wlxd
1d ago
They can, however, move out themselves and their stuff out of the blast radius, which actually does make a difference.
wlxd
5d ago
It has only partly happened, which is even worse. We are full on papieren bitte, except where it would help deporting the illegals.
wlxd
6d ago
Falsely claiming that you’re a US citizen to an ICE agent conducting a raid is a federal felony (18 U.S.C. § 1001). I suspect that ICE will have enough circumstantial evidence to support a reasonable belief that you’re lying, which will allow them to arrest you, and unless you help them in their investigation, you’ll be sitting in jail until they do in fact determine you lied. This is limited by detention capactity, of course.
wlxd
7d ago
He is also claiming the right to do it in a way which would probably prevent a US citizen caught up accidentally getting relief through the courts.
That depends on what happens with them after they get deported. If they are set free in some foreign country, they can literally buy a plane ticket and come back here. Sure, they will not get a relief that will prevent them from getting detained and removed from the country in the first place, but I don’t see how this is relevant. It is perfectly normal and common to be able to get any relief only after illegal action of government has already been inflicted upon you. It really is not substantially different than getting illegally arrested and jailed: the government needs to take utmost care to avoid doing it, but when you are getting arrested, you cannot get court relief right there and then.
wlxd
7d ago
This is true, but it’s also true that calling your recruiters to check up on status often does make a difference, and usually expedites the entire process. As anyone who has ever worked in any large company, pinging people regularly to update their status and nudge them towards doing or accelerating the work they owe you, is in fact a significant part of your work, and does make a difference. Recruiters/HR is no different, and pushing them does work.
wlxd
10d ago
Only if all your friends also live within walking distance, which is unlikely in any case.
wlxd
10d ago
Putting parking lot in the back makes little difference. It only matters if you’re already on the street with the front entrance. If you’re a block away, you need to cross the parking lot anyway.
More generally, without a car you are effectively disabled, in the literal sense: not fully able to participate in society in the same way the majority is. Most societies make some accommodations to the disabled, but there are real limits and trade offs involved. For example, people who have trouble walking (which in US is I suspect a bigger group than people without access to a car) typically appreciate a lot being able to drive right to their destination, and park right at the entry.
Point is, it is not clear to me why we should cater to your disability, to the detriment of the majority.
wlxd
13d ago
It's easy being an AI advocate, I just have to wait a few weeks or months for the people doubting them to be proven wrong haha.
Often you don’t even need to wait, doubters often say things that are wrong already when they say it. Remember Gary Marcus? He was big a couple years back, but everyone learned to ignore him after basically everything he said was wrong.
wlxd
13d ago
The LLM is still talking to the image generator. It just does so using native tokens and vectors instead of going through a text encoder layer in-between.
This is very confusingly stated. The second sentence is correct, but in the first one, it’s confusing to say that LLM is talking to image generator, because the LLM and the image generator are literally the same thing.
wlxd
21d ago
They marry legal immigrants present in the US or marry foreigners outside the US.
You missed one option, that is, they marry illegal immigrants, but otherwise this my point: all family based immigration is downstream of previous immigration events.
Yes, legal immigration.
This is only true in the most literal sense, as illegal immigrants are not eligible for petitioning for family based immigration, but overall it misses my point: US citizens can and do petition for family based immigration for their illegally present parents, spouses, and siblings. There is a whole legal industry for that, just search Google for “green card for undocumented parents”, you’ll find many immigration law companies adveritising their services. If your spouse, parent or sibling did not enter unlawfully, but eg. overstayed their visa, there is hardly any legal issue preventing adjusting their status. Even if you entered unlawfully, all you need to do is sneak out of US, and then pretend you’ve never been here illegally; perfectly viable for many illegals who haven’t generated federal record of their presence.
You've provided no evidence of this.
Sorry, do you actually believe that people who enter or stay illegally are a complete dead end from family based immigration purposes, or are you just asking for evidence this to be obnoxious? The existence of the legal industry dedicated to legalizing parents and spouses is evidence. You can find many businesses that help with that in Google.
wlxd
21d ago
They are being sponsored by US citizens or permanent residents.
OK, and how exactly do you think US citizens come about to have foreign family? Again, think it through. These US citizens are almost universally downstream of some relatively recent immigration event. They either became naturalized citizens, or were born to immigrants. People who were born to two American-born parents are highly unlikely to have any foreign family that they could even consider getting in here.
So, basically all family based immigration is downstream of recent immigration. If you ignore the family based legal immigration, then legal immigration has been absolutely overwhelmed by illegal immigration for many years now.
What I am arguing here is that large chunk, if not a majority of legal family based immigration is downstream of some illegal immigration event that happened in recent history. For example, US citizen born to illegal parents, or formerly illegal aliens who legalized their presence in some way (and there are ways to do it for quite a lot of people).
Therefore, when you say that
that the type of immigration that will be paused under this administration - asylum claims from people entering through the southern border (…) - is a fraction of the overall immigration growth since the 60s.
You are missing the forest for trees: yes, family based chain migration have brought more people here than fake asylum claimants, but the point is that fake asylum claimants will cause more family based migration in future, so reducing the former also reduces the latter.
wlxd
21d ago
Only US citizens or permanent residents can sponsor their own family members. The "illegal" spouse cannot sponsor anyone
Yes, that’s why I said “get married to legal residents”.
unless they acquire permanent residency, which is very difficult if they entered the US without a visa.
Anything involving legal immigration system is “very difficult” if you talk to pro immigration advocates, but as it happens, I personally know multiple people who went exactly this route, and it worked out for them.
I would think it's a small portion of the overall family based visas.
Who do you think are the millions of people coming on family based visa? Are you suggesting that 200k of former employment based green card recipients are bringing 5 family members from abroad each?
I think I know what you're getting it, but just so I understand, can you explain how the parents and siblings are "illegal" in this situation?
You sneak through the border with a husband and a kid. You give birth to an another child. Your child is a citizen. Once he becomes old enough, he sponsors your and his brother’s family based green card.
wlxd
21d ago
Showers are annoying but what’s way worse is water saving dishwashers. They run for way longer, and do bad job cleaning.
wlxd
21d ago
Roughly 85% of new immigrants every year are immediate relatives + other sponsored family members + employees.
Of legal immigrants, yes, but 1) recently, we have had more of illegals immigrants than legal, and 2) legal family migration is to a large degree downstream of illegal immigration. Illegals come here, and get married to legal residents, which enables them, and their families to start chain migration. They give birth to children who have been treated as US citizens, which again allows them to bring their illegal parents and older siblings through family process, and also to get married to illegals who then are legalized.
As it happens, Trump actually tries to do something about that, with his EO stopping birthright citizenship to illegals. We will see what SCOTUS says about this, but the implications of it could be enormous. For example, it will discourage illegals from starting families in here, because their children will be in bad legal situation. It will make it easier to deport parents of small children if they are no longer US citizen children.
wlxd
21d ago
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand what multi modality is.
The LLMs are not trained on text corpora. They are trained on tokens. These tokens are just numbers. The training process is good at finding patterns in the numbers they are fed, and predicting subsequent numbers.
Where do the numbers come from? Well, in text only LLMs, there is a tokenizer stage that takes text input and translates it into string of numbers. These numbers don’t directly correspond to individual letters or words, and so LLMs never really see those. This is why, for example, they had trouble telling how many rs are in strawberry, because what you’re asking them is how many rs are in 2645, 675, 15717 (this is the tokenization of Strawberry). It’s actually pretty magical that they manage to figure out that there are any rs in these numbers at all, that they are able to learn detokenization.
So how about different modalities? Well, these are represented as just different tokens, different numbers. For us humans some numbers represent image fragments, some represent sound snippets, and some represent pieces of text. For a multimodal LLM though, it’s all the same, it’s all just numbers. When you train them, you feed text, images, and sounds directly into the model (after tokenizing), you don’t do anything like “first transcribe sound to text through some different model and then feed it as text”. The sounds are never mapped 1-1 to English tokens, they are mapped 1-1 to sound tokens, which is just a different set of numbers than those representing Unicode text.
Because of this, for an LLM, not only sounds and words are intercompatible, but in fact there is literally no difference between the two on a technical level. There is of course a difference on a semantic level: for example, it learns quickly that text and sound tokens never mix, because it’s never fed training data that’s intermingled sound and text. Instead, after sound comes another sound (eg response to a dialogue) or a bunch of text (a transcription). But, to a model, there is no fundamental difference between text and sound and image.
wlxd
21d ago
I don’t understand what you mean, eg
But audio tokens are not intercompatible with text tokens, for obvious reasons
What exactly do you mean by “not intercompatible”?
wlxd
22d ago
Think of it this way: the point of even purely text-based LLMs is not to understand text per se, but rather to understand concepts, ideas, and meaning. The text itself is just a medium through which these are conveyed. The same is true about voice modality: we do not care about the pressure waveforms, but rather about what is being conveyed by these. Transcribing them to words and digesting them as word tokens is lossy, you lose tone, tempo, background, etc. Training on audio is going to make your model perform better, not only on audio, but likely also when dealing with just text. It's similar to how models pretrained on lots of computer code work much better at non code related tasks.
wlxd
22d ago
Do you know for a fact that new GPT models include native voice modality, versus some sort of Whisper preprocessing stage? I’m asking, because a couple of days ago I was trying to explain to /u/jkf that this is most definitely within the potential range of capabilities of frontier models, with him being skeptical.
wlxd
22d ago
It may seem that this judge is constantly getting the law "wrong," but in fact he is getting the law "right" and will later be vindicated by Dobbs.
This sounds reasonable at first, but if you think about it, the legal system cannot work like that. What this means in practice for users of the system is that if they happen to have bad luck and draw this judge, it just adds an additional useless step to the process, where the superior court will have to overturn. Imagine if appeals court remands the case back to lower court. What will this lower court judge do? Will he rule wrongly again, requiring another appeal? Or will he rule as instructed by superior court in this particular case, but will do the opposite in other cases?
Anyway, my point is that the hierarchical judicial system requires lower courts to defer to rulings and opinions of superior courts. It is normal and reasonable when superior court overrules a lower court because of some mistake or error, but the system cannot maintain the trust and respect of the users where lower courts routinely ignore law and superior precedent.
wlxd
22d ago
Does this internal process covers being a terrible judge, or just actions of criminal or corrupt nature?
I’m imagining a scenario where we have a judge that keeps issuing clearly wrong decisions that keep getting overturned in appeals. This stuff happens sometimes to all judges, but let’s assume we are talking someone who is wrong as a matter of law frequently very frequently and egregiously. Assume though that there is no corruption involved. Does the internal judiciary process even recognizes this as an issue? Or is Congress initiated impeachment the only option here?
wlxd
23d ago
Ukraine pre war was something like 0.5% of world's agricultural output. Every single major European country produces more food (by value) than Ukraine. Even if their yields fall due to climate change (highly unlikely: agriculture can adapt to climate change very easily), it's extremely unlikely that Ukraine's fields would make a significant difference. I certainly hope that high up military and government people are not so innumerate to take this seriously. As it happens, the silly climate change deniers would be more correct on this than you.
wlxd
27d ago
I'm not really sure what your disagreement with me is then other than risk appetite and investment value.
Well, let's go back to how this exchange began, maybe that will help clarify things. I said:
When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
You then replied:
It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing. If so, then they are likely making far less than the 300k TC.
And then I spent a number of posts explaining to you how incorrect this attitude is. My arguments were highly successful, to the point where you are arguing against your original statement, saying that $10k would be a low ball offer for "their fake money that is worth literally nothing", and in fact, the actual value "is entirely dependent on the individuals estimation of its long term payoff and the time horizon on which they want a return on it". Yes, thank you, that's exactly what I was trying to get across the entire time.
My stance this entire thread is that Average MLEs working at xAI make the a likely comparable comp to other MLEs at other FAANGs, which is ballparked at 300k to 350k.
Let me then helpfully quote yet again my original post:
So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
And indeed, I am exactly correct: X AI valuation in May 2024 was $24B, and in Dec 2024 they raised another $6B, resulting in $50B post-money valuation. This is 80% increase in stock price. Assuming they got RSUs, and that their comp split was 50% cash 50% stocks, the $300k is now worth $420k (blaze it). If (which is more likely), they got options, instead of RSUs, then assuming, say, 30% gap between stock price implied by 409A valuation and the preferred price (you know what these two are, right?), then their $150k/year worth of stock options granted at May 2024 valuation is now worth $500-600k/year (if you don't understand how I came up with this number, X AI's Grok will helpfully explain it to you, just copypaste this paragraph to it verbatim, and enable Think mode).
Of course, if they got options before the May round, they might be making over $1M/year now.
Maybe, I'm likely to be wrong, betting against musk seems like a bad idea but at the same time the man just keeps betting on black, eventually he's going to lose and I currently do not see the value difference that xAI has over its entrenched rivals. A non-woke ai is great but I'm not sure to will convert into monetary value. I also think he made it to piss on Sam Altman in their little spat.
I largely agree with all of this.
I argued this point from my personal beliefs as someone who is in a position to go potentially work for xAI, it's not an abstract argument like it might be for you.
You are completely unwarranted in making this assumption, and you're only saying this to be nasty towards me. It's a really cheap shot, doubly so because I cannot show how wrong you are without doxxing myself. You can do better than this.
wlxd
27d ago
That’s still expensive and risky. Sham marriage would be immigration fraud, a crime. This means that you need to compensate your co-conspirators generously to go along with it, because it requires a lot of effort and legal risk, and binds them to you for years. Ultimately, the investment visa might be cheaper in practice when you adjust for risk.
We can nitpick on what we mean by “visible”, but at the end of the day, that’s really not a high bar to meet. The only visible form of political expression I ever engaged in was anonymous posting on SSC/TheMotte. Most of my friends don’t do even that.
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