gigama

"Humans are capable of strategically deceptive behavior: behaving helpfully in most situations, but then behaving very differently in order to pursue alternative objectives when given the opportunity. If an AI system learned such a deceptive strategy, could we detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques? To study this question, we construct proof-of-concept examples of deceptive behavior in large language models (LLMs)."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566

"The detective’s request to run a DNA-generated estimation of a suspect’s face through facial recognition tech has not previously been reported. Found in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, it appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face algorithmically generated from crime-scene DNA."

"It’s really just junk science to consider something like this," Jennifer Lynch, general counsel at civil liberties nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells WIRED. Running facial recognition with unreliable inputs, like an algorithmically generated face, is more likely to misidentify a suspect than provide law enforcement with a useful lead, she argues. "There’s no real evidence that Parabon can accurately produce a face in the first place," Lynch says. "It’s very dangerous, because it puts people at risk of being a suspect for a crime they didn’t commit."

Kyle Chayka: "What I worry about is the passivity of consumption that we've been pushed into, the ways that we're encouraged not to think about the culture we're consuming, to not go deeper and not follow our own inclinations."

“There is a distinct difference between the two policies, as the former clearly outlines that weapons development, and military and warfare is disallowed, while the latter emphasizes flexibility and compliance with the law. Developing weapons, and carrying out activities related to military and warfare is lawful to various extents. The potential implications for AI safety are significant. Given the well-known instances of bias and hallucination present within Large Language Models (LLMs), and their overall lack of accuracy, their use within military warfare can only lead to imprecise and biased operations that are likely to exacerbate harm and civilian casualties.”

"If there’s one thing which probably unites all of Hackaday’s community, it’s a love of technology. We live to hear about the very latest developments before anyone else, and the chances are for a lot of them we’ll all have a pretty good idea how they work. But if there’s something which probably annoys a lot of us the most, it’s when we see a piece of new technology misused. A lot of us are open-source enthusiasts not because we’re averse to commercial profit, but because we’ve seen the effects of monopolistic practices distorting the market with their new technologies and making matters worse, not better. After all, if a new technology isn’t capable of making the world a better place in some way, what use is it? It’s depressing then to watch the same cycle repeat itself over and over, to see new technologies used in the service of restrictive practices for short-term gain rather than to make better products."

tl;dr:

* New technology should not be used to shorten the lifespan of a product

* New technology should not be used as an excuse to inhibit repairability

* New technology should not be tied to unnecessary services

* New technology should not be detrimental to the planet

Another question that troubles Olympics security watchers is how long the system should remain in place. “It is very common for governments that want more surveillance to use some inciting event, like an attack or a big event coming up, to justify it,” says Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-society organization in San Francisco. “The infrastructure stays in place and very easily gets repurposed for everyday policing.”

Reply hazy, concentrate and ask again.

The Medium article (linked) is a write up of this ~5 min video from @emilymbender. It is a very good summary of the current state of AI from a virtual roundtable convened by Congressman Scott on "AI in the Workplace: New Crisis or Longstanding Challenge?"

https://youtu.be/eK0md9tQ1KY?si=3GJx7l70SupDHmTl

In it, she clearly underlines how replacing the term “AI” with “automation” quickly opens up a whole host of useful questions: including what’s being automated, who’s automating it and why, and who’s impacted or harmed by that automation.

"...and in the darkness, bind them."

A sincere "thank you" to all the determined Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and Ents helping to keep the TOR network up and running.

"Mission: To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."

https://torproject.org

Here's a related Intercept article re: TwitX from today:

    https://theintercept.com/2023/10/27/elon-musk-twitter-purchase/

This recent PBS Frontline episode was also quite good:

    https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/elon-musks-twitter-takeover/

Full title 23 too long: GAO Report Shows the Government Uses Face Recognition with No Accountability, Transparency, or Training

(I am Jack's utter lack of surprise.)

"When searching for flights on Google, you may have noticed that each flight's carbon-emission estimate is now presented next to its cost. It's a way to inform customers about their environmental impact, and to let them factor this information into their decision-making. A similar kind of transparency doesn't yet exist for the computing industry, despite its carbon emissions exceeding those of the entire airline industry."

"Every US national election from 2016 has brought with it an additional country attempting to influence the outcome. First it was just Russia, then Russia and China, and most recently those two plus Iran. As the financial cost of foreign influence decreases, more countries can get in on the action. Tools like ChatGPT significantly reduce the price of producing and distributing propaganda, bringing that capability within the budget of many more countries."

Cost-effective propaganda at scale... keep your shields up.

tl;dr

Delayism, deflection and doomerism are some of the tactics that have replaced outright denial of climate change, says high-profile climate scientist Michael Mann. Carbon polluters delay action — either by suggesting that there’s still time or that the planet is already past the point of no return — or try to place responsibility on the individual, Mann explains. “Ironically, that framing helps the fossil fuel industry even more because it plays to this notion on the right that climate action is about controlling people’s lifestyles.”

“GAMECHANGER is an ironic name: They’re patting themselves on the back for, in the best case, figuring out what they’ve said in the past, which is pretty modest.”

Maybe a better name would be "GIGO"

"...communicating with people who are no longer with us? That is the aim of TeleAbsence, our speculative design project. We attempt to bridge the vast emotional distance caused by bereavement. To create the illusion that we are communicating and interacting with a loved one who has departed. And to discover whether this illusory communication can help soothe our grief.”

https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/teleabsence-1/overview/

[edit: added link]

I don't accept the premise of the headline. The migration hasn't failed, it's still in progress. Also, it's not just Mastodon, it's the entire Fediverse.

I bailed on the twit site when Muskrat's purchase agreement finally went through. Saw the writing on the wall and was already gone-deleted by the time he carried his sink into the lobby.

Took me awhile to find a Fediverse instance that jived, but am a happy camper now. Zero ads to scroll past. Postive interactions with people I don't really know but who are at least real humans who share mostly interesting things. Unwanted bots and agenda crap are easily muted. Posts can be set for auto-deletion which is a nice featire and comes with the same tweetdeck-style interface so nothing lost there.

Basically I have been enjoying Mastodon and don't find it addictive or outrage-inducing at all. Certainly feels like a more open and mentally healthier "virtual space" than any privately owned and profit-driven ones. So maybe it's just taking time for people to find their way out of Melon's escape room.

We are at a pivotal moment in the development of A.I. What began as a fun way to generate beautiful images and engage in entertaining conversations with hallucinating chatbots has ballooned in potential in mere months, resulting in a technology so powerful that we are now terrified of the impact it could have. So, while we continue down a capitalist path of throwing endless resources at the development of these humanlike systems at breakneck speeds, basically guaranteeing our own demise, we are also taking a moment to write, sign, and publish this very important letter that will hopefully absolve us of any responsibility for our own actions, while simultaneously allowing us to say, “It’s the government’s fault,” “I told you so,” and “¯\_(ツ)_/¯.”

Tregoning makes some good points:

"This made me reflect: if there is a section in a grant application that can be written by an AI, does that section really serve any purpose? If a computer can churn out something deeply generic that still answers the question (more or less), why are we asking people to address the question at all? I think the answer is clear: these sections never really did serve a purpose and certainly don’t now."

"I want low-engagement tasks to take up less of my working day, allowing me to do more of what I need to do to thrive (thinking, writing, discussing science with colleagues). And then, because I won’t have a Sisyphean to-do list, I’ll be able to go home earlier — because I’ll have got more of the thinking, writing and discussing done during working hours, rather than having to fit them around the edges."

"Rent-seeking [behavior] is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Thanks for these helpful links and tweaks. Customization and code sharing -- both in keeping with true hacker ethos.

Got a good chuckle from the Stylus plugin privacy policy:

"Unlike other similar extensions, we don't find you to be all that interesting. Your questionable browsing history should remain between you and the NSA. Stylus collects nothing. Period."

Agree, though rather than be annoyed I opted to have some fun. Using a browser plugin that automatically changes all occurrences of selected words in a web page I now get a snarky chuckle whenever EM is mentioned. Also works well for craven politicians and narcissistic celebrities.

"Laughter is like shock absorbers. Without it you feel every bump in the road."

"After years of development, researchers have managed to shrink two-photon microscopy into a device that can be mounted on rodents' heads without impeding behaviour."

"[The] thumb-sized two-photon fluorescence microscope... can illuminate and record living tissue at depths that are unattainable with conventional fluorescence microscopes. Weighing just 2.4 grams, the Mini2P can be attached to the head of a mouse and track the activity of hundreds, even thousands, of neurons while the animal runs, climbs and leaps from a platform."

"The Mini2P achieves 'nearly as good' resolution as a bulky bench-top two-photon system. It is also open-source, with parts lists and instructional videos available on GitHub."

https://github.com/kavli-ntnu/MINI2P_toolbox

Nym sounds like Tor with a blockchain financial incentive to keep it perpetually decentralized.

[1] https://nymtech.net/

[2] https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/reward-sharing...

Interactive map: https://native-land.ca/

API info: https://native-land.ca/our-wonderful-wily-api/

API docs: https://native-land.ca/resources/api-docs/

"Meta is asking its competitors for a wide range of insights, from their best-performing features to the names of their biggest advertisers. It wants to see all business receipts, which to its competitors is seemingly turning the antitrust litigation into a business opportunity for Meta to find out precisely how other companies attract users, scale products, and gauge success."

If the CA Federal Court doesn't squash the subpoena in its entirety, then Snap (and the other 100+ companies) should just say it couldn't identify where all the data is stored across its platform and to do so would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question.

"People think it's a big deal but it happens all the time. Most of the time the seller is a government, a county, or it is electric recycling. ... And it is a good thing because hackers are a resource to make things safer."

Hackers like him, he said, are not interested in weaponizing the weaknesses they find. "The reason you pop open the machine is to learn the vulnerabilities" of each machine, in order to safeguard democracy, he added.

Right on, Harri.

> No action is needed from you but stay alert for scams.... especially leading up to the Merge. Don’t send your ETH to anyone in an attempt to “upgrade to ETH2” as there is no ETH2 token. Once The Merge is complete, there will be no differentiation between ETH 1 and ETH 2, which have since been renamed the execution and consensus layer, respectively.

Gee if only there were a way to automagically summarize and classify research articles through an API.

Oh wait, there is...

https://openai.com/api/

Only have 1 spine and it has to last me the rest of my life so I tried these out and they feel like they actually work. Didn't even break a sweat. Seemed worth sharing here.