BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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Okay, but again, this is not an example of him eschewing Congress; this is him quite explicitly following the law as Congress has passed it, so this has essentially no relevance to any other greater grievance you might have with him.

If it's actually illegal for him to do certain things without Congress and Congress isn't cooperating, I don't really see how that's his fault either, unless you have the counter-example of this Congress agreeing to do things he said he would do but him not doing it anyway. Beyond that, it sounds like your fundamental issue is that Biden is, er, following the law?

That's an argument for Congress revoking it though, not for it being illegal.

To that end, I mostly do agree actually. It's not a good idea for the President to have such vast unilateral military powers without prior Congressional oversight, but again, this was all done by Congress to begin with. They can repeal it at any time.

This is the kind of soundbite that comes off really nice and edgy but doesn't actually stand up to a second of real legal scrutiny.

The President, under prior acts of Congress, absolutely has the authority to order strikes like this. You'll notice that the complaining Congress critters here have not actually filed a lawsuit, because they know they're wrong and will lose. The President does not unilaterally have the authority to institute single-payer healthcare or guarantee abortion rights federally.

He's not ignoring Congress here. He's following prior acts of Congress that are still in force. If Congress wanted to stop these actions, they could revoke those authorizations at literally any time.

There's not really any room to agree with her legally; she is categorically wrong. This action falls under previous standing military authorizations that Congress has passed.

If Congress has an issue with it, they can revoke them at any time. She can say that she thinks it's wrong and that we shouldn't have done it, but to say that it's unconstitutional is just broadcasting an embarrassing lack of knowledge for a sitting member of Congress.

Rep Tlaib is welcome to file a lawsuit if she thinks the AUMF in unconstitutional. It would be a bit strange though if it survived 23 years of use, including actions in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and then a response to direct attacks on US Navy ships winds up being what sinks it.

But again, these representatives can sue if they're so confident.

I mean, they were launching direct attacks on US Navy ships. Frankly, not responding to that is unusual.

Luckily, the Houthis are not the internationally recognized government of Yemen, so this isn't relevant.

Obviously they should just triple their carbon emissions by going around Africa instead. This saves the environment!

So, you exhale CO2 when you breath.

Draw whatever conclusions from that that you like.

I guess you don't know this, but there are, in fact, different limitations in what the President can do.

When it comes to military action, Congress gave the President essentially blanket authority to do anything that can be even remotely connected to "fighting terrorism", so this is not in any way a "Fuck Congress" moment. If Congress wants to withdraw that authority and actually do its job again, it can do that at literally any time.

Given that actual US Navy ships have been getting attacked and this is largely in retaliation of that, I think it stretches the imagination a bit to say that the US started this.

Yeah, there's absolutely a valid question of whether the AUMF is a good idea or not, but the fact of the matter is that it did pass, it is in force, and therefore essentially any military action - especially in response to direct attacks on American military ships - is unquestionably legal.

If Congress would like to complain about the President conducting war without its authority, they should perhaps revoke the essentially unlimited authority to conduct war that it gave him.

Ah yeah, I have heard of similar things, particularly with differences in word order (subject-verb-object vs subject-object-verb, for example), and I don't doubt that there are some minor effects there. Ultimately though, my general understanding of the research is that any effects from this are quite small and don't really rise past the point of being little curiosities. In the grand scheme of things, all human languages are of essentially equivalent expressive power and all do essentially the same things, even if in different ways. This is perhaps not terribly surprising really, given that they're all running on the same hardware of a human brain.

I would note that there may be something of an slight over-correction in linguistic orthodoxy with topics like this, since efforts to prove the inferiority and simplicity of "savage" languages was a big effort in late 1800s and early 1900s scientific racism. I remember my professor once showing me a book written by the chair of Harvard's Linguistics Department talking about how the noble Sanskrit was corrupted by being mixed with too many "Orientals" until it became watered down into basic and dumb languages like Hindi. Hell, the entire theory of the Aryan race originated with linguistics, the term itself originally just being a (ultimately incorrect) term for Proto-Indo-European, the theoretical ancestor language of Greek, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and some others, the idea being that any group of people whose descendants became all those great civilizations was obvious the pinnacle of humanity. It was of course noted that Hebrew does not belong to this family. The entire field - along with sociology in general - had a massive course correction after WWII for obvious reasons, and while this does align much closer to the actual truth, it has lead linguists to generally be quite reluctant to ever pursue the idea of any language being "better" in some way than others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houthimovement

Enjoy.

Amongst linguists, Arrival is beloved for essentially everything except that one single element haha. Except for the linguistic relativism, it's actually an extremely accurate depiction of what linguistics work looks like. Of course, it is still a sci-fi movie and so it needs a little magic as well, and I won't begrudge it for that.

I'm not surprised about your medical friends though. Because everyone speaks a language, they people often thing that this makes them qualified to speak on linguistics, especially smart people.

I don't want to entirely overstate this though. For instance, if you present people with two shapes, one with a bunch of spikes and the other a more softer blob-like thing, tell them that one of them is called a bouba and one is called a kiki, and ask them to guess which is which, the vast majority of people with call the spikey one the kiki and the blobby one the bouba. So there are some curious inherent effects that language has on our perceptions, but they're subtle, and absolutely nothing like "you cannot imagine the mere concept of disobedience because you don't have a word for it".

I've gotta dash, but essentially, the fundamental linguistic premise behind 1984 is this idea that, if people do not have a word to describe a thing, then they cannot meaningfully think about it.

This is, to put it simply, just not true. The greater concept is called linguistic relativism, or the theory that specific languages play a significant role in our general cognition, but outside of some very minor effects, evidence simply doesn't support it. All human languages are essentially of equivalent complexity, and even in situations where a pidgin is created through language contact, it rapidly re-complicates into a fully developed language.

For a concrete example, the idea is that, by replacing 'bad' with 'ungood', people's domain of thought will be meaningfully reduced. The problem is minds don't actually give much of a shit about etymology. In practice, what would rapidly happen is that 'ungood' would come to simply be the word for 'bad' just as deeply as the word 'bad' is to us. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, consider the word 'discover'. When I say it, you might think of a new scientific discovery, an explorer finding new land, or something to that effect. What you probably do not think of is that is quite literally 'dis-cover', that is, to undo the act of covering something up. Etymology very rapidly gets disconnected from peoples' internal sense of a word, and to that end, manipulating it doesn't really do all that much.

To go back to Newspeak, it's trivial to re-develop a word for 'rebellion' with something like 'goodthink freeness', which will quickly be internalized into meaning the same concept. The range of possible thought doesn't actually get meaningfully reduced.

My point is that not having access to a dictionary does not massively reduce one's ability to learn their own native language, not that dictionaries aren't useful.

I actually majored in Linguistics and will eventually wind up doing a Ph.D in it because I'm a horrific nerd. I love dictionaries and consult them literally every day for etymology information. That doesn't change the fact that, as I said, the absolute vast majority of someone's linguistic knowledge of their own native language is gained by observing the language used in context, not by explicit lookups in a dictionary. You don't teach a baby to speak by throwing a dictionary at it; you just talk to it and they figure it out.

Given that dictionaries are a relatively recent development in history, and yet people did manage to speak English, I can guarantee you that 'most of them' is a massive over-estimate.

To be clear, I'm not trying to imply that dictionaries aren't useful or that them being inaccessible is a good thing, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people's linguistic knowledge is learned unconsciously through context and simply talking and hearing other people speak.

Just to throw it at you, of your first sentence there:

When I was a wee lad reading something I would ask my parents what words meant and we would look it up in the dictionary

I would essentially guarantee you didn't learn any of those words by looking them up in a dictionary, and you probably knew them all before you could even read, with the exception of 'dictionary'.

My point, which I guess I didn't state as explicitly as I needed to, is that the entire linguistic premise of newspeak in 1984 is essentially nonsense. Language simply doesn't work that way, and people's understanding of words does not generally derive from dictionaries.

To pose a simple question to you, of all the words you know, how many of them did you learn by consulting a dictionary? Or perhaps even more simply, how many times have you looked at a dictionary in the past year?

For the vast majority of people, the answers are "a tiny fraction" and "single digits".

The key element here is that an LLM does not actually have access to its training data, and at least as of now, I'm skeptical that it's technologically feasible to search through the entire training corpus, which is an absolutely enormous amount of data, for every query, in order to determine potential copyright violations, especially when you don't know exactly which portions of the response you need to use in your search. Even then, that only catches verbatim (or near verbatim) violations, and plenty of copyright questions are a lot fuzzier.

For instance, say you tell GPT to generate a fan fiction story involving a romance between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. This would unquestionably violate JK Rowling's copyright on the characters if you published the output for commercial gain, but you might be okay if you just plop it on a fan fic site for free. You're unquestionably okay if you never publish it at all and just keep it to yourself (well, a lawyer might still argue that this harms JK Rowling by damaging her profit if she were to publish a Malfoy-Harry romance, since people can just generate their own instead of buying hers, but that's a messier question). But, it's also possible that, in the process of generating this story, GPT might unwittingly directly copy chunks of renowned fan fiction masterpiece My Immortal. Should GPT allow this, or would the copyright-management AI strike it? Legally, it's something of a murky question.

For yet another angle, there is of course a whole host of public domain text out there. GPT probably knows the text of the Lord's Prayer, for instance, and so even though that output would perfectly match some training material, it's legally perfectly okay. So, a copyright police AI would need to know the copyright status of all its training material, which is not something you can super easily determine by just ingesting the broad internet.