides accurate caller ID, and block the rest. And then they could also collaborate with the dumbphone makers and any new entrants to the smartphone market.

I think this is actually not a bad solution, and the market-driven motivations are clear. Phonemakers benefit from happy phone users and don't profit from phone spam.

That's the thing: it isn't. Those are monetary movements that exist only on paper, not realized. Company A "invests" $x on company B, which invests $y and $z on companies C and D, with C then investing $p back into A and $q into D, with company D then investing $r back into A and $s on B, and B also investing $t on A, etc. It's a Ponzi scheme, but in the form of a maze rather than that of a pyramid.

The purpose of those movements is to leverage stock prices. A company valued at $hundreds of billions that gets re-evaluated at $trillions due to all this paper-shuffling sees its stock prices rise. Executives and shareholders profit by exchanging their overvalued portfolios for actual money, and whoever is left with those shares on hand when the bubble pops and the market crashes (read: pension funds) loses.

The last prediction I saw on this said people are likely going to see half their lifelong retirement savings disappear almost overnight when that hits, all the while the billionaires who sold at the right moment will see themselves catapulted into almost trillionaires, with a few becoming outright trillionaires.

Democrats wouldn't let those companies die either. Can you imagine all their hawks being content letting Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Nvidia cease to exist, and with them the global leverage those companies provide the US? No, they're all "too big to fail" no matter who's in charge. That's pretty much a bipartisan thing.

The problem for Russia is they're running out of money. Even with suicidal infantry being cheap, those still need lots of equipment and logistics to keep going, and there's nowhere else to source all of that from, whether from within or without. And it isn't like Russian pseudo-allies are really helping.

China, in particular, is double-dipping on them by demanding that oil and gas it purchases from Russia be sold at extraordinarily low prices, with the exact same heavily subsidised prices Russia sells them to its own population, while at the same time selling everything Russia needs for military use at the highest price it can charge. Russia cannot say no to either demand, so that's depleting Russian coffers even faster than they expected. And it isn't like China minds Russia becoming weaker due to this strategy. The more dependent Russia becomes on China, the easier it'll become for China to, someday, demand Russia give back all the Chinese territories the Russian Empire took from them when China itself was weakened during the 19th century.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has developed its military technology in-house, and with such a high level of competence, it's now exporting it and even building drone factories in other countries, countries that are in turn becoming heavy customers of Ukrainian tech and dependent on it for their own military uses, which in turn is paving the way for that technology, that doesn't depend of people on the ground walking toward the meat grinder while making it even more of a meat grinder, to advance at a faster and faster pace.

At this point, there's little Russia can do that'd turn things around other than going nuclear, and even that isn't guaranteed to go well for Russia, as Ukraine has very likely been preparing for that contingency for the last four years. If anything, going nuclear would precipitate the entire world attacking them.

And then to China taking back its former territories even earlier than they expected to.

Tyrants in general, from Putin to Trump, Xi to Kim, and everyone in between, practice seeding waves upon waves of contradictory lies mixed with a handful of truths with the very deliberate goal of causing exactly that emotional reaction: exhausted cynicism. They promote contradictory lies at home, so their people become accustomed to the notion that factual truth is hard or even impossible to achieve, and then convince their populations to generalize that cynicism so that they also start believing it's the same everywhere. That generates apathy toward politics in general, and by extension mistrust of those who are genuine in their activism, the latter being "felt" as nothing but agents of so many hidden interests, actors faking conviction in exchange for under-the-table benefits. People tune out and, as the saying goes, if one opts for neutrality in a dispute where one side is more powerful than the other, then one's siding with the powerful against the weak. And tyrants absolutely love that attitude: it's a huge factor in them maintaining their power unchallenged.

There are ways out of that. The heuristic I personally follow is to side with the weak side in any direct dispute with the powerful unless I have access to extremely trustworthy information showing that specific case is one of the very, very rare instances in which that doesn't apply due to extreme circumstances.

Hence, in Ukraine vs Russia I'm with Ukraine, because Ukraine is the weak against the strong and Russia is the attacker. Were it NATO attacking Russia, or China attacking Russia, I'd be with Russia. Were it the US attacking China, I'd be with China. Were it China attacking India, I'd be with India. India attacking Pakistan, I'd be with Pakistan. And so on.

Ditto for internal contexts. A Christian government in a Christian-majority country against small religions of minority groups, or against LGBT+ people? I'm with these. Muslim fanatics in Islamic-majority countries attacking Christian minorities? I'm with the Christians. Chinese attacking Falun Gong cultists or Vatican-loyal Catholics? I'm with both of these. Etc.

Take the side of the immediately weak against an attacking directly immediately strong, and you will rarely be on the wrong side of that specific dispute.

You're welcome. I only act aggressively in discussions when I'm attacked first, or the other deliberately acts with intellectual dishonesty. If that isn't the case, then my rhetoric may be at times ironic and even sarcastic, but it's always serious and on topic.

I too felt that way about SGU. Aside from introducing me to Flogging Molly - in one of the best applications of popular music to a show ever - I enjoyed the story that SGU was telling.

ON THE OTHER HAND...nostalgia is a powerful drug.
A coworker and I have watched from SG movie, SG1 through Atlantis all the way into SGU; we're in SGU S02E10 and ... it's palpably running out of gas. Atlantis was absolutely an evolutionary step up from the monster-of-the-week very-1990s-feeling episodic SG1. It ended when it should have, while SG1 ran about 3-4 seasons too long.
SGU then was an *absolute* step up in writing depth and character building but already in season two it feels adrift. From episodes where basically nothing happens to utterly-contrived conflicts (let's be honest, the entire Lucian invasion plot was incredibly stupid from s2e1). Also a tiresome (to me) emphasis on personal dramas...blech. That's not what I'm watching the show for "Peyton Place in Spaaaaaace...."
I've read JM's reddit posts on 'what might have happened' which just reinforces that none of this was already-baked, just writer-room ideas basically. Which it very much feels like.
I don't recall precisely the last half of SGU season 2, I only generally recall it ended sort of abruptly. But right now, halfway through? I'm more looking forward to getting through it and us starting our Babylon 5 watchthrough more than the 2nd half of SGU.

In this usage "plots" implies something secretive or insidious. Why this usage?

This seems like a reasonable plan to review and address dangerous bottlenecks in services provided by external actors.

Honestly, if the bullshit around national dick-flexing shows countries generally that it's a stupid fucking idea to rely on multinationals (American or otherwise) generally for critical infrastructure (and in 2026, email is an example of critical infrastructure), then hey maybe there is a silver lining here.

Most of Russia's science reputation were Ukrainians, actually.

That's impossible. Narcissistic egos cannot understand the meaning of "no".

If Russia wins? Yes, since it'll be the same dictator governing both countries.

Yep! Chaos, followed by a unified Empire (the Roman one), followed by chaos, followed by another unified Empire (Christendom in its different imperial incarnations), followed by chaos, followed by the currently newly forming unified Empire, followed by chaos, followed...

The current incarnation is following the "perpetual peace" playbook as devised by Kant. 300 years to start reaching fruition, but such things take time.

The key sentence being "for the time being". In your list I'd only kind of agree with Iran not being expansionist. Putin has declared many times he wants conquest, having followed closely Dugin's "foundations" outline. China indeed isn't expansionist in the same sense, but in classic Chinese fashion it wants to be surrounded by wholly vassal states.

That means little. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine all claim descent from Kievan Rus, but they've culturally diverged within that common ancestral origin. And yes, as a good Russian propagandist I know you toe the (Duginian) line that Ukraine doesn't have its own distinctive culture because ${mythopolitical_nonsense} and therefore "should be" this and that and the other thing, whether willingly or by force. Ukrainians clearly disagree, so more power to them.

Ah, there's no need for that. Ukraine learned to be like Afghanistan, a land where Empires go to die. Even if Russia were to win, it would see no peace until it gave up, likely under the next dictator, who won't have the same commitments as the current one does to his pet projects.

Me neither, but that's mostly because the US may have left by then, or been expelled, and Europe will reorganize into its own anti-Russian-aggression coalition.

Yep. Those were lost opportunities for all the involved.

Nope. Have you seen how the regions in Russia bordering China are filled with Chinese companies and businessmen, Chinese language everything, and more and more dependence on China itself? This allows China to use the same trick Russia used in Ukrainian regions of, whenever it so wishes, declare that any kind of Russian effort to make sure China doesn't take control of Russian strategic resources is "anti-Chinese persecution", and declare a special military operation to "protect" ethnic Chinese minorities "oppressed" by Russia, thus justifying taking back to tasty, tasty cities and mineral resources.

Remember, the Century of Humiliation didn't happen only on the Southern Chinese border, but on the Northern too. And China remembers, ah, how it remembers!

And yet they're not only not winning, but approaching defeat. And not to NATO itself, in its full might, but to Ukraine, with very minimal NATO support, and several opposed moves by the US.

A better, and much easier, solution, would have been for Russia to have applied to join NATO, and thus get all that support for themselves, so that down the line China doesn't take back the many disputed territories they have with Russia. Too bad the end result will be Russia losing to Ukraine and becoming so weakened they'll also lose to China.