nativeit

Every socialist I’ve ever met has conceded that capitalism is a great mechanism for wealth generation. Just not for much else humans might value in their societies.

That’s a good reminder: With scarce few exceptions, your job doesn’t actually care about you, companies and platforms aren’t your friends, and life is too short to waste it on assholes and sociopaths.

That depends if they routinely and cheerfully behave in objectively insane ways.

If there’s no way to be sure, then why blame Chinese operators? Because American companies have given you so many reasons to believe they’re acting in good faith?

I don’t particularly trust anyone at this point, and I assume AI traffic on my web servers are all malicious actors, and never bothered to consider what country the malicious bots came from. Mostly because I couldn’t possibly care less, but it kept happening even with geofencing and rate limits, so some American companies who own domestic IP blocks are facilitating them.

Because OpenAI and Anthropic are so virtuous and trustworthy?

I found this while looking for a good option for centralizing management and monitoring of access controls for my small hosting services now that my "staff" is expanding with things like Hermes agents. I found Teleport to be a little too enterprise-y, and didn't want to mess with any custom CA servers or DNS tricks.

This appears to be getting regular updates, the project is hosted on OVH's GitHub. Anyone have any experience with The Bastion, or have any alternatives to recommend? I'd imagine a fair many of you are vibe-coding similar utilities at this point, but I thought this struck a nice balance between shooting from the hip, and full-on enterprise access control platforms.

I'd also appreciate any advice on keeping the machines contained in their own sandbox. My work requires using agents with access to development infrastructure, and I currently keep everything behind a ZeroTier VPN with no public access allowed in/out by default (individual MCP's can request approval for one-off web searches and things like CURL requests to public URLs). I've tried to be very careful about keeping secrets off the agent's machines, and only providing them with narrowly-scoped SSH keys to other dev machines on the same subnet.

But I understand there are mechanisms for agents to escape this kind of setup, and while I'm not an AI doomer, I want to be responsible with what seems to be an increasingly powerful and potent tool. To be clear, I'm also not an AI booster. The entire industry, the people leading the largest companies, the incestuous financing, the politicking, and the shaky development of hesitant regulatory frameworks all make me deeply ambivalent. I'm just a guy trying his best to ply his trade as a freelance I.T. consultant in an increasingly uncertain environment. Hope this finds everyone well. Thanks in advance if anyone reads this and/or responds.

“…now let’s sprinkle some crack on this [homeowner], and get out of here.”

Well done.

Thanks. I have been looking forward to this. Tao's perspective is sadly absent from a lot of the debates I've seen surrounding this, even the less dogmatic and more substantial discussions. The greatest benefits of research and theory development are realized in the process, not the results. It's to our own great harm that we relegate these processes to the machines. That's not meant to suggest ignorance, only that these new tools will need to be leveraged responsibly. For those who espouse "self regulation", I believe this is one space that's appropriate and accessible for LLM providers, and I think it's sad that their first tests don't seem to suggest good faith engagement. It's never too late to do better.

Related: Two Dire Warnings, One From Terrance Tao - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49620412

New Zealand, off the top of my head. If you can’t find examples, you aren’t looking.

People were executed and/or sent to labor camps for their negligence in Chernobyl.

Seems like we routinely prosecute such crimes. If a Philly grand jury doesn’t hear any hearing felony indictments from this, then we’re ceding [even more] authority to the industry.

Did you instruct the self-driving car to explore random nearby surfaces without safety features enabled?

“I couldn’t possibly take action to save the Earth unless I get to be the only person taking action to save the Earth.”

Well that certainly tracks with what I know about these people and their twisted philosophy.

So destroy the company. What are we even talking about here? I thought this was some “extinction level threat”, and you think it’s excusable to prioritize profit and product because…why?

The primary proposed benefit of creating mirror-image organisms is as a means to mass-produce mirror-image forms of molecules that are produced by normal life. Mirror-image molecules have been studied for several decades and may offer a range of potential applications. There is broad agreement among scientists that it is important to distinguish between mirror-image molecules and whole mirror-image organisms. Some scientists argue that chemical synthesis methods are sufficient for creating mirror-image molecules without posing the potentially catastrophic risks of mirror-image organisms.

Potential applications of mirror-image molecules include:

Enantiopure drugs: Some pharmaceuticals show different activity depending on enantiomeric form.

L-ribonucleic acid aptamers: Artificial oligonucleotides that are constructed from the mirror-image versions of their natural forms. L-RNA aptamers are highly resistant to degradation by nucleases and are currently being tested in clinical trials.

L-glucose, enantiomer of standard glucose: Tests showed that it tastes likes standard sugar, but is not metabolized the same way. However, it was never marketed due to excessive manufacturing costs. More recent research allows cheap production with high yields; however the authors state that it is not usable as a sweetener due to laxative effects.

[From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror-image_life]

I’d lean into the adjacent technology that allows me to find another place to eat.

This looks like it's maybe one very particular configuration of Nextcloud, but that certainly wouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind. It seems pretty specific to personal organization, rather than a cloud app infrastructure.

These kinds of discussions very quickly arrive at the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” line of thinking. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, some activity or product you engage with will have been the result of some kind of exploitation.

Aggressive enforcement tactics certainly haven’t won the war on drugs.

I’m still baffled as to where these 100x valuations came from. Amazon’s market cap is $2.65T, and I don’t see how any AI company comes within a faint whiff of that sort of value.

I’m not really a dev, so hefty pinch of salt with this take, but doesn’t this feel like we’re just inventing new “fuzzy” regex with much more required compute?

I think I heard that we’ll be fracking with nuclear materials soon so we can harvest the tritium water as a byproduct. Does anyone know if that’s just a wild, stupid theory that will never work, or an actual idea being explored? Sounds horrifying.

Recycling plastics is a huge lie that’s caused society to perform rituals that absolve them of the horrible impact they’re inflicting on the planet.

I don’t think this kind of gaslighting is unique or new, but the AI company’s specific melange of fear-mongering, disingenuous helplessness, ethics-washing, with a handy wildcard of regulatory capture is perhaps uniquely optimized and (so far) effective.

> …if you see an emdash it’s probably AI generated…

Or, and—hear me out—the writer typed two successive hyphens on their iDevice.

This brings back some memories. I was an admin for “Millions Against Monsanto”, a group on the still-nascent Facebook. I ultimately left because the org was overtaken by conspiracy theorists who couldn’t stop yelling about aspartame and antivax nonsense long enough to focus on the very real, and very alarming, actions of Monsanto. At this point in time it was still not considered “normal” to patent biological materials. I’m a bit more pragmatic, since I’ve grown past my college idealism, but I still don’t believe seeds should be considered patentable.