You SBF defenders have such a weird view of how the law works. If I embezzle money from my company and then bet it all on black in Vegas, intending to give it back if I win, your implication here is equivalent to saying I did commit a crime if the wheel comes up red, but I did not commit any crime if it comes up black.
Not a SBF defender, and at no point am I suggesting that a crime was not committed. I am saying that the crime is different to theft.
Would you say that a misuse of funds with zero chance of the rightful owner losing their money is a less serious crime than a misuse of funds with a 50% or 100% chance of losing their money.
I think it is, and penalties should be proportionate. That is a principle that I hold independent to any of the specifics of this case.
Paying back a victim, or "making them whole" is part of required restitution, but it's not adequate as a deterrence. If all I have to do is pay back my victims, there's very little disincentive to keep trying my schemes until I "win."
Loss of freedom is ultimately what will reform a criminal, if reform is possible.
>Loss of freedom is ultimately what will reform a criminal, if reform is possible.
I don't believe that is correct. In fact there's pretty good research to suggest that custodial sentences inrcease recidivism. This does not really apply to the SBF case, but I shall elaborate for the general case.
There are far more burglars in their 20's than in their 50's. The predominant characteristic amongst people over the age of 50 being convicted of burglary is previous jail time for burglary.
Research has shown the single most reliable way to reform a criminal is to let them get older without going to jail, and to a lesser extent gaining a criminal record. People are far more often criminals by circumstance than by nature.
> the single most reliable way to reform a criminal is to let them get older without going to jail
I think it’s just getting older. If they’re a recivifism risk, locking them up until they’re older can be argued to serve the public good. If they’re not, you’re right, don’t jail them. The argument is essentially against short prison sentences; either find another way to punish or commit to locking them up until they’re 60.
I don't think that is supported by the evidence. A custodial sentence can counteract any benefits of age because it isn't the age itself that matters, it's the increased life experience.
Subjecting people to a fairly brutal environment for that time provides a completely different set of experiences.
The long standing dichotomies of crime management is whether reduced crime is more, or less important, than justice. On top of this is is punishment retribution, deterrent, rehabilitation, or mere isolation.
Many people disagree on these points. Some refuse to acknowledge the possibility that some of the goals might be in conflict.
> Loss of freedom is ultimately what will reform a criminal, if reform is possible
The goals of penal sanctions are “retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation” [1].
Bankman-Fried is a sociopath. He isn’t going to be rehabilitated, his continuing pursuit of a pardon proves that. The benefits in jailing him are mainly in the first three: retribution, deterrence and incapacitation.
> Would you say that a misuse of funds with zero chance of the rightful owner losing their money is a less serious crime than a misuse of funds with a 50% or 100% chance of losing their money.
No, because the crime is the same either way. The crime is "misuse of funds", full stop.
If recklessly using those funds is also a crime, then there should be an extra charge tacked on, which would presumably increase penalties on conviction.
Agreed. I've seen local officials convicted of misusing an offical credit card for groceries and other personal purchases, even though they paid everything back and there was no "loss" to the taxpayers. But they were still misusing public credit for personal benefit.
Of course it was a pretty clear pattern of usage over time, not a one-time thing that could be explained as accidental.
I would disagree, solely because one or more of the following reasons:
1. the person taking the money had no guarantee that the money, or some of it, would not be lost.
2. it wasn't their intention to give all or some of it back to its rightful owners.
3. the fact that some of it could repay some of the rightful owner's was often a matter of luck, not intent (there is some overlap between 1 and 3).
SBF hits all three of these. Your intent matters. At some point SBF intended by conscious acts to run and continue running a Ponzi scheme. He wasn't trying to bail himself out of the hole other than to the extent required to keep the Ponzi scheme going and enrich himself in the process.
So, respectfully, I disagree. May there be other cases that I agree with you on, depending on the particulars? Perhaps so. But not this one.
I disagree that this was shown in the SBF case. In fact, it seems much of the case was based on the fact that these points were not pertinent to the charges he faced. Which is also likely why his appeal failed. The argument that he was disallowed from making would have spoken to those issues. If it had have been relevant to the charges, he should have been allowed to make the argument.
Intent isn't necessarily an element required to prove fraud. Recklessness can be sufficient. Also to the extent intent is required intent to deceive is sufficient, ie the intent to cause someone to rely on a false statement, even if there's no intent to harm because you're convinced your fraudulent scheme will ultimately lead to success.
This is how people who get to the top act, the ones you see at the top are the ones who correctly guessed the roulette number .
If you want to become successful sooner or later you'd have to do the same .
As I realized this I am slowly but steadily abandoning the race for money and I am trying to approach it by finding the best deals for the stuff that I like as money saved is money earned and there is very little difference between experiencing a top 85 percentile thing and a top 99.999 percentile thing , but that last 15% man that is what the money exonential really goes crazy
Yeah I'm starting to think the BLS needs to do "Boomer aging adjustments" to jobs numbers, in a similar manner to how they do "seasonal farming adjustments". Until we get through the Boomer population bulge, healthcare is going to keep adding jobs for quite a while regardless of how the rest of the economy does, but that doesn't necessarily mean the overall labor market is healthy.
If you leave out healthcare, 2025 had massive job losses overall, with Boomer bedpan cleaning bringing the net number up to just above zero.
If there is an increased demand in healthcare jobs that will increase wages in healthcare which will pull people out of other jobs and into healthcare in a healthy labor market. I’m not saying whether or not the labor market is healthy, but this adjustment wouldn’t help you figure that out.
Also Gen X isn’t that much smaller than the boomers, and millennials are the largest generation ever. Plus all generations aster the baby boomers have fewer children per couple to take care of them, so demand for healthcare jobs isn’t going to drop anytime soon.
> the BLS needs to do "Boomer aging adjustments" to jobs numbers, in a similar manner to how they do "seasonal farming adjustments"
You’re comparing a low-frequency trend with a high-frequency cycle. The latter has lots of data to characterize it. The former may be secular or may be a slow cycle; nobody should be adjusting for it in the base data.
It's the "If we don't, someone else will" effect. So long as there are competitive markets and competition between nation-states, a single player cannot unilaterally defect from the race, no matter how dangerous it is. Half the comments on HN lately are "wtf Claude is so dumb compared to Codex; I'm switching"-- nobody can slow down while those exist.
We, globally, can stop it. It has worked (so far) for nuclear disarmament, and could work for training large models. I know that policing the usage of computer clusters is not a popular opinion in technical forums, but something has to be done.
Specially when talking about potential superintelligences. And if people think that's impossible, remember that current models would have been considered science fiction just a few years ago.
I don't buy the superintelligence package, but I think uncritical LLM adoption poses plenty of threats to things I care about, in a mundane human-scale way.
Anyhow, I think you're (absolutely! ugh) right about the politics and I try to make the same point to people: whether you love or hate LLMs, accepting the "inevitabilism" framing is just ceding control of the Overton window. For better or worse, technology adoption can be and has been slowed by politics. We don't have nuclear plants everywhere. We don't have Project Orion starships colonizing Mars. We still have very strong social stigmas against genetic selection for human embryos, etc. This all can change in a heartbeat, and I'm not sure that policing the hardware rather than holding specific humans accountable for bad LLM outcomes is productive, but fundamentally: yes, we can stop it.
It's the same deal as Quantum Computers breaking crypto. Maybe there's an 80% chance of it never happening, but when you multiply that remaining 20% by the potential impact...
It hasn't worked for nuclear disarmament. We live in a world where many countries have nuclear arsenals. "But it hasn't killed us yet!" Yeah sure, it's only been less than a century since they were invented. Who knows when nuclear war will come?
True, but look at nuclear tests. There used to be around 50 tests every year, for decades. Now the only nuclear tests in the last 27 years were the six done by North Korea[1]. And there's still only nine countries with any nuclear weapons, and none in the past twenty years[2].
That's a bit better than just "it hasn't killed us yet". I think it shows we can at least stop the further development of this kind of technology.
Nuclear tests are extremely easy to detect worldwide, and enrichment activity is a major industrial process that is also fairly easy to track given the specialized equipment needed.
AI development doesn’t have any of these characteristics. It would be almost impossible to easily distinguish a datacenter that is working on AI development and a datacenter mining cryptocurrency.
It would not be nearly as easy to stop AI development as it is to stop nuclear arms development.
There's also little reason to keep iterating on nukes. What we have now more than serves its purpose. With AI/LLM there's always going to be a push to one up everyone else.
To the extent nuclear arms control works, I think it's only because nuclear weapons are so hard to build-- uranium enrichment is hugely expensive and complicated, and plutonium weapons need actual reactors.
If it was possible for ordinary companies to build nuclear weapons, and also release open-source ones that anyone could use to compete with the paid ones, I suspect we'd all have been dead a long time ago, arms control treaties or no.
Even the (SOTA LLM) open source models are trained with huge clusters. Datacenters are also hugely expensive and complicated.
Or you can take one step back and look at chip allocation. As far as I know there are only three companies on the planet that can make the chips that go in those clusters. One (ASML), if you look back the supply chain to the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Systems.
If politicians decided that no more large language models should be trained, it sounds like we could do it.
with nukes you can regulate the inputs because its physically impossible to build one without uranium or some other fissile material. they also give off radiation making it easier to detect. its hard to make them in secret when you need mines, big enrichment facilities and years of research with hundreds of engineers where just one of them can leak the whole thing.
training llms only takes compute and memory. two things that are basically everywhere. even if you somehow stopped making new gpus today theres still millions of them out there and its possible to start a secret production line. you can maybe try some controls at the tooling and chemical level but look what happened with asml and huawei.
the only thing you can really do is find and stop large data centers that are built out in public. nothing outside of political pressure works against secret operations in a fortified bunker or any form of distributed training. if a "rogue state" like north korea decides to make skynet they will eventually get it as long as their engineers know what there doing.
and the best way to fight bad X {ai, tech, religion, politics} has always been good X, not no X. in this case thats open source models, coming out of china or europe or anywhere else. thats the real answer.
I think the standard answer is "yes, the consequence of noncompliance is bombing the datacenters, but it wouldn't happen because China also understands why we shouldn't build it".
In 2023 there was an open letter titled "Pause Giant AI Experiments", signed by almost all the big names on the West. I'd say the public opinion only got worse since then.
Clearly state "we could both verifiably slow down, which you might want to do given that we're ahead & have way more compute. If you don't agree (or defect later), we'll just immediately resume and win"
Ideally also persuade them there are risks and it's worth everyone slowing down for them, and apply pressure in other ways, but not sure that's even necessary.
The price of electricity is set by the marginal cost of the most expensive individual source - if your grid is 80% solar, 20% coal, the price you pay is the price of coal, because the solar providers can increase their prices to just below that of coal. Obviously I'm simplifying somewhat, but that's the general dynamic.
This is "by design" in the sense that it offers big subsidies to more solar generation to come online, but you won't see the biggest price cuts until the last expensive sources are pushed off the grid entirely. Because Germany's marginal source is coal, they pay way more than countries whose marginal source is gas or nuclear.
The Alaska Permanent Fund from their oil revenue is worth $90 billion and they send every resident an annual $1,000 check on top of heavily subsidized fuel. I think they can pay competitive teacher salaries.
Alaska is already in the top 8 median elementary school teacher salaries nationally, with ~$79,260 in 2025 compared to 2024 national median of $62,310 (couldn't find 2025). They were #2 and #3 in education spending as a percent of state GDP in 2024 and 2025. [1][2][3]
It would need to be more than just competitive, it would probably need to be doctor-tier "I'm giving up my life plans for this salary in Alaska" level (which is what I assume it's like for foreign labor).
It's possible they can afford it. I would think they would need to double or more their education spending (~$2.77 billion (24/25), ~45% -> wages) state wide which would be most of what the Alaska Permanent Fund pays out per year ($3-4 billion) [4][5]
I imagine it would be politically very unpopular for obvious reasons.
Google is also issuing a bunch of debt this year. It sounds like they need a lot of capital and want to keep a particular debt/equity ratio, rather than having a strong opinion on their share price.
I suspect you enabled some weird setting that you've forgotten about. ghostty isn't unimaginably fast but it's faster than iTerm 2 which is plenty. And I'm sitting here with a lengthy Claude Code session open, as well as a couple tabs for my docker container and dev servers, and its idle CPU usage is 0.0%.
> That it was pushed into other usages was a function of cold war politics (makes Russia seem larger/more intimidating) and needs to be considered in that context.
Is this actually true, or was it just done "on autopilot" because before universal public education most people using maps of the entire world were navigators for whom Mercator made the most sense?
I don't know, I just hear a lot of conspiracy theories about the dominance of Mercator. If it's not Cold War politics then it's "white supremacists trying to make North America/Europe larger and Africa smaller", and I think laziness and just going with what worked in the past is a more likely explanation.
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