Man, that Jordan Silverman story is horrifying. Have to agree with Ollie Parks's comment on it, the whole thing seems like it was very much instigated by two particular malicious actors. (Although, the system is very much also a problem -- notice how he suggests modifications to the system as solutions!) And what's with all the goddamn vigilantism?? Really nasty...
This advice is surprising:
> Criminal defense lawyers generally advise people under investigation not to speak to police. But “Lana,” a D.C.-area sex abuse investigator who is familiar with the case — and who has worked both with law enforcement and defense attorneys — says it’s different with child services. “If they only have some questionable accusations and there’s no other evidence, sometimes all they need is a denial” to dismiss the allegations, she says. “But if you don’t talk to them, all they have are the accusations. And if there’s no evidence pushing back, they have to substantiate.”
This bit at the end, and the parts around it, also surprise me:
> “Any man who works in childcare is putting his life on the line,” says Lana, the metro-area sex abuse investigator. “I’ve told my own sons to never, ever be alone with any kid who isn’t your own. Maybe that sounds extreme, but I’ve seen it too often. As a society, we just don’t trust men around kids. And it only takes the slightest bit of suspicion to ruin your life.”
I mean, I remember seeing MRAs complaining about this on the internet back in the day, but I've just never had a problem with this? I mean I guess working at a day care exposes you to a lot more? :-/
The war in Sudan seems like a return to an older mode of warfare, rather than the dawn of a new one. "Soldiers aren't paid, they just steal from civilians as they march" is how most armies used to work!
Unfortunately, I think this is normal warlordism. It happens quite often when societies break down - the last famous Warlord Era was in China, but it's hardly unique. It's just incredibly horrible.
Yeah the part that seems new, rather than a return to history, is that the aims of the war seem ill-defined: seizing cities without much of a plan for keeping power in a region; not much of an overarching ideology; even the ethnic cleansing seems to be massacres in the moment rather than an actual goal of establishing an ethnicity over another longer-term.
Would it be hard for you to annotate these links with where they're going? I'm much more interesting in clicking something that goes to Asterisk than Vox, etc, and it's annoying to open them on my phone to check
I quite liked the "thinking differently in different languages" article, but I don't think they did a good job at the explanation of why newer models are different from older ones.
LLMs work by reading text and then spitting out text, based on training data. In earlier versions, they would write something in german, and it would spit out some german in response very quickly. Write it in english, it spits out english.
In reasoning models, there's now an intermediate step. When you send it a question, it takes your response and opens up a scratchpad where it writes like 30 pages worth of an internal monologue on how to craft the perfect response. We only see the final response that it produces in the end. Sometimes they will set it up to output intermediate updates summarising what it is doing as well.
These models appear to have been trained to only ever write these inner monologues in english. So if you ask it something in german, it will translate the question into english, write 30 pages worth of english monologuing, and then translate the answer into german and output it. It's a reasonable hypothesis that this allows for the values of written english to take over.
> They admitted in open court that they arrested and detained a journalist who was here legally because he was reporting on ICE raids. That journalist is expected to be deported to El Salvador today.
He apparently did not in fact leave the country then and continued to reside in the Atlanta area, working as a journalist for a Spanish-language publication and focusing on immigration-related issues. According to https://www.newsweek.com/mario-guevara-immigration-reporter-arrested-ice-detainer-georgia-2087016 , he was arrested while reporting on a June 2025 No Kings protest for unlawful assembly and some related charges. These charges were dropped but ICE put an immigration detainer on him while he was in jail and transferred him to immigration detention in preparation for deporting him. He apparently had an application in progress for a green card via one of his natural-born-citizen children at this time. There were some further appeals while he was in ICE custody, and he was finally actually deported back to El Salvador in October.
I have several thoughts about this:
- I do not care at all if the Trump administration admitted in open court that they detained him because he was reporting on immigration raids. The guy should have left the country voluntarily in 2012, and if he didn't US immigration enforcement should have arrested and deported him at that time. The fact that he was able to continue living and working in the US for more than a decade after that, until he happened to get arrested at a protest and get on ICE's radar, is the actually meaningful violation of due process here.
- The fact that he was able to continue living and working in the US for more than a decade after being denied asylum, and the fact that there are millions of foreigners on US soil who are living illegally under similar circumstances, is a good reason to support ICE taking a more proactive role in finding, arresting, and deporting illegal immigrants. It's also a good reason to support wholesale reform of the asylum process, the refugee process, the process for every legal visa (Guevara originally entered the country on a temporary business visa), and any other legal process that lets a foreigner set foot on US soil for any reason. The US government should assume that any foreigner who sets foot on US soil for any reason might have the intention of spending many years applying for some kind of legal permanent residency, and then simply refuse to leave if denied; and build bureaucratic systems accordingly.
- While Guevara was in the asylum process, he begat multiple children on US soil who are legally natural-born US citizens, and then managed to delay getting deported for so long that they became adults and he was trying to get legal permanent residency status through them. People who are not legal permanent residents or citizens of the United States should not be able to make their children US citizens simply by bearing them on US soil. This story is a good argument for a constitutional amendment that eliminates the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th amendment.
Guevara might have a decent shot at a selective prosecution defense. It's hard to pull off in the United States, but the US government is not allowed to single out people for an unconstitutional reason so they can charge them - and not others - with a crime, even if they really are guilty of the thing that they were charged with. For example, if you got a speeding ticket from a racist cop that only ever gave speeding tickets to black people, you could (in principle) have your ticket thrown out even if you really were speeding.
Deportations for not being legally present in the United States are a legally-distinct mechanism from charging someone with a crime, even if both involve the use of the policing power of the state.
There's also the issue that prosecution decisions are to some degree a political rather than legal question. Suppose that there was a lot of speeding happening in some city, and the crime of speeding was disproportionately committed by black people, and a local political candidate ran on a platform of promising to crack down on speeding, and won an election, even though his political opponents were specifically attacking him during the election campaign by calling him racist against black people for his speeding policy. Then, once in office, he ordered the local police to start cracking down on speeding, and they indeed did start giving way more speeding tickets to black people who were speeding than they previously did. Would any particular black person be able to use a selective prosecution defense against a speeding ticket? What if there was some particular black person who was also a local journalist who had been active in the campaign against this politician (and who was actually speeding)?
Normally, selective prosecution is damn hard to prove in the United States, so the guy getting a speeding ticket would normally not succeed with such a defense, but a prosecutor saying in open court "yeah, I really did single this guy out for this (unconstitutional) reason" is probably one of the few things that actually would be enough to get a judge to throw a case out on selective prosecution grounds.
> How, exactly, are schools supposed to not accept foreign students that have un-American beliefs while *also* not discriminating on the basis of political views?
Umm... well that's pretty easy- just don't accept any foreign students at all. Which I think the Trump administration would have little issue with.
Man, that Jordan Silverman story is horrifying. Have to agree with Ollie Parks's comment on it, the whole thing seems like it was very much instigated by two particular malicious actors. (Although, the system is very much also a problem -- notice how he suggests modifications to the system as solutions!) And what's with all the goddamn vigilantism?? Really nasty...
This advice is surprising:
> Criminal defense lawyers generally advise people under investigation not to speak to police. But “Lana,” a D.C.-area sex abuse investigator who is familiar with the case — and who has worked both with law enforcement and defense attorneys — says it’s different with child services. “If they only have some questionable accusations and there’s no other evidence, sometimes all they need is a denial” to dismiss the allegations, she says. “But if you don’t talk to them, all they have are the accusations. And if there’s no evidence pushing back, they have to substantiate.”
This bit at the end, and the parts around it, also surprise me:
> “Any man who works in childcare is putting his life on the line,” says Lana, the metro-area sex abuse investigator. “I’ve told my own sons to never, ever be alone with any kid who isn’t your own. Maybe that sounds extreme, but I’ve seen it too often. As a society, we just don’t trust men around kids. And it only takes the slightest bit of suspicion to ruin your life.”
I mean, I remember seeing MRAs complaining about this on the internet back in the day, but I've just never had a problem with this? I mean I guess working at a day care exposes you to a lot more? :-/
"Chinese supermarkets discount produce late at night so that they can free up space for fresh produce in the morning"
American supermarkets often discount some products on one day of the week for similar reasons -- they're going to restock that night.
The war in Sudan seems like a return to an older mode of warfare, rather than the dawn of a new one. "Soldiers aren't paid, they just steal from civilians as they march" is how most armies used to work!
Unfortunately, I think this is normal warlordism. It happens quite often when societies break down - the last famous Warlord Era was in China, but it's hardly unique. It's just incredibly horrible.
Yeah the part that seems new, rather than a return to history, is that the aims of the war seem ill-defined: seizing cities without much of a plan for keeping power in a region; not much of an overarching ideology; even the ethnic cleansing seems to be massacres in the moment rather than an actual goal of establishing an ethnicity over another longer-term.
Would it be hard for you to annotate these links with where they're going? I'm much more interesting in clicking something that goes to Asterisk than Vox, etc, and it's annoying to open them on my phone to check
Sure!
I quite liked the "thinking differently in different languages" article, but I don't think they did a good job at the explanation of why newer models are different from older ones.
LLMs work by reading text and then spitting out text, based on training data. In earlier versions, they would write something in german, and it would spit out some german in response very quickly. Write it in english, it spits out english.
In reasoning models, there's now an intermediate step. When you send it a question, it takes your response and opens up a scratchpad where it writes like 30 pages worth of an internal monologue on how to craft the perfect response. We only see the final response that it produces in the end. Sometimes they will set it up to output intermediate updates summarising what it is doing as well.
These models appear to have been trained to only ever write these inner monologues in english. So if you ask it something in german, it will translate the question into english, write 30 pages worth of english monologuing, and then translate the answer into german and output it. It's a reasonable hypothesis that this allows for the values of written english to take over.
> They admitted in open court that they arrested and detained a journalist who was here legally because he was reporting on ICE raids. That journalist is expected to be deported to El Salvador today.
The journalist in question appears to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Guevara_(journalist) , who is from El Salvador. He first moved to the US in 2004, according to https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/21/journalist-ice-detained-lawsuit-00518571 on a B-1 temporary business visa, and then applied for asylum. His asylum claim spent years going through the courts before being finally denied in 2012 according to https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2012/07/07/Immigration-reporter-ordered-to-leave-US/48301341698680/ . He and his immediate family were ordered to leave the US within 60 days at that time, with the exception of two children he had had since that time, who were born on US soil and thus legally natural-born American citizens. "Voluntary departure is not an option for me," Guevara said. "I don't see going to El Salvador as an option. Here in this country, I have found everything I need."
He apparently did not in fact leave the country then and continued to reside in the Atlanta area, working as a journalist for a Spanish-language publication and focusing on immigration-related issues. According to https://www.newsweek.com/mario-guevara-immigration-reporter-arrested-ice-detainer-georgia-2087016 , he was arrested while reporting on a June 2025 No Kings protest for unlawful assembly and some related charges. These charges were dropped but ICE put an immigration detainer on him while he was in jail and transferred him to immigration detention in preparation for deporting him. He apparently had an application in progress for a green card via one of his natural-born-citizen children at this time. There were some further appeals while he was in ICE custody, and he was finally actually deported back to El Salvador in October.
I have several thoughts about this:
- I do not care at all if the Trump administration admitted in open court that they detained him because he was reporting on immigration raids. The guy should have left the country voluntarily in 2012, and if he didn't US immigration enforcement should have arrested and deported him at that time. The fact that he was able to continue living and working in the US for more than a decade after that, until he happened to get arrested at a protest and get on ICE's radar, is the actually meaningful violation of due process here.
- The fact that he was able to continue living and working in the US for more than a decade after being denied asylum, and the fact that there are millions of foreigners on US soil who are living illegally under similar circumstances, is a good reason to support ICE taking a more proactive role in finding, arresting, and deporting illegal immigrants. It's also a good reason to support wholesale reform of the asylum process, the refugee process, the process for every legal visa (Guevara originally entered the country on a temporary business visa), and any other legal process that lets a foreigner set foot on US soil for any reason. The US government should assume that any foreigner who sets foot on US soil for any reason might have the intention of spending many years applying for some kind of legal permanent residency, and then simply refuse to leave if denied; and build bureaucratic systems accordingly.
- While Guevara was in the asylum process, he begat multiple children on US soil who are legally natural-born US citizens, and then managed to delay getting deported for so long that they became adults and he was trying to get legal permanent residency status through them. People who are not legal permanent residents or citizens of the United States should not be able to make their children US citizens simply by bearing them on US soil. This story is a good argument for a constitutional amendment that eliminates the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th amendment.
Guevara might have a decent shot at a selective prosecution defense. It's hard to pull off in the United States, but the US government is not allowed to single out people for an unconstitutional reason so they can charge them - and not others - with a crime, even if they really are guilty of the thing that they were charged with. For example, if you got a speeding ticket from a racist cop that only ever gave speeding tickets to black people, you could (in principle) have your ticket thrown out even if you really were speeding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_prosecution
Deportations for not being legally present in the United States are a legally-distinct mechanism from charging someone with a crime, even if both involve the use of the policing power of the state.
There's also the issue that prosecution decisions are to some degree a political rather than legal question. Suppose that there was a lot of speeding happening in some city, and the crime of speeding was disproportionately committed by black people, and a local political candidate ran on a platform of promising to crack down on speeding, and won an election, even though his political opponents were specifically attacking him during the election campaign by calling him racist against black people for his speeding policy. Then, once in office, he ordered the local police to start cracking down on speeding, and they indeed did start giving way more speeding tickets to black people who were speeding than they previously did. Would any particular black person be able to use a selective prosecution defense against a speeding ticket? What if there was some particular black person who was also a local journalist who had been active in the campaign against this politician (and who was actually speeding)?
Normally, selective prosecution is damn hard to prove in the United States, so the guy getting a speeding ticket would normally not succeed with such a defense, but a prosecutor saying in open court "yeah, I really did single this guy out for this (unconstitutional) reason" is probably one of the few things that actually would be enough to get a judge to throw a case out on selective prosecution grounds.
> How, exactly, are schools supposed to not accept foreign students that have un-American beliefs while *also* not discriminating on the basis of political views?
Umm... well that's pretty easy- just don't accept any foreign students at all. Which I think the Trump administration would have little issue with.