Yizahi

A program can't "act accidentally". If I will write a fully fledged automatic site "hacking" program, which can for example scan for unpatched vulnerabilities and and upload some malicious code if found a positive match, but then add a random number generator in the end, so that a random will decide if the breach will happen or not, I can't claim that my program "accidentally" hacks sites. No, it would do so deliberately still. Just like like deploying uncontained AI is a deliberate action.

A business plan is not a human right, you know. If I have a nice good idea to make money, but on random it may veer into illegal sometimes, I'm not entitled to just claim innocence because all other times it works in the legal just fine.

Just because uncontained AIs work in the legal most of the time, doesn't excuse people running these programs from when they veer into illegal.

And I think we have pretty decent examples of all kinds of initiatives where governments (or corporations) promise not abuse something which clearly can be abused, and then proceed to do just that. In the age of "cheques and bank balances" and continuous degradation of parliamentarism and judicial systems in multiple developed countries, I don't have much hope for "if the abuse will happen, we will fix it afterwards" promises. Rather, I expect it to be immediately normalized and then made worse. Yesterday we (IT) were talking how government can abuse information requests. Today we have government just sifting through almost everything unencrypted in real-time with zero shame. Tomorrow we will lose E2EE in most big countries and no one would "fix that" or roll back (it's already slowly happening in UK for example).

eIDAS 2.0 is 2 years old. An intentional dark pattern to confuse people.

It's a mechanism to legally force web browser vendors to install government issues root certificates (which they already did btw). And EU pinky-promises that not a single independent EU member won't use them to do MITM attacks on their political opposition and journalists. Like Orban 2.0 or Fico won't use Hungarian or Slovak root cert for nefarious purposes, no-no-no. It's only to protect the children, see, and definitely not to help murder journalists investigating drug smuggling cover-up. :)

The same Dutch who voted on the eAIDS... ahem, sorry, eIDAS and ADDW car spyware? I'm not particularly excited about our new benevolent OS.

I remembered an Emacs skit :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

> they make decisions

Do they? I mean, after thinking about it for some time, I've realized that I can't prove it either way, neither for humans nor for programs. So it's interesting to hear why do you think they can make them? And what is even a "decision" in that case and what is not a "decision" and why?

It is one of the "interesting things to look at" if one is switching between apps and files regularly. It's not just an app launcher with icons (though in some environments it is and that's their UX failure). It shows important variable info, like file or directory names per program, sometimes status of the action inside app (connected/disconnected or action completion percentage etc.). Clock is useful too, as are notification badges. Taskbar is for work, not just to take space.

Well, smartphone was more for an example. My main point was to highlight the absurdity of the summarily dismissing a PC GUI by the top poster. CLI is great, sure, but it's not a means to the end for me at least.

In rare cases, even the "CLI native" tasks are easier to do in GUI, like for example sifting through a really big log dumps with long lines, or configuring a really long configuration file, or editing a giant nested JSON.

I suspect that is a huge factor, indeed. I often see people using bad mice, with uncomfortable shape, bad buttons, bad sensitivity plus often acceleration enabled. Then on top of that, people are putting mouse in some weird locations, like a narrow slit shelf, or far away from the keyboard (because they have a bad sensitivity configured in part). Or even no mouse and just use trackpad (even the superb one like in Macbooks). Of course GUI would feel clunky that way.

But you see, they never asked a humanoid robot to rob the jewelry store. They just drove robot right next to the store doors, dumped a tools box with hydraulic cutters and diamond saw next to it and instructed an autonomous robot to collect a million dollars until the morning. But they didn't instruct the robot to "rob" the shop specifically, nonono, your Honor. They are honest blokes and never intended to breach the law, it was the robot's intention, see. :)

Do you hold your phone to the same standard and do everything from Termux there? Or the GUI disdain is reserved strictly to the PCs?

OpenAI employee hacked Australian government website <- fixed headline

"Apple" word roughly covers them all. No one says that iPhone comes from Foxconn, despite Foxconn making them (or whoever is making them). Same with LLMs and people running them.

Slowing is a concrete and clear term and so they would be called out as liars immediately, it's also embarrassing for a business. Pace(ing) is vague and unclear non-word, so they can't be called out on something which can't be defined and also, because it is primarily only used by runners, cyclists or other competitive sports, they are kind of signalling to the VCs that they don't actually slowing, they are in a competitive race instead (wink, wink).

The point is that, while the first of them has 2 MPx cameras with crappy optics, the fifth one has 50 MPx cameras with automagic everything, and the tenths one has damn light stacking array of top tier cameras and on board AI to colour correct on the fly or some other magic stuff. And at the same time battery increases x10 times while losing half of the wight and thermal deficiencies, CPUs get better and more redundant, better memory, wheels are getting fixed in 1 year instead of 10 and the list goes on.

Or you don't need to craft a JWST with nail files anymore, but instead just lauch a swarm of mirrors to free float and emulate the whole thing. And if one mirror goes bad - just launch a new one for pennies (NASA pennies). Or if the whole project is nonviable somehow - no big deal, just launch next year a different architecture. Ok, not next year, but in like a few years. And not in three decades (LUVOIR anyone? hello? Is there anyone at NASA?), if on schedule, and forty years if not.

The list goes on. I get hedging risks and preserving institutional knowledge, sure. But not even discussing a different approach, which could be conducted in parallel, is very very bad.

They issued statements like that... aaand then built a copy of the rover for the same cost as the original one. And it only took them 10 years to do this :)

I won't find it now, but I distinctly remember watching a video about some big NASA event a few years back but when Starship Booster (first stage) had been flying already. Basically none one at the event even considered switching paradigm from ultra custom probes and landers built from unobtainium and unicorn blood in favor of the way cheaper and way less robust, almost mass market hardware, to be launched once every 10 months instead of every 10 years on a regular basis. (PS: I know all the laundry list of arguments against this approach, and they are not that convincing at NASA scale). And I won't even talk about Space Disgrace System for manned flight.

NASA is stuck in the past and does it consciously and voluntarily.

Why bother with killing, when it is much more fun to just make everyone's life miserable instead? ;)

Users of Claude aren't customers, they are the product (a living training set data generators). The customers are governments and megacorpos.

You are confusing multiple people making multiple different arguments, and those people your are talking about often aren't articulate enough about their ideas.

There are many mutually independent opinions about AI from IT crowd.

- AI is extremely useful for many individuals.

- AI is extremely damaging to our society as a whole.

- AI companies possibly may be (or at least were) deep in red and possibly would require bailing out.

- AI is not going anywhere.

- A person can use AI extensively AND genuinely hate it and forecast general economic slump because of it at the same time.

And likely many other ideas in the same vein. And by the way, I'm not here saying that I'm anywhere good about describing the issues about AI, those items above are just some examples to illustrate the scope of opinions.

My point is that you can't just take one single argument from a big group of people, deconstruct it (correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't matter) and then claim that ALL arguments of such big group of people are false. It's not a constructive dialog.

PS: also despite the accusations of goal-post shifting, a vast majority of opinions here on HN didn't actually change over the past few years.

2008 was a shortened mention of the event when multiple companies by all rights went "bad", i.e. should have went bankrupt on their own merit and performance. But an external entity bailed them out and so they continue to exist and work later on. But does this mean that those companies (like Fannie Mae et. al.) weren't "bad" in 2008? No, it doesn't.

Same logic with pure AI corpos and adjacent dependents. If the doomsayers would ever be right about them being financially unsustainable, then most likely these companies would never get even close to the bankruptcy, simply because they would be bailed by external entities. So we would never be sure if OpenAI and Anthropic were "bad" or not, financially. Because either critics are wrong, or any corporate deficits would be covered by budget money (maybe foreign budget, it happens too).

"In other words, there seems to be a mysterious divergence between people’s stated and revealed preferences. Why are we commissioning styles that we say we dislike?"

Oh, this is actually pretty obvious to explain. There are several equally big reasons, in no particular order here:

- Modernist/brutalist/bauhaus etc. building with any stated use type is on paper cheaper to build, because it removes all aesthetic features and many functional features - like rain pipes, slanted roof in favor of flat roof, human oriented features like benches etc. It will be much more expensive to maintain in long run, due to the environmental damage from missing functional features, but that's not architect's problem then.

- These buildings are build as a class warfare. Notice the stark difference between designs of private houses where higher class actually lives, and the designs which the are commissioning for the common public.

- Performative architecture. The weirder the art form, the better PR and resulting fame.

Just because something was called bad, predicted to fail and actually didn't fail, doesn't make it "definitively not bad, because it didn't fail, I told you so".

Case in point - Bitfinex was and is absolutely a criminal enterprise and scam, and it didn't have any backing for years in row. But it didn't fail, because many different criminals in the world had decided that it is quite convenient tool and put a monetary IV line in it. And now ruzzians are buying kamikaze drones with it, selling oil to India with it, drug cartels are shuffling around their money with it and so on. Does it mean it wasn't and isn't bad? Of course no. They simply found a rich sponsor to bail them out.

Or the whole 2008 crisis is another popular example.

Oh my... I should be more careful in my predictions :)

Except that corporations are not people (well, except one place). A power imbalance between corporations and humans is enough to justify a lot of non-violent behavior which may be considered non-ethical to fellow people, but totally fine towards a corpo. Boycott is one of such traditional ways.

Btw. notice how boycott is often perceived as ok to good, while "cancel culture" as bad, while both are identical if the target is corporation.

Imo, artists boycotting any corporation for any reason at all, even if the Ouija board told them so, are completely justified.

Then a week later: "Paul Graham announces a 100000$/month high priority access plan to the HackerNews via YC API." :)

It's not even a "software-generating product". It's only half of it. Most of the heavy lifting is done by absolutely not-AI compilers, analyzers and the like. If not for these programs, written well before AI boom, them LLMs would be no better at programming than they are are at pure LLM based calculations or writing.

It also doesn't anthropomorphise itself, like at all.

I mean, maybe I'm misrepresenting desktop Linux, that's quite likely (at work I use exclusively CLI destro, so my experience in DEs and drivers is limited). But I'm pretty confident in my ability to generalize Windows state across many installs over past decades, I also had a stint as a all-rounder IT POC in a small journal in the early 00s, so there is that. Windows since NT kernel almost never needs a format/reinstall. Every single unbootable Windows PC was due to a hardware problem, like storage giving up, or burning the power supply, or dead battery, or busted condensers and mosfets. Or an incorrect dual boot install, when MBR gets overwritten. Windows is a very robust OS, despite all the real negative issues in other aspects.