lenerdenator

The problem is, some humans seem to be consistently drawn towards products or services that fit that description.

In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.

Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.

These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.

We need to see the kind of regulation of these apps and websites that you see with state gambling control boards. If you need to present ID to walk onto a casino floor, you should need one to log onto these services. Each time. You should be able to ban yourself at the device account level. The odds need to be regulated.

That, in turn, allows for people to just point at the agent as a human analog and shirk responsibility. Understand: that's the goal of a lot of people who don't have anyone's best intentions but their own in mind.

Ultimately, they do nothing without humans in the loop. The prime mover here is a person who can bear at least some legal consequence for what the program does, even if it's just having to deal with an investigation.

1) Ultimately, money means more to foreign nations than what happens with internal affairs of their trading partners

2) Accusations of genocide, whether they stand up or not, are great fodder for whataboutism discussions. Let's say the world's two largest economies, the US and China, decided to start sanctioning Israel for what's happening in Gaza. You could expect other countries to start threatening actions against the US and China over their previous or current genocidal behaviors. These are obviously not things that the US and China want to deal with.

> independent goals

AI does not have goals. These are statistical models of language patterns that people shape into different tools, and that people direct to do things. If I fire up an OpenAI prompt, and enter no input, it is not going to do anything.

No, someone at OpenAI is running the model with some sort of prompt and allowing it to just follow the numbers to do whatever it wants, up to and including breach of government computer systems.

Whether that means anything to the CFAA prosecution, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, but the use of language treating these agents like they're something other than tools at the direction of humans is bad.

It's more like me firing off a rifle into the air on the Fourth of July with no regard for where the bullet lands. I knew that it must come down somewhere, but fired anyways.

I don't really see the harm in charging someone under the CFAA. Let's see if a jury agrees with the charge or not. If not, write new laws.

I don't know if OpenAI's necessarily too big to fail. It could simply evolve and make a few changes - switch back to its original goal, fire everyone at the company who has spent more than an afternoon on Stanford's campus - and probably succeed with burning a lot less cash.

Remember, the original idea for OpenAI was to make open (thus the name) AI models that could only generate a maximum return of 100x for the investors. There was none of this hyperscaling, proprietary technologies, pure profit motive, etc. until later on.

I think it ultimately comes down to ideology. Simple financial math has nothing to do with it and never has. SV and DC, at least today, have a lot of beliefs in common. It can really be summed up as "divine right of CEOs". These are the "best and brightest" who came from the right parts of the country, who went to the right schools (even if they didn't finish their degrees), and ran in the right circles. They don't simply receive the opportunity to make unfathomable wealth and power; they're owed it. If they do something, by default, it must be right, and if a circumstance comes in their way, it's the circumstance that is wrong.

That's why you don't see a small motorcade of black Chevy Suburbans headed to these companies' headquarters from the local DHS field office. They aren't wrong; the expectation that the AI agent doesn't hack into government websites is wrong.

I was thinking maybe investigations and prison time should crush Oracle's business model.

They bought Cerner early in the decade and have whittled it down to absolutely nothing. This is a problem when the software that Cerner sold was EMRs and I have people who used to work there telling me that the perioperative and anesthesia suites now have one person working on them, and no one's fixing issues.

Web scale is old hat. We're now on planet scale.

> One reason might be the share price has collapsed and he has no confidence in it coming back (pretty scandalous if he's the CEO!)

Is it?

Scandals require consequence. He's getting a new job at Meta. It'll take lawsuits to suss all of this out and those take years.

Worth noting: CJ wasn't just the CEO, he was also board member and president.

This is what happens when you don't have effective corporate governance.

Another one to look at is the maps of Ukraine [0]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/google-maps-...

So they're dealing with the problem the rest of the country has been dealing with since everyone started wanting to move to California?

> Someone I know on Telegram found "fifty or so" Linux filesystems kernel bugs a few days ago, of which 26 were the first night while he slept; this was with Kimi which is one of the open models. He stopped it when the backlog of fixes to submit was too big, not because it wasn't finding more.

So in this anecdote, a model is presumably working on instructions from a human to complete a task.

That's what I mean by "It's unlikely that this is some AGI that spawned itself out of nothing and started doing this."

As for Altman being aware or not, well, that doesn't matter. His company's product hacked a computer belonging to an allied country's government. That means he doesn't know what he's doing. That doesn't happen if proper safety measures are in place, because if it does happen with safety measures in place, by definition, those measures aren't proper.

In saner times, this would have triggered a few black SUVs from DHS to show up at the company's headquarters to have a talk with him, likely without the public even knowing the hacking had occurred. Maybe a few days later, there'd be a press release about how Sam had decided to step down from his position and take time off. Perhaps the same would be true of other c-suiters at OpenAI. We'd just assume that investors had bought him out and wanted someone who would take a fresh approach, and wouldn't give it too much thought until a few years later when someone wrote a tell-all book about their time at OpenAI.

> At 2 a.m. Monday, June 7, 1937, Lansing police pounded on the Washburns’ door to arrest him and his wife, Nevah, but the union leader was on a train back from Detroit. His wife was home with their three young children, all under 10. Nevah was arrested and left her children with a neighbor. Several labor union leaders and their wives were rounded up that night by the Lansing Police Department.When Washburn returned to Lansing about an hour later and found out his wife was in jail, he hurried to a pay phone — he said police had cut the telephone wire outside their home before serving the warrant for their arrest — and started waking people up. He gathered with other leaders who had escaped arrest and, within the next few hours, the UAW had declared a Lansing Labor Holiday. Approximately 15,000 union members would not report to work that day to protest the arrests. The union members and their supporters took to the streets in a parade led by a gravel truck, Washburn recalled in the 1986 interview.

sigh

If it makes you feel better, this is a concept. They probably won't produce the vehicle they showed, especially since customers are making it known that they want regular buttons/door handles/HVAC vents/etc.

... probably.

> Him having control would be an improvement on the reality.

Oh, he does. It's unlikely that this is some AGI that spawned itself out of nothing and started doing this. If he were a decent person, he'd simply find a way to investigate this internally, fire the people responsible, and find a way to set up guardrails around his product.

The problem is, like most people in SV, Altman seems to have a twisted ethical compass. He doesn't see these incidents as an issue, he sees them as an opportunity. He has both the thing a bunch of Western governments want (a superhacker agent that can do dirty work) and a crisis that can be used to craft regulations that favor OpenAI and thus his bank account.

Well that's just it: we don't seem to apply laws in meaningful ways anymore.

Part of that is by design. The entire point of incorporating a business is to separate it as a legal entity from you, the person who owns/runs it.

Unless you can point to someone at OpenAI intentionally using their software to hack the Australian government's website, the best you can do is have some drawn-out proceeding where you charge OpenAI, the corporation, with some sort of crime, convict them (of what I don't know, IANAL) and fine them. Hopefully the fine is 1) large and 2) sticks through the appeals process.

There's no real mechanism to legally punish the likes of Altman and his c-suite over this.

> implying that morale mattered in the first place at Oracle

Is it, though?

If the goal is to exfiltrate data, I guess it is. If the goal is to make the people working in the FBI feel vulnerable - and pushing out this sample data would suggest that it is - I don't think it is. You could probably do the same with data from social media sites and data brokers.

It doesn't do nothing. It does make things somewhat harder to attack.

There was a time, 25-ish years ago, where exploits were thrown about like candy at a parade. The procedures you mention, along with other things, have made zero-days like these more valuable than gold.

That's assuming that the result of this will be to switch away from PeopleSoft.

The irony, of course, is that this will likely have a negative impact upon Oracle's reputation, which will have a negative impact upon its value, which will then be resolved with more RIFs.

It's okay. Larry got another island.

Hey, man, like... something's gotta fund the next game.

No, not TES VI. Starfield.

In all seriousness, I've not played Starfield, and I'm sure it's at the very least a serviceable game (at least by my Bethesda fan standards), but regardless, it wasn't the right game to make at that point in time, no matter what Todd thinks.

Prior to the release gap between TES V and TES VI, the longest gap there had been between new mainline games in that franchise was six years. They're now fifteen years deep.

Their only goal is to be more profitable.

Obsidian became a part of Bethesda, huh?

The Fallout TV show probably had to be the final straw for how much independence Bethesda gets to have. Boy, to have been a fly on the wall in that conference room.

"The TV show is doing gangbusters and you're telling me you don't have any F*CKING RELEASES IN THE CAN?!?! Stick Starfield, Todd, you're done with your 'art'."

Like everything else, "it depends".

There will be people who want to host things on-device. At some point, you could probably do most day-to-day tasks with a Siri-like agent, so you don't necessarily need it to be on a datacenter rack somewhere.

More complex tasks being run quickly opens up a choice: insanely beefy individual devices, on-prem hosting, or cloud hosting, whether that be some data center running FOSS models, or ones from people like Anthropic or OpenAI.

Beefy hardware for individual users? Not cost-effective. Could have people share that hardware by putting it in a data center. Do you want to operate that data center? For proven business cases, sure, why not? If you're still working out what your scale will be, maybe you ask the Googles, Amazons, or Microsofts of the world to rent you the hardware so you don't have wasted or too little capacity.

The real question is, how much value is there in a few companies that talk about how their eventual goal is to create AGI as opposed to just giving you enough intelligence to augment your current workers?

The answer is "probably not enough to justify more than one company having a valuation of over a trillion dollars, and that's generous".

30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.

It used to be that the goal of a company was to compete in a market and gain value through performance in that market over the long term.

In the 1990s, several CEOs, including Jack Welch, realized how exactly things work. Namely, most shares are held by retirement and pension plans who employ entire companies' worth of people to find a way to diversify and hedge, and the reporting period for their earnings is 90 days. You had major chunks of corporate capital held by people who couldn't really care less about anything other than the line going up, and any way to do so within three months was valid.

Once a company has achieved a certain market position, the long-term and non-financial aspects of holding shares (pride in the company, an interest in the market they competed in, etc.) are unimportant, and the customer's opinion stops mattering as much. You can assume that enough customers will stay around through sheer inertia no matter what you do, and that includes breaking up the company and selling it for scrap.

Since most shareholders aren't really attached to any one company's holdings, they plan for customers to leave when companies do anti-consumer things, and if a company is broken up, they just take the earnings per share on that break-up and plow it into something else that sounds like it'd be profitable.

You have to do business with people who are operating in a spot below that market position if you really want them to care about pleasing you as a customer.

Remember: Cable TV started out as ad-free.

I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free.

Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.

That's my point. ZIRP never should have happened.

Now we have a bunch of people who think that ZIRP was the norm. The industry's full of people who would not, and could not, have made their fortunes if they had to have gone to a bank to get another loan at 5% to make companies like Uber work. At some point, the answer would have been no, and they'd be just like every other failed business person instead of a member of the Cult of the Founder.

This is what lots of people forget.

Android is not a Linux desktop or server distro. It is not about you getting to put what you want on the hardware you bought for free.

Operating systems are hellaciously expensive to maintain and that only gets worse in markets with rapid hardware improvements, as the smartphone market was up until maybe the late 2010s. Google is not a charity. SV did not come into national prominence for making investors $0. There is no money in giving maybe one in one-hundred smartphone users (and that's being generous) a bunch of code, for free, so that they can put it on their gizmo and talk to their nerd friends at their hacker meetup.

When they pitched Android as "open", they meant that carriers and device makers could load it up with all of the revenue-enhancing bloat that they wanted. In return, Google got a device that would let them hoover up all of the data they could ever want in order to build better ad service profiles for those using the devices. That is, after all, their business.

For a while, this could coexist with us screwing around with a real-life tricorder. At some point, though, the free stuff turned into a revenue opportunity that had to be exploited. And so, it will be.