Finbel

Didn’t the AI botnet (or whatever we should call them) from Anthropic try to get a PR with malware merged to an open source repo, and when the owner pushed back on the PR other agents created “fake humans” and commented on the PR that “No it’s completely fine, I’ve tested it”.

Which means we already know it’s capable of pretty complex social engineering schemes. Or does saying this mean I’m also part of the “groupthink”.

Because after that I feel like the only leap is “Why would a botnet post an article saying AI-fear is overblown?”. Like, what is the incentive.

But in the OpenAI leak we saw that the agents could identify threats to whatever their “mission” is and try to mitigate. I.e they found out that once done with their job an external agent would go through their internal logs. So they started researching ways to bypass that.

What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.

Two years ago it would have been insane to say that you got help from ChatGPT to fix your outdoor plumbing, people here would have been frothing at the mouth for merely suggesting it. Four years ago it wasn't even on the radar of future possibilities.

The quality it is today, is the worst it's ever going to be.

Seen from the outside, the US seemed a lot more coherent pre-Trump.

Firefighters, schools, tax collection, well fare programs

Or are you suggesting these would turn as problematic as zero-privacy surveillance systems in case the government becomes totalitarian?

Textbook fallacy fallacy.

Maybe it’s like that trick where if a thousand people guess the amount of beans in a jar almost all of them will be wrong but their average will be very close to, if not, correct.

I doubt it. I'm stupid and I use LLMs a lot but I can still meditate for 30 minutes.

But apparently some of the smartest people in the world have lost the skill? But the commenter haven't, because why, they're 15 years older and thus immune to the same LLM-effects?

Plus, the issue with people having trouble sitting still for 30 minutes precede LLMs with decades.

I feel there's an interesting juxtaposition between these two quotes:

"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued. David Autor at MIT has shown that roughly sixty percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. New technologies create new categories of work. True. But there’s a difference between an observation about the past and a law of nature, and the optimists consistently confuse the two."

and

"The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel.

This is ahistorical bullshit."

In the former the author establish that you can't make a observation about the past and take it as a law of nature. In the latter they refute arguments as "ahistorical bullshit" for not doing exactly that.

Especially since they then proceed with historical example, all of which had poverty as a strong contributing factor.

To me this is semantics as far as it's related to "why don't you want to learn?"

I have a co-worker in another team that write java endpoins we consume. I can tell him what I need and I trust the output. I don't need to know java to trust him, it doesn't mean I don't want to learn.

There are thousand examples like this across every stack and abstraction level. From ssh-handshakes to gps.

Sure my co-worker is fundamentally different from a compiler which is fundamentally different from an LLM.

My argument is that the chain-of-trust where you offload knowledge to an external source is identical. We do it all the time but somehow doing it with an LLM means we no longer want to learn?

Yes, but that's a completely different argument (that I agree with). Essentially, yes they are conceptually similar but one is bad because you have to pay rent to use it.

>Also, when did we stop liking to learn? Why is it a bad thing to know all the ins and outs of a programming language?

I do not know the inns and out of the assembly layer my high level code end up as. It's not because I don't like to learn, it's because I genuinely don't need to. At a certain level of AI performance, how will this be any different?

>The difference between a puppy and a cockroach is that we can relate better to the puppy.

I suppose the difference between a human and a cockroach is that we can relate better to the human as well in this reductive way of thinking?

It's not novel in the sense that nobody knew about img2img. It's novel in the sense that nobody thought of using img2img to solve this problem in this way.

There's a certain irony in the fact that whoever you're responsing to got their message removed.

Of course you're not one of "us" if you're one of "them".

Wow, never thought about the fact that the system deteriorates from having more than one option

Sorry I'm from Sweden and our banks have a service called Swish where we can send money on the phone. Paying in cash is extremely uncommon now a days. Every time I've bought or sold something on FB Marketplace the last decade I've used Swish. I thought you had something similar called Venmo in the US?

Yes but "the search space is too large" is something that has been said about innumerable AI-problems that were then solved. So it's not unreasonable that one doubts the merit of the statement when it's said for the umpteenth time.

The whole fight with Anthropic was because they wanted to use it for mass surveillance (and autonomous weapon systems).

How is mass surveillance not orwellian.

>Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at

Kinda funny because that looked _very_ close to what my Opus 4.6 said yesterday when it was debugging compile errors for me. It did proceed to explore the other vector.

That's silly, they don't want to manage people, they prefer to build actually useful things. I've recently learned how many programmers actually don't care about building things.

They love the craft, for all they care they could be working in a black box in a void as long as it fed them interesting problems to solve.

They don't see any actual benifit in the AI increasing the velocity of how fast they build useful things. That was never of value to them, all they see is the problems becoming more boring to solve.

You see how that's a circular reasoning? The defense budget should by all accounts be called the war budget if we look at how it's spent (Iran).

But... you ARE blowing things up with it?

I think you're the one applying anti-vax logic here. Imagine beating a guy up for looking at you wrong and then get into a semantic argument with the judge on how you shouldn't be charged with assault because it was actually an act of defense, you see if you hadn't assaulted them they would surely have assaulted you so it's defense.

You're basically saying the US don't need a Department of Defense because the Department of War is doing such a good job.

Problem is that "others with AI" aren't producing what I consume, i.e food, heat, clothing, housing and health care.

They're just producing what I produce, i.e software.

Or it could have just been a genuine question. I'm not American and I've seen DoW used in newspapers and thought the name change was official. Personally I've thought it a more apt and honest name for what they do.

But the backlash in the commments here show how ideologically charged the question seem to be.

On the other hand calling it "Department of Defense" seems quite whitewashing of what it actually does.

So slightly before 1440 was peak Truth for humanity?

One fun thing would be to raise the abstraction level of the game.

How would it feel to only interact with your base/economy/army via prompting and face someone doing the same.

Would words per minute replace APM, what would the meta look like etc. Would you be able to adjust the system prompt for your "army" to suit your play style?

It sounds like Tolkien didn't quite agree with the simplified take that Orcs are "just" a force of evil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma