socializer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJjhNVpSQzw
The entire continent was basically in a constant state of flux (and perpetual wars) through most of its history, ending with WWII in the West, with the fall of the USSR in most of the Central and Eastern Europe, and then continuing with some regional score-settling in the Balkans.
And even this is a bit reductionist: Spain was a dictatorship until about 1975! How crazy is that. This is basically the recent past of the EU.
For the misery of Central and Eastern Europe specifically, "Bloodlands" by Snyder is a good book. And this gets me to my second point: I think you're veering too far into relativism. Yes, every country did some shitty things - that's the history of the world for ya - but the Russian Empire and the German / Austrian / Prussian Empire can be singled out as especially awful when you look at the past 300-500 years. Even just by the simplest metric of the number of people displaced and killed, it's many orders of magnitude worse than what anyone else has done. This distinction is important because the legacy of bloody imperialism continues on the Russian side today - beyond Ukraine - and it's most certainly not excused by the fact that, dunno, Poland occupied Moscow once.
Not obviously? In the US, there are some crimes of strict liability (you're guilty if it happened), but most require intent or at least the ability to foresee consequences (i.e., it must be shown that you neglected to take due care).
For example, you're generally not liable for freak accidents, like if a tire comes off your vehicle and kills a pedestrian, even though you're the one who set the vehicle in motion and therefore are the one most directly responsible for creating the circumstances that led to the outcome. Now, if you knew the tire had issues and you secured it with zip ties, that's another story.
I think this will get litigated to figure out where "you could not have seen this coming" ends and negligence or deliberate malice starts, but it's not black and white right now. Normally, I would say you don't want to be patient zero, but with the attitudes shown by frontier labs, I guess YOLO is the way.
You're replacing juniors with AI to save money (because again, I doubt there are velocity gains to be had at MSFT), and then you're spending money to keep junior SWEs on payroll and train them in a parallel program.
There's no way this is cheaper than just letting some junior SWEs actually do the coding on the actual projects you're building, right? And gain experience that way?
This is really what we're doing? This makes sense? Am I taking crazy pills?
1. People who decide to go on murder sprees are usually not high-functioning individuals, so even modest barriers can improve outcomes.
2. Fewer weapons in homes means fewer heat-of-the-moment acts involving these weapons. For example, there are very few firearm suicides in the EU, compared to the US.
I don't think it's useful to point out inconsistencies; the bottom line is that lasers will be on the chopping block within our lifetime too.
Which is a good thing. An important thing. The reason you're stuck in a perpetual update cycle for most Linux distros and for Windows is that they ship with an insane number of things that most users have no need for. Yeah, every laptop definitely needs NetBIOS and iSCSI and UPnP turned on by default.
It's true that everything you add on top of the OpenBSD baseline increases your attack surface, but it's a saner approach than shipping with a gigantic attack surface and then forcing you to know about and disable the things you don't need.
> Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.
Which is almost certainly a combination of the complexities of govt IT procurement, the needs of non-technical users who may only be familiar with Windows & MS Office, and the enterprise management features of Windows that aren't as good in most other OSes.
I mean, yes, but so does the author of this article. It's literally his business. The article is, in part, an advertisement for what he sells.
I disagree with Yudkowsky on almost everything and I think the philosophical movement he co-founded is a pox on the SF Bay Area tech culture, but I don't think we can deny him credibility that's comparable to the credibility of the author of this article (who, as I understand, is a young guy who spent some time at OpenAI). They both know what they're talking about and both are motivated to reach specific conclusions.
But that doesn't sound like a good argument to ride off into the sunset, right? You probably enjoy living and it does make a difference in the lives of some close friends and relatives?
We don't organize societies around ruthless efficiency optimization, we organize them to be at least somewhat hospitable to humans and human enterprise.
I see inherent value in hearing from and talking to other humans. There is, unfortunately, a lot of AI content hustlers who want to rob me of this so that they can get more links to their website, more eyeballs on their product, etc.
The answer here isn't to demand that submarine marketers and SEO dudes prompt better so that the text is more pleasant to read. It's to cordon it off wholesale. And yeah, that sucks for some corner cases, but there's nothing else we can really do.
One immediately obvious pattern you'll see is that humans not familiar with this test will have a strong aversion to generating runs of zeroes and ones. For example, you probably won't see 0-0-0-0 or 1-1-1-1 in the human-generated sample, even though it has a pretty high chance of appearing in truly random data. It just doesn't "feel" random, right?
This has a practical application: if you're building a game with a component of randomness, people will often feel that the game is unfair or biased if they lose a number of times in a row. Tetris, famously, works around this by repeatedly taking a "bag" of seven possible tiles and shuffling it, rather than picking the next tile based on a dice roll. This way, the distribution over time is still random, but you never get more than two identical tetrominoes in a row.
The real answer is that we have a culture based on heuristics that working code and coherent text equal to effort and brains. It is now possible to invest nearly-zero effort and put your name on LLM output for internet points or professional gain, so people do, and then come up with justifications for why it's OK to bend the truth.
Of course, you can use AI tools while retaining creative control, but most of the "I made this" projects we see on HN aren't that. They're people discovering a "cheat" button in the zero-sum game for attention on the internet. And it just wouldn't be getting as many upvotes / views with a full disclaimer.
With respect, I think you're doing the same thing. You picked a word to squabble about while ignoring the context of the sentence. If you take the sentence and replace "is an idiot" with "has an idiotic point", my argument isn't weakened. Neither is the argument in the original article: we make this assumption more often than we should, because the game we choose to play is to be the smartest guy or gal on the internet.
I guess the internet tests you because it exposes you to more stupidity than you might have thought existed, and some of it is engineered to keep you outraged or otherwise glued to the screen. But I think we have a choice between fewer more meaningful engagements and higher numbers of drive-by quips, and we should probably be choosing the former.
Unfortunately, it's another thing made worse by AI, because when the volume of long-form punditry is up 10x due to LLM-generated blogs and social media posts, how do you even choose what's worth engaging with? Increasingly, there's no human on the other end who cares about what you have to say. It's just karma / reach farming at a scale, and it makes no difference if you respond with a thoughtful argument or a singular "this is dumb".
Given that this appears to be a largely AI-written article, I guess it's AI being shaken by AI.
> Now basically: every single attack that's been described as "theoretical" or "far-fetched" or "only existing in the mind of a paranoid person" did actually happen.
Huh? Nothing here is theoretical or far-fetched. Hardware attacks of this sort have been documented for decades and basically part-and-parcel for most intelligence agencies, from the US govt installing backdoors in Cisco hardware to the exploding pagers for Hamas. This is not even the first hardware wallet attack documented on the internet (although it might be the largest-scale one).
It's just that hardware attacks are complicated, expensive, and risky, so they're usually done in a targeted manner. The only news here is that the crypto community painted a gigantic target on their backs by inventing a currency that can be taken from them with zero recourse, broadcasting it to the world that they own a lot of it, and then buying cheap hardware from overseas retailers to "protect" their assets. So all of sudden, it was profitable and relatively low-risk to cast a wider net.
It's fascinating in the sense that we're discovering from first principles why the financial system works the way it does. The damage caused by cryptocurrencies has been really pretty staggering, for little real benefit.
I have zero difficulty accepting that they're using conversation logs, probably anonymized and then chopped so that they can claim it's no longer user data and that it can't be tracked back to a specific chat. And yes, sometimes, a single piece of text is enough to move the needle, especially when it comes to some exotic, sparse topics.
That said, functionally, they're more or less a restatement of the halting problem, essentially "if the halting problem was a sequence of numbers". Also see Godel's incompleteness. A bit mind-blowing that you have sequences of integers you can't "know" (i.e., compute or verify), but that's about it. There's no chance of this being useful in the system of mathematics we have today.
Maybe you weren't a part of it, but I don't think any of us gets to disclaim "association".
Now, we only have ourselves to blame: we built this technology, we enthusiastically embraced it and one-upped each other by showing how much we can vibecode. And now, we're queasy about what comes next.
In my view, probably nothing pretty. I suspect we might wake up in a society that looks much like how it used to: cancer still not cured, poverty and hunger not solved, but now with tech jobs that pay less and suck more because you're just thoughtlessly babysitting agents and are a lot more replaceable in that role.
> “I bought a house through an app called Open-something and now I don't know if I own a home or a model checkpoint.”
I don't even know what this means. No human has read this and thought to themselves "this is a funny joke, let's keep it". Or how about this:
> “I tried to make a restaurant reservation and accidentally fine-tuned a language model. OpenFatigue finally made me feel seen.”
...or this:
> “My open-source project got forked into a closed product called OpenMyProject. Now I just lie on the floor.”
This is another example of "Claude make me a joke website for HN points", with zero effort behind it. There's so much real, human work in the /new queue, and we upvote this...
But more to the point, there's plenty of grocery stores that ask 20% more than their competitors and are doing just fine; in fact, constant price changes and promotions make it impossible for consumers to really compare if Safeway is cheaper than Whole Foods, so people usually go to the place that's physically closer, has better selection, or better vibes. I can't even know if a 12-pack of Coca-Cola is going to be $6.99 or $9.99 today.