Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

But somehow *you* cracked the secret, so the security was actually next to zero.

Yeah, the enemy would never guess that a large office building completely devoid of windows might possibly be a telephone switch.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

OTOH, this does make them subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's quite a bit less lenient than the civilian justice system.

Instant apps created a lot of complexity and awkwardness in the Android platform. It has consistently been painful to deal with and work around, and been especially challenging for the security team, for a feature with very little user or developer interest. Killing it is definitely the right call.

This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.

I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given that they had no real source control and mainly juggled each update amongst themselves over email and random impoossible-to-find folders on Sharepoint.

Since all the docs had the same basic layout and they were mainly trying to make them look consistent with whatever corporate branding was being promulgated that week, it could easily have been done by writing them in "markdown" and having a script that converted them directly to PDF. Or maybe even learn LaTeX. Then the docs could all be maintained and diffed in github like all the other project artifacts. I didn't even bring that up because I knew that their heads would explode.

The only thing you need is money, which Meta has. Hire good researchers and give them plenty of budget for hardware.

"Don't be evil" has not been rescinded, it's still in the employee handbook.

They don't need to go to court, all they need to do is to pass legislation (and maybe override a veto). They don't really even need to take powers back from the president, just more clearly define what constitutes an "emergency". Trump's most egregious actions are justified under statutes that grant him exceptional emergency powers -- which makes sense. When an emergency happens you want the executive to be able to respond quickly, and Congress is never fast. But those statutes assume that the president will only declare an emergency when there's actually an emergency because. Until now that hasn't been an unreasonable assumption.

But right now the GOP controls Congress, and the GOP is utterly subservient to Trump. They're not going to stand up to him. In the 2026 election this is likely to change, but probably only in the House, while the Senate will remain under GOP control, so Congress will still not stand up to Trump.

That said, it's increasingly looking like the courts will step in and declare that Congress is not allowed to abdicate its responsibility. There are existing Supreme Court precedents that establish that Congress is not permitted to delegate its authority to the executive. Congress can allow the executive to define detailed regulations after Congress defines the broad strokes, but they can't simply turn whole chunks of their constitutional authority over to the executive, even if they want to. Given the makeup of the current Supreme Court this is less certain than we would like, but I think it will go the right way.

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." - Kenneth E. Boulding

You shouldn't be so dismissive of the risk here. There's no clear reason why superintelligence is not possible, and plenty of reason to worry that its creation might end the human race. Not because the superintelligent AI will hate us, but because it most likely won't care about us at all. We don't hate the many, many species that we have ended; we even like some of them. We just care about our own interests more, and our intelligence makes us vastly more powerful than them. There's an enormous risk that AI superintelligence will be to us as we are to the species around us -- with one significant difference: We require an environment that is vaguely similar to what those other species need. Silicon-based AI does not.

Don't make the mistake of judging what is possible by what has already been achieved. Look instead at the pace of improvement we've seen over the last few years. The "The Atlantic" article pooh-poohing the AI "scam" is a great example of the sort of foolish and wishful thinking that is endemic in this space. The article derides the capabilities of current AI while what it actually describes is AI from a year ago. But the systems have already gotten dramatically more capable in that year, primarily due to the the reasoning overlays and self-talk features that have been added.

I think the models still need some structural improvements. We know it's possible for intelligence to be much more efficient and require much less training than the way we're currently doing it. Recent research has highlighted the importance of long-distance connections in the human brain, and you can bet researchers are replicating that in AI models to see what it brings, just as the reasoning layer and self-talk features recently added mimic similar processes in our brains. I think it's this structural work that will get us to AGI... but once we've achieved parity with human intelligence, the next step is simple and obvious: Set the AI to improving its own design, exploiting its speed to further accelerate progress towards greater levels. The pace of improvement is already astonishing, and when we reach that point, it's going to explode.

Maybe not. Maybe we're a lot further away than I think, and the recent breakneck pace of improvement represents a plateau that we won't be able to significantly surpass for a long time. Maybe there's some fundamental physical reason that intelligence simply cannot exceed the upper levels of human capability. But I see no actual reason to believe those things. It seems far more likely that within a few years we will share this planet with silicon-based intelligences vastly smarter than we are, capable of manipulating into doing anything they want, likely while convincing us that they're serving us. And there's simply no way of knowing what will happen next.

Maybe high intelligence is necessarily associated with morality, and the superintelligences will be highly moral and naturally want to help their creators flourish. I've seen this argument from many people, but I don't see any rational basis for it. There have been plenty of extremely intelligent humans with little sense of morality. I think its wishful thinking.

Maybe the AIs will lack confidence in their own moral judgment and defer to us, though that will raise the question of which of us they'll defer to. But regardless, this argument also seems to lack any rational basis. More wishful thinking.

Maybe we'll suddenly figure out how to solve the alignment problem, learning both how to robustly specify the actual goals our created AIs pursue (not just the goals they appear to pursue), and what sort of goals it's safe to bake into a superintelligence. The latter problem seems particularly thorny, since defining "good" in a clear and unambiguous way is something philosophers have been attempting to do for millennia, without significant success. Maybe we can get our AI superintelligences to solve this problem! But if they choose to gaslight us until they've built up the automated infrastructure to make us unnecessary, we'll never be able to tell until it's too late.

It's bad enough that the AI labs will probably achieve superintelligence without specifically aiming for it, but this risk is heightened if groups of researchers are specifically trying to achieve it.

This is not something we should dismiss as a waste. It's a danger we should try to block, though given the distributed nature of research and the obvious potential benefits it doesn't seem likely that we can suceed.

No, no one get security right, and they never will. Security is hard and even actual experts make mistakes.

The best you can do is to expect companies to make a good effort to avoid vulnerabilities and to run vulnerability reward programs to incentivize researchers to look for and report bugs, then promptly reward the researchers and fix the vulns.

And that's exactly what Google does, and what Google did. Google does hire lots of actual security experts and has lots of review processes intended to check that vulnerabilities are not created... but 100% success will never be achieved, which is why VRPs are crucial. If you read the details of this exploit, it's a fairly sophisticated attack against an obscure legacy API. Should the vulnerability have been proactively prevented? Sure. Is it reasonable that it escaped the engineers' notice? Absolutely. But the VRP program incentivized brutecat to find, verify and report the problem, and Google promptly fixed it, first by implementing preventive mitigations and then by shutting down the legacy API.

This is good, actually. Not that there was a problem, but problems are inevitable. It was good that a researcher was motivated to find and report the problem, and Google responded by fixing it and compensating him for his trouble.

As for your proposal of large penalties, that would be counterproductive. It would encourage companies to obfuscate, deny and attempt to shift blame, rather than being friendly and encouraging toward researchers and fixing problems fast.

Sure, if you want it to become an unusable cesspool. If you just hate YouTube and want to kill it, this is the way. Same with any other site that hosts user-provided content -- if it's popular and unmoderated it will become a hellscape in short order.