Sounds like he’s been huffing too much of whatever the neoreactionaries offgas. Seems to be the inevitable end result of a certain kind of techbro refusing to learn from history, and imagining themselves to be some sort of future grand vizier in the new regime…
Interview with the president of the signal foundation: https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in there, the observation that LLMs and the broader “ai” “industry” wee made possible thanks to surveillance capitalism, but also the link between advertising and algorithmic determination of human targets for military action which seems obvious in retrospect but I hadn’t spotted before.
But in 2017, I found out about the DOD contract to build AI-based drone targeting and surveillance for the US military, in the context of a war that had pioneered the signature strike.
What’s a signature strike?
A signature strike is effectively ad targeting but for death. So I don’t actually know who you are as a human being. All I know is that there’s a data profile that has been identified by my system that matches whatever the example data profile we could sort and compile, that we assume to be Taliban related or it’s terrorist related.
You should try what these folk are selling.
WONTFIX: system working as designed.
To my limited knowledge, no, for various values of “someone”. It is just a sort of malign beige juggernaut that’s shitty all by itself without needing external direction.
I have faith in the ability of the UK public sector (or rather, the relentlessly incompetent outsources they hire) to catastrophically fuck up delivery of any software project.
For example, capita has already lined up at the trough: https://www.capita.co.uk/news/capita-advances-approach-next-generation-ai-microsoft
If you’re unfamiliar with capita, that’s probably a good thing. I’m not aware that they’ve ever been successful in anything, other than their continued ability to fleece the government. They’re basically too big to fail in the uk, because HMG’s procurement processes mean that they basically can’t stop giving them money.
Sounds like the exordium device from the Revelation Space books.
TESCREAL was chosen, at least in part, because it would be easier to search for. TREACLES matches all sorts of other stuff.
Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?
(also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)
Didn’t Silicon Valley have them all flung into the abyss? Or maybe they were just a myth made up to annoy venture capitalists?
(But yes, I probably should have said “freelance” rather than just “professional”. I haven’t actually thought very hard about how commercial moderation is done, beyond reading horror stories about Facebook)
Do any “ai” companies have a business plan more sophisticated than
I don’t recall seeing any signs of creativity, or even any good ideas as to what their product is even for, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for one of the current crop to manifest creativity now.
Perhaps I missed something, though?
The notion of “professional moderator” should perhaps ring some alarm bells. Sure, some people will be good at that sort of things, but:
treehouse.systems had a nice thread recently about their modding arrangement, but I can’t find a handy link to it right now.
I like the idea of small communities, but a major issue (possibly the biggest issue) as demonstrated by many mastodon servers over the years is longevity. What happens when your admin gets bored/burns out/dies/goes fash/is replaced with an asshole/is unable or unwilling to moderate effectively?
I don’t particularly like the big mastodon hosts (eg. mastodon.social) but they’re probably still going to be here tomorrow, unlike eg. octodon.social who are winding down because adminning was too much (after 8 years, which was a pretty good run!) and they didn’t have any plans or processes in place to handle this eventuality.
Between that sort of thing and stuff like matrix cryptography being full of holes and large matrix room management being a nightmare and email really being gmail, I’m slowly coming round to the idea that federation is too hard to do well and that if we could just manage a decentralised identity service and decent client software then it wouldn’t matter if servers didn’t talk to each other because we’d still have 90% of what people wanted from federation in the first place. Just a simple matter of engineering, I’m sure.
Oops, I’ve been trying to avoid calling it “clownstrike”, and didn’t quite manage to fix that initial syllable.
Summary of the recent crowdstrike report: 🧵https://infosec.exchange/@munin/112916974811882522
Munin wonders if the weird writing style of the report might be because crowdstrike used an LLM to generate a summary of several source documents, which would be funny-yet-depressing if true.
The actual causes of the incident probably won’t suprise anyone… “didn’t bounds-check, didn’t test parser on bad data, didn’t stage rollouts” in order of should-have-done-this-first-ness.
They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.
the US government has enough computing power to decrypt your internet traffic even if you use a VPN
No. Not even slightly.
I see you are completely unfamiliar with any of the issues here. I appreciate they are complex, but I don’t have the time or patience to educate you right now, even assuming you’re willing to learn.
You realise that all electronic currencies will necessarily involve transaction logs stored in someone else’s computer? Even Zcash and monero, which have clever anonymous transactions, allow selective disclosure of the details of those transactions if you ever find yourself at the wrong end of a criminal investigation or tax audit. Moreover, their anonymity guarantees are not perfect (the IRS has certainly paid big bucks to chainalysis for de-anonymisation, for what that’s worth).
Unless someone magically invents a software artefact that can’t be duplicated (don’t hold your breath, I’m serious about the magic) there’s no escape from this fundamental requirement.
So I realise that this is very euro-centric and the majority of people on earth don’t get this sort of convenience, but… fast and easy interbank transfers and contactless debit and credit card payments just do all the stuff that most people want out of electronic cash, and transaction logs are a small price to pay for a substantial reduction in risk.
Setting aside the “and then a miracle occurs” bit, this basically seems to be “rich people get to have servants and slaves… what if we democratised that?”. Maybe AGI will invent a new kind of ethics for us.
If the hardware to train and run what currently passes for AI was cheap and trivially replicable, Jensen Huang wouldn’t be out there signing boobs.