It would generally be the opposite, what law gives them standing to sue?
My knowledge as a non-lawyer generally agrees with above, most states won’t allow you to sue for neighbors doing something legal that decreases your property value (CA is the exception I’m aware of, and even then it’s a “sometimes” kind of thing).
I’m not even sure who they’d sue. Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things. You could sue the city to try to prevent the zoning, but sovereign immunity would preclude suing them for doing their job (zoning, in this case).
The question is about doing something illegal, such as removing a covenant that was involved in a sale when reselling? If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
The breaking of the covenant is what is being sued over.
> Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things.
If my house is zoned for a possible datacenter, that doesn't mean that anyone can build a datacenter there - it is still my house. If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
The zoning doesn't say "The land must be a datacenter."
edit: It would be bizarre if we can sue over terms of service as if they constitute law, but we couldn't sue over terms of sale. I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
> If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.
They don’t because it’s a private agreement, so only the involved parties can sue. In this case, if the original seller died then standing to sue would be inherited (I believe). If the inheritor doesn’t care, then neither does the government.
There’s also a bunch of weird edges. Like if the land just isn’t usable as a park because it’s too out of the way to be worth maintenance or building it would be insane because it’s a literal swamp, what is the city supposed to do with that? Own it and just do nothing with it in perpetuity?
> If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.
Sellers don’t get to do any zoning, the city does. You can add a covenant that says a single family home in San Francisco can only be used for fracking, despite the fact that there’s no oil and zoning wouldn’t allow it.
> I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.
No, you can’t. Or rather, you can file it, but it will be tossed out immediately. There is no tort for failing to enforce your own ToS. You might be able to sue Facebook for negligently failing to stop a user from breaking an actual law.
It’s against Facebook ToS to use a name other than your legal name on your account. How confident are you that you could win a lawsuit against Facebook because Post Malone’s account isn’t named “Austin Post”?
> Real covenants affect the landowner’s property rights and “run with the land,” meaning that future owners of the property are bound by the covenant.
Since there's a covenant on this land, the current owners are bound by it, regardless of the terms of sale they thought they were getting.
The reason that restrictions on real estate work this way is pretty simple: ownership of real estate is tracked in a giant centralized registry, so arbitrary restrictions can be recorded there.
Is this a good idea as a policy matter? Absolutely not. But we have the law we have.
Go look at their page for “covenant”, because “real covenant” is a subtype that only specifies the ways it’s different from a non-property covenant https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/covenant
Quoting from that page:
“The party capable of enforcing the covenant depends on whether the burden or the benefit runs with the land. In other words, only the party who the covenant is designed to help can enforce it.”
Your page spells out the other relevant bits. Real covenants must benefit one party at the expense of another (horizontal privity), so the heirs of the man who donated the land are the benefactors. That it helps (or at least doesn’t harm) the neighbor does not make them the benefactor here because their benefit was incidental (ie they aren’t legally “the benefactor”).
Covenants being centrally registered is a matter of convenience when house shopping, not a declaration that the state will enforce them.
I’d actually bet there are a lot of houses that have racial segregation covenants on them still because the benefactors quit trying to enforce them. I know my city has a bunch of racist laws on the books still because the city quit enforcing them ages ago, city council doesn’t want to spend time revoking laws that haven’t been used in 50 years, and no one has standing to sue to revoke them unless they get arrested for them.
> Like if the land just isn’t usable as a park because it’s too out of the way to be worth maintenance or building it would be insane because it’s a literal swamp, what is the city supposed to do with that? Own it and just do nothing with it in perpetuity?
Why would the city buy it with the original stipulation attached if that were the case? Seems dishonest (which isn't illegal), but yeah...
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law) the requirements for standing were developed in the Constitution and elaborated in some later cases. To quote from the article, the apt criteria seem to me (2 of the 3):
1. Injury-in-fact: The plaintiff must have suffered or imminently will suffer injury—an invasion of a legally protected interest that is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent (that is, neither conjectural nor hypothetical; not abstract).[44][45] The injury can be either economic, non-economic, or both.
2. Causation: There must be a causal connection between the injury and the conduct complained of, so that the injury is fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant and not the result of the independent action of some third party who is not before the court.[46]
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The best way to understand why standing was not found is to read the court's ruling. Unfortunately (but not unusually) 404Media has not linked to the judgement. (I will try to find it.) My guess (IANAL) is the injury is hypothetical or conjectural.
There was an interesting case Knife Rights v Garland (v1) where they determined you also don't have standing for imminent jeopardy if no one has done the imminent thing in decades in a way that results in criminal rather than just mere economic damages. This is why those in danger of getting a felony for interstate commerce of switchblades are unable to challenge the law because it's not considered an injury to merely have your business destroyed and your inventory seized.
There isn't a single precedent; standing and jurisdiction are like 70% of civil procedure in law school. This page is a good jumping off point: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/standing
Right, standing seems like a series of technicalities until you realize it's fundamentally what keeps judges from becoming philosopher-kings that control the entire rest of the government: judges only exercise power in actual cases and controversies between formally-identified parties.
I find that standing makes judges philosopher-kings in collusion with the rest of the government. If they don't like the plaintiff, they reject them for not having "standing". If they do like the plaintiff, they'll find standing, no matter how thin a connection they have to rely on for it.
For example, the Supreme Court case where they found standing for somebody to refuse to make a same-sex wedding web site, even though nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites. (303 Creative v Elenis)
There was no actual case. The Court invented one because they wanted the opportunity to overturn a state law, and they invented it out of whole cloth.
As opposed to the case where citizens are having their votes essentially erased because of district boundaries explicitly designed to target them. They lack standing to sue over it.
I have zero faith in "standing" as anything other than a tool for picking and choosing on ideological grounds, without having to address any facts of the matter.
> the Supreme Court case where they found standing
> nobody had actually asked for one and the person didn't even make wedding web sites
> There was no actual case
303 Creative v. Elenis started out because the web designer sought injunctive relief from a Colorado state law that would have made her unable to refuse to make a website for a same-sex wedding. She had received a request to make a wedding website (for a heterosexual couple), and preemptively wanted to preserve her right to refuse in light of the Colorado law and to put up a public-facing notice stating as much. The case was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court by the designer herself.
It doesn't read to me that any standing was "invented" here. Notably, the dissent in this 6-3 decision does not discuss standing at all; and in fact, the Tenth Circuit that decided against the designer (prior to the SC appeal) did find that she had standing.
It sounds like you have your own personal gripes with this decision, which is fair, but an attack on the grounds that there was no standing is misguided.
Lots of questions about the colloquial (mis)understading of standing, and the actual standard, so might as well reply here.
IAAL, and the legal precedent is... the doctrine of standing. The article is paywalled halfway down for me, so I don't know the particulars of the complaint, but it's presumably in state court. Either way, most state doctrines are some variant of the essential elements for Article III (federal) standing, which are 1) An injury in fact that has or will imminently occur (i.e., no speculative or indefinite injury); 2) That injury must be a direct consequence (but-for causation) of the defendant's actions or inactions; 3) The injury must be redressable by the court. "Soandso did something and I, an otherwise unconnected party, may potentially lose value on my home's resale value at some undefined point in time in the future" is the type of abstract, speculative injury that never clears the hurdle. To the extent you actually want to soak in the torment of 1Ls everywhere, Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez are your big ones.
Outside of that, you'd likely need standing created by statute to bring a claim. But standing is just a threshold question that every litigator with a brain will attack because it kills the whole thing before reaching the merits. Even if Ps had standing, the prospects of prevailing aren't great given the timing, parties, and issues involved.
IANAL, but from all the legal podcasts/commentary I consume, I get the general impression that standing is a bit of a mess and is applied in highly inconsistent ways throughout the legal system
Somewhere in all this it is crazy that the choice could be between a US company creating an AI that could doom civilization or letting China create the AI that dooms civilization. Do we want to be the first to "summon the demon" in our own fashion or let China manifest it first. Not saying this is the choice, but it would be a crazy dillema, albeit easy choice imo, if it was.
"Folks smarter than us" sometimes start from really weird starting points. Their logic from their may be flawless, better than we can do, but if their starting point is wrong, who cares? They aren't going to get wrong answers anyway. They're just going to go further extrapolating the logical consequences of the wrong starting point, and that's not really any more useful than a stupid person doing it.
Those folks are not "smarter", they are just louder. Just think independently for a few mins and its pretty easy to see why they are wrong.
For an all powerful AGI to exist, it has to basically beat the computationally irreducable processes within nature - i.e it has to simulate reality faster than reality, with a high degree of accuracy, which would imply that NP=P amongst other things.
And thats assuming that anyone has any idea to build an AI that can automatically build necessary simulations to make decisions in the first place. Such an AI is won't need data center with massive training data to be built. The "genesis" code will be something that is capable of figuring out how to go on the internet, and train itself. How do I know this? Because in order to figure out how to solve complex problems (like how to make humans give you control of the nuclear arsenal), is exactly equivalent to a problem of being able to write/read bytes to a file (assuming that file is a socket in Linux) and figuring out how to talk http to get a particular piece of data, without ever being trained on anything internet.
Even more so, there is a fundamental question of whether this genesis code is a P or NP problem in itself - i.e can we generate this code using a training data set, or can it only get created through simulated evolution, much like human brains and capacity for reasoning did IRL.
So as long as everyone keeps talking about number of parameters, transformers, attention, and benchmarks, I promise you we are safe against all powerfull AI.
Very cool. On Voyager 2 we placed a map on the side of the probe that places the position of our sun based on an array of Pulsar stars (the map was designed by Carl Sagan). I noted in the PHM movie Rocky and Dr Grace made similar 3D maps (I think they were pulsars(?)). I guess pulsars form natural beacons that can be detected at large distances.
We can get timing (rather than imaging) parallax...
> We find that with the first method a parallax with an accuracy of 20% or less can be measured up to a maximum distance of 13 kpc, which would include 9000 pulsars. By timing pulsars with the most stable arrival times for the radio emission, parallaxes can be measured for about 3600 ms pulsars up to a distance of 9 kpc with an accuracy of 20%.
This explains why so many AI chat tools suck at text selection on MacOS / iOS. They got the streaming and markdown part right … flicker free, but at the cost of text selection.
High end AI is at its most useful when you use it to replace high end human labor. You can't buy 9000 cybersec specialists on demand, but you can buy more Mythos tokens.
Then we get into all the scaling curves. Such as: LLMs getting more capable per FLOP, per byte of weights, per byte of VRAM, etc. And: inference compute getting cheaper over time.
I see a lot of "should make the industry nervous", but when you try to dig into it? It's wishful thinking, every fucking time.
As the article states, right now Anthropic does not have the compute capacity. I suppose they could charge an enormous amount of money, but if it is indeed that powerful there are folks that would pay and they would degrade everything. To make matters worse, bad actors could use it to find zero-day exploits in the power grid and banking system.
This is kind of what I already do with Claude which can employ a multitude of languages, libraries, and platforms. I write text files with detailed specs in English of what I want and Claude makes the plans which include testing regimes w datasets I have. Why do I need a less flexible tool for this?
When the IJ says it, they mean they have proof that they will stand behind of 14 examples. They decidedly aren't saying that it only happened 14 times.
It is a given that any power will be abused. However not giving power out is often worse that the abuse of power.
The real question is what do we do to detect and prevent that abuse so it is minimized. All too often people are "this person is mostly on my side so I will overlook their abuse" which is the wrong answer.
I agree but the combination giving power without doing anything to detect and prevent abuse in my opinion is worse than not giving power at all, in 100% of the situations - no exceptions. if 14 detected incidents here end up with 14 convictions and enough time in prison to deter anyone else from doing this ever again (5-10 years, per incident minimum), cool with me. it is no different than any other "law breaking" - people will people and law should be there to protect the citizens. but in our society it is obvious we cannot give power to people of authority cause whenever they abuse that power - there is either no law to charge them against or even if there is one they'd be immune to it
Yes. I don't know if this is exactly the recipe, but something akin to this could have .. no should have .. existed. Probably 1¢ is too much. Also, full public key encryption and digital signatures should be easily integrated by now as well. I know the whole trust problem ... yadda yadda ... I don't even read my email hardly at all anymore -- I want everyone that needs to get a hold of me don't rely on email.
I would be more likely to share this w others if the domain name didn't have an f-bomb in it. It doesn't bother me that much, but I really don't want to share it in certain circles...
Hey Wayne, I bought wheretheheckdidmytaxesgo.com and will make it live after work today. Sorry about the profanity! It’s just how I felt after seeing the stats firsthand :)
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