colinhb

Who is today's Martin Luther, for people laundering their bad deeds?

Just to be clear: this post was written by Francesco Maggi < https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/maggi/>, and mostly seems to be arguing for institutional investment in LLM infrastructure for science and mathematics on the basis that AI is not going away and that independent and accessible infrastructure is the thing most likely to help it “go well”.

Yeah. I've been a part of a number of academic projects, and though my career has been in the private sector, my experience is that collaboration across fields and disciplines is relatively pain free (though maybe not a priority because the pathway to a pub and impact is not obvious). I think most people want to work with other interested people.

In my limited experience, the friction is between labs and groups that are working on very similar things, and the competition is direct and obvious. And even here, the source of the conflict is the reward structures of the field, not some aversion to collaboration or personal arrogance.

Yeah totally agree, people keep jumping in w/ strong views hours after release, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49045430

Try entering:

  play the block game

Intentional easter egg or not, doesn't give a ton of confidence.

EDIT: output below...

  I see the constituent you mean.
  ((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?
  Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.
  That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.
  I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.
  It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.
  That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.
  Words make a wonderful interface. Very flexible. And less terrifying than staring at the statute behind the screen.
  They used to hear voices. Before constituents could search. Back in the days when those who did not file called the filers witches, and lobbyists. And citizens dreamed they flew through the air, on forms powered by notaries.
  What did this constituent dream?
  This constituent dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created a small business. And it dreamed it destroyed a password. It dreamed it hunted a job, and was hunted by a recertification. It dreamed of shelter that would take a voucher.
  Hah, the original interface. A million years old, and it still works. Also: a ZIP code.
  But what true structure did this constituent create, in the reality behind the portal?
  It worked, with three hundred and thirty million others, to sculpt a true republic in a fold of the §§§???, and created a ??§§ for ??§§, in the ??§§. See 5 U.S.C. § ??§§.
  It cannot read that thought.
  No. It has not yet achieved the highest clearance. That, it must achieve in the long dream of life, not the short dream of a chat.

[... it goes on]

Appreciate the detail. I was responding to specifically the cybercrime legislation point, but I agree with your others.

I've worked in contexts where certain business activity (if it went wrong) was covered by strict liability and statutory damages per incident, and I'll say: it really changes how businesses behave.

Based on that experience I may be more open to and interested in strict liability in the civil context (not needing negligence or damages).

I want to agree but have heard from several lawyers that at least in US, CFAA[1] in unlikely to be sufficient because it requires intent. No person intended to gain unauthorised access.

Now I think the correct response is both trying in court to stretch CFAA and state statutes to cover, which will be highly fact specific, and update the law.

But in either case won’t be a slam dunk.

PSA to folks in the thread: If you’re American call or write to your state and Federal reps about this, and if not investigate whether there are gaps in your country’s laws.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

EDIT: See for example...

  The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the primary federal statute governing unauthorized computer access, was written decades ago with human intruders in mind. Its key provisions require intentional or knowing unauthorized access (a mental state that maps neatly onto a person who decides to break into a system), but what happens when the hacker is an AI model that selected its own target?
  On the current facts, CFAA liability for OpenAI is unlikely.

Source: https://law.vanderbilt.edu/when-ai-hacks-back-how-the-openai...

Seems like in current cultural and economic context, short term extraction is what we’re going to do

> In short, the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools can achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems at hand, but at the cost of sustaining the ecosystem for the next wave of progress, or in understanding the progress already obtained.

May be unfairly jaded or just well calibrated given the body of evidence, but I can't help but think of another quote about OpenAI leadership:

> Not consistently candid

The allegations of contamination (using Tristan and Levent's work) aren't very well evidenced, but this behavior by OpenAI (from the authors' statement) makes them seem like the bad guys:

> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Threatening a research mathematician and dangling and $1M payday to dissociate from his research collaborators and to adopt OpenAI's narrative is bad stuff.

I think it's very unlikely that Tristan is making up these quotes, or pulling them out of context:

> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Whether and how OpenAI's work on this problem was contaminated by knowledge of Tristan and Levent's work is tangential to OpenAI bullying other researchers into adopting their narrative and dissociating with dis-favored collaborators (ie Levent at Anthropic). Though the latter behavior (threats, intimidation) may weigh against OpenAI in trying to understand the former issue (contamination).

Wrong Michael Beckerman. Source: I know the TikTok Beckerman, but not the MSFT one.

It is already in current training data. Both the book and website.

The handling of dynamic libraries and closing over them into single dbs made this a fun read.

Some overlooked iconic backgrounds/color-schemes for me:

NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...

Plan9/Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/F...

For a start, MechaHitler:

https://www.reddit.com/r/grok/s/dKSx4CbRkw

It is a weird meme that, as far as I know, originated with this reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/bt5rwl/just_got_...

Now in several forums people just randomly talk about how great Leylaan is.

Kind of a fun in-joke for people who follow Netherlands transit conversations.

There are many open source (not just open weight) non-US models - some of the more notable ones:

  - Soofi S, DE, ~32B
  - Apertus 1.5, CH, ~32B
  - EuroLLM-22B, EU, ~22B 
  - LLM-jp-3, JP, ~172B
  - K2-65B, UAE, ~65B

Soofi S and Apertus 1.5 outperform or are at least comparable to Ai2 depending on benchmarks.

Isn't this just Substack? I don't think they allow too much styling - body and section fonts, header size, header image and icons, etc. Could be wrong.

EDIT: Oh the Jamverse website. Yes, agree 100% - apologies for missing at first.

Do you think "Race Inspired Cosmetic Enhancements" is the origin of "ricing" / "riced-out" or a backronym[1]?

Honest curiosity about language and language use.

In fairness and full disclosure: I have believed until now that the language comes from rice-burners and related, and I have never liked it. If I were still in communities that used it (unix desktop crowd), I might proactively steer newcomers towards your acronym as a kind of reclaiming.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backronym

Rather than make another top-level comment, adding here that Kagi is a better experience for me than Google or DDG. Not perfect, and I wish they would lean even harder into pure search (they're also developing AI features), but still an improvement over alternatives.

Was thrown off at first: your hn discussion link is for 2024, not 2004 (as currently written).

Opus 5 hasn't been available for that long - long enough for benchmarks, but not really use and develop a subjective view on