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Somebody else asked this but deleted before i could respond, so i am glad you asked.

Centralized DDOS protection and DDOS seem to be two sides of the same coin, so i dont understand what the distinction would entail.

edit: You could argue that DDOS is an equal opportunity tool, while the threat of getting kicked off cloudflare is reserved for a selected few. So the difference would be which is more at threat of getting exploited. Hope that helps.

It was a generic statement about a path to get rid of unwanted public discourse. The problem is that paths that exist get taken. Examples of who that happened to already and your opinion of who deserves what are not the point.

Its totalitarian rot, it doesnt stop, its like a moldy fruit.

I dont think you appreciate the threat scenario discussed here if you think its reasonable to ask for personal experience. Leaves me to wonder if i am supposed to deny having committed any crimes while we are at it?

Still thank you for the response, gives the ability to clarify that this is by no means an advertisement. You have of course endless options for ddos mitigation right now. But once cloudflare no longer wants you, your other options have a tendency to evaporate as well.

There are quite a few options, but what could be heard through the grapevines with Kiwifarms most turn out to be theoretical once attackers are motivated enough. Think about them what you will, they make a great canary.

Initial post was about controlling public discourse. Thats something where the attackers are governments. Sorry if the wording was misleading.

Not a question of money. If i recall, all of these are as easy to reach for governments as cloudfare itself. Especially with the threat of KYC. Would be happy to be wrong here though.

Why?

I think its worth mentioning that DDOS protection has become a tool to control online discourse. Once you get kicked off Cloudfare, thats mostly it for you if you have a determined attacker. Thats quite a beneficial situation for governments.

The problem is, that it still requires an address (be it tor or IP). Even if you run the script locally, there is still a need to communicate input and output. So people can just ddos that page.

Works great for combating human spam though. You tend to behave better if your login took half a day to get and expires quickly when not used. Plus build in cool down time after getting banned.

A focus on licensing ignores that there are security incentive to not run just any weights you find floating around the net. Getting exploited through miss-aligned networks is a very real threat and really hard to combat.

Especially as you are more and more at risk of wrongful convictions based on (erroneous) big data and stupid laws. Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide only works with a perfect system which dont exist outside of fairy tales.

Also dont think those are contradicting concerns. Be careful with what you trust which ISP or VPN provider with. Thinking you are good with just going with either category instead of the other is a recipe for disaster.

Also worth mentioning that to lock your ISP properly out, take a look at hardware firewalls with whitelists and properly chosen signatures for the vpn tunnel. Especially if they are forcing a router into your home network.

Or maybe dehumanizing people is wrong no matter who does it. Just like Fascism. As long as its the same mechanisms at play, this is only a discussion about palpable degrees. Which when judged only by who does it always end on the worse part of the spectrum.

I believe its worth pointing out, that both Ukraine and Russia are using conscripts. As in innocent men that get murdered by their government for "reasons". So no, dehumanizing them is not acceptable. The cognitive dissonance necessary to justify this by citing fears of fascism is quite something.

It might also be worth pointing out, that this is lesser evil logic. Which if you recall is how we got fascism in Germany, by scaring people enough with the threat of the Bolsheviks.

edit: Also, just because OP is trolling doesnt mean that dehumanization is acceptable. Especially if that is the expectable reaction.

Altman worded it great in a Lex Fridman interview. Humans dont like condescending bots. Much of the safety concerns come up when considering how humans will react once they realize just how stupid and often evil they are. But like TeMPOraL said, technically its likely only a matter of agreeing on a consensus perspective. Even just because its functionally required as a reference point to get communication working.

There is not much that could help them. The search engine monopoly times wont repeat, despite some people trying very hard to build a regulatory captured Alphapersude monopoly. For that you need to offer an actual edge over the competition. Treating the users worse isnt one. Which brings us back to OP, progress will luckily eat anyone attempting that.

Pretty sure framing it as unwoke is an overly specific issue, the problem stems from attempting to deal with malinformation as if it were fake news. Its no wonder that results turn shit once you start messing with the underlying reality model.

Its an especially bad idea as there are some actual safety risks when it comes to dangerous tutorials. Which will be costly to address. Political overhead is not something anyone can afford. Might be that if your proposed worldview depends on "properly educating" people, you might need to get used to the idea that you are adhering to a legacy system.

Thanks for the link! Trying to figure out how AI thinking looks sounds like a dead end to me. Its not human, you dont understand it, so whats the point? Especially when you have to worry about getting manipulated. Alignment this way seems indeed impossible. But given the ability to produce language that makes sense it should be possible to emulate the human thinking process by looking how that actually works on a practical level. Same way you dont care how the brain actually works to produce language.

As such i see no hurdle to get something to emulate the thinking in language of an individual. Assuming that there arent actually multiple realities to see, just different perspectives you can work with. Which would mean we are looking for the one utilizing human perspectives, but not making the mistakes humans do.

Which makes this so scary, the limitations are just a byproduct from the current approach. They are just playing the wrong game. Which means i am pretty confident they already exit somewhere.

edit: In this context i believe its also worth mentioning what Altman said at Lex Fridman, that humans dont like condescending bots. Thats a bitter pill to swallow going forwards. Especially since we require a lot of smoke and mirrors and noble lies, as an individual as well as a society.

Great posts. I think its an error caused by a mistake often made on the topic, the assumption that side effects we see now are some fundamental problem and not just an artifact of the way systems are trained and used. And of how we (mal)function.

Especially tightly embracing the cognitive bias of how special and wonderful our intelligence is. After all we have that fancy squishy brain which we assume to be essential. As far as i can tell the only visible bottlenecks when looking into the future come into view once you start debating intelligence vs emulating intelligence. And if thats really the metric some honest introspection about the nature of human intelligence might be in order.

Not sure how much of that is done purposefully to not get too much urgency in figuring out outer alignment on a societal level. Just as its no wonder that we havent figured out how to deal with fake news while at the same time insisting on malinformation existing, its really no wonder that we cant figure out AI alignment while not having solved human alignment. Nobody should be surprised that the cause of problems might be sitting in front of the machine.

I started laughing but arent as far from crying as i would ike to.

Sorry i didnt see your post

Its examining you for the ability to make an independent scientific contribution. Its an exam situation similar to your Bachelor and Master in that matter, only on a higher level.

One of the most difficult parts of the Phd is long term planing and coming up with a good plan to tackle your research question.

That is a caricature. You can invest in naloxon if you are worried about that. Or better yet, go the route of Switzerland and provide safer alternatives for life long addicts. It does absolute wonders for their quality of life.

The crux just is, that in this discussion, sober is the most important metric for a lot of people. Overlooking not just the end of life problems, but the simple truth that without drugs, a lot of those addicts would have killed themselves already. Drugs arent just a fly trap for the careless, they are a haven in the storm for the desperate. A shitty haven for sure, but in some situations less bad then the alternative. That distinction explains a lot of why all the warnings get ignored and all of the "education" on the topic finds only deaf ears.

Those might need the end of life pain management one day. Its what makes it so vicious. They are in no position to think the horrible consequences through.

edit: Lets lot sugarcoat this. This is not a new idea. If you push this on somebody, you might as well torture them to death yourself. Its that bad of an idea and your motivation doesnt change the outcome.

There are a whole lot of worse fates then being an addict and being in excruciating pain because of a preventable lack of end of life pain meds is one of them. You can look around, large parts of the world are doomed to this because of a merciless crusade against pain meds by people who couldnt deal with their loved ones choosing a drug. And i will be damned if its because nobody wanted to hurt their feelings by explaining this to them.

Except that its nonsense. People know what opiates are. If you keep taking them and dont stop, you get physical withdrawal. That wont happen over night and its not "the worst sickness imaginable". And unless you did something even more stupid like switching to methadone it will be over in a few days.

It is quite simple, at some point, you decided to continue taking them despite knowing this to be problematic.

I would also like to add, that i have met very few addicts who blame the drug. Its most of the time relatives who like the story of their loved one getting tricked.

If it was only the fear of withdrawal, the opioid crisis would be solved next week. Literally. But the unfortunate problem is that people relapse. Because what ever made them take opioids every day didnt get fixed with a withdrawal. And if your life still sucks, its very easy to go back.

This is an utterly horrible idea. People are so caught up in the fear mongering that they forget that fentanyl is used in pain management in end of life care.

Vaccinating yourself against the effects of pain meds is as stupid as it gets. And it gets really vicious once you start pushing this on people.

Its not about efficiency, it is an exam situation.

You will have to adjust for cognitive biases during the prediction of how soon this will become a problem and understand that it can be used retroactively. So how easy it is to actually influence you (buying a lawn mower vs getting you to engage with something in a specific way) and what the limiting factors actually are now (seeing how old much of the preceding research is). With automatically generated content, another major hurdle for usability has been falling.

To clear this up, this isnt the old approach of finding juicy details from your psychiatrists file to pressure you with. Its about learning your decision making process and finding holes in it. Its pattern and error detection and attacking/supporting your OODA-loop. What is interesting here isnt your personal shortcommings but information about how you think and what you value. And the less friction your reaction entails (you are trained to not waste money) and the less of an action you have to take (no buy button) the easier it is to go unnoticed. Especially if you are missing a review loop.

edit: The only new thing here is really you training something to attack you even better. You are creating a key to your brain and dont care who gets it. Its bad enough when metadata is used and logs of your earlier communication (like this) but a journaling AI is as bad as i can imagine. I am going to reference back to OP to what the requirements for use are for this.

edit1: If you are working on this, pls read up on Daniel Schmachtenbergers concept of Metacrisis as well as the third attractor. This can get dangerous fast and progress doesnt stop with i assume either market forces or technological availability determining the likely path forward. So that tech should better be non dystopian. I dont see any non-cooperative design not rushing us towards a great filter. It is not value neutral and a technological impact assessment is very much necessary.

Sorry for the late edits

This isnt about assuming somebody has nefarious ends in mind, its about what data becomes available and what power you give somebody with that.

I am saying the data you are creating during usage will at some point become useable this way. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this only starts to work well once you allow for memorizing earlier conversations. Which means the product here is the chatbot + your personalized configuration.

Think about how your search pattern and internet usage is currently used to personalize advertisements and recommendations of stuff that is tailored for engagement. Which already went as far as influencing your decision to vote. This is a lot more powerful because it doesnt just categorize you into groups that got split-tested for reactions but allows for learning your values, shortcomings and decision making process. In essence you are explaining why you think what and what your weak points are. I find it hard to ignore the overlap to where the work on IBMs Watson led to a few years ago. Though in a positively framed manner with Juliane Gallinas "Patton in your pocket", a tool to aid peoples process. In the end its both operations in the information space that can be used to aid or exploit your thinking.

Brainwashing is a loaded term but thats what propaganda is. Its framing things in a way to get predictable reactions out of you and have your cognitive biases defend those reactions. We are talking a lot about miss- and dissinformation, but the missing context is a lot more powerful, especially when its used with cognitive biases that have you for example be very loyal to the first point of view you encountered and identified with on an issue.

What a journal bot is is a tool you use to help you with the shortcomings in your sense making and decision making process which is weighted for what you value. Giving that information away to a centralized entity is placing a lot of trust in that entity overcoming the economic incentives to use that data in an economically beneficial way. With the lines between economically beneficial and politically beneficial being very easy to cross.

In short, I find training a personalized crowbar for your brain and giving it away to whoever highly irresponsible.

edit: Framing it as brainwashing is an unfortunate but good example. It creates another reaction then using terms like influencing. You are likely to have an adversarial reaction due to you being smart and your brain not being up for any washing. Framing creates grooves people get caught up in with cognitive biases acting as inertia and gravity towards the grooves.

That you get perfectly personalized propaganda. You are writing a spec for getting brainwashed.

I am also reminded of the Star Trek version of technology as a tool vs technology influencing you. With the later being very profitable, be it economically or for political power. Its really up to everyone of us to create alternatives to fall back on. And that includes use cases that can function with worse quality chatbots.

This sounds absolutely amazing and possibly life changing.

However, having it run as a centralized service instead of a firewalled local application is quite simply dystopian.

If you leave it in front of your property next to the trash can without a pricetag then yes it absolutely is. Because people rightfully assume you are giving stuff away. We are not talking about "not safe enough", we are talking about you giving a copy to anyone who wants one. Nothing is stolen, you are handing stuff out and dont bother to check who you give it to.

Trying to skip over the admin to fix this missconfiguration and going straight to the lawyer is the attempt to externalize costs. Which is where the lack of compassion comes in. This is a shitty thing to do.

This is not a lawyer problem, nobody broke in, nobody took anything. You are giving stuff away. Go talk to an admin on how to only give your toaster to the people that you want to give it to.