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If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it. They could verify that it actually belongs to the person they want to sanction before putting it on the list. Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.

Verifying identity is a much simpler problem than establishing identity.


> If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it

They didn't care to figure out if the Sean Byrne of County Sligo actually existed before putting the name on the list. I doubt they would bother verifying an ID number.

Plus, going back to my point about the list being full of foreigners, how do you verify the validity of a foreign ID number and address? Maybe Ireland is going to comply with a US request, but many other countries won't, and you are now back to square one.


Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. As you said, Ireland might comply, which would’ve solved this particular issue.


Yes it's true we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. But good also has to be good enough to solve the problem without creating more problems faster than it solves them.

It's fine to propose a solution but if people aren't convinced just throwing an aphorism grenade at them isn't productive.


I like to tack on "good enough" when throwing this particular aphorism grenade


The courts obviously never had an id document for the US to find. Is the US going to omit all partial identities to avoid false positives or is Ireland going to illegally investigate lists for the US from extra judicial processes that likely involve non-extraditable crimes? Will the US believe every country that says these investigations found no real citizen?

Not bending to the US might be less convenient at times but if you bend for them you will eventually be bending for China.


Testing a new Markov chain? What is this incoherent drivel?


From the article which clearly wasn’t read:

> In both cases the courts called for better matching. Compare the date of birth. Compare the middle name.

> There is no version of that available to me. The listing has no date of birth to compare. No middle name and no passport number, because the person doesn’t exist. A screening system that does its job perfectly will still flag me, forever, on the only two facts the record contains: a common Irish name and a country.

These systems operate by matching as much information as possible. If the information isn’t there but the rest matches (even if it’s just a name) it flags in the system.

> Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.

Sounds like you should tell the author. They’ve been living with this problem for 6 years but I’m sure your zero experience with these systems or trying to deal with it will help him immensely.


You’re talking about different things. Sweden has personal identity numbers and they’re public information. It protects you from being mixed up with someone with the same name. Not from identity theft though.


Making them explicitly public is better than the US situation where they’re treated like a password - a password you can’t change if it gets disclosed, and that lots of people feel entitled to get.


I assume that’s why Altman wants the government as a co-owner.


Everything seems rotten with this administration.


And sama.


I'll take Sam over amodei.

It's a both are bad choice.


Sam, the proprietor of Woldcoin?

Amodei might play hardball, but he's got nothing on sama's evil villain ambitions.


Why downvote me for an opinion?

Anyways, I'll take a liar over a zealot anyday.


You're asking the wrong person, I didn't downvote you. I am challenging your opinion with evidence of sama's uniquely sinister ambitions.

Can you elucidate why you think Sam is the better horse to bet on? From what I can see, he's the biggest zealot by quite a margin, in addition to being a chronic liar.


Honestly I'd say both are both. They just lie and are zealots about different things.

Ultimately they both want money and power, they just grasp for it in different ways.


And Sama over Trump?


Which of these two administrations? :)


Wasn't Bernie saying the government should confiscate half of OpenAI and Anthropic. This seems like sama is just trying to get ahead of it.


True, especially since President Sanders tends to be a bit heavy-handed on exerting political pressure. He's been issuing an unprecedented number of executive orders since he took office...


5% vs 50% is a dramatic difference in how things would work out.


Not to mention that a government ownership stake also incentivizes a bailout if this all goes bust.


A 5% stake in an overvalued private company without public financials and with an indeterminate timeline to profitability is a bailout. Shareholders cash out while the taxpayer is stuck with the bill.


Is the government buying their stake or being given a stake? In the second scenario there's no bagholding.


With the way they're treading on, I'd not be surprised if a bailout happens in the next decade.


Why?


"Too big to fail."


I’ve only used Opus in GitHub copilot and was hugely underwhelmed. It was barely usable. Are you saying it’s better with the official Anthropic tools?


Night and day in my opinion. But these are all purely Feels so YMMV etc.

I like how especially the Claude Code CLI version communicates how it's progressing, something they hide a lot more on the desktop app for example.


I don't know about better but it's certainly different. It's painfully slow through claude code vscode extension compared to copilot but maybe "smarter", I feel like I have to correct it less using sonnet on both. I don't use opus much because of the cost but coworkers say the difference between harnesses there is also pronounced.


Why are they storing a time period (start and end date) in the first example? Why not just store the date when the price comes into effect? That would make both overlaps and time travel impossible without using any constraints.


Works when there is always an active price. Having an explicit end date allows certain rows to be inactive automatically after validity period. Think of seasonal categories/products etc which dont exist after a specific period


And even if you don't have seasonal products, you still need an end date to mark when you stop selling a product; otherwise you have to do something hacky like defining "<price> = NULL means we stopped selling the product after <valid_from>" and inserting an extra record.

I think the end date should be nullable though, but valid_to is NOT NULL in the starting example... later in the article, when showing the "new way" using date ranges, it inserts a row with an open-ended range, which is more what I'd expect.


You could also make the price column nullable and just insert a row with price null and the date from which there should be no price.


Yeah, but now this is implicit information (no price == marker row) and duplicate the entire row. And it is baking in "price" as the special field. This may not be just one field for another temporal entity


JOINs and other operations become really difficult if you can't evaluate whether a row applies or not based on that row alone.


It's a trade-off. If you store both endpoints you can continue to think of rows as order-invariant tuples. If you store only one endpoint, you have to impose a meaningful order on the rows in order for them to make sense.


Sure, from a theoretical perspective, but in practice there’s got to be some sort of order at some point even when storing timespans.


If you sell a product where the customer can buy the future version today (for delivery in the future), that doesn't work.


It's a contrived example.


By that logic VPNs and many other technical solutions are also not solving technical problems, since it is theoretically possible to achieve the same results by other means.


Just use array_values() and suddenly you can use int indicies again.


I've been writing PHP for 20 years now. It's my bread and butter.

The one thing I really wish PHP would add is structurally typed objects. I really miss it when moving back and forth between PHP and TypeScript.

They could call them anonymous objects if they want to (that would be a more culturally correct analogue to anonymous classes).

Like, I wish it was possible to do

  {
    string $mystring = $myvar,
  }
and have it be equivalent to

  new class($myvar) {
    public function __construct(
      readonly public string $mystring,
    ) {}
  }
and then be able to typehint it like

  function ({ string $mystring } $myobj) {
    echo $myobj->mystring;
  }
and honestly, why not go all the way and allow type definitions/aliases, something like

  type myobj_type = { string $mystring };
That'd be great.


You can do that. Of course, PHP's native types are quite limited, but a phpdoc syntax should work with static analysis tools. For instance:

    /** @psalm-type MyobjType = object{mystring: string} */

    /**
     * @param MyobjType $myobj
     */
    function (object $myobj): void
Here are some documentation and examples:

- For Psalm, see https://psalm.dev/docs/annotating_code/type_syntax/utility_t...

- For PHPstan, see https://phpstan.org/writing-php-code/phpdoc-types

It may work in your IDE (autocompletion, etc.) but there is no standard on this side. Some IDE have their own parsers, others use one of the LSPs for PHP.


Yeah, at the moment we use arrays as anonymous objects and phpdoc+phpstan to verify the types, but I want it in the language. PHP already supports intersection and union types, it really feels like just skipping the naming part and going all in on structural typing is not that far fetched by now.


I don’t think AI demand is driven by consumers.


What a great blog post! I have wanted to do rootless docker with subuids, but putting it all together like you have is not easy. Thank you for writing it down!


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