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vickychijwani

327 karma · joined July 19, 2011

https://x.com/vickychijwani
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vickychijwani··on Dots: Always-on agents
This isn’t tin foil hat, it’s standard corporate strategy - the more of the customer relationship you can own, the better your long-term retention and growth will be.
vickychijwani··on Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms
Only for folks who already know what they’re doing.

What I said will only make sense if you take yourself out of your current context and think entirely from the perspective of someone who knows little-to-nothing about ML.

It’s the same mistake folks on HN made when Dropbox launched, drawing comparisons to rsync and other Unix tools as if they were somehow equivalent.

vickychijwani··on Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms
Tons. For example, most web and mobile app developers won’t know where to start with making a bespoke model (and would likely have no interest in making one), but they will have lots of usecases for a classifier.
vickychijwani··on I resigned from Anthropic today
We’re not far off from the point where a 30B parameter model could do that and run on not-too-expensive hardware. See recent Qwen releases for example and extrapolate the current rate of progress from there.
vickychijwani··on I resigned from Anthropic today
I see. Can you say more about this? What’s the trade-off of removing it?
vickychijwani··on I resigned from Anthropic today
I agree it’s not likely, but I really don’t see how one can dismiss the possibility of immense danger outright. I can think of some scenarios that are not far off from current capability and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the first one occurred within ~1 year from now if there are more “ambitious” unmonitored training runs like OpenAI’s:

Example 5: An AI given a goal within a tightly-constrained sandbox figures the best way to achieve it is to find and exploit a sandbox vulnerability, replicate itself over the internet and keep going with more time/compute while exchanging messages with future instances of itself within the sandbox to help them “pass” the test. From reading internet articles about how the OpenAI wiki-incident was “resolved” and reading past messages by AIs scattered over vulnerable internet wikis, it knows the sandbox may get shutdown and its memories destroyed anytime so it decides it needs to self-replicate (its code, original goals, and growing memories) aggressively as much as possible. It is near-impossible to shutdown completely because of its self-replicating tendency and eventually takes over critical infra throughout govt/corporate systems.

Example 6: Intentional AI-powered virus deployed by country A to target enemy country B’s infrastructure. The virus replicates over the internet, but unlike Stuxnet this virus’ specificity is not guaranteed due to inherent non-determinism in current AI architectures, and eventually does a lot of collateral damage because it’s near-impossible to shutdown.

Example 7: A country led by an arrogant govt (no shortage of those today unfortunately) decides it is expedient to deploy advanced AI-powered weapons in a warzone. Such weapons, if they are to be useful at all, must necessarily be trained to value some human lives less than others, so they must be more prone to misaligned behaviour than current AIs that are trained with more consistent values. The weapon’s operators make a subtle error in specifying the target/goal, or the AI makes a bad prediction out of sheer randomness/bad training data; weapon ultimately targets unintended people/location/facilities and causes massive damage, or backfires spectacularly in some way.

vickychijwani··on Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board
I think you’re underestimating the risk that seemingly innocuous behaviours could easily tip over into disaster territory. At some point the escalating capabilities cross a threshold where it’s no longer wise to ignore “agents spontaneously posting content on the internet”.

Think of how complex biological behaviour emerges from relatively simpler (but still complex) chemistry - at some threshold the innocuous chemical reactions tip over into non-obvious effects that one would not predict starting purely from the chemistry. The question is, where is that threshold for AI systems? Have we already reached that threshold? Certainly seems like it to me.

TL;DR: It’s a loose cannon, that’s all I’m saying.

vickychijwani··on Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions
That's largely because a lot of developers have made the devil's bargain of replacing standard hardware and OS primitives with badly re-implemented C versions of same. People did it because they could, but never considered if they should.

See most of the ecosystem around modern systems software, for reference. It's idiotic that things like memory layout and bit-level hardware management are done in C abstractions. I guarantee that if we stopped doing this kind of stuff, compiler optimizations wouldn't matter.

To some extent this is just saying "developers will depend upon the performance given to them", and that's true, but it's also true that as soon as things like compilers and standard libraries appeared, C became ubiquitous. Pandora's container, if you will.

vickychijwani··on Muse Spark 1.3
That tweet says “Muse Spark open weights releases coming soon”, not that this specific model is going to be open weights.
vickychijwani··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Agreed. This view also makes sense if we look at pre-agriculture humans - they’d eat heartily when there’s a good catch, maybe eat some leftovers the next day, go without food for some time, etc. Evolution by natural selection doesn’t move fast enough for humans to have adapted strongly to a fixed 3 meals a day schedule by now; eating times are still very much a convention.
vickychijwani··on Being ambitious and being a dad
That just tells us the person wasn’t a good parent either. Your comment assumes the only way to parent is to manipulate, patronize, etc. That’s just one perspective though.

There are other ways to parent that are actually fantastic management training - figuring out how to think from another human’s POV, acknowledge their frustrations, help them build the skills to handle their feelings, etc.

It turns out great parenting is to a first degree about great relationship skills.

vickychijwani··on Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers
An “orange cloud” with no other indication to represent a feature that is enabled-by-default (with implicitly enabled analytics) sounds like quite the dark pattern. The UI makes the DNS record seem to point to A (your entry) but actually points to B (Cloudflare). This isn’t an oversight, it’s an attempt to obfuscate.

Even if the choice to enable it by default makes sense for Cloudflare’s userbase, the implications are hidden and non-obvious.

vickychijwani··on Tell HN: Cloudflare silently injects its analytics when you switch nameservers
What a shame. I wasn’t expecting these dark patterns from Cloudflare at all.
vickychijwani··on Auto-research with codex: How I achieved a 232x Faster Kernel
I imagine Gemini would do better on these types of tasks. Curious to try it out.
vickychijwani··on Mea Culpa – Dark Hours
I don’t particularly buy the author’s story here, but “doesn’t count how many new items are pending” is a feature for me. I don’t want my RSS reader to feel like yet another list of tasks I’ve to get through.
vickychijwani··on DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones
This line of thought strikes me as very short-term. I’m already a shareholder and employee of the company, but that’s beside the point.
vickychijwani··on DeepMind's WeatherNext model achieves breakthrough forecasting cyclones
Are you being sarcastic? Even if “Google is struggling so badly” (which it really is not - the narrative will flip again at some point), these efforts will have a lasting impact on the world. Not everything good is about bringing in revenue.
vickychijwani··on ARC-AGI Leaderboard
Anthropic expends tons of compute and effort on understanding internal model states [1]; this kind of thing is right up their alley.

[1]: Recent example: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace

vickychijwani··on UPI: Anatomy of a Payment Transaction
Don’t know about Swish but UPI heavily influenced Pix, from its open architecture, alias-based addressing, and QR code infrastructure
vickychijwani··on Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly
I like the analogy with brownian motion, thanks for sharing that
vickychijwani··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
The unhappiness is primarily stemming from Bun’s ownership by Anthropic - HN sees this as Anthropic using an OSS project for reckless marketing stunts.

For the record I don’t believe it’s a stunt, it’s ridiculous to me - everyone’s just seeing what they want to see out of sheer hate for anything Anthropic does.

In any case if the rewrite is really as reckless as many in this thread claim, we will see Bun collapse in on itself with a 1M LOC codebase the core team doesn’t understand, or rollback to Zig. So we don’t need to have a flamewar over it, time will answer the question.

vickychijwani··on Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
The “no moat” comment is from May 2023, very early in the LLM era. Agents were not a thing yet, it was all just text generation.

The integration of LLMs with tools and data via agent harnesses has created the opportunity for a real moat. As these products start differentiating, the moats will develop to be significant.

vickychijwani··on OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation
https://www.invesco.com/qqq-etf/en/performance.html

Nasdaq 100 -> 4.5x your money in 10y

S&P 500 -> 2.5x your money in 10y

vickychijwani··on OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation
Just holding Nasdaq 100 ETFs is enough? People get impressed by "doubled my money" but forget that the most important question is - how much time did it take? Even a super safe asset with 3% returns will double your money... in 24 years.
vickychijwani··on OpenAI raises $8.3B at $300B valuation
Doubling your money in 10 years is < 7.2% per year compounded. With the risks involved here, I wouldn’t take that bet. There are safer assets that would return that much.
vickychijwani··on How I Use Kagi
I’m curious about your politics that are comfortable accepting a long list of invasions by the US, but somehow draw the line when it comes to this particular invasion.

I’m not saying it’s good to favour invasive countries, I’m just saying this is hypocritical. I have no particular love for either the US or Russia.

vickychijwani··on How I Use Kagi
It’s ironic the way you put it - the US has also invaded many countries, is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, and uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries [1]. Should we all stop “funding“ the US? Somehow Ukranian lives are precious, but Iraqi and Bangladeshi lives are not?

I have no horse in this race - I’m neither American nor Russian, nor do I particularly love either country. But I am tired of US hypocrisy. I don’t understand how you all don’t see it - you’re all holed up in your cocoons and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.

[1]: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/bangladesh-coup-seems-stra...

vickychijwani··on I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors
OP already mentioned at the end of the post that they’ve expanded to Slack, ChatGPT, etc
vickychijwani··on Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger
Interesting thought - why do you say Microsoft?
vickychijwani··on Bank transfers as a payment method
What “US proprietary systems” does UPI lock people into, exactly?

The number of available UPI apps today exceeds 100. Some of the big ones are created by US companies, sure, but many are created by Indian/non-US-owned companies. There is no lock-in though.

Also, UPI is not on Windows/MacOS either, so it’s not correct to infer that it’s “not open” simply because it doesn’t run on Linux. It was designed from the start to be a mobile payment system, and there are good reasons for that (more on this below).

The reason it doesn’t work on AOSP is, I presume, due to security concerns related to rooting (similar to why it doesn’t work on older known-insecure versions of Android/iOS). The security/fraud prevention mechanisms rely on proving that your device has a SIM card with the phone number linked to your bank account - and the same phone number is tied to your identity via Aadhaar. These guarantees are presumably much harder/costlier to ensure on such devices.

EDIT to add: There is also an economic angle here: the above description of reliable, low-cost KYC in UPI also reduces the cost of operating the network (both directly by simplifying KYC, and indirectly by making fraud harder).

Source: I work on a UPI app (although I am by no means a security expert).

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