DharmaPolice
DharmaPolice on Hacker News
>So I'm supposed to believe that the intent of publicly announcing e.g. the HuggingFace incident was to simultaneously persuade investors that the technology will rocket ahead, and also to persuade governments that it needs to be thwarted?
No, you're not "supposed to believe" anything. I was responding to your point about it being difficult to believe (i.e. requiring mental gymnastics) that companies would try to spin a story differently for investors and the government. They do that all the time.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. SO was helpful many times but also there were many instances where I found someone asking exactly my question only to see the question was closed as a duplicate of another question which didn't have the same specific issue as I was experiencing.
It seems like their rules sometimes biased towards older questions/answers which in fast changing areas that's the wrong way round.
I don't think it takes mental gymnastics to believe that corporations want the government to believe one thing and investors another. You see the same thing in a number of other areas.
WhatsApp doesn't have any option to enable/disable encryption for standard messages that I can see. Business chat messages are not encrypted and neither are backups (by default) but if Alice messages Bob on a fresh WhatsApp install, the message is E2EE (as far as I know). Is that incorrect?
>Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?
Yes, it would be both of those things. Imagine it the other way round, you create the atom perfect copy of you (which we'll assume has all your memories, intelligence, emotions, etc) and it kills you. Is that murder? The answer would seem to be yes. So why would the reverse be any different? Because you created them? We don't give parents the right to kill children once they're born so creation doesn't give you special rights over another sapient creature. The fact you've built them to expire/vanish just feels like a method of murder, but even if not then slavery still applies.
If you're talking about a clone which somehow didn't have your brain in it's current state or capacity then it's a different question. If you could create a human being with the brain of a chicken (obviously impossible for such a creature to survive) then they wouldn't be treated like a normal human. But I think public policy would frown on creating such abominations.
Trying to access this site on my corporate Windows laptop and it was blocked "by your IT admin" (in Windows itself, not the browser/proxy). So it's already on some kind of list.
As someone who used to go clubbing a lot there was more social interconnections than you might expect. Excluding tourists most of the people you met ended up being people who knew people you knew. Men/women with behavioural issues would often get a reputation. And there was a culture (especially among women, understandably) of warning someone if it looked like they were about to hook up with someone known to have some sort of form.
When adoption of social media started to ramp up (on MySpace initially) it quickly became apparent that most of the seemingly random people you met were all on each others friends lists.
That's an interesting analogy as a lot of Factorio players feel like the game becomes fun when you gets bots (to the point where there are mods so you start the game with them).
For me, the individual placing of items gets pretty tedious. Solving nuclear power is interesting once but placing the same thing a second, third or tenth time is pretty dull.
The challenge of Factorio shifts throughout the game - initially you're worrying about individual metal plates and then you're dealing with belts full and then it's entire sections of your factory. This is why the Space Age DLC is so fun, it adds an entire new dimension of worrying about getting things between planets in a timely fashion.
Eventually the final boss is UPS (basically the performance of the game on your computer). Suddenly "the factory must grow" stops being the solution to your problems and usually makes things worse.
I don't think it ever reaches "vibe coding" levels - true, you can end up not knowing how part of your factory works but it's still a lot more active than just typing in a bunch of prompts.
That's why I said "little bit more difficult". It's additional friction for people wanting to check these things on the fly.
I agree one should be suspicious by default but the two scenarios are a bit different. Having 300k followers is an audience which an advertiser would definitely pay to access. Having 300k karma doesn't mean that anyone will listen to your next post any more than anyone else. It might prove you are "good at Reddit" in some sense (or at least, heavily invested in posting there).
>There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind.
Maybe not their state of mind but if you have access to people's betting history you can very likely identify people who are "problem gamblers", especially if you also ask them their annual income when they become a customer (I have no idea whether they do this in the US, but they do on UK sites and will suspend your account if your betting exceeds certain thresholds).
You certainly wouldn't even AI to spot people who are chasing their losses for example.
As to whether they should be obliged to care, I'm not sure. But through public policy you can make it their problem.
I suppose it depends on what the level of proof you need for your purposes. If someone is promoting Sony products at what feels like disproportionate rates then I don't necessarily want the person banned, but it would be useful to just filter that person out.
There's an additional problem that if an increasing number of people are getting their search results via AI summaries, the AI fetch bot is obviously including all this astroturfing.
There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
I feel like most of these schemes to categorise data as "public but not really" are ultimately doomed to failure. Even if you could trust every AI company in the world to respect these terms, is there anything stopping someone else indexing the data and selling them the information? I know there's copyright law but they're apparently ignoring that anyway.
Ultimately this reminds me of those really early social media profiles (before people understood privacy settings if they even existed) which would say "If you're not my friend you're not allowed to read this page".
If you don't want your content to end up in some database/archive don't publish it for the whole world to see.
Not to sound too cynical but it's extremely hard to imagine that ever passing into law in the places which need it most.
This might be naïve but wouldn't the appropriate response be to reduce access/rate limit free/new accounts in order for service to be maintained for everyone else?
I feel like pretending to be a child is cheating somewhat. Might as well print random key presses and claim it's a toddler.
I think it's more of a negative indicator. It's like turning up to a job interview wearing dirty clothes - unless you're a savant it's probably indicative that you don't give a shit or have some sort of other problems in life. But wearing clean clothes doesn't give you points because it's assumed to be the norm in that setting.
I think there's a larger problem of externalities (i.e. environmental costs) not being fairly represented in transactions. AI is just the latest and biggest symptom of this. If someone has a business process which involves generating a waste product (or utilising some resource) then that's only a problem if the cost isn't being paid by that business (and ultimately reflected in the price charged for the product/service).
Obviously that's not the whole problem - the other issue is the financial resources these companies have access to. Presumably if they wanted to, instead of pushing up the worlds prices for DRAM or electricity they could have distorted pretty much any market they wanted to given the money they have. If instead of datacentres they decided to buy the world's supply of coffee then presumably people would be paying $100 for a tin of coffee beans. You could introduce all sorts of restrictions and market controls but for me a better reform would be ensuring that they didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend in the first place.
>Except that perhaps this time AI is the tool which is actually going to do to the office what the assembly line did to the factory.
I think this is probably right, but for the people who worked on assembly lines they (or more realistically their kids) could go find an office job to do instead. It's not clear what the kids of todays office workers are going to do for employment (if anything).
I don't think "just a tool" is necessarily in opposition to regulation.
Slander isn't a crime in most places.
I do care about the Curiosity rover but I'll be honest that I only know JPL from The Martian.
It's relatively "easy" to cut pollution if you just outsource most of your manufacturing.
Ironically (or not) I've seen smoking gun attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle in a Sherlock Holmes story. (It was smoking pistol in that story). Even if that's rubbish, I think that one is common across the English speaking world. The baseball/American football stuff is a bit different. In the commonwealth we might say "Hit for six" instead of hitting it out of the park. There are a bunch of other ones related to sports more common in England like snookered, own-goal, red card, etc.
I work in a non-profit sector, if they could save money by replacing me they could use the money elsewhere where they desperately need money. So lots of people would benefit. That same principle wouldn't apply if I worked for some mega corp of course.
But the discussion was about Meta employees in general. They're heavily involved in the second type of surveillance that you alude to.
I don't think the two things are comparable. While it would be inconvenient for me personally if I was replaced by AI, it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else. The same could not be said about everyone under constant surveillance by some megacorp or the government.
It would actually be better if slot machines never paid out and 100% of their bets went to the house. Very very few people would use them. They're addictive exactly because they do pay out sometimes.
It doesn't matter if it's a fake name as it's a pubic record. Anyone is allowed to see the information.