> What is a “foreign national” is more what I’m wondering.
The following quoted text is from the Definitions section of 8 USC § 1101, which is reproduced at [0]. (Though, you will probably have to scroll up a bit to be able to read subsection (a)(21), which is the thing I'm linking to.)
(21) The term “national” means a person owing permanent allegiance to a state.
(22) The term “national of the United States” means (A) a citizen of the United States, or (B) a person who, though not a citizen of the United States, owes permanent allegiance to the United States.
(23) The term “naturalization” means the conferring of nationality of a state upon a person after birth, by any means whatsoever.
From this, it's fairly clear that a "foreign national" is someone owing permanent allegiance to a foreign (that is, non-US) state. What's not immediately clear to me is whether a US citizen can also be a "foreign national", [1] and how that would affect access to things from which foreign nationals are barred. [2]
EDIT: For a more official source of this information, you might be able to check out [3] and/or [4]. After examining and interacting with those pages, one might see why one might go to an unofficial source for casual inspection of this information.
A "foreign national" is any person who is not a US Citizen:
"The United States Department of State defines a “foreign national” as anyone who is not a “U.S. person.” A “U.S. person” is any one of the following: U.S. citizen; Lawful permanent resident (green card holder); and “Protected Person” i.e. political asylum holder." [0]
A foreign national is a person or organization who is not a citizen of the United States, and who is a citizen of a foreign country. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses the term "alien" to refer to a person who is not a United States citizen, and does not use the term "foreign national."[1]
Do you have a reliable citation for this claim? [0] I disbelieve that this has been happening in any substantial way in the US. I expect that at very best, they've stayed roughly as restrictive as they have been for quite a long time.
> US cops have to assume that everyone is armed.
Weird. In San Francisco, California (a city of roughly 800->900k), the regular CompStat reports [1] have this to say about the number of incidents of firearm violence (whether fatal or non-fatal) in the city:
* 2022 -> 185 incidents
* 2023 -> 162 incidents
* 2024 -> 132 incidents
* 2025 -> 101 incidents
For fun, you can slap this pretty fucking shitty Power BI dashboard [2] around to compare those numbers to the number of times cops have either threatened to shoot or have shot someone each year.
Weirdly, I'm having great difficulty finding the city's officer injury reports. In the absence of those reports, I'll assume that policing still doesn't crack the top ten most hazardous jobs in the US, and that it's still roughly as hazardous as being a groundskeeper or professional athlete.
[0] If your supporting evidence is "spooooky ghost guns", I'll laugh my way out the door.
It's pretty clear to me that gun laws have become less restrictive. Stand your ground laws and open carry have become more commeon and more normalized. Tactical rifles (i.e. semi-automatic variants of military rifles like the AR) are less restricted since the "assault weapons" bans expired or were overturned. Perhaps even more importantly, ARs have become a much more prominant part of gun culture. Openly carrying guns at protests has become more normalized (although it did exist before; e.g. many Black Panther demonstrations).
> Openly carrying guns at protests has become more normalized...
Yes. For hundreds of years, open carry has been legal just about everywhere. More people choosing to do things that have been legal for ages doesn't mean that the relevant regs have been loosened.
I do note that over the past couple of decades it has become illegal to openly carry in many places, [0] so that's a substantial increase in the restrictiveness of firearms regulation.
> Tactical rifles (i.e. semi-automatic variants of military rifles like the AR)....
By this you mean to say "semi-automatic variants of rifles designed in the last sixty five-ish years". [1]
> ...are less restricted since the "assault weapons" bans expired or were overturned.
You should look into the status of state regs on firearms possession and notice how many of them have been enacted within the past decade. You should also look into the regs on ammunition production, sale, and possession. While the regulation of ammo possession, sale, and production is not literally the regulation of firearms, a firearm without its ammo is no fun to operate, unless you're really into swinging around a very expensive, poorly-balanced club.
[0] ...among them, schools, hospitals, wherever a private business owner places a legally-conformant notice...
[1] Seriously, go look at when the AR-15 was designed and first manufactured.
> Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these.
Easier (and correct) fix: Telecoms operators should not be permitted to provide transit to a call that's routed through one of these.
> I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962...
This doesn't make sense. Even my inexpensive Mikrotik switches can augment packets with the ID of the port that they originated from. I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same. The fact that that grandma can send and receive calls tells you that both that that equipment exists and that it knows what port her phone is connected to.
The simplest phone you can attach to any POTS line in the US is the touch-tone phone. [0] It's a microphone, speaker, ringer, switch, and a DTMF tone generator. The most complicated part of this device by far is the tone generator. The line it's attached to provides the power for all of the electronics/electromechanics inside the phone... and is also responsible for activating the phone's ringer and "knowing" the status of the "on hook" switch. The most basic phone models have no memory or logic inside them of any kind.
Given these restrictions, how does one ensure that one can activate the ringer of a single phone (and connect its speaker and mic to that of the caller, and noone else) in a world where all of the human operators were replaced by electromechanical ones, which were then replaced by fully computerized ones? Once one has figured that out, how does one ensure accurate and correct determination of the calling parties, the transit networks, and the duration of the call? One needs to recover your costs, and one uses usage-based billing to do so. [1]
In order to do those things, mightn't the system that that phone is connected to have to have all of the information about the callers, the systems the call flows through, the duration of the call, etc, etc, etc?
[0] Rotary phones are even simpler than touch-tone phones because they replace the tone generator with an elecromechanical gizmo that bangs on the line when it's rotated. Because I vaguely remember hearing that some phone networks were phasing out support for rotary phones, I'm assuming that you're not guaranteed to be able to attach one and have it function.
[1] I'll only briefly mention POTS features from ~35 years ago such as "Caller ID", "Read to me out loud the phone number of my most recent caller", and "Keep calling this number for the next half hour and ring me if they pick up", which had to (and did) work with these dumb-as-bricks phones.
> I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same.
The example should rather have been some telecom carrier in Africa or India. Telco equipment is expensive, the technology is ridiculously complex and getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible. Think about it, the globally connected phone system includes countries where you get 10 GBit/s symmetric fiber in your home and it includes countries where people don't even have running water because they're so poor.
The fact that we in Western countries can have a realtime conversation with someone in the Saharan desert or in an Indian village that requires days worth of travel [1] is nothing short of a miracle.
Odd. I could have sworn that Caller ID, Customer-initiated Dialback, "Tell me the number of my most recent caller", and "Keep calling this number for the next half hour, and ring me if the call is answered" were features that were available on the POTS since the early 1990s. I agree that the tech's complex, but the R&D for the stuff I'm talking about has been over and done with for at least thirty five years. There are adult HN users who have never lived in a world without this stuff.
> ...getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible.
I don't see how that's the problem of "The West"? If it's actually a problem, instruct "Western" telecoms to send a couple-hundred-million dollars in last-gen equipment, along with the techs required to install it and let them declare its original purchase price and the full cost of the manpower as a tax credit.
> ...is nothing short of a miracle.
If we ignore the existence of long-range radio, and if this were prior to 1965 or -at latest- 1970, I might agree. But, like, we've had satellite telecommunications for nearly sixty years, terrestrial microwave transceivers for a couple of decades longer, and short- and long-wave transceivers for far, far longer than either.
Additionally... I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not uncommon to have a satellite phone in your pocket these days.
This is similar to my situation with Gentoo. Across my Gentoo systems, I have exactly one package installed from an "overlay" [0], and that's Steam. Everything else is straight out of the official package tree.
[0] ...which is -IIRC- Gentoo's term for a user-provided and entirely-unvetted collection of packages...
> ...because its security model has always been fundamentally broken...
I disagree that "These packages are provided as-is. No work has been done to determine their safety or fitness for purpose. Use at your own risk!" is a "fundamentally broken" security model. It's one that places the burden of verification and validation on the system administrator and -in the case of the AUR- fully informs them of this fact. Treating system operators like the adults that they are isn't "fundamentally broken", but it is _much_ more work for that operator than if they relied exclusively on distro-vetted packages.
I do agree that it'd be fucking silly of OP to switch away from Arch because some of the packages in the collection of packages that are explicitly provided as "as-is and unvetted" got some malware in them.
I was lucky(?) enough to have played enough RPG video games that had good stories and combat to be completely unimpressed with WoW when it came along. I got to level three or five or something, said to myself "Shit, this is boring." and never looked back.
That said, I put a ton of time into Guild Wars 2, so don't misinterpret this comment as me sneering at folks who did (or do) put a ton of time into WoW.
If you have a sizeable bucket of money, it's so, so easy to get folks so distracted by (or invested in) movie plot threats that they totally fail to (or have a "plausible" excuse to fail to) notice the actual, lasting harm that you're doing to society at scales both small and large.
If Anthropic had pushed hard and nonstop since their founding to ensure that all LLM companies in the world were legally bound to stop all LLM development the minute any one of them called for a halt to work, then I'd give their claims about safety some credit. They've been screaming about "safety" and "alignment" for years, but -because LLMs are impossible to secure against code injection- their products are fundamentally unsafe and always have been... I just don't trust their claims about a commitment to actual safety.
My read on their recent calls for a global "stop work" emergency cord is that they're very soon to (if they haven't already) reach a point where they will not be able to produce products that are sufficiently improved over the previous versions to justify the level of investment required for their development.
My prediction is that Anthropic and OpenAI will get serious barriers to entry of new competitors enshrined in Federal law, they will call for a "pause" or a "slowdown" in new research for "safety" reasons, and the US will attempt to engage in economic warfare with any countries that don't agree to force their domestic LLM companies to stop working on those LLMs.
> So because of threats to cancel their claude subscriptions and outrage from the community about the invisible guardrails, only then they decided to walk back their stance?
The possibility that the news about "fixing" the "overly aggressive" nerfing of the tool will drown out news about how mismatched the hype and the performance of Mythos and Fable is surely just a bonus.
I expect any well-informed corporate lawyer that has thought about this carefully is strongly advising that these tools not be used. When the LLM [0] barfs up some nontrivial code that's covered by the AGPL and your company's devs put it into the company's "all rights reserved" codebase -entirely unaware of its provenance- it's going to be a nightmare to come back from that.
[0] ...that Nvidia's CEO says they should be spending 50% of a senior dev's salary per seat per year on...
Oh definitely not. We're not yet solidly out of the "extremely exuberant hype" phase, so the folks that matter tend to not ask questions that dampen the mood.
Sorry to tell you friend, but LLMs have touched the vast majority of active codebases out there, whether you like it or not. You can tell yourself that you’re one of “the folks that matter” (lol) all you want, but we’re never going back.
That's what people told Ignaz Semmelweis, too, I assume. "Nothing you can do, the powers that be decided, you are a minority, you don't matter, lol!" Snickering in the shadow of what they won't confront at those who do.
Not a great analogy. A better analogy is to longbows and muskets/rifles. Longbows in the hands of a skilled user were much better weapons than early muskets, but muskets brought consistency, a lower skill floor and reduced ammunition cost. Fast forward a few hundred years and the modern incarnations of muskets make longbows look silly, and nobody would ever argue that you should go to war with longbows.
You don’t even know what we’re talking about in this thread, do you?
We’re talking about whether corporations are going to risk using LLMs in their codebase because of the theoretical legal risk that they might produce something that would fall under open source licenses, and be difficult to untangle later.
Regardless of what you think the morality is here, or what the legal situation turns out to be, this is already happening. The vast majority of corporate codebases are already “infected” by LLM outputs. Even at corporations where that’s not allowed, I promise there are devs using LLMs anyway.
It's not just about collective agreement, there's a prisoner's dilemma in there.
If some segment of engineers uses agents and outperforms engineers who don't use agents, market forces will push all other engineers to use it over time. The only way we're going back is if we get concrete evidence that engineers using agents perform worse than engineers that don't, and that evidence isn't invalidated by improved models.
> You can tell yourself that you’re one of “the folks that matter” (lol)...
kek. I'm a frequent commenter on HN. I'm definitely not one of the folks that matter.
> ...LLMs have touched the vast majority of active codebases out there...
I agree that LLM use is widespread. I disagree that LLMs have "touched the vast majority of active codebases".
Regardless, the courts are slow and Open Source licensevio cases are even slower. You seem like you'd be unaware of how terrified so many businesses are of having AGPL code deployed in their systems. In my professional experience, a great many businesses will refuse to deploy systems that contain AGPL-licensed utilities... even if those utilities are only used for internal housekeeping purposes, and whose only remote communications method is a UNIX socket used for communications with a CLI control utility that can only be used when you're SSHed into the system. If they're aware of any AGPL'd code anywhere, they will not touch it.
No amount of LLM-provider-provided indemnification can save you from license obligations you've become bound to by creating and distributing a derivative work. People who are in the know know that these tools occasionally regurgitate nontrivial portions of their input data, verbatim. Such people also know that AGPL-licensed code is absolutely in their input data. I'd wager that getting a nontrivial amount of *GPL'd code plopped into your company's "all-rights-reserved" codebase by one of these tools is more likely than the typical US driver personally being in a nontrivial automobile collision.
In the US, people go their entire lives without getting in nontrivial automobile collisions, but they usually wear their seatbelts... even prior to widely-deployed surveillance cameras. I wonder why. It seems like awful lot of boring, repetitive work for a thing that's really never going to happen to you in your lifetime.
The following quoted text is from the Definitions section of 8 USC § 1101, which is reproduced at [0]. (Though, you will probably have to scroll up a bit to be able to read subsection (a)(21), which is the thing I'm linking to.)
From this, it's fairly clear that a "foreign national" is someone owing permanent allegiance to a foreign (that is, non-US) state. What's not immediately clear to me is whether a US citizen can also be a "foreign national", [1] and how that would affect access to things from which foreign nationals are barred. [2]EDIT: For a more official source of this information, you might be able to check out [3] and/or [4]. After examining and interacting with those pages, one might see why one might go to an unofficial source for casual inspection of this information.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1101#a_21
[1] I think they can be.
[2] I'm very uncertain.
[3] <https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim...>
[4] <https://uscode.house.gov/browse/prelim@title8/chapter12/subc...>
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