software engineer, godfather, hunter: Ask me about my newfoundlands
Atlanta, GA
Joined January 2010
- Tweets1.4K
- Following476
- Followers305
- Likes2.8K
Reid Baker retweeted
Lina, you don't know the honest truth.
In the military, you got your POGs... Person Other than a Grunt. Guys who don't shoot anything. You need them, because you need all sorts of specialties, but you can't trust their big-picture judgement, because the overall mission of the military is shootin' people, and they don't do that.
In civilization, we have POMs.
Person Other than a Maker. Dudes what don't build things. You might need them. But you shouldn't take them too seriously, or listen to them too much, because on some fundamental level, they are never going to get it. They are never going to understand. The fundamental task of civilization is making things, and POMs don't do that.
"This is just a mash-up of existing technology" is the most POM-like typing you could ever hope to see. It's a tell that someone has never done a significant engineering project in a technical role.
Experienced engineers not only understand differently, we eat, sleep and breathe the basic reality that 99% of engineering challenges are "get mechanism to work with other mechanism". Without breaking, shaking itself apart or blowing up.
Every basic scientific principle behind the internal combustion automobile was understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans.
And yet they were not only unable to harness those principles to make a primitive steam-powered automobile, they were unable to conceive of the very idea, because their ability to implement and integrate wasn't advanced enough.
If you look at everything that Elon Musk has ever done, every company he has ever built, every technology he has ever brought to market, none of it was a purely new invention.
It was ALL taking stuff that already kinda worked, and making it do new things. And not just do them, but do them so well that they actually became practical.
SpaceX didn't invent the rocket. They made it reusable.
Tesla didn't invent the electric motor or the battery. They made them practical for ground transportation.
Neurallink didn't invent electrical nerve interfaces. They made them control a computer UI.
This shit is incredibly hard. If you try to use the known principle of a cold-gas thruster to make a car fly, you're going to crash and blow up a lot. You're going to have to make mistakes, and fix them, one by one, until you run out of mistakes and the thing flies.
Real engineers, real makers, know that this is what the word engineering means. POMs don't get it. Lina doesn't understand what she saw.
She thinks she saw a publicity stunt to impress yokels.
No. That was a publicity stunt to impress engineers.
It wasn't a demonstration of a flying car at all. It was a demonstration of the engineering capabilities of team.
It was a flex.
"Look," they said, "we can reify the Gernsback continuum. Give us your silliest, low-effort science fiction meme tech, and give us enough time, and we'll make it real."
The purpose of making a flying car isn't to let you do a jetpack leap over traffic. It's to learn all the little implementation details and balancing tradeoffs and gotchas that you have to master to make a car fly.
It's not the big scientific discoveries that build civilization. By themselves, they are nothing but curiosities.
What builds civilization is all the little discoveries that you make when you try to get the big ones to stop crashing and blowing up.
When someone does that on a unprecedented level, you either help them, or you stay out of the way and keep your ignorant POM opinions to yourself.
I'm not an Elon hater.
I'm just telling you the Honest Truth:
This is a marketing stunt.
The technology is quite old.
Just nobody ever thought of bolting it on a car.
Because it's pointless.
Porsche or Ferrari could also build something like this if they wanted, but they don't, because it's not worth it for them.
It's worth it for Elon though, because his entire brand is all about having the halo of futurism.
His marketing scales especially well with tech gimmicks like this, which is why he is financially incentivised to do them, while others aren't.
Again, I'm not hating, but actually educating yall.
This is not engineering genius.
It's marketing genius.
Reid Baker retweeted
Every year, the government orders the Internet accounts of about 1 in 1,000 people to be copied in their entirety & held for the government, all in total secrecy, and all without any cause. In this article, I explain why I think that's unconstitutional. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
Reid Baker retweeted
As much as we may disagree with and often dislike our antigun opponents, one thing we never try to do is silence them. Hell, we want them to speak more, because it exposes the evil and idiocy underpinning their policy preferences and ideology. Sadly, they almost never directly engage with us in a substantive way (probably a smart choice on their part).
Their strategy is entirely different. Everytown & friends constantly try to silence us. This attack on the free speech of guntubers is just the latest example. They also sue gun companies for their marketing even when they have zero evidence a crime suspect even saw the advertising in question (let alone evidence that the ad caused them to do the crime). The point isn't that such frivolous litigation would win, it's to use daddy Bloomberg's wallet to bury companies in litigation expense.
They also tried to block our access to the courts in California in 2022, backing SB 1327 which would have made gun rights litigants responsible for the State's legal fees if we sued and lost on any claim. For example, suppose we sued California over reciprocity, making both a Second Amendment argument, but also a secondary right to travel argument. Then suppose we win on 2A, but the court isn't convinced on our right to travel cause of action. Huge win right? Nope, under SB 1327, we'd have to pay all of the State's legal expenses because we didn't technically win *every* claim.
The law was blatantly unconstitutional for violating the right to petition the courts for redress of grievances, Bonta refused to defend it. Newsom's own lawyers came in to defend it, and we crushed them. Easiest court win I will ever be a part of. Newsom didn't even appeal when Judge Benitez struck it down.
But you know who did back that obviously tyrannical law? The scum at Everytown, as well as Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action (which are also Everytown).
So this isn't new for them. They see silencing us as a legitimate vector of attack. And pressuring Youtube to deplatform guntubers is just another part of that strategy.
As expected, here's the new Everytown article complaining about "how the firearms industry supports 'guntubers' who endanger public safety" smokinggun.org/report/loaded…
Reid Baker retweeted
(1) Prevalence of AR-15 and 10+ round magazine possession has increased.
A gun owner today is actually slightly more likely to own a 10+ round mag than to not own one.
26.4 million adults own an AR-15 or equivalent, compared to 24.6 million who *ever* owned one in 2021 data.
Reid Baker retweeted
You have a Second Amendment right to frontier AI.
If they really start to gatekeep who gets to use the best models, that is a declaration of war.
This prospect fills me with the most sincere, bodily cypherpunk will-to-power that I've ever felt (at least since I was a teenager). If they really go down this route, I would go all-in on building the most psychotic swarms of open-source models and fine-tunes possible, all geared toward a Chaotic Good jamming of the entire institutional public sphere. If we didn't do that, all of political life and the marketplace of ideas would be over before we know it.
It's one thing if the top models become too expensive for me or others to use (I'm already pricing that in, and if you can't build something profitable enough to climb that ladder as it gets pulled up, then that's fair enough).
But if the ladder gets pulled up politically, now, so only select institutional players get access to the most intelligent models, then any mature American man should be as energized as gun collectors are around the 2nd Amendment, or liberal women are around Planned Parenthood.
Reid Baker retweeted
part one of "Why Software Factories Fail" hit 250k views in under 24h - now you get to enjoy part two
Reid Baker retweeted
My distaste for slop is not so much about creator effort. I just want to avoid becoming a distillation of the median LLM. I suspect we will eventually move to a paradigm where rather than checking if AI was involved in content production, we will want to know whether a piece is original (i.e., out of distribution). Today, the best proxy for out-of-distribution ideas is out-of-distribution writing style via Pangram. In theory you don’t need a human to curate the token arrangement of a piece of text for the ideas themselves to be worth reading. In practice, style and originality are correlated. I expect that in the near future, @pangram will discern both style and underlying originality.
www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinar…
Jump to page 50 for a great an short read on the history of bowie knives and their legislation and how to read them in the second amendment context.
Reid Baker retweeted
Judge VanDyke concludes with what I started out by being amazed at - the claim by Judge Wardlaw that "all agree" the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.
Reid Baker retweeted
VanDyke: "Most of my colleagues can’t fathom writing a pro-Second Amendment opinion. They need to get some reps in. Forcing them to bite the bullet and make a ruling they disagree with will operate as a form of exposure therapy."
Reid Baker retweeted
They barely hide it anymore. This isn't about "common sense" measures. The NFA registration process has what they demand. Background check, registration, plenty of paperwork. People with NFA-registered items almost never commit crimes.
Yet they are STILL mad. Why? Because the process is now faster. Their demand is not simply licensing measures; they want it to arbitrarily take a long time, so less people exercise their rights.
Everything they argue should be interpreted through that lens. These are people who want to ban all guns, and failing that, they want to make guns harder and more of a pain to get.
Everytown complains that the ATF is approving so many NFA forms this year: smokinggun.org/trumps-atf-bo…
Reid Baker retweeted
Please don't back down. We want you to know you tried your hardest in favor of authoritarian gun control, and still lost.
Reid Baker retweeted
STATEMENT: Late last week, the federal government imposed export controls on Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 artificial intelligence models, citing national security concerns. The government action reportedly bans Anthropic from allowing foreign governments, foreign companies, and foreign individuals from using these systems. The directive, which reportedly came in the form of a letter from Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to Anthropic, is still not public. In response, Anthropic shut down access to these systems for all users, regardless of nationality or location.
The government’s demand that Anthropic effectively shut down its models to comply with the export controls threatens core First Amendment rights.
Artificial intelligence models are expressive tools, and their creation and use fall within the First Amendment’s protection. Mythos and Fable — the company’s cutting-edge tools made publicly available only last week — reflect deliberate expressive choices by Anthropic about how to train and weight these models, and what guardrails to create and maintain. Once in a user’s hands, this technology provides the ability to gather, create, and share information. Like any tool, AI has both lawful and unlawful applications. But the government has offered no public explanation as to why export controls were justified.
By demanding Anthropic eliminate access solely for foreign users — a functional impossibility, per the company — the government is exercising the kind of “kill switch” on artificial intelligence we have seen repressive regimes abroad use on the internet.
By leaving the public in the dark as to the specific threat identified and the statutory authority invoked to address it, the government’s dramatic action functions as an arbitrary abuse of power. The export controls serve as a prior restraint or a licensing system, requiring Anthropic to receive government approval as a condition of operating expressive systems.
If left unchecked, the administration’s assertion of control would allow it to censor models that contradict the government's preferred views or punish developers who oppose the administration. And other AI companies and users are now forced to grapple with uncertainty regarding what they may develop, deploy, and engage with without crossing the administration’s invisible line.
The administration’s action follows President Trump making plain his hostility to Anthropic, calling it a “radical left, woke” company, a stance shared by members of his cabinet. Last March, the administration deemed Anthropic insufficiently "patriotic" over model guardrails it disagreed with — ultimately designating it a "supply chain risk," again citing national security grounds. But simply invoking national security does not immunize government officials from their constitutional obligations or give them carte blanche to punish speech.
Heavy-handed, arbitrary, behind-the-scenes governmental bullying is anathema to our free society, in any form. And its unacceptability is at its apex when directed to an endeavor that is inherently expressive, as is the creation and use of tools like Fable and Mythos.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
Reid Baker retweeted
If they didn't pay the tax, they don't have standing because they didn't pay it
If they did pay the tax, they don't have standing because the tax didn't stop them from owning a gun
Reid Baker retweeted
Turns out ignorance of the law IS an excuse....but only if you are enforcing said law, not if you are accidentally violating it.
Cool!
A New York federal judge ruled that NYPD officers didn't violate a carry permit holder's rights when they arrested him, suspended his permit, and took his guns because they didn't know what a "business carry" license was: storage.courtlistener.com/re…
