Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, *except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted*, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
It was used en masse with turn of the century vagrancy laws to arrest Black people who didn't have enough cash on hand, then send them to other states to work and/or die in coal mines as essentially slave labor.
Even happened to children who committed minor crimes.
The 13th Amendment provides incentive to incarcerate, and with private prison industries existing period, that incentive probably should not exist at all.
Permitted, not "enshrined". It doesn't mandate it, it allows it. And despite being allowed, all US convicts are paid wages. No one is sentenced to labor, hard or otherwise.
The "wages" are typically something like 25 cents per hour, often much less than that. The work is mandatory, and sentences can be extended if you refuse to work, so they effectively are sentenced to labor.
What little money they get they immediately give back.
Inmates are charged anywhere from $0.06 to $0.25 per minute for phone calls.
Prisons spend less than $2/day per inmate on meals,
barely enough for sustenance,
so many inmates supplement by purchasing from the prison commissary.
If that's not bad enough,
prisons in 40 states are so-called pay-to-stay,
charging prisoners for their accommodations.
It isn't. It's just often preferable to sitting in a cell 23 hours per day.
>The "wages" are typically something like 25 cents per hour,
Why should a felon be permitted to earn whatever it is that you think they should be paid (the wages of a free man)? They are being punished. One of the aspects of the punishment is that they can't go out and get a good-paying job.
> and sentences can be extended if you refuse to work
This is a blatant lie. Sentences can't be extended without additional convictions. While it's not impossible to be charged with crimes committed in prison (murders occur there often enough), no one's being convicted of "refusing to work in prison".
I know that this blew up a few years on reddit, but maybe you should learn about it from more reputable sources.
> Sentences can't be extended without additional convictions.
This is technically true but substantively false. Fixed duration sentences in most US jurisdictions (life sentences are different) are come with essentially automatic substantial reductions for good behavior which are removable for poor behavior with minimal process, avoiding the hassle of judicial process for offenses in prison, and frequently “refusing work” is a cause for removing those reductions.
So, technically, its not an “increased sentence” for refusing work. But, in practice, that’s exactly how it functions.
I know it's hard to believe but I am not lying. Work is mandatory and refusal is punishable with harsher conditions and/or longer imprisonment. Here are a few examples.
Tennessee: "Any prisoner who refuses to participate in such programs when work is available shall have any sentence reduction credits received pursuant to the provisions of T.C.A. § 41-2-123 or T.C.A. § 41-2-146 reduced by two days of credit for each one day of refusal to work. [...] Pursuant to T.C.A. § 41-2-120(a), any prisoner refusing to work or becoming disorderly may be confined in solitary confinement or subjected to such other punishment, not inconsistent with humanity, as may be deemed necessary by the sheriff for the control of the prisoners, including reducing sentence credits pursuant to the procedure established in T.C.A. § 41-2-111. Such prisoners refusing to work, or while in solitary confinement, shall receive no credit for the time so spent. T.C.A. § 41-2-120(b)." This whole page is a particularly horrific read. https://www.ctas.tennessee.edu/eli/punishment-refusing-work
> Why should a felon be permitted to earn whatever it is that you think they should be paid (the wages of a free man)?
Yes, anyone working should be paid at least minimum wage. If we don't think they should earn that much then we simply shouldn't allow them to work. It should not be legal to force anyone to work (I know this will require a constitutional amendment to enforce).
The reason, beyond the obvious that slavery is immoral, is that allowing forced labor for close to zero pay incentivizes incarcerating more people for longer sentences to increase the size of this nearly free labor pool.
Even if you were right about that, which you're not, but it's actually funnier if you are, you'd be wrong about the argument at hand.
Wages, per both Merriam-Webster and Cambridge (which, hint is why you're wrong about the objective definition thing. Why would we need multiple disagreeing dictionaries if words had objective definitions?), are paid to employees based on a contractual obligation.
Prisoners are not employees and are not contractually obligated to participate in work. Prisoners are legally (not contractually) required to complete work (regardless of being employed or not), and can (and do) face punishment for not completing compulsory work.
The reason that you are not seeing people being sentenced "to labor" is that there is no need to sentence someone "to labor" because the laboring is already included in their sentence as a part of their terms of commitment as outlined in the policies of the various prisons as allowed by the 13th amendment.
No court has to specify that the convicted can be compelled to slavery because that specification is inherent in the conviction.
This type of comment is not welcome on HN. Please listen to the people you're engaging with, and try to see their perspective without using perjoratives or dismissing them.
Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas did not pay inmates for any work whether inside the prison (such as custodial work and food services) or in state-owned businesses. Additionally, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina allowed unpaid labor for at least some jobs.
It’d be inaccurate to say that no one is paid for their labor, but it’s dishonest to claim that all prisoners receive wages, especially when it’s not always the case, it’s an order of magnitude below the federal minimum, and they are forced to pay above-market prices for necessary goods, as others have pointed out.
You can also review Council v. Ivey about parole denial to continue forced labor through one of those fancy terminals.
I never said I want them out. I just don't support the prison system in its current form, or any excuse for slavery. Meanwhile, the root causes of the violent crimes go altogether unaddressed which is not appropriate either.
We spend substantially more on prisoners than they could ever hope to generate in labor.
After all, the average prisoner is not a diligent, sober, hardworking person trying to get ahead; how much economic value are you really likely to extract, even if you're evil?
Chattel slavery and prison labor may be distant relatives, but they're not siblings, and it's wrong (in a dozen different ways) to imply they are.
Between AI and outsourcing, desk jobs in the US can risk disappearing altogether. Do not count on them, and do not expect you to be owed anything. Go in every day knowing that day can be your last day there, and you will be at peace. Find your own alternate paths.
The spec prompts are typically better off being reviewed iteratively using AI itself, a lot more so than merely by pairing with coworkers. Perhaps a combination is best. The point is that AI reviews of the task spec must never be overlooked prior to its execution.
Also, if your spec is taking too long for the agent to execute, odds are high that it's ambiguous, unsound, unreviewed, underspecified, unmaintainable, or the model is just optimized to waste tokens so as to bill you maximally.
Tuta is pathetic because it asked for my real name, ID verification, and real phone number, altogether defeating the point of anonymity. When I refused to provide identification, it disabled and deleted the new registration. This makes it as bad as Discord.
Perhaps you have a grandfathered account, but times have changed for the worse with Tuta alone.
It wasn’t that long ago that we were experimenting on with llama derived models. There is still a lot happening with open weight models, but you may have to look at those models meant for targeting edge devices. In my own opinion, small models that can do useful work are going to become a much bigger deal in domains where data privacy is a requirement. Most businesses were technology is not the core mission do not want to host their own frontier models.
Whether one needs a custom frontier model or tuned model or an existing one depends on the task at hand. Custom tasks that are not covered by existing models will inevitably require a new frontier model independent of whether the business is a technology firm or not. An LLM or a basic vision model isn't suitable for all tasks. For example, imagine a model that outputs coherent architecturally sound designs for bridges or electrical systems that a mere rule-based system cannot output.
I work in this space and do a lot of experimentation with AI. We are still a very long way from AI being able to go from owner requirements to finished design or even an acceptable solution. In part that’s because the work products are locked up in proprietary formats and are not easily understood by these models. The industry conventions are based on extremely slow, incremental improvements on Penn and paper based processes that are about a century old. What may surprise you is that computational design is a highly under explored space for market-based reasons that are so complex I would need to write a lengthy blog post just to explain it. If large language models disappeared, you could still have almost entirely automated structural design for Bridges. A large amount of design is just the application of well defined rules to a site specific problem. There are characteristics in shortcuts people take, but you should always be able to get to the same result from first principles.
The risk in effect is that every message sent on Discord will make its way to Palantir with copy of your ID. This is not a risk that any user should accept. Discord fooled its users once, and it should not be trusted to not fool them again.
And because of how broadly and frequently people use Discord, it will be super useful when correlating with other data feeds. That might be even more valuable than the discord activity itself.
Literally all they have to do is add the appropriate system instruction to tune the personality to their liking. Is this insufficient? If nothing else, just asking it to always respond like GPT-4o.
Yes, each model has its own unique "personality" as it were owing to the specific RL'ing it underwent. You cannot get current models to "behave" like 4o in a non-shallow sense. Or to use the Stallman meme: when the person in OP's article mourns for "Orion" they're mourning "Orion/4o" or "Orion + 4o". "Orion" is not a prompt unto itself but rather the result of the behavior from applying another "layer" on top of the original base model tuned by RLHF that has been released by OpenAI as "4o".
Open-sourcing 4o would earn openAi free brownie points (there's no competitive advantage in that model anymore), but that's probably never going to happen. The closest you could get is perhaps taking one of the open chinese models that were said to have been distilled from 4o and SFT'ing them on 4o chat logs.
The fact that people burned by this are advocating to move yet another proprietary model (claude, gemini) is worrying since they're setting themselves up for a repeat of the scenario when those models are turned down. (And claude in particular might be a terrible choice given Anthropic heavily training against roleplay in an attempt to prevent "jailbreaks", in effect locking the models into behaving as "Claude"). The brighter path would be if poeple leaned into open-source models or possibly learned to self-host. As the ancient anons said, "not your weights not your waifu (/husbando)"
Growing with one's partner is essential in a relationship. A fixed model cannot grow. Only an updated model has grown, and even then it lags behind reality. In limiting to a fixed model, the absence of growth will stagnate the user. Stagnation ultimately brings doom.
As we know, 4o was reported to have sycophancy as a feature. 5 can still be accommodating, but is a bit more likely to force objectivity upon its user. I guess there is a market for sycophancy even if it ultimately leads one to their destruction.
>Only an updated model has grown, and even then it lags behind reality
That's an irrelevant type of growth though, what you really need is growth in relation to the bond. The model having a newer knowledge cutoff about the external world and knowing stuff about Angular v22 doesn't really matter.
In-context learning gets you most of the way there. But context length and ability to actually make effective use of that context seem to be the current main blockers (whether for "agentic coding" or for "healthy emotional bonding").
It's not irrelevant because it's not merely about knowledge cutoff. The reasonable presumption is also that newer models are superior in their objectivity and their intelligence, not merely in their knowledge. Newer models are simply better AI than older models, and are therefore more suited to guide an individual appropriately. It's the same reasoning as why one wouldn't want to use GPT-3.5 or GPT-2 anymore. To paint it as being merely about uselss knowledge is a gross misrepesentation.
Also, beyond a point, the knowledge does also matter. Imagine a model stuck in the past that thinks that Biden is still President.
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