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Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

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Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#151

Post by JKCalhoun »

gotoeleven wrote: post #130
JKCalhoun wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my reading, the administration claimed it was legal, a Federal judge stepped in and said it was not legal (the administration ignored), and finally the Supreme Court ruled due process was in fact denied: some deportees lacked criminal records and denied any meaningful judicial review or legal defense.

Sorry what supreme court ruling are you referring to? There was one batch that was deported that included Garcia, and Garcia has since been returned to face federal human trafficking charges in the US. There was another batch of venezuelans that was going to be deported to el salvador but was stopped by a Supreme court ruling on April 19th. Perhaps you are referring to an appeals court ruling to that effect ("some de…

I was referring to Noem v. Abrego Garcia [1]

[1] https://www.usconstitution.net/supreme-court-orders-trump-ad...

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#152

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

compiler-guy wrote: post #136
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I would think that those who claim that git is a good tool for an environment completely unlike software development Laws consist of strings of characters in a particular sequence, occasionally you don't want to be additive but subtractive, and these sequences are grouped into multiple papers. It's just code. Code on paper, but code nonetheless. They can't easily check what the previous version was, or compare two o…

All of this is an argument for version control--which I wholly support, and did from the first message. But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from. Yes, yes, you can use "-C -C -C" if you really want to know and have time to wait, but that is terrible compared to systems that track moves as first class happenings. And no one was offering to run this experimen…

>All of this is an argument for version control--

Do you know of another version control system that is superior to git?

Is there something special about legislation which makes it incompatible with git, that another version control system would be better at?

There's nothing sacred or special about the sausage-making that is legislation. It is a clunky process done poorly with bad tools.

>But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from.

Which is good, because that's not an issue in legislation. What's important is who authored the code, when it was introduced, what changes have been made to it since, and tracking things like votes/ratification/signing. These are all doable in git. No one much cares if subsection eleventy clause 9b-ii says in subsection eleventy or is moved to umpty-four. I can see how that can be a problem in software, but the processors legislation runs on don't much care.

>And no one was offering to run this experiment for free that I could see.

I don't think dang or anyone else is going back around and ninja-deleting my comments, they are there for everyone to see. Like this one...

>>>I wanted to do the Constitution (and US law in general) in git, but dates before unix epoch weren't possible. I don't think it's since been fixed. I had went so far as to start digging up treaties (about 700 of them, ratified) and draft constitutions (would have been non-master branches of some sort).

Maybe you got my stuff confused with someone else's. The comment tree seems to move around as they're re-ranked.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#153

Post by compiler-guy »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #152
compiler-guy wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of this is an argument for version control--which I wholly support, and did from the first message. But not an argument for git, which even sucks at things like tracking where code is moved to and from. Yes, yes, you can use "-C -C -C" if you really want to know and have time to wait, but that is terrible compared to systems that track moves as first class happenings. And no one was offering to run this experimen…

>All of this is an argument for version control-- Do you know of another version control system that is superior to git? Is there something special about legislation which makes it incompatible with git, that another version control system would be better at? There's nothing sacred or special about the sausage-making that is legislation. It is a clunky process done poorly with bad tools. >But not an argument for git,…

> Do you know of another version control system that is superior to git?

I'm quite partial to Mercurial myself, and jj seems to be up and coming. But in any event, the idea that even if git were a perfect VC for programming, the idea that it is therefore a good tool for legislation is rather suspect.

And yes, it absolutely does matter when Section 11.2.33 paragraph 6 (in rev 19928), becomes Section 32.1.4 paragraph 8 (in rev 200480). Lawyers and lobbyists get paid good money to track stuff like that.

For one thing, even if one particular person proposes a change, things like cosponsors, exchanged and proxy votes, wide commenting and committee authorship make the workflow, at the very least, not a natural fit for git. Sure, it could probably be shoe-horned in. But a good system to be required by law? Not really.

>>>>I wanted to do the Constitution... > Maybe you got my stuff confused with someone else's.

Speaking of getting one person's stuff confused with someone else's.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#154

Post by llm_nerd »

eqvinox wrote: post #106
jddj wrote: post #43

The Reddit thread is reasonably inflamed, but the theory about changing reality downstream by changing the sources that chatbots ingest is a chilling one.

Chilling, but not very realistic. It's not like chatbots forget all the previously trained-in data when you change the source. In fact, it'd be a pretty hard problem to solve to get there (but actually desirable! - i.e. the ability to remove individual trained-in things.)

New models are generally trained entirely from scratch, and we're constantly tossing old models into the dumpster and replacing them with the new hotness. Meaning it isn't like GPT-5 is just GPT-4 with some fine tuning, but instead they start an entirely fresh training process on their archive of source material.

Now the archive of source material is a growing corpus, but a canonical source like the government's published version of the constitution will indeed get subbed out in an updated crawl, and that would be used as the basis of the training of the next model. Now the site has reverted to the correct text, but the hypothesis of corrupting models is a valid and real concern.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#156

Post by krapp »

emchammer wrote: post #71

How could discussion of such a grave matter be flagged?

I hate the current regime as much as any reasonable person but this isn't a grave matter.

This website wasn't the Constitution. It wasn't a legal source of truth regarding the Constitution. There are literally millions of other references to the Constitution and its contents in existence, including original documents. Everyone knows what it says, everyone knows what's missing.

There is no possible nefarious consequence that can arise from this, it's just text on a website.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#157

Post by johnnyanmac »

krapp wrote: post #156
emchammer wrote: post #71

How could discussion of such a grave matter be flagged?

I hate the current regime as much as any reasonable person but this isn't a grave matter. This website wasn't the Constitution. It wasn't a legal source of truth regarding the Constitution. There are literally millions of other references to the Constitution and its contents in existence, including original documents. Everyone knows what it says, everyone knows what's missing. There is no possible nefarious consequen…

>There is no possible nefarious consequence that can arise from this, it's just text on a website.

In a year where this administration is saying a lot of things that "has no nefarious consequences", only for foul play to occur weeks/months later: that does not fill me with much consequence.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#158

Post by IAmGraydon »

AlexandrB wrote: post #53
frogperson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the first step is cutting out the cancer, healing can not begin until then.

By "cancer" do you mean ~50% of the US population? That sounds pretty extreme. What does "cutting out" the cancer mean here?

Hang on…you think 50% of the US population supports what is going on right now?

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#159

Post by johnnyanmac »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #91
cameron_b wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you see as skepticism, others see as Hanlon's Razor[0]. The prevailing wind of incompetence has masked a lot of what you might rightly consider malice, but in holding to a certain decorum or "wishing the best of people" there is a lot that could just be bungling. I'm certainly not saying you're wrong, a lot of dots connect and do look like malice, but there's a vast amount of data that supports incompetence. [0]…

Like the person you are responding too ... at what point does Hanlon's Razor become dull?

Note that malice and stupidity are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I say that dulled for me since the time the executive branch refused to appropriate congressional funds, lost several federal rulings on this and then continued to do so (the beef against Harvard and other high profile Universities is one of many recent examples).

The "Big Beautiful bill" was the moment the razor completely broke in my mind.

Re: Constitution of the United States Website has removed sections

#160

Post by johnnyanmac »

_justinfunk wrote: post #49

Presuming this is just incompetence instead of malice, when the missing paragraphs are replaced, will "Constitution of the United States Website has replaced missing sections" hit the front page of HN?

If this article is to give an example: it will be posted, get a few votes, then be flagged anyway.
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