> The statute requires that a person knowingly circulate a false report. Combs says she was repeating what people told her. Gregory says she should have verified it with the hospitals first
It would be a violation of HIPAA for a medical system to disclose that to a private individual. The State Health Services or TCEQ would need to conduct that investigation and ask those questions. Both of those are state level agencies and would require significant momentum for a small town like Trinidad to trigger their attention. Ironically, it sounds like her social media post and the Streisand effect around it have triggered a TCEQ boil water notice and (likely) an investigation.
It is absolutely bizarre for a municipal or county law enforcement agency to take interest in this kind of thing. Texas Rangers and federal authorities should be looking at what triggered her arrest and whatever investigation came before it. That's assuming Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick, or Ken Paxton haven't totally compromised them at this point.
> It would be a violation of HIPAA for a medical system to disclose that to a private individual.
If multiple people told her they were hospitalized then you could ask and answer about that in a general way without violating HIPPA. "Were the multiple cases of hospitalization due to water quality issues in the recent month?" As long as individual data isn't revealed then there is no violation. Which is obvious when you think about any generalized health statistics.
Which isn't to defend the Trinidad Police department, but to point out, if their concern was community awareness, then they could have asked any news outlet to do this same reporting as a matter of public interest.
Instead the police decide that it's better to use their limited resources to take a citizen into custody over factually ambiguous statements. We live in disappointing times so it's not hard to imagine a friend or colleague pressured the police into violating this woman's civil rights in an effort to shut everyone up about the sorry state of their infrastructure.
I was almost arrested a couple days ago because i walked to the nearest grocery store with my backpack on. I needed to visit a specialty shop nearby and put the goods in my backpack. I travel with a backpack. It holds my money, identification, nicotine, other odds and ends, some aleve, and also a foldable cane, an assistive device that I need when my bad knee goes out (tibial plateau). The store was willing to confiscate my bag for me, but are naturally not responsible if it all goes missing, or if the cash goes missing, or if my cards get skimmed, or if someone social engineers another employee into handing the bag to them. So in order to protect the stores green beans, I am ordered to forfeit all my personal property and identity information as well as my assistive device. When i refuse, they called the cops and attempted to insinuate over the phone to the cops that I "may have weapons" and "may be dangerous" even though I am just literally an austistic disabled person walking a mile to the store because it was too rainy to ride my motorcycle. In either case, I would be wearing a backpack. This is essentially the same as a woman carrying a purse. I am at a point I no longer want to participate in this society or even live amongst anyone here. I can no longer function except in full isolation apparently because everything I am, and everything I've done for four decades on this planet, is being attacked and criminalized with prejudice. I am constantly kicked out of stores for existing, i cannot go anywhere without people yelling at me or threatening violence against me. I despise existence and everyone that has enabled this society to become this way. There is nothing good here anymore.
HIPAA or not, I assume the hospital wouldn’t tell a private citizen anything concerning anyone else, just on general principles. There’s no FOIA or something like that to force them to.
But they don't have to disclose identifying information to say, "yeah, we've had more XYZ cases," or some other statistic. I'm not saying she should have to contact the hospital to exercise her right to free speech. I'm just saying that HIPAA doesn't mean healthcare institutions are a black box. I find that idea strange because I can immediately see how to ask questions to work around it while still protecting individuals.
> “…HIPAA doesn’t mean healthcare institutions are a black box.”
Ok, but it’s a sure-fire way to not answer any question you don’t like or if you are unsure of the person making the request—from the receptionist to the hospital administrator. A convenient “fig leaf” if you will.
In a more charitable view—if a hospital admin did disclose something they shouldn’t the consequences are legal. E.G. the context for answering has to be legal, or someone trained to answer your specific questions. Now, try to find that person and get an answer—crickets.
Texas is a quasi fascist state at this point. I wouldn’t hold your breath about Greg Abbott coming to the rescue. This type of interaction with their constituents is common now.
What do you mean? Abbott and politicians like him are well known for disregarding the law for their own advancement/benefit. There's a long list of court cases they've lost if you want to look this up.
Your desire that more politicians behave this way doesn't make them not corrupt.
Didn't greg abbot spend a lot of time trying to make political hay out of persecuting a Muslim charity? Not from the state, so correct me if I am wrong.
What's really interesting in this comment chain is an observation I've expressed a lot more lately. When someone knows an LLM was involved they raise their expectations. I do it too in my own work and I have to remind myself things like "this bug would've also likely occurred with a human working at this level of complexity." The real question is did the operator arbitrarily and knowingly increase the level of complexity or is it appropriate for the task.
> The real question is did the operator arbitrarily and knowingly increase the level of complexity or is it appropriate for the task.
There's one major reason to have higher expectations for autonomous systems (of all kinds, not just LLM-powered) than for humans, at least those intended to be deployed at scale, and that's the scale. If a human makes a mistake, has biases, or even intentionally breaks the rules the impact of their actions is limited by the nature of them being a human, where something like an autonomous driving system, a coding agent, etc. is intended to be deployed by the thousands, millions, or more and any problematic behaviors happen at that scale.
There are obviously millions of bad drivers out there, but every one of the human ones is bad in different ways. If Waymo pushes a bad update there could be tens of thousands of "drivers" that suddenly become bad in identical ways.
Humans also have the ability to learn from our mistakes. The ones you'd want to have working for you usually don't make the same one twice. LLMs are pretty good at making the same mistake repeatedly, even the simplest things like basic math or counting letters.
And there’s good reason for that. Anthropic, OpenAI, Salesforce, and so on have aggressively marketed LLMs as better than humans at working. It’s no surprise when we find out something is build using an LLM, we expect it to match the marketing.
But what constitutes "better than humans at working"?
Zero defects? Because you can always find at least one defect. But people don't naturally think statistically, so they grasp the thing that confirms their bias and then hang on tenaciously.
You'll notice the incredible amount of vitriol resulting from a purely cosmetic bug (which, it turns out, results from a missing TERM env in the base image - Claude is very conservative when it can't determine utf-8 support with 100% certainty).
There are two simultaneous problems that I've come to understand with datacenters and the people that live in their proximity:
1. Somehow the public is always left holding the bag for increased transmission costs despite the cause of the increase being a single (or short list) of outliers.
2. The residential public, as is tradition, is always asked to scale down for industrial demand.
How can we imagine expanding a system that results in both of these outcomes? That, to me, seems to be the thing to fix first.
Transferring wealth from the young and poor to the old and wealthy is the entire purpose of our government.
This is now the endpoint we are bouldering towards: the bottom 90% increasingly have nothing left to steal or exploit. And just like an algal bloom that eventually runs out of oxygen and dies, this is where this system and our society unravels.
No... we are specifically transferring it from the young. This is happening across the west. Once birth control was created, we kicked off a ticking time bomb of a crisis by not actually changing our social safety nets, with fewer young people paying to support an much larger number of older folks.
At the same time, our entire housing shortage is designed to enrich the homeowners by protecting the value of their property at the expense of the young who live with a zero-sum shortage, when previous generations could typically buy a home at, or near, the cost of construction.
We need to be honest that while yes, we are transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, we are also transferring wealth from the young to the old.
It's very obviously not the total number of people that matters. It's the difference in the number of people being funded and doing the funding. The math is fairly straightforward:
# of Boomers - Greatest Gen > Millennials - Boomers
This means that Millennials will have a greater burden than Boomers did. Which means Millennials will live with fewer resources.
Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security. That age can vary but let's pick 65 as a typical retirement age.
I worry that someone here who can't follow a simple a population delta mapping from one generation to another isn't exactly arguing in good faith.
>Presumably you're comparing people of working age contributing to social security vs. people in retirement receiving social security.
No, we are talking about the previous net contributors (vs receivers) -- that is Boomers vs Greatest Gen in the 1980s -- versus the current net contributors (vs receivers), e.g. Millennials vs Boomers now.
That number has gone down dramatically, and because of that, social security is effectively insolvent.
>Under the current structure, the Social Security Administration estimates that Social Security will pay full benefits until 2033, when it will be forced to reduce benefits by about 23%.
The reason why it's insolvent now is that the relative number of payment contributors to payment receivers has gone down dramatically. Today there are "fewer young people per old person" than there were in previous generations.
And because poor people don’t have much money, the government decided it could borrow heavily from future generations and give it to rich ppl, making them even poorer.
The idea that capitalism off loads the cost of externalities onto the unwitting public is nothing new. This is just the most recent and obvious version. Air anbd water pollution are the old ones. They make the pollution and the public pays for it with superfund sites or increased health care costs.
The solution is having the consumer pay for the externalities when they use the product. But this would make AI so much more expensive. When you use AI you are exploiting other people. Just keep that in mind.
It's the tired pattern of absolving the direct bad actors (the corpos themselves), as well as corrupt regulators who give them a pass, in favor of diffusing the responsibility onto individuals. If we're talking about collective action to solve the problem, it should be more of the form of demanding regulation that directly stops the bad actors, rather than this nonsensical fallacy from the same vein as "voting with our wallets".
Absolutely not. The default economic system is anarchy, also known as sharing and mutual aid. You see this even in the reddest of US states, where disaster victims help each other, and a huge pastime is sharing food via potlucks. But all evidence points to anarchical/egalitarian cultures as the baseline mechanism of human organization from prehistory.
Externalities don't exist in anarchic systems, because there is no hierarchical separation between producer and consumer. You can't push off costs to some members of the community when they have equal power to retaliate in kind, and there is no incentive to do so.
Sure they do. I do a thing, it benefits me but causes a problem for my neighbor in the process, I say "oh well fuck him", that's a textbook externality.
> they have equal power to retaliate in kind
A convenient fiction often engaged in by proponents of anarchy. In practice if you compare pairs of people at random you will find almost none that can reasonably be described as equal. Equality is something imposed by the law in an attempt to improve our lives on average.
Anarchy lasts exactly as long as it takes people to start banding together and no longer.
The far left tends to treat humans as essentially good and plastic — corrupted by unjust systems, but redeemable once those systems are dismantled. Remove capitalism, hierarchy, scarcity, and people will naturally cooperate. The far right tends toward a Hobbesian view — humans are greedy and lazy by default. Without the discipline, consequences, and hierarchy, civilization unravels. Hence “if you tax people more they’ll stop working.”
Both are cartoon versions of something real, and both fail in predictable ways.
The more honest picture comes from behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology: humans are neither blank slates nor rational maximizers. We’re a messy bundle of cooperative instincts and tribal ones, capable of extraordinary generosity within in-groups and breathtaking cruelty toward out-groups. Our “goodness” has always been conditional and contextual.
What really undermines the anarchist vision specifically isn’t that people are evil — it’s that they’re biased and self-deceiving in systematic ways. There’s a well-replicated finding that when you ask members of a team to estimate their individual contribution to a group outcome, the percentages sum to well over 100%. Everyone genuinely believes they pulled more than their weight. This isn’t malice — it’s a predictable artifact of how memory and attention work. We have more access to our own effort than to others’, so we weight it more heavily.
The practical consequence of this is underappreciated: it means that even in a community of genuinely well-meaning people with no bad actors, you’ll still get persistent grievance and conflict, because everyone will sincerely believe they’re being shortchanged. This isn’t a solvable problem with better norms or more transparency — it’s baked into human cognition.
This is what people say when they have no idea what people mean by the POLITICAL system of Anarchism (Libertarian Socialism).
Anarchism, the political system, is not "chaos". That is propaganda that started during the 1930's. If you want to learn about it, real the Anarchist FAQ.
(I have a degrees in American History and Economics if that matters).
Anarchism means "without hierarchy". This how humans organized until the populations of sedentary agricultural communities exploded. I will argue, and keep arguing despite downvotes, that anarchism has the least impedance mismatch with human nature out of every system, because it was the status quo before civilization became the norm.
This is the same issue for water in California as well. Growing water thirsty crops in a desert to use an allocation while average people are asked to conserve.
How will this be fixed when the public doesn’t have any power to make changes, and politicians are bribed—i.e., lobbied—by all these companies building data centers?
The reality is that these data centers make money for billionaire douchebags.
And unlike the billionaire douchebags of yesteryear they don't invest in the local economy. NOTHING IS TRICKLING DOWN
In fact our modern billionaire douchebags love talking about how much they hate humanity.
There's also another animal/dog documentary that I've watched recently that puts a finer point on this realization. The secret to survival and evolution is cooperation. For instance, not all dogs evolved the same way in this documentary. Some were more nuturing, some were more problem solving. For the focus of the documentary the challenge was to match the dog with a human that had a need they could address.
I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.
I'm not sure this is really true anymore and it ignores the reality on the ground of "cheap areas". Often times cheap areas are underserved in a way that once you require or depend on a service that is baked into other higher cost of living areas your life becomes much more expensive than if you'd simply lived in a high cost of living area. There are many examples of this but hospitals in rural areas are one of my favorite examples. There used to be many of these but many people didn't realize they were all (or mostly) subsidized capital ventures. Many of them are closing now that the subsidy has ended. So, is that county land cheap? Yes, but when you have an incident where time matters your likelihood of being cooked goes up precipitously.
> This feels really premature. The announcement was a week ago. The “this model is too powerful for the general public” sounds like marketing to me.
Anthropic was born out of the idea that they feel paternity over humanity. They believe by limiting access they are performing a necessary pillar of security in multiple facets.
I think it's up to the public, and articles like this are part of the public's voice, whether this belief is serious or not and secondarily whether it's okay to even posture this kind of belief since it inherently results in marginalizing the many and rewards an already very successful few.
I did read them but I interpreted the topic of this thread to be Anthropic's vague approach to compliance enforcement not specifically how claude -p is used and interpreted by Anthropic.
Both of these camera systems also usually come with a kangaroo civil court of sorts. Last time I looked at red light camera distribution in Texas it was also fairly obvious that they were only installing them in poorer areas.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
If they only installed them based on collision/injury data, and that data identified mostly poor areas, you would be ok with it? Because this is what the data finds over and over. The people most harmed by red light running are the poor people who live in these neighborhoods.
I might question the benefits of making the poor area even poorer via fines they likely can't afford. I might wonder if there are confounding factors like poorly maintained roads and vehicles at play. I might wonder if the yellow lights have the same timing as in the suburbs.
Are the small fines for red light violations costlier, or the impact on health and life from the collisions red light running inevitably causes? I think letting poor areas be high traffic injury areas through deliberate neglect is even costlier to the poor who live there than red light fines.
I might question why you are so opposed to interventions that save the lives of people in poorer neighborhoods (disproportionately not owners of cars).
In my experience it's the rich areas chock full o' Karens that get the latest and greatest in jackbootery because they have all the money for the new hotness, no real problems to divert their attention and almost nobody who's ever been on the business end of government enforcement so they don't see any real problem with dispensing it at the drop of a hat.
Any dataset involving police actions will show high concentrations in poor areas because that's where police patrol the most and where they're most likely to crack down on behaviors that might be allowed to slide elsewhere (in part due to the racial demographics of those areas).
Usually allocation decisions are related to actual car/pedestrian fatality/injury counts + trial placements and measurements. Either way, wouldn't you be in favor of measures that remove police from overpoliced poor neighborhoods in favor of a technology focusing on traffic safety enforcement?
This is a bizarre comment. What level of absence of evidence would you accept to prove "not corrupt enough?" The "corruption snack" language strongly suggests you aren't really interested in changing your mind even if such evidence could be provided.
They are potentially now, but when I lived there (~a decade ago) they were not and this was the battle we were fighting as neighborhoods and communities. At the height of it they couldn't take your drivers license but the company could file an injunction preventing you from renewing your drivers license over civil penalties.
> Its not your responsibility to ensure transitive importers of your library are on the latest version of Go. Don't make that decision for them.
and yet the Go maintainers did not include or build (in the future) a tool that determined the minimum version of Go that your application can be compiled in.
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