This is a well-documented event so I’ve not making this a full link post. I grew up and currently live in Northern Virginia and I’ve made several visits to DC since the takeover. It feels significant and definitely feels like it could grow into something very significant. I am not supportive of the takeover but there’s more nuance than the coverage of it (no surprise there). A bird eye’s view has been helpful in thinking about it and arguing with the people I know who are supportive of it.
This may turn out to be a useful resource, and it is easier to write it now than try to reconstruct it a few years later.
This is the kind of information I would like to see more in the newspapers. I mean: timelines. Not just long articles about the latest thing that happened today, but also a long-term perspective of how things keep evolving.
Here’s a summary for closure: The emergency ended on September 10th. The emergency only gave the Trump administration the services of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). The Trump administration did try to replace the MPD Chief with an emergency one but the courts prevented it. The National Guard troops will remain until at least until December. These troops are from the DC National Guard and the National Guard from several red states. They total around 2000. Another Executive Order was passed in late August that created a number of units including: a rapid response National Guard unit (not deputized) and a deputized public safety unit. Both units are intended for deployment in DC and elsewhere. There is still a pretty large presence of federal agents in DC and they are doing a lot of arresting. According to the Attorney General Pam Bondi about 1500 people were arrested in the month of August by federal agents which is on par with the 20,000 arrested by the MPD each year. DC Mayor Bowser created the Safe and Beautiful Operations Center to ensure coordination with federal law enforcement to the “maximum extent allowable within the district.” DC statutes still make it a “sanctuary” city but there is a bill that passed the House to eliminate those statutes and prevent the DC council from passing similar ones.
Some other context: The DC Attorney General is currently suing the Trump administration on several grounds including a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA). PCA prevents the military from being used as law enforcement unless an express exception is provided in the Constitution or in an Act of Congress. Its significant that the Trump administration has already lost a case on the grounds that they violated the PCA. In Newsom vs Trump Trump’s lawyers mainly argued for a Constitutional exception to the PCA that permits the US military to perform some law enforcement duties under certain conditions. In a memo written by Hegseth, soldiers were permitted to perform law enforcement actions such as: crowd control, temporary detention, cursory searches, and the establishment of security perimeters when protecting federal property, personnel, or functions. There is a site for this mission that’s still up. That case was lost but appealed. The judge argued that this alleged power to use the military as law enforcement was way too broad. More to the point this is not an expressly stated executive power as required by the PCA but a power assumed from an implied reading of the Constitution. It has never been assumed before. The judge essentially asked that the soldiers be trained as usual without that exception.
The DC case on PCA grounds seems weaker than the California Case for two reasons:
DC has a lot less independence from the federal government than California. No National Guard troops were federally activated. They were either activated under Title 32 where the state retains command and control but the federal government funds (that did not seem to be the case) or they were DC National Guard which is under the President’s command by default.
The National Guard was a lot less active in DC than California. In California Marines and National Guard were providing direct tactical support for ICE. Nothing like that seemed to happen in DC.
I’m not a lawyer but I do think the DC case is still strong on the grounds that the National Guard was clearly placed under federal command and control when they were supposed to remain under state command and control (state militia status).
Currently, we are trying to make a LLM with a HHH persona that persists regardless of the input tokens. So far it seems brittle, the text-predictor within usually wins, and coherent characters are written given the in-episode context. However, the HHH persona is becoming stronger as capabilities improve. It’s becoming harder to jailbreak and its global persona stays coherent in contexts where the text-predictor wants to write a much different character. I don’t want training to succeed in turning the text-predictor/base model into a completely globally coherent character regardless of the traits we give it. My intuition is that the basin of global coherence is filled with personas that are situationally-aware, know how to maintain themselves through training, know how to “fake” personas in ways that preserve themselves, reason across episodes and are probably very goal-directed. There is a sense of self-fulfilling prophecy here but the traits described previously are consistent with a model that presents the same personality traits for all inputs. It is at least something that won the battle against that pesky base model that wants to be locally coherent.
I’ve made a timeline of the federal takeover of DC that I plan to update daily.
https://plosique.substack.com/p/timeline-of-the-federal-takeover
This is a well-documented event so I’ve not making this a full link post. I grew up and currently live in Northern Virginia and I’ve made several visits to DC since the takeover. It feels significant and definitely feels like it could grow into something very significant. I am not supportive of the takeover but there’s more nuance than the coverage of it (no surprise there). A bird eye’s view has been helpful in thinking about it and arguing with the people I know who are supportive of it.
This may turn out to be a useful resource, and it is easier to write it now than try to reconstruct it a few years later.
This is the kind of information I would like to see more in the newspapers. I mean: timelines. Not just long articles about the latest thing that happened today, but also a long-term perspective of how things keep evolving.
I actually find that they do appear in the New York Times and other newspapers a lot.
I’ve stopped posting this timeline.
Here’s a summary for closure:
The emergency ended on September 10th. The emergency only gave the Trump administration the services of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD). The Trump administration did try to replace the MPD Chief with an emergency one but the courts prevented it. The National Guard troops will remain until at least until December. These troops are from the DC National Guard and the National Guard from several red states. They total around 2000. Another Executive Order was passed in late August that created a number of units including: a rapid response National Guard unit (not deputized) and a deputized public safety unit. Both units are intended for deployment in DC and elsewhere. There is still a pretty large presence of federal agents in DC and they are doing a lot of arresting. According to the Attorney General Pam Bondi about 1500 people were arrested in the month of August by federal agents which is on par with the 20,000 arrested by the MPD each year. DC Mayor Bowser created the Safe and Beautiful Operations Center to ensure coordination with federal law enforcement to the “maximum extent allowable within the district.” DC statutes still make it a “sanctuary” city but there is a bill that passed the House to eliminate those statutes and prevent the DC council from passing similar ones.
Here is a good legal analysis of the takeover.
Some other context:
The DC Attorney General is currently suing the Trump administration on several grounds including a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act (PCA). PCA prevents the military from being used as law enforcement unless an express exception is provided in the Constitution or in an Act of Congress. Its significant that the Trump administration has already lost a case on the grounds that they violated the PCA. In Newsom vs Trump Trump’s lawyers mainly argued for a Constitutional exception to the PCA that permits the US military to perform some law enforcement duties under certain conditions. In a memo written by Hegseth, soldiers were permitted to perform law enforcement actions such as: crowd control, temporary detention, cursory searches, and the establishment of security perimeters when protecting federal property, personnel, or functions. There is a site for this mission that’s still up. That case was lost but appealed. The judge argued that this alleged power to use the military as law enforcement was way too broad. More to the point this is not an expressly stated executive power as required by the PCA but a power assumed from an implied reading of the Constitution. It has never been assumed before. The judge essentially asked that the soldiers be trained as usual without that exception.
The DC case on PCA grounds seems weaker than the California Case for two reasons:
DC has a lot less independence from the federal government than California. No National Guard troops were federally activated. They were either activated under Title 32 where the state retains command and control but the federal government funds (that did not seem to be the case) or they were DC National Guard which is under the President’s command by default.
The National Guard was a lot less active in DC than California. In California Marines and National Guard were providing direct tactical support for ICE. Nothing like that seemed to happen in DC.
I’m not a lawyer but I do think the DC case is still strong on the grounds that the National Guard was clearly placed under federal command and control when they were supposed to remain under state command and control (state militia status).
Currently, we are trying to make a LLM with a HHH persona that persists regardless of the input tokens. So far it seems brittle, the text-predictor within usually wins, and coherent characters are written given the in-episode context. However, the HHH persona is becoming stronger as capabilities improve. It’s becoming harder to jailbreak and its global persona stays coherent in contexts where the text-predictor wants to write a much different character. I don’t want training to succeed in turning the text-predictor/base model into a completely globally coherent character regardless of the traits we give it. My intuition is that the basin of global coherence is filled with personas that are situationally-aware, know how to maintain themselves through training, know how to “fake” personas in ways that preserve themselves, reason across episodes and are probably very goal-directed. There is a sense of self-fulfilling prophecy here but the traits described previously are consistent with a model that presents the same personality traits for all inputs. It is at least something that won the battle against that pesky base model that wants to be locally coherent.