alwa

Not to mention his Royal Rainbow!

To put a finer point on it: these are ideas they had long ago and already ran with…

Sometimes humans bridge the gap to carry stuff in (firmware updates, say; or data for analysis, or reference material), and the hope is that no medium allows data to flow the other way. So depending on the sloppiness of the enterprise, you might be able to get stuff in but not out.

In the Stuxnet attack, famously [0], the malware propagated via craftily-formed autorun.inf on USB sticks that ferried data into the facility. Nothing crossed the otherwise-robust air gap in the other direction, but nothing had to in that case.

Lessons have been learned since then, but this sort of possibility (electromagnetic exfiltration vector) has, for quite a long time, been taken seriously enough to inform secure facilities’ physical design [1].

[0] https://www.eweek.com/security/stuxnet-worm-nine-facts-every...

[1] e.g. https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla... , https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/information/tempest-and-electromagne...

Oh! So we’re digging a moat again, but this time an extra-super-double-good moat. With alligators. Well that’s that sorted then!

Maybe we can use AI agents to patrol the boundary for the AI agents. After all, the only thing that stops a bad guy with an AI swarm is a good guy with an AI swarm…

Ah! Of course:

> Teams of frontier-model agents were tasked with finding vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could allow them to take unauthorized actions […] Accordingly, we’ve made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to evaluate whether our frontier training and evaluation runs can proceed securely.

Thank you for the nod to Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect! I’ve been meaning to revisit it for dog’s years and now I have the impetus :) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom comes to mind, too [0]…

I think you nailed it with respect to the fading magic of scientific culture, and the power of shared purpose to gloss over social differences.

Even as a plot device, it feels like the notion that {solving material/energetic needs solves existential needs} feels of a piece with a very particular, commoditized, late-industrial type of social climate. That “tea, Earl Grey, hot” would mean the same thing every time, down to the molecule—to an appreciator of tea, no less—always struck me as a dismal proposition.

Everywhere I look, though, I feel like, as soon as one source of friction gets greased, people forge right ahead and find (or create) a new site of friction.

Food security’s largely solved? What a challenge dieting can be! Not to mention toxins and gluten and agricultural monoculture and the livestock’s moral standing!

Magic robot writes all my code for me? Filthy BigAI, limiting my tokenmaxxing strategy to only billions of words of thought per week! And they want me to pay them an amount approaching the cost of a shared desk in an office?! Plus, the robot sometimes makes mistakes that require me to eyeroll _read_ the code…

Or, more benignly: I think of my skater friends. No sooner do they nail one demanding or stupid trick, than they’re reshuffling the obstacles and pushing their flips an extra revolution. A 4-minute mile was revolutionary, now it’s routine. Everest became packaged, so the wealthy seek out lesser but unconquered peaks [1].

No, we’ll have no problem finding and inventing friction and forming ad hoc communities accordingly. To the extent the friction is collectively-initiated rather than imposed by Nature red in tooth and claw, I’d say that’s probably a blessing—just as the unifying friction of the scientific frontier is more wholesome than the unifying friction of war or siege or famine.

> But a convincing replica of art might be all we need to sabotage the real deal, either through spam or demotivating the novice artists.

I share your worry here. I try to reassure myself on both points. On spam, I tell myself that breadth-of-attention isn’t the same as quality-of-attention: I’d imagine orders of magnitude more humans know Justin Bieber’s work than have ever known Mozart’s 6th. And as far as demotivation: I tell myself the frontier has always been a lonely place to operate. Great artists famously die poor and unknown: their urge, their obsession to create, seems to be almost possessing; to irrational degrees. Most people follow, a few lead; the greats in the past did so at even higher cost than those today.

Thank you for your thoughtful writing, here and around HN. Browsing through your comments you seem completely lovely and I’d love to invite you for a meal if we ever find ourselves in the same part of the world :)

[0] in which our hero bemoans his flagging stock of Whuffie. In Kissimmee. https://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_t...

> in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented—your personal capital with your friends and neighbors—you more accurately gauged your success.

[1] e.g. https://archive.is/9nuSv (Bloomberg)

This AI analysis frustrates me in a different way than others. Mainly: is anything surprising or important about this? Why does this matter? Do these raw stock price data illuminate anything interesting about the way corporate strategists think about their options?

I don’t really know or care how accurate or rigorous the analysis is (then again I’m obviously unskilled in the art of technical trading). What I’m missing is: does anybody really care about what’s being traced here?

As a relative outsider, I assume raw stock prices to be largely indicative. That is, their informative value is relative to that particular stock over time. And thus I imagine the $1-warning thing has more to do with the exchange specifying a minimum increment, a range of resolution in which their bids and offers allow enough nuance for the market forces to do their work. If the thing’s priced at 2 cents and I can only bid 1 cent or 3 cents, that’s not super useful or informative since it involves a 50% change in value on either side.

The new and specific facet of my AI frustration here, is that, true or false or accurate or hallucinated, the analysis leaves me none the wiser about whether I’m totally off base with those priors.

My specific discomfort feels a little different from asking the article to do something beyond what it’s setting out to do—it’s more that it feels like a psychic’s “cold read.” It could exist in a world that works the way I think it does, or in a world that works any number of different ways, and it would still feel like a plausible thing for somebody to have undertaken.

Rewrite it in service of… what exactly?

I dunno—I spend a lot of time “just hanging out” with people who aren’t particularly dazzled by work or intellectual pursuits or higher education. I feel like those constitute one set of processes by which people come together and form relationships and, for those of us who are mainly familiar with that set, it can be instructive to seek out communities that form without any of those elements.

One place to look might be ministry or service. Illness, loss, grief, infirmity, death, age, family strains—people require care and people give care regardless of their postgraduate endeavors. Nuns and Jesuits and the like aren’t for everybody—but look to the neediest among us and, in large parts of the world, those sorts of order are the people doing the invisible, unglamorous, uneconomical, “chop wood, carry water” form of devotion and social labor day in and day out. In intimate community even with very difficult (and sometimes ungrateful) members.

Another might be the sort of ad hoc communities that arise in exigency: disaster, forced migration, encampments, solidarity against forces of difficulty.

Unhoused, unemployed, and retired people can provide a particularly illuminating contrast to the pastimes and concerns that animate a working life. A visible minority fill their days with addiction, but a whole lot are complete and interesting people with the full range of human ambitions and desires and fears and joys, and somehow they fill their waking hours with more than just material striving.

Another might be organizations like union halls, advocacy groups, music scenes, circus folk, jugglers, running clubs, political groups…

Kids are great for this too. They do a lot of hanging out, with nothing more than imagination and a drive to self-expression.

Even our hominid ancestors do a pretty good job of hanging out litigating social hierarchy and nurturing one another—no university degree or novel engineering task required…

I would go so far as to preserve the complete, forensically-vouched data image that the original prosecution relied on. The good, the bad, and the ugly. At the offender’s own expense, as you mention; for as long as they want to keep paying before they bring their lawsuit (or not).

If the claim is that some of the material there evidences police abuses of some sort, you can’t really let the offender pick the stuff they feel supports their claim and wipe the stuff that might weaken it.

And if there’s criminal material mixed in with the other, non-offending data that the offender claims they need, it seems like you kind of need some kind of adjudication process on an item-by-item basis.

They’ve clearly worked out a way to manage custody, access, and review for the purposes of the initial prosecution. Let the offender fund it under the same terms until they either fish or cut bait. Maybe if their claim of police abuse works out, this might be among the costs the court could award.

Contemporary reporting in the WSJ:

https://archive.is/xjSZA

Though it seems Yahoo was the more aggressive offender

For that matter, these first major examples of AI literature—like the first passable Stable Diffusion images, and the first halfway-hummable Suno jingle—have the advantage of cultural novelty. I feel like the shine is likely to come off quickly as derivative AI works multiply.

The first spatter canvas was a new conceptual move and valued more for that than for the paint and canvas; subsequent works tended to ring hollow and command neither interest nor value. The first “ChatGPT, reword this like a pirate shanty” was worth a laugh, now it’s worth an eyeroll.

For that matter, as artists and writers incorporate these new tools into their practice, there’s still a difference between low-effort slop and the products of artistic obsession. AI image gen is commoditized right into the ground, yet you can still find interesting and distinctive works in, say, Midjourney’s community galleries. Or in at least one example from TFA:

> An AI reading machine uses computer vision, OCR, and language processing to find short poetic combinations in physical books, erase the surrounding words, pair them with images, and publish new volumes.

That sure sounds like an artistically interesting endeavor to me, independently of their choice to execute their concept through AI models.

Should the innocent person not be able to afford an attorney, they can petition the court to chuck their case at a random lawyer, who's obliged to accept it. Such indigent cases tend to be compensated at a statutory rate well below what the lawyer might be accustomed to—with corresponding effects on the enthusiasm of their defense...

Then again, once the tolling infrastructure is in place and normalized, it’s all too easy to boil the frog…

Bugzilla bug in question:

https://.mozilla.org/showbug.cgi?id=2083449

And what’s more, the average human’s counterparties are exquisitely tuned to exploit the gaps in that natural endowment. But the tools to improve discernment are the same as they’ve always been, just as pushups and crunches lead to physical fitness.

I’m not sure how exactly that generalizes to LLM behavior, but to you as a human cultivating discernment, I imagine it implies that anything Internet-mediated (and unvetted by you) is less reliable than it used to be.

Same as always: Develop a healthy sense of skepticism, cultivate a stable and diverse network of sources whose credibility you understand, don’t trust what you read, and certainly don’t trust synthesis unless you know how it’s made?

Once or twice I’ve enjoyed snails flushed/fed up on green herbs and parsley. They effectively come pre-seasoned. The ones I’ve encountered have been smallish.

I understood it to be more of a finishing feed than a long-term dietary commitment on the part of the snail farmer, but both places I attended have since gone out of business. So maybe the economics are in fact against it…

As the announcement reminds us, NYC’s system has “over 150 accessible subway stations.” While there’s certainly room for improvement, I wouldn’t underrate the rest of the MTA system: the busses are all accessible and cover the same geography.

More to the point, there’s a parallel system that came out of the same lawsuit that found the subway system illegally inaccessible to people with mobility needs. Those people can use MTA-funded “Access-a-ride” service, which offers private, scheduled door-to-door transportation for the price of a subway ride. It’s a really expensive way to do it, but a remarkable lifeline for the people I know who, for example, need occasional transportation to and from medical appointments.

If only we had a technology that could classify the topic, tone, and sophistication of arbitrary natural-language conversations; you know, to sort the proofs from the furries…

I found it interesting when I felt my focus shift from the number-generating task to noticing (and responding to) the house’s guesses.

As soon as I noticed it repeating its guess, I had a good long run of adversarially avoiding that number… it’s kind of fun being on the machine side of the slot-machine-type racket!

Fridges tend to have built-in defrost cycles these days. Without that, ice builds up around the coils that ordinarily cool the compartment (and by extension the ambient moisture in the air, encouraging it to condense). And you'd have to thaw it yourself from time to time.

Boy that was a slog, to dig deep enough through the slop to find the technical details…

In retrospect @gigachad’s summary is worth as much as both articles combined, but for the Clauded technical source (with pictures!) that Ledger’s Claude-release refers to: https://www.tibane.net/research/ledger-nano-x-implant

Then again, I feel like I know industrial designers who play with building on ideas that came before, reexamining whether those ideas might have a fresh form and a place in the world today.

Who iterate and hone until they have something worth existing in today’s world—often doing do more publicly than corporations’ R&D departments—then let the patent technicalities be the well-paid lawyers’ problem…

Nothing truly new under the sun

I’m having trouble finding more background on the “science-based medicine” you refer to. Wikipedia refers to a website operated by two members of the “New England Skeptical Society.” The disambiguation link redirects to “evidence-based medicine.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science-Based_Medicine

Is this the school of thought that you mean?

I believe that was rather his point. That assertions like “ideas are getting harder to find” or “all the good ideas have already been exploited” proceed from structural misunderstandings about intellectual progress.

For what it’s worth, I felt my time reading this breezy bite-sized essay was time well-spent. I enjoy Mastroianni’s voice as well as his thinking, and I look forward to his forthcoming book on this subject.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/772441/the-stranges...

At the risk of playing to popular stereotypes, Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch (2014) comes to mind:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Against that backdrop, and treating your question as literal: sounds like they’re saying it’s a classic coordination problem, with a dash of moral superiority. If we don’t, somebody else will; we’d rather it not happen at all, but if it’s going to happen, we’d rather it be us at the wheel. Because, you know. “Good guys” and all.

Horses for courses, right? They build these entire peaker power plants to sit idle most of the time, just to handle the couple dozen or hundred hours of maximum load in the year.

4 hours at a time hopefully buys you your way through such a peak, even if it doesn’t get you through weeks at a time… and presumably you can top it up from base load after demand peaks for the day, right?

In the equatorial and desert regions they’re talking about, I think both seasonal supply changes and demand profile might be more consistent than, say, dreary cold parts of Europe..

I think the $37 might be the cost of producing the energy via solar, and it’s the grid-scale batteries that are expected to get cheaper:

> Four-hour storage reaches $120/MWh in 2026 and is forecast to fall 33% to $80/MWh by 2035, cementing its role as the enabling technology for solar and wind integration.

Cheap or not, solar isn’t dispatchable on demand, so in and of itself it doesn’t replace the role of a peaker plant. But now that the big batteries are a viable thing, solar-plus-battery is feasible to handle the parts of the demand curve that required open-cycle gas plants before.

I’d like to take a moment to praise the writing here. Rigorous, dense, and well-organized; communicative rather than coughing up tables of raw figures in prose form.

I’d refer to the source studies, but at $9,990 per region… Ms Pickerel’s overview seems plenty informative for me.

Regarding EMEA:

> Grid-scale battery storage costs are now decisively cheaper than gas peaking across the region. [and price will fall another 33% in the decade ahead]. This shift means storage is displacing open-cycle gas turbines on cost in every gas market across the region, marking a significant structural turning point for power system planning across both the Gulf and Africa.

The analyst’s bottom line:

> From Latin America to Asia Pacific, the combination of falling storage costs and world-class renewable resources is closing off the economic case for new gas peaking capacity, while long-term contracted renewables increasingly set the ceiling rather than the floor on power costs.”

Heady times! For all the gnashing of teeth about regulating our way out of combustion-based production—it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants, no arm-twisting required. “Not with a bang, but a whimper”…