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.

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...>

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.

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.

Sure, agreed.

> ...the technology is ridiculously complex...

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.

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.

[1] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...>

[2] <https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/published-repor...>

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.

[0] ...which is -IIRC- Gentoo's term for a user-provided and entirely-unvetted collection of packages...

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.

Wow. What I said is true and reflects the experience of a lot of people. Amazing!

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.

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.

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.

[0] ...that Nvidia's CEO says they should be spending 50% of a senior dev's salary per seat per year on...

People falling all over themselves to write docs for their pile-of-linear-algebra-with-a-smiley-face-painted-on-it [0] don't read the docs, no. People who give a shit about writing solid software that doesn't get them paged at three in the damn morning do.

[0] The face is there to provide social-trustworthiness signals to engage the human pack-bonding instinct, natch.

Yes, I agree strongly. I used "whitepaper" because I didn't want my comment to reach back before too many HN readers were born... but I generally use the term "report".

> [Isn't] "startup" ... hyped-up vocabulary for ... "unprofitable company"?

No. It's hyped-up vocabulary for "new, investor-funded company". Many are unprofitable, but they need not be. Old companies will declare themselves to be a startup company, but that's like an eighty-year-old human declaring that he's spry and flexible.

> ...the vocabulary of a particular niche becomes cool and hype-sounding when that niche starts to pull in a lot of money.

It does, yes. But there's more to it. Projects that want to generate hype because they don't stand up to careful scrutiny will invent new jargon for old concepts. This causes people who would rather deeply misunderstand something than appear to not understand something that they think their peers strongly support to fail to discover that the "new, sexy, revolutionary" thing is the same system everyone has been using, just in a new wrapper.

But most hype-dependent projects need new vocabulary for old concepts to keep people from looking too closely and maybe drawing parallels to "legacy" "unsexy" projects, so whitepapers get called "system cards" and startups get called "labs", and so on.

What I've observed is

* when Steam downloads are in progress, between four and nine logical CPUs worth of processing power on my 32-way Threadripper are being used and zero logical CPUs are running at 100%

* when EGS downloads are in progress, exactly one logical CPU on that Threadripper is pegged at 100%

It's true that you can do gigabit downloads without having a multithreaded downloader. [0] But it seems to be true that the two biggest PC-game-store clients absolutely cannot... for whatever reason. Given the prevalence of gaming machines that have CPUs with four or more logical CPUs, I expect it's not really worth the effort to make whatever Steam is doing single-threaded, or whatever single-threaded thing EGS is doing fast enough to saturate a 1gbit+ download.

[0] One widely-deployed example would be SSH/SCP.