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Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

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This. If the LLM has access to the outside world through its harness, then it can do real damage - data exfiltration, etc.

I'll believe it when I see it. The chances of discovery are far too high to make a malicious LLM.

> You wouldn't use a C++ compiler binary provided by CCP, right?

Racism aside, one can prove a compiler is correct. It can be shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that a compiler produces correct output for a given input.

Would you use such a piece of software? Or is the boogeyman too scary?

You might want to read "Reflections on Trusting Trust": https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

> "Racism aside" ...

I'm not sure how an unwillingness to trust the Chinese Communist Party is in any way "racist" exactly. I know lots of Chinese people I'm fairly sure I could trust, but the Chinese Communist Party ain't among 'em. Do you trust them?

Authoritarian communism is not a race.

Just because a compiler binary compiles program A without a backdoor, it does not prove it won't add a backdoor to program B.

One could always, you know, reverse engineer it to find if there's anything off.

You cannot. See the sibling commenter's link to "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

I don't see how that applies here. In that case it's 2+ potentially compromised things working in tandem to propagate the malicious effect. In this case I'd think someone reverse engineering a compiler to see if it's compromised would ensure their tools are clean enough (use known clean sources or build their own). And if there's no way to ensure a minimal cleanness then the world is already irrecoverably lost.

> You wouldn't use a C++ compiler binary provided by CCP, right?

Why not? Comments like this are a bit mystifying for anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated into a Trump/MAGA style view of the world.

Well, you know they do a lot of cyber attacks and espionage right?

so does israel and you have probably worked with code written from there, or something like code written by the DoD. people wouldn’t say this about Ada

In an application where I was concerned with security against nation state attackers, I certainly wouldn't use services or unaudited, closed-source binaries supplied by organizations I suspected to be under the influence of DoD, Mossad, or the Chinese Communist Party.

This isn't racism, it's basic opsec.

akomtu commented on 9/18/26

> Scientology is an evil cult, while Falun Gong is more like Buddhism. You can't really compare them.

maybe that's why not

> ... "anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated into a Trump/MAGA style view of the world."

Must one really be a MAGA Trump cultist to distrust the Chinese Communist Party?

Compared to what? A trillion-dollar US corporation? The US government?

What I'm really alluding to is nationalism, which at this point in the US is mostly synonymous with MAGA.

Although, I've found the US people in general are pretty nationalist by Western standards, even liberals, progressives, and many other (not all) members of the left. It's basically this webcomic: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/0*W8YT...

So sure, if you distrust the CCP more than your own government or largest corporations, you don't have to be MAGA, just an indoctrinated nationalist.

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