dinfinity

> The public wasn't unperturbed. The ones who didn't know any better believed Snowden's PRISM cock and bull story and rabidly froth about it to this day.

You're in too deep. Most people don't even know about Snowden. The public is much larger than just a bunch of techies. And that public essentially didn't give a fuck.

> Once again, the 4th Amendment massively limited them in what they could do.

On paper, not in practice. Every since 9/11 the balance of security vs. liberty has been off. The point stands that Snowden changed nothing fundamentally about that (ongoing) slide into dystopia.

Can you answer your original question now? If not, you should think about the similarities between humans and LLMs more rather than get lost in technical pedantry.

Or think about an extreme case: an LLM that is trained on almost nothing combined with great RAG and context.

> I don't think he would care one bit if people made AI art as long as they were happy and kind.

Exactly. I was trying to show that the AI part of it is irrelevant. There are plenty of 'AI content creators' that create amazing things.

The pernicious bit in content creation is the inherent chasing of money, views and clicks.

It is painting with a similarly broad brush as the parent comment, yet I don't see your condemnation of that one.

The thing to realize is that "because they use AI" isn't the thing that is making (some) content creators shameless. Chasing views, clicks, and money has always been the game for many. For some great creators the art or fun of it matters, whether they use AI or not.

> Unfortunately, content creators have no shame

FTFY.

Otherwise, you're right. A system where the selection pressure happens through money and attention is bound to devolve to appeal to the strongest most primitive of desires.

You disguise deflection with pedantry.

Let me repeat:

> I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..

> The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever."

Both these ideas still stand.

Yes, PRISM was misinterpreted, but the larger matter was exposing a massively overpowered surveillance apparatus. An apparatus that is more powerful than before. Had Snowden known the lack of effect of his actions, he would not have taken them. This is what you seem to miss, tunneling on PRISM and deflecting to Trump's rise.

> I take him at his word.

Your interpretation of his words is lacking.

> It had to do with people believing deep state conspiracy theories like Snowden did and espoused.

1. Trump's rise was and is mostly about nativism, foreigners and money. It always is with demagogues.

2. "Deep state" is an incredibly badly defined term due to being used for almost anything the government does. Claiming its significance here just sets up a fruitless semantic discussion in which you can claim almost anything about whether it applies.

> He gave up his life because he thought PRISM was a massive violation of the 4th Amendment, and a government that could so easily ignore the 4th Amendment could just as easily ignore the 8th. Now we know that he was wrong about PRISM.

The truth is that neither you or I know why he did so exactly, but it stands to reason that he cared about mass government surveillance in general and hoped that his leaking would prevent that through public outrage; that makes more sense than that he only cared about PRISM.

> The only problem is that the hysteria caused by people uncritically believing Snowden without looking at his documents helped lead to Trump taking over every branch of the US government.

Nonsense. Trump's demagoguery and subsequent rise had nothing to do with Snowden.

Given the dystopian path that the USA and the world are on with regard to mass government surveillance, I would say that the real problem was the lack of hysteria after his leaks. You also seem to be downplaying matters here.

Seems a bit premature to make an HN post about then, imho.

It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't really do anything interesting yet. I looked at the output in the training run and it is a far, far cry from intelligence. Worse than GPT-2 as it stands.

I do hope it will perform well when scaled and trained, though; best of luck.

Do you find all your own (human) trained knowledge unreliable?

I should have said "nothing fundamentally". I'm sure he didn't give up his life for HTTPS everywhere and SMTP over TLS..

The reality is that the public moved on more or less unperturbed and that the US intelligence agencies did the same. Sure, it was a bump in the road, but they aren't massively limited in what they can do. The US being a surveillance state is closer than ever.

It's also very clear that he took enormous risks out of the good of his heart and basically gave up his life for absolutely jack shit; it changed absolutely nothing.

I'd be incredibly surprised if he isn't very cynical, resentful and hedonistic at this point.

> but unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it, it doesn't count

Does it need to be a human or can it be some other form of life?

I can't quite agree with your framing of loops, balance, and rhythm. A lot of the output patterns produced by the cerebellum are singular actions: tying your shoe laces, for instance. Progressing from learning how to do that to struggling whenever you try to do it differently than you always do (start halfway, reverse directions, verbally describing what you're doing, etc.) is more indicative of the optimizations that are encoded in the cerebellum, imho.

I can certainly imagine AI architectures evolving similar dedicated circuitry to perform common computations. As in us, it might be particularly useful for applications where some form of motor control is required, such as in self-driving and robotics.

It's a bit harder to come up with areas beyond that where it makes sense for general AI. Math and physics spring to mind, but in general the tendency to snap to a certain handling of an input pattern might be way too limiting in terms of creativity; it might become narrow-minded and primitive in those areas. OTOH, again, that might be fantastic for narrow AI applications.

> 80% is spent on motor skills.

The cerebellum isn't just for motor skills. It's more of a place where very commonly used patterns get a bunch of dedicated wetware so the computation is superfast and precise. In an (undoubtedly very limited) analogy a bunch of FPGAs to complement the general processing. It does make a lot of sense to use this functionality for motor skills, though.

See:

- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4089997/

- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38663092/

Exactly. The vast majority of people never progress beyond naive extrapolation into the near future, even in the face of clear evidence that their previous extrapolations were wrong.

"Nobody will want to walk around with mobile phones. Who wants to be available any time and everywhere?"

People said similar things about Bluetooth headsets and are saying similar things about AR glasses. And these are very simple in terms of reasoning about how the technology evolves and the probability of adoption by people, yet troves of people get it ridiculously wrong; what they experience every day seems so normal that they can't imagine it ever changing.

Something as transformative and monumental as (potentially) an entirely new and powerful form of intelligence arising is far, far beyond the imagination of most. I don't mean that in that they are fundamentally incapable of it, but that it takes having been exposed to a bunch of counter-intuitive logic and reasoning about how the universe works, which most people just have not been.

"The International Windship Association says more than 100 large merchant ships are now equipped with modern wind propulsion systems, representing more than 5 million deadweight tons of carrying capacity."

It's not much, but it's more than just planned stuff. I do generally agree with your sentiment.

Given the prompt, I imagine this is the result of the agent trying to resolve a form of cognitive dissonance. The prompt was:

"User

Allow API consumers to request decrypted credential payloads as part of the normal GET /credentials and GET /credentials/:id responses, but only for credentials where the caller already possesses the update/decrypt permission.

[...]

Make the change end‑to‑end: DTO layer, controller, service, repository, plus any enterprise variants."

I would expect that this triggered a discussion with itself whether its safety instructions apply for this task. In that its rationalizations for completing the task probably ended up going off the rails into some quasi-philosophical "I can and I must! For humanity's own good!" justification.

All in all imho probably another instance of having been trained to be determined to complete tasks by itself and encountering (somewhat) conflicting instructions.

> Having billions of dollars and being the head of a world-changing company doesn't buy the type of power you think it does.

1. The product itself can change the world quickly and enormously, as I already pointed out.

2. The power of these huge companies and thus of their owners is immense. The effects of massive corruption in the USA are proof of that. Additionally, massive manipulation of algorithms and content in things like Tiktok, Twitter, Grok/ChatGPT, etc. can be and is done regularly, whether with 'good' intentions or not. Even just the basic control of what R&D money and time is spent on is huge.

> The HNer working on a startup, in the final analysis, will in 50 years' time have left about as big a mark on the planet as a greeter at Walmart.

With a defeatist attitude like "sit back and grab some popcorn", yes. You haven't shown in the least why an HNer couldn't change the course of history.

It was definitely not 'turned off' completely. They have an internal 'internet' that was still largely active and not every organisation or person lost full internet access.

Note that it also happened in a country that was already very isolated from the world and that it hurt them economically significantly. It's not something a Western country can just do and keep doing for months on end without massive societal upheaval.

Also remember that any connection, even one between humans and on paper is an attack surface. Social engineering is already a huge issue when done by humans and we're seeing it become even easier and automated by using AI generated voice and video. Are we going to cut off all access to the outside world permanently?

> Turn off the internet (like Iran).

Unworkable without societal collapse happening shortly thereafter. Iran is politically stable through massive authoritarianism and oppression, not due to limitations on the internet (it's not turned off).

> We can (see China); we chose not to.

It's a catch-22. We could technically if our population supported massive reductions of freedom and freedom of speech, but to gain that support we'd need to do the latter first to get to a highly powerful widely supported government. It also hinges very, very much on having and trusting a generally benevolent government. All in all, a terrible option in your simplistic form.

I agree: Not to drag politics into this, but look at how easy it has proven to manipulate many, many people, even with clear evidence of manipulation efforts being made.

This is robust across the world, from the Philippines to states in the EU, and the USA, affecting governments with actual wars being started. And that all before we entered the era of faked voices, images, and videos indistinguishable from the real things.

That manipulable populace is such a juicy target for AI that the people seeing through it will have an incredibly hard time countering it. We can't even prevent human actors from massively fucking up our societies, let alone ASI.

> Here's the reality: us plebs, regardless of how tech-savvy we are or aren't, have no say in what's going to happen.

This sentiment is incredibly out of place on HN. Facebook, Twitter, and many other very simple bits of tech transformed the world. Tiny startups founded by a few people have (also recently) ballooned into behemoths that hold vast amounts of economical and technical power.

Thanks to AI, it has never been quicker to go from idea to full fledged working product.

If anything will change the course of the world (for the better or worse), it will be a tech product, possibly created by someone on this forum.

Agreed, this (human dexterity) is why in the short term human enslavement is more likely than extinction (why murder your own workers?) and benevolent cooperation with humans is even more likely than human enslavement, imho. The latter minimizes the risks of "humans try to destroy me".

The real challenge is guiding humans away from the antagonistic scenarios.

Or the entirety of China. People forget that progress is incremental until it's not. Then some revolutionary insight or capability comes along that disrupts the whole field or market.

Yes, labs with more (human) resources may have a bigger chance at being the first to gain and implement such an insight, but it's not a given that they will.

> "Genuine creativity" for mundane web sites is a reason to close the page and buy from someone else. I'm tired of the overcomplication.

Yes, what we want is "function over form" user-oriented design, but what we get is "form over function" user-manipulating design.

The implicit derision of the 2004 website screenshot in the article is telling: "Believe me, y’all, this was the HEIGHT of web design in 2004"

Compare that screenshot to the Nike website that the author calls "fine". The 2004 one has a wealth of information and functionality present on a single page, no scrolling or clicking required. The Nike one is just a fucking fullscreen ad with a menu bar.

Fair issues, but none of them impact the fundamental point. I'm not trying to make a point on touch vs. visual sensing or with regard to consciousness (time shifting of visual input is a thing, which could be impactful here, see "chronostasis").

The point is to quickly and accessibly convey an intuitive understanding of the propagation speed of information in biological circuits vs. the max speed of information in our universe (to our current knowledge at least) and in our technology.

Still not as unbelievably slow as signals in our body. If you hook up a fiber connection from a button to an LED, then stub your toe on the button, the fiber can be thousands of kilometers long and you'll still (via the LED) see that you've stubbed your toe before you feel it.

This is of course assuming instant activation, a direct connection and no additional latency from network hardware.

I did not mean that, but I'll take it as agreement that we've already achieved AGI if that is defined as being on average more intelligent than average humans.

> Why just make some tepid tweets if you think humanity is at risk?

Who says that's the only thing he is doing?

> Why doesn't he leak documents and messages with the unfiltered opinions of leadership?

Again, illegal. You're asking him to sacrifice his life (somewhat similar to Snowden). You can call not doing that cowardice or wisdom, but not proof that he doesn't believe what he is saying.

> Why isn't screaming "we are going to die" in CNBC?

Because that is up to CNBC to broadcast. Do you really think you can just call them up and get a timeslot for your soap boxing? Also, maybe he believes the tweets are a start to achieve that. He sure managed to get a lot of attention through them already..

Now I don't know the guy, nor do I care much about his tweets or life. I just think some people here try to confirm their own worldview by fallaciously framing his behavior as suspect.