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Comment by frumiousirc | Hacker News Reader

> the maximum achievable throughput is 26 bps at 1.5 m and goes down to 22 bps at 4.5 m.

And when there are more than one transmitters in real world conditions instead of anechoic chamber?

It's cool and all and if this work is for it's own sake, for the sake of research, no issues. But otherwise, I struggle to think of practical use cases. I grant that my imagination may be deficient.

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Maybe it's more of theoretical interest, e.g. the interplay between thermodynamics and information theory, etc.

Figure 9C in the paper shows testing in a wooded area. Figure 9F shows transmitted data collected in a residential building, so not a test chamber.

> I struggle to think of practical use cases.

I guess your not on Twitter. It's not a coincidence this research paper from 2022 got posted today.

What happened today ?

I think someone from OpenAI said something like "air gapping AI can't (hypothetically) work because it will figure out a way to basically morse code across the airgap". (I think this was in response to people calling them out for not airgapping)

> "air gapping AI can't (hypothetically) work because it will figure out a way to basically morse code across the airgap"

All things well-known for good two decades and written about by x-risk/LessWrong crowd, but to date continued to be dismissed as lunacy.

On one hand it's great to see it demonstrated in practice in concrete terms, on the other hand it's sad we have to basically make the mistakes ourselves, with live and close-to-dangerous systems, because we can't believe the obvious warnings.

You're likely not familiar with TEMPEST/EMSEC but this stuff was known about and discussed when designing air gaps going back to the 60s..

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

the x-risk/LessWrong crowd aren't adding anything to the conversation that seriously people haven't already considered.

I didn't mean they first invented or described the methods, but that they've been consistently presenting a solid argument that these and other methods make airgapping and sandboxing AGI a dangerously flawed idea from the start. They are the serious people who considered this, and to date nobody listens.

Well... they aren't the serious people... which is probably a good thing. You don't really want to know the serious people.

you really don't

We need a Wildfire base like in the Andromeda Strain

Less wrong gives off a give of wanker doomsday cult in general. Like they just enjoy being scared or something, but are not actually serious about anything. Like the true crime YouTube series enjoyers. That's purely vibes based of course

Yet they were much better at predicting Covid or AI than the "serious people" which dismissed these subjects until it smacked them in the face.

I'm pretty sure this is from the plot of the show Continuum.

There needs to be something on the other side to receive that morse code. Unless it's like Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect and it figures out how to rearrange matter just by modulating some electronic signal.

If you think this is a realistic possibility, you might be experiencing AI psychosis.

They were thinking of Van Eyck Phreaking

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