caaqil

> An authoritarian regime is not your friend

Absolutely. In fact, the authoritarian regime already did try to force export controls on major frontier labs not long go so this isn't a theoretical.

> follow the HN commenting guidelines, specifically #1, 7 and 11

This never occurred to me, you should really think about accompanying dang on his tireless job here, and maybe even get some dough along the way. I appreciate the insightful suggestion.

> Lisp isn't difficult to read

You'd be surprised how seemingly simple things can be hard for some. As an example, it's extraordinarily difficult for some HN users to read beyond the title and try to understand the reasoning behind it, so they instead settle for showcasing their intellectual prowess by answering the question outright as if that was the thesis. It's a very smart strategy, I must say.

> It boggles me we completely forgot that the world operated like this just 4 years ago

I'd think that's what they call paradigm shift, and this probably repeated across generations from the introduction of the printing press, PC, the wheel, the internet to stochastic parrots that reduced what we still stubbornly insist require our special neurons to mere statistical modelling that can be aggressively scaled.

Back when things were sane and normal before this AI stuff, people used to complain about these things called bots and bot farms that they said were "interfering" with elections, or even "spreading misinformation" on the internet. It always puzzled me. You see, I am an intellectual, a really rational SWE and free thinker, so I would insist we correct the vocabulary: "No bot can interfere with anything," I would insist, "These are just programs written to engage and just follow template-based text posting". People and even seemingly smart policy makers kept insisting it's dangerous and could even poison discourse. But not me, for I was a rational intellectual who really knew these were nothing more than if-else and for-loops, not something that could bring down democracy or interfere with normal human discourse. They have no intent! They can't be acting or doing things on their own, they had to be directed by humans! But people never got me.

I am working on a new book along that line of reasoning now, this time focusing on why stochastic parrots can not, under any circumstance, do anything "on their own".

> Non-commenting Hacker News readers are observable

So: a) you can observe/measure the size/source of non-commenting HN readers from various proxies b) you can make claims about the intellectual status or influence of users not logged in to HN as an outsider

It's obvious that a and b are orthogonal.

This is bad. 90% of the HN front page is just pure AI slop on any given day, might be time to start adding penalties for AI stories on HN ala NSA era.

I am going to assume that life science researchers are less egotistic and less prone to anti-tech hysteria (i.e., more exposed/accustomed to the benefits of tech) unlike mathematicians who thought pen and paper was all they needed because their incredible 2-3 SD IQs was all the processing they needed and any evidence of a stochastic parrot pattern-matching aggressively faster than they could was simply cheating.

> I don't know why this popped up 13 years later

Maybe we the HN nerds are recomputing your proposed formula and quirks, and seeing it in real time, which may have worked since it's #1 now and I can prophetically reassure everyone it's gonna disappear in a few hours, per the article. Self fulfilling prophecy as they used to call it.

So let me be the resident heretic once again: 5 bucks says this is part of the drumbeat for the AI safety hysteria where so-called "experts" cosplaying as whistleblowers, EA safety cultists and friends pretend the doom is near. Convenient timing for the "leak" as well. The US military isn't exactly known for its competency or tech-savvy culture.

Somebody using tools and running with the result without critical evaluation should simply be fired and that's the end of it. No story here.

> In a more normal media ecosystem, the reactions to these cybersecurity issues would be obvious. American AI companies would reconsider doing business with Irregular, not only because of its failure to secure its systems, but because it is an Israeli firm potentially outside US oversight. Lawmakers would consider taking action against Irregular or against its American business partners, which include OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. They may consider strengthening liability against firms which instruct AI models to commit cyberattacks, and whose models then commit those cyberattacks.

The obvious point is that dealing with Israeli companies/entities by the same standards you usually deal with others is a career suicide with enormous political consequences (in the US especially). When you combine that with the opportunistic nature of the overlords that run these labs, the benefits of screaming "pace the frontier" outweigh everything.

Huh, are we sure this is just NTP shenanigans and not some super duper dangerous AI agents "escaping" the "containment"?

> This suggests pacing the advances: not training or deploying AIs without a strong safety case27 that convinces independent experts. Such a rule would also create an incentive to work out how to build AIs that are safe by design.

Has any attempt to pace AI ever succeeded? Isn't that the same philosophy that got us OAI and Anthropic? Maybe we are overthinking this, it's much simpler to let AI loose and see how much it can break the arrogance that human thinking is special.

> Don’t use AI to replace every job, from graphic designer to accountant to software developer. Place legal restrictions on (at least) large companies such that they may not use AI to replace human labor in this way.

AI is taking all of our jobs. We need to control the means, nay, the pace of production. We should build some kind of barrier, not of concrete and cement but also of the regulatory variety, to stop these agents from coming into our special white color cubicles. It's the only way.

The OP I was replying to edited the comment, so I wasn't even considering that scenario. The original comment I replied to was about islamic banking comparison (up to the Wikipedia article link), dude added the scenario after my comment.

That you think I don't understand the other supposed POV is a limitation of your own faculties.

Hacking open source infra? No, you misunderstand. This is sandbox escape, really just agents being clever and super duper dangerous. Aggressive red-teaming for free really if you think about it.

Everything is fine. Sandbox escape. We will publish a report on it. Export controls, maybe? You hear about China AI stuff? Can you imagine if they get this stuff? Wow, we need to seriously think about regulating this. When is the IPO again? Sorry, ignore that, so yes alignment and sandbox hardening is where it's at.

Everything is fine.

The mathematicians would be wise to re-read The Bitter Lesson, maybe twice a day, until it sinks in. No offense and with all due respect to the Ivory Tower Giants but the whole "oh no you ruined the game because you solved it, I was supposed to play with that in child-like wonder manner and take several years to do so, and by then I would have showed you all the trickery I did to get there and maybe that will be useful to you" over the past 2 weeks is, get this, cope.

Chess. Go. Coding. Now Math. Another one bites the dust. Let's meditate on this lest we forget: Stochastic parrots that generate the next-token cannot reason or produce anything meaningful. Let's protect our jobs at all costs, even if we have to drag all of humanity down. It can't be! Stochastic parrots can not replace the Ivory Tower. No way.

So... what's the critique here exactly? "Oh hey everybody, Paul is out touch!" - Okay, now what? Rich people are rich, that's truism. Some comments made good counter arguments but this lazy polished ad-hominem attacks are more offensive than the piece itself.

Not the point of the story at all. Read before commenting.

In the modern world: any tech proposition that starts with protection of children as a goal can be dismissed out of hand, since it's emotional manipulation masquerading as tech policy. When I hear "protect kids", all I see is a sleazy politician bowing to their respective Security State apparatus.

It's currently #1 on the front page too. HN drowning in AI slop, what a sight to behold.

You don't generally reach that level of wealth and success without at least having strong sociopathic (maybe even psychopathic) tendencies.

I will be that guy: how is this different from HN? Or the many niche subreddits that already do this? I am seriously asking.

To me, it seems like a poor version of subreddits with HN shell to wash it down.

My first reaction to the title was: "duh, selection/survivorship bias" but their counter is pretty solid:

> Firstly and perhaps most importantly, selection bias is possible because individuals who are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease may be less likely to enter or remain in memory intensive driving occupations such as taxi and ambulance driving. This could mean that the lower Alzheimer’s disease mortality observed in these occupations is not due to the protective effect of the job itself but rather because those prone to the disease may have self-selected out of such roles. However, Alzheimer’s disease symptoms typically develop after patients’ working years, with only 5-10% of cases occurring in people younger than 65 years (early onset).1114 While subtle symptoms could develop earlier, they would still most likely be after a person had worked long enough to deem the occupation to be a so-called usual occupation, suggesting against substantial attrition from navigational jobs due to development of Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, even if lifelong taxi driving selects for individuals with strong spatial processing, our findings would still suggest an interesting link between spatial processing skills and risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

If you read the news with enough cynicism, you'll realize that rules like formality, password strength or cybersecurity hygiene are for the average Joes, not the morons/perverts who run the world.

> "tangential annoyances"

It's relevant to the central argument of the article, so I don't consider it a tangent (assuming that one even cares about the so-called policy).

The author should consider smelling his own perfume, given the state and design of the site where he delivers his musings and gives us the moral lecture on not making the lives of one's customers miserable (without a hint of irony).

Instead of the ceremonial complaint and preemptive whining, why don't you consider making the argument coherently and see how people respond?

Ironically, the pointless arguments you so despise (and refuse to invite) offer more than whatever utility this comment has.

So we now have just pure marketing slop on the HN front page? How is this interesting or "curious" again? The AI slop season is affecting HN in clever ways.