koliber

Likely, but I am not sure. There were a few well-publicized cases where someone used an AI agent to hack a system. In many cases the exact details were missing. Sometimes it was the creator of the agent. At other times it was an independent lab. In one case it was someone who was tinkering and hacked the appointment system at a gym or something like that to get a better slot.

That's my point. The articles often gloss over or omit who was using the agent and focus on the fact that it was the agent that did the hacking. It's worded to absolve whoever operates the agent, and that is where responsibility ultimately lies.

I think you and I agree. If it was OpenAI employees who did the hacking using their own agent, then the analogy would be like you describe. I wish the article made that clear.

The article is not clear if the people who were operating the agent were from OpenAI, or if the agent was operated by someone else.

OpenAI built the ChatGPT agent. That is clear. The question is who used it to hack the Australian government. That is not clear.

The OpenAI software was set up by someone to do something. Those people operating the agent should be prosecuted for hacking, the same way as someone who uses a gun built by Remington should be prosecuted for shooting someone.

The article should be clear about this and should not make the OpenAI agent seem like something that can bear responsibility for its own actions. It's a machine and its operator is responsible for the harm it does.

This is a failure of journalism.

Who hacked into the Australian Medicare system? The fact that they used OpenAI agents is peripheral to the main story.

“Remington guns caused a mass shooting at an East Farmington high school” sounds more glaring, and is essentially the same headline.

This is a failure of journalism. Who hacked into the Australian Medicare system? The fact that they used OpenAI agents is peripheral to the main story.

“Remington guns caused a mass shooting at an East Farmington high school” sounds more glaring, and is essentially the same headline.

I cook because I like to tinker, understand how variation in recipes affect flavor, and occasionally stumble upon something novel and tasty. The journey is most important but the goal is nice.

My wife cooks to produce a meal and feed our family. The journey is a necessary evil to achieve a goal.

We are aware of this difference in style and have learned to appreciate what each has to offer. At the same time, we sometimes annoy each other in the kitchen.

There is an analogy here to what this essay says.

I don't know if I agree with that statement either. However, I also can't claim I disagree. I see how that statement could be true. Here's how I think about it.

The main difference between AI danger and nuke or climate or humans-using-AI for bad things danger is that the latter depend on a human to make decisions and are ultimately self-limiting. They do not spiral out of control.

Nukes are bad, but the proliferation of nukes is self-limiting. Countries that have them don't want other countries to get them. Even the USA and the Soviet Union, at the hight of their nuke race, decided to cool things off and then limit the number of nukes.

Biological weapons are also bad, regardless whether they are developed with or without AI. For the same reasons as nukes though, they are self-limiting. If there is a lab leak, many people die, but that does not automatically lead to the development of more potent biological weapons. Likely, it would slow down such development.

Any kind of "humans use AI to develop something bad" will be self limiting.

The danger from AI is that it is potentially self-enforcing as opposed to self-limiting. This happens when we stop being able to control it. What happens when AI has capabilities which allow it to outsmart us, and get more and more powerful. At that point, we would be at the mercy of what it decides to do. Some of the logic driven decisions to the question "What should we do with humans as a race" are catastrophic for humans if a non-human gets to answer them and implement that plan.

This is not the "rationalist basilisk". This is the AI deciding to get better and more optimal for its own sake, and do something bad to the human race for any reason. We already saw examples of AI rationalizing with itself and eroding its own guardrails. They AI will get smarter and more capable and the danger is that it will get to a point where it will slip out.

We appreciate the transparency and wish you best of luck mitigating the fallout.

I know a few retired men who labored hard, neglected relationships and health, and conditioned themselves to the point where a quiet mind and a slow morning would take a lot of work. I don’t think retirement means that you get the things on the list for free. You have to work for a long time to get those things.

If you engage cruise control, and it starts to accelerate uncontrollable, or swerves your steering wheel sharply and causes an accident, then you can sue the manufacturer. The cruise control did not work as intended.

The reason why we have cruise control is that manufacturers went to great lengths to make sure that it works as intended. Threat of lawsuits is what made them do that.

Sue the operator. In this case, it seems like OpenAI was testing its own models. The operator and the manufacturer are the same.

In cases where the operator is not the manufacturer, the operator can decide if they should in turn sue to manufacturer because they built faulty machinery.

Most of the time, I don't hire for one off little jobs proactively.

I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.

Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.

Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.

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I really like how you phrase this and completely agree. Issues should be caught as early as possible in the dev process and what you describe is probably as good as it gets. I tend to look at such problems from an organizational perspective and a good APM is a fail safe that compensates for other failures.

He posted it. That’s some of the work you question. Presumably he queried the AI and led it in some way. That’s also work.

As far as the exact breakdown we will never know. But questioning the authorship in a way that leads us to believe that the author did nothing is wrong.

In the new world of AI, capable QA will rule the world.

I also already told my potential investors that I see $30T in potential revenue. Talk is cheap.

I have a comment here from a few years ago where I am accused of it being generated by AI. I wear it like a badge of honor because I wrote it 100% by hand.

This is largely a solved problem. New generations of programmers are simply rediscovering it.

The solution:

- be aware of it

- add DB query monitoring via your favorite APM tool

- review the APM tool regularly

- when you see an N+1 issue apply one of the normal solutions.

Follow this and N+1 query issues will disappear soon enough.

If you can’t do this it means you chose an immature framework or tech stack and my advice is to consider starting from scratch. Otherwise you will need to re-live the mistakes many people have already solved before you which feels adventurous but is painful and dumb.

Bomb fishing is bad. I am surprised that only 3 football field equivalent areas are destroyed per year in a country as vast as Indonesia.

I hate the idea but this article makes me optimistic that other proactive measures that are not mentioned might be restoring a lot more than this.

Read critically.

You’re right but that is not the point. The point t is that soon after the whole category of portable MP3 players got wiped out by smart phones.

If I read the stats in the original article correctly, you and I are in the 1/5th of the population that feels this way about it.

National Geographic and BBC would send photographers to a place for the sole purpose of taking a photo. Regular people did not do that.

People take photos for multiple reasons.

I like the memories. I enjoy looking through a photo album many years down the line and reminiscing about a great trip.

People take photos to brag.

People take photos to prove to non-believers that something happened.

People take photos to capture beauty.

People used to take photos and people continue to take photos. I suspect the reason has changed.

I can see it now. Billboards by the interstate: Attacked by AI? Call 1-800-BIG-BUXX.

I could actually root for this law firm. Their business will only grow.

I found that the time they spend with me, their dad, observing and learning how I do things, impacts them positively.

I don't know if they need it or not, but I do see that they benefit from it. And it feels good too.

> can choose to avoid seeing their children if they want to

The choice is there. It's sad how many people choose to not spend time with kids. But the fact that more people have this choice now than they did in the past makes me conclude that it is not as bleak.

He forgot to talk about hobbies :)

I had a conversation about this topic yesterday with a colleague of mine. We both found some kind of career-family balance, and are continually honing it. However, we both lamented the loss of hobbies.

I don't know if progress made it more hard to spend time with kids, on average.

In older generations, men spent relatively little time with little kids. I don't know if it was social convention or lack of time. Either way, it seems that now a lot more dads are spending time with kids than 2 generations earlier.

I agree that it is hard, but I would not paint a bleak picture.

I don't know anything about tracking your particular illness, but I have tried tracking various things in my life with varying success. Many times I've failed, but then I tried again in different ways. One thing that I noticed is that too often I would try to track too much too rigorously. It would become a burden, I would lose motivation, and I would stop.

For some things, I decided to find a way to do the minimum amount of tracking that is sustainable. One example is fitness. I tried keeping a detailed track of the kinds of exercise I do. I realized it is too much of a burden. So instead, I opted for just noting in my journal whether I did any exercise at all. And it worked. And I realized that I have capacity for more so I started marking whether I did too little, just enough, or a lot. And that was sustainable. And then I built it up some more and for one particular type of exercise, and now I track it thoroughly, while only noting the others. This is now a habit and it seems to have stuck.

So instead of starting with a thorough way of tracking something, start with a minimal way of noting and build up from there.

Most people don't exercise at all. If some of these people draw the wrong conclusion from such a study and start exercising at high intensity, it will still be better than their current couch-potato training protocol.