lsanders

Karma: 89

lsanders 10 Mar 2024 2:53 UTC
3 points
0
on: MA E-ZPass Without a Car?
Ah, that’s probably a better process than our house’s trick of having two separate MA EZPass accounts simultaneously associated with the same car in order to get a second transponder I can use when I rent. (Our way makes it hard to predict which account gets billed in the rare occasion that they have to fall back to the license plate because a transponder read for the double-associated car fails.)
My sample size is not huge, but personally I’ve never had a problem with associating mine with a rental using the timestamps of my rental contract and indicating that the car is a rental.

lsanders 18 Jan 2024 13:45 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Eliminating Cookie Banners is Hard
Fair enough, although I put a little less weight on the undesirable precedent because I think that precedent is already largely being set today. (Once we have precedents for regulating specific functionality of both operating systems and individual websites, I feel like it’s only technically correct to say that the case for similar regulation in browsers is unresolved.)

Also, the current legal standard just says that websites must give users a choice about the cookies; it doesn’t seem to say what the mechanism for that choice must be. The interpretation that the choice must be expressed via the website’s interface and cannot be facilitated by browser features is an interpretation, and I’d argue against that interpretation of the directive. I don’t see why browsers couldn’t create a ‘Do-Not-Track’-style preference protocol today for conveying a user’s request for necessary cookies vs all cookies vs an explicit prompt for selecting between types of optional cookies, nor any reason why sites couldn’t rely on that hypothetical protocol to avoid showing cookie preference prompts to many of their users (as long as the protocol specified that the browsers must require an explicit user choice before specifying any of the options that can skip cookie prompts; defaulting users to “necessary cookies only” or the all-cookies-without-prompts setting would break the requirement for user choice).

But we don’t see initiatives like that, presumably in large part because browsers don’t expect to see much adoption if they implement such a feature, especially since it’s the type of feature that requires widespread adoption from all parties (browser makers, site owners, and users) before it creates much value. Instead, lots of sites show cookie banners to you and I while we browse the web from American soil using American IP addresses, seemingly because targeting different users with different website experiences is just too sophisticated for many businesses. They evidently see this as a compliance requirement to be met at minimal cost rather than prioritizing the user experience. I don’t see how the current dynamic changes as long as websites still see this purely as a compliance cost to be minimized and as long as each website still needs to maintain their own consent implementations?

lsanders 16 Jan 2024 3:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Eliminating Cookie Banners is Hard
In theory, yes. Do you have particular knowledge that things would likely play out as such if the regulations permitted, or are you reasoning that this is likely without special knowledge? If the former, then I’d want to update my views accordingly. But if it’s the latter, then I don’t really see a likely path for your regulatory proposal to meaningfully shift the market in any way other than market competition forcing all major browsers to implement the feature, in which case it doesn’t practically matter whether the implementation requirement has legal weight.

lsanders 14 Jan 2024 16:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Eliminating Cookie Banners is Hard
Once you’re willing to mandate browser features to bolster privacy between multiple users on the same device, I’d get rid of website-implemented cookie banners altogether (at least for this purpose) and make the browser mandate more robust instead. I could see this as a browser preference with three mandated states (and perhaps an option for browsers to introduce additional options alongside these if they identify that a different tradeoff is worthwhile for many of their users):
- Single user mode: this browser (or browser profile) is only used by one user, accept local storage without warning under the same legal regime as remote storage of user data.
- Shared device mode: this browser (or browser profile) is shared among a constrained set of users, e.g. a role-oriented computer in an organization or a computer shared among members of a household. Apply incognito-inspired policies to ensure that local storage cannot outlive a particular usage session except for allowlisted domains, and require the browser to provide a persistent visual indication of whether the current site is on the allowlist (similar to how browsers provide a persistent indication of SSL status).
- Public device mode: this browser (or browser profile) is broadly available for use by many people who do not necessarily trust each other at all, e.g. a machine in a school’s computer lab or in a public library. Apply the same incognito-inspired policies as in shared device mode, but without the ability to allowlist specific sites that can store persistent cookies. The browser must also offer the ability for the computer administrator to securely lock a browser in this mode to prevent untrusted users from changing the local-storage settings.

lsanders 14 Jan 2024 3:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Eliminating Cookie Banners is Hard
Good to know, thanks!
(And thanks in particular for linking to the original text — while your excerpt is suggestive, the meaning of “similar device” isn’t entirely clear without seeing that the surrounding paragraph is focused on preserving privacy between multiple users who share a single web-browsing device. I feel like that is still a valid concern today and a reasonable reason for regulations to treat client-side storage slightly differently from server-side storage, even though it’s not most people‘s top privacy concern on the web these days and even though this directive doesn’t resolve that concern very effectively at all.)

lsanders 13 Jan 2024 21:31 UTC
1 point
0
on: Eliminating Cookie Banners is Hard
(I’d love to see the regulations changed here: there’s no reason to single out storing data on the client for special treatment…)
I haven’t personally needed to pay super close attention to the e-Privacy regulations but I thought they exclusively focused on cookies as a specific technology? The web has client-side data storage that is not cookies, and cookies are more privacy invasive than simple client-side storage because they’re also automatically transmitted to the server on every matching request without any further interaction from either the user or the website.
It seems to me that it’s much easier to respect user privacy when using other mechanisms for client-side storage and for transmitting data from the client to the server. I’ve also generally found that the cookie-free approaches tend to result in more maintainable and debuggable code, without incurring additional overhead for many use cases. (An exception: document-centric use cases where the documents themselves are access controlled generally do benefit from cookies, and low-JS sites have more legitimate use for a non-JS mechanism for storing and transmitting authentication information; but both of those seem to be somewhat niche use cases relative to the current web as a whole.) Thus, I’m a bit annoyed that there hasn’t been more movement across the industry to migrate from cookies toward other more-targeted technological solutions for many use cases requiring data storage on the client — particularly for those use cases that would be legitimate banner-free uses of cookies according to e-Privacy.

lsanders 13 Jan 2024 20:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: tslarm’s comment on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
Yeah. Other folks have already mentioned that the degree of enforcement leeway in the U.S. increased when the federal government made artifically-lower speed limits a requirement of federal highway funding in the 1970s. Which I can’t confirm or refute, but does make sense: I imagine that some states who disagreed with the change might have grudgingly set the formal limits in line with the federal policy, and then simply used lax enforcement to allow the speeds that they preferred all along. I have noticed that it’s often seemed politically unpalatable for officials to stick to a program of stricter enforcement to rein in a particular area’s entrenched driving culture after speed limits were increased in the 1990s, though.
In any case, if folks think that part of the reason for lax enforcement is measurement error then that could be used as an input toward designing a separate maximum speed designation. One could keep the “speed limit” enforceably defined in terms of the actual vehicle speed, while defining a new parallel “maximum speed” constraint strictly in terms of a measurement taken by law enforcement equipment that passes a particular calibration standard within a particular window of time before and after issuing the citation. Then you’d end up with one standard that gives the benefit of doubt on measurement error to the driver and another that gives the benefit of doubt to the enforcement record, and thus there’s a logical reason for (at least some of) the spread between those two thresholds. (This legal system might also make it easier to move toward maximum-speed enforcement that works more like existing license-plate-based tolling systems, allowing for a much more pervasive enforcement regime to push the culture toward compliance without the downsides of setting up lots of direct conflicts between irate drivers and law enforcement officers.)

lsanders 13 Jan 2024 19:58 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
Probably not, since some U.S. states do post minimum (fair-weather) speeds on Interstate highways. Section 2.2 of this paper includes a slightly dated map indicating the minimum speeds in each state (where applicable).

lsanders 10 Dec 2023 22:53 UTC
4 points
1
on: Deeply Cover Car Crashes?
Personally, I’m more familiar with folks creating entirely new nonprofit media outlets to focus on reporting in an area that they believe to deserve better coverage (many of which then seek to partner with traditional publishers on specific projects once they have a demonstrated body of work), rather than directly funding that coverage at an existing paper.

I think Religion News Service is basically an older representative of this approximate model, and topic-focused non-profit journalism organizations like this seem to be popping up more frequently as traditional models of funding journalism come under increasing strain. More current examples that appear to fit this approximate pattern include The Intercept for coverage on surveillance and adjacent issues, The Marshall Project for issues relevant to criminal justice reform, and Anthropocene Magazine for climate change solutions.

lsanders 4 Nov 2023 2:33 UTC
3 points
0
on: Public Weights?
(Back in 2017 I asked for examples of risk from AI, and didn’t like any of them all that much. Today, “someone asks an LLM how to kill everyone and it walks them through creating a pandemic” seems pretty plausible.)
My impression from the 2017 post is that concerns were framed as “superintelligence risk” at the time. The intended meaning of that term wasn’t captured in the old post, but it’s not clear to me that an LLM answering questions about how to create a pandemic qualifies as superintelligence?
This contrast seems mostly aligned with my long-standing instinct that folks worried about catastrophic risk from AI have tended to spend too much time worrying about machines achieving agency and not enough time thinking about machines scaling up the agency of individual humans.

lsanders 6 Oct 2023 2:06 UTC
5 points
4
on: Can the House Legislate?
I will be morbidly amused if this market resolves true because McHenry ultimately schedules a vote to decide whether he can schedule other business, and then the plurality result is that he cannot.

lsanders 17 Jun 2023 13:28 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: bhauth’s comment on: Looking Back On Ads
Jeff touched on this, but I want to underline the point more strongly: How do the sharing platforms themselves (Reddit / YouTube / etc) exist without ads? To be clear, I’m no fan of the audience-distorting incentives of ads… but the infrastructure for free content isn’t exactly free, either, and we need to pay for that somehow or else that otherwise-funded content doesn’t get distributed (and then the lack of distribution inherently prevents donation / patronage models from working). I’m having trouble seeing another realistic way for that to work?
We could look at Substack‘s model and say that the donation/patronage mechanisms should get subsumed by the distribution platforms, who’d take a percentage off the top of that revenue. If there are enough donations then they can afford to support the platform. As Jeff says, we’ll see how that works out for Substack; in theory it seems like this model could work, but as of now Substack is still losing millions per year. As for your other mentioned platforms: At a glance, it seems pretty clear that Reddit (which has platform-supporting ads) is still losing money (given that they were losing money the last time they shared info in 2021, and are now studiously avoiding all discussion of profitability while ostensibly preparing for an IPO), which helps explain their motivation for shenanigans like the current API pricing fiasco. YouTube is the one site of the three that is making money, and it probably only became outright profitable in the pandemic era as they increased their already-high ad loads (and expanded supplemental product lines like YT Music and TV).

lsanders 18 May 2023 12:58 UTC
11 points
2
on: DCF Event Notes
As a foster-only parent in Massachusetts, I think I have much more interaction with DCF than most parents, albeit from a rather different angle.

In general, the parents’ concern here seems overblown to me — my perception is that DCF case workers will pretty much always start by talking to parents about their concerns if at all possible, and that they’re wildly unlikely to take any punitive action if a conversation about DCF’s expectations is enough to correct (from their perspective) the family’s behavior. If nothing else, the institutional incentives are structured this way; taking on another long-term case even just for monitoring purposes will add more work, case workers already have full loads (or more) as it is, and DCF’s funding (thus staffing) generally doesn’t scale per case.

What I’m seeing is that DCF doesn’t remove children from their homes lightly; if anything, they tend to wait a little too long in order to collect clearer evidence that removal is necessary. They also just don’t really have enough good places to put kids for it to make sense for them to remove kids whose parents are willing and able to cooperate with DCF guidance. Note that removal is not a purely administrative procedure: DCF generally needs to get a court order authorizing a removal before acting, and while they can act immediately in emergency situations, that will get reviewed by a court within days and is subject to a higher legal standard (so from what I see, case workers are hesitant to go that route if they see any other option). Case workers really do not want to risk getting their judgment overruled in court.

Which brings me to:

Having no guidelines is probably better than having very limiting ones, so maybe I should be thankful that MA DCF doesn’t give any?

Yeah. I can see how sensible guidelines would be useful and reassuring, but I think we’re better off without the formal guidelines that would actually be created if such guidelines were established. I think there would be both political pressure toward more conservative guidelines (when people think about the appropriateness of minimum age standards, I think most people are primed to assess what is reasonable for most kids rather than what is reasonable for the most mature cohort thereof, and political discourse generally isn’t nuanced enough nowadays to draw such distinctions very well) and institutional pressure in the same direction (case workers don’t want anything that will make their jobs harder, and they totally will end up arguing with parents and their public defenders about whether guidance for more mature kids is applicable in their case when they have less mature kids), so I’m really not surprised to see that the states that do give guidance were heavily slanted in that direction.

lsanders 16 Apr 2023 15:46 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Outrage and Statistics into Policy
It’s not clear to me that putting effort into enforcing existing regulations is more feasible for many of the folks advocating assault rifle bans, nor is it clear to me that it’s a significantly higher impact approach.
Re: feasibility — Your examples of folks advocating additional legislation are federal and state politicians, while my impression is that most handgun enforcement actions in the U.S. traditionally rely on law enforcement agencies at more local levels. Thus, it’s not clear that the folks pushing such policies are in as good a position to affect the prioritization of handgun law enforcement, which (at least somewhat) counteracts the benefit of pursuing a less controversial remedy.
Also, in particular, the politicians you refer to are Democratic party politicians. The creation of gun laws is already a highly partisan issue in the United States, with Democratic party associated with efforts for more gun control and the Republican party associated more with gun rights. My impression is that enforcement of gun laws is currently seen as a much less political issue. If Democratic politicians start prominently pushing for shifting enforcement priorities toward a political goal of keeping guns off the street, I think that risks turning gun law enforcement policies into just another front in the political debate over gun control legislation. In the worst case, that could actually result in negative impact from Democratic politicians (particularly a Democratic U.S. president) pushing such policies, because it creates a potential incentive for Republican politicians at the state and local level to decrease such enforcement in order to maintain their political image of “defending the second amendment”.
Re: impact — I agree that an assault rifle ban would have fairly low impact on the bulk of the incidents indicated in the statistic. However, the limited reporting I’ve seen on efforts to enforce existing regulations has generally indicated that simply scaling up existing efforts in this area doesn’t actually impact gun violence much either. One example of such reporting (chosen for being particularly easy for me to remember how to re-find in this moment, rather than for being the most compelling report) is https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/03/23/gun-laws-violence-chicago-policing-what-to-know, which observes that increasing enforcement of gun possession laws has “not substantially reduced shootings in Chicago. In fact, as possession arrests skyrocketed, shootings increased — but the percentage of shooting victims where someone was arrested in their case declined.”
If we need to introduce entirely new tactics for enforcing the existing laws in order to get the outcomes we’re expecting, such a constraint will correspondingly decrease the feasibility of rolling out that approach.
(Also there may be a degree to which, for politicians, impact is more palpably associated with the avoidance of political crises centered around gun violence, rather than actually avoiding gun deaths. But I’d rather not focus too much on that one...)

lsanders 30 Mar 2023 2:01 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Run Posts By Orgs
Fair enough. Thanks for the conversation!

lsanders 30 Mar 2023 1:46 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Run Posts By Orgs
Okay, so you‘re defining the problem as groups transmitting too little information? Then I think a natural first step when thinking about the problem is to determine an upper bound on how much information can be effectively transmitted. My intuition is that the realistic answer for many recipients would turn out to be “not a lot more than is already being transmitted”. If I’m right about that (which is a big “if”), then we might not need much thinking beyond that point to rule out this particular framing of the problem as intractable.

lsanders 30 Mar 2023 1:01 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Run Posts By Orgs
For that distinction to be relevant, individuals need to be able to distinguish whether a particular conclusion of the group is groupthink or whether it’s principled.
If the information being propagated in both cases is primarily the judgment, how does the individual group member determine which judgments are based on real reasons vs not? If the premise is that this very communication style is the problem, then how does one fix that without re-creating much of the original burden on the individual that our group-level coordination was trying to avoid?
If folks try to square this circle through a mechanism like random spot checks on rationales, then things may become eventually consistent but in many cases I think the time lag for propagating updates may be considerable. Most people would not spot check any particular decision, by definition. Anything that requires folks to repeatedly look at the group’s conclusions for all of their discarded ideas ends up being burdensome IMO. So, I have trouble seeing an obvious mechanism for folks to promptly notice that the group reverted their decision that a particular org is not worth supporting? The only possibilities I can think of involve more rigorously centralized coordination than I believe (as a loosely-informed outsider) to be currently true for EA.

lsanders 30 Mar 2023 0:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Run Posts By Orgs
Do you disagree that “some degree of group-level weeding out of unworthy organizations seems like a transparently necessary step given the sheer number of organizations that exist”? If not, how does that dynamic differ from “shun[ning] orgs based on groupthink rather than based on real reasons”?

lsanders 30 Mar 2023 0:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TekhneMakre’s comment on: Run Posts By Orgs
I don’t have a clear opinion on the original proposal… but is it really possible to completely avoid groupthink that decides an org is bad? (I assume that “bad” in this context means something like “not worth supporting”.)
I would say that some degree of group-level weeding out of unworthy organizations seems like a transparently necessary step given the sheer number of organizations that exist. I would also agree with you that delegating all evaluation to the group level has obvious downsides.
If we accept both of those points, I think the question is more a matter of how to most productively scope the manner and degree to which individuals delegate their evaluations to a broader group, rather than a binary choice to wholly avoid (or support) such delegation.

lsanders 20 Mar 2023 4:08 UTC
4 points
0
on: Write a Book?
Maybe this is because of my vantage point (as your friend and someone who has deliberately distanced themself somewhat from EA as a whole), but I tend to think of you and Julia as relatively central figures in EA. Like, I’m not sure if you’re among the very most centrally-connected circles of that community, but I’d also guess that you’re not really more than about one rung out from there. In that case, I’m unsure how much you as an author would contribute to “de-centralizing” author representation?
That said, I do think that EA would absolutely benefit from raising some more approachable / less academic voices to a higher public profile. I’d certainly enjoy reading a book from you about the topics you describe, even though that book would be unlikely to shift my personal skepticism about the wisdom of EA as a movement. Your other listed advantages as an author do make sense to me, and I think that your “relevant credentials” disadvantage isn’t meaningful given the desire to focus on a less philosophical lens and to diversify the types of centrally-public EA voices.