684 karma · joined December 25, 2023
It's not just in computer security, it's in almost everything. People hate friction, but they need it make good decisions.
What we really need is smart people creating well-designed eusocial frictions, rather than trying to mindlessly eliminate friction from all areas. But guess which thing leads to products that can be sold more successfully on the market?
I don't think that's true. There's a lot of crisis and uncertainty today, but fertility is still going down. Many people are investing their resources in zero offspring.
Oh the dictators will still need citizens, but only to stomp on their human faces forever.
But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.
The people building these technologies do not have a good understanding of humanity (they have some oversimplified view focused on reducing friction), and even if they did their goal is not to help communities from but rather extract the most profit for themselves out of society. They won't maintain the friction that helps communities form and keeps them cohesive, just like they won't maintain the friction that keeps us healthy as individuals.
> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
That's a fantasy. The technological trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).
I think you're generalizing a brief summer, when the web was new and the power-that-be had not yet muster their resources to control it, as the natural state, when it was really a happy but unsustainable state.
That is called "Being greedy as fuck, as greedy as you can possibly get away with. Fuck everyone any anything else."
Ditto with the ballroom: knock it down, and build a precise replica of the East Wing.
Or few truly have the discipline to do that, but they got a lot of it "for free," because of the effort they had to put into making the slide deck.
I'm more and more of the opinion that friction isn't bad, and mindlessly reducing it has actually been bad for us. What we should have are "friction engineers," that carefully design things we need to do to be difficult in precise ways that force us to do other things we benefit from but don't have the discipline to consistently choose.
> This is controlling them.
I think it's meant to remove them from that class.
Controlling: telling them what to do, implementing policy through their power.
Eliminating: removing their power until they're not oligarchs.
The reason is simple: arrogance and being out-of-touch.
What's you're point there? People laid off because of AI will immediately shift into AI-centric small business, and start hyping AI?
That doesn't make sense to me. People being laid off are likely to be bitter about the cause of their layoff, and even if they all start their own businesses (which is unlikely), most of those will fail, leading to more bitterness.
Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday, they just have access to new technology (and new footguns).
I'd rather have a well-designed legacy system that does the job well, than an incompetently designed "modernized" system that doesn't.
I agree with that, especially with some of the more fanciful "extinction" scenarios.
> There are real problems like inequality that P(Doom) loves to conveniently forget.
Extreme inequality is my "Doom", and I think the P(Doom) of that is pretty high. With AI, I'm way more concerned with human marginalization, capitalist logic fucking most of us over, inescapable surveillance and control at scale, etc. than killer robots and bioweapons.
> Over and over again you have to contend with bullshit like 120MB APKs full of obfuscated code, root detection, custom firmware detection, "non-mainstream device" detection, VPN detection, and even more obscure spyware-flavored functionality.
Ok, the question is then: exactly why do they go through that much trouble? Because that's a lot of trouble.
Or another: it just ignores us, but keeps the good resources to itself. There's still humanity, but it's brutish and primitive, regressed to the stone age, and pushed to the margins. Basically feral animals. They know about the AI's works, but don't understand them. The smart ones stay away out of fear, the dumb ones go where they're not wanted and get killed by pest control.
There are so many bad ends to this, and not many plausible good ones. But of course we have no choice but to race forward, off the cliff. After all, we can't let China be the ones that push humanity off it first!
Yes. Personally I'd prefer the US government get its stake from a bankruptcy court for pennies on the dollar.
I think Elon Musk says a lot of things.
Exactly! No rational person could oppose supergeniuses like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, etc., so if people do, the logical conclusion is that they've been manipulated by a psyop.
Science is my superpower!
> ...what? Why? Do you feel the videos she likes should be allowed to just vanish into the mists of time? To me that sounds like saying 'my sister takes pictures at her daughters' birthdays and I'm trying to get her to stop'.
Anything, even good things, can be done to excess.
1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"?
2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.
For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).
I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.
How, it sounds like they're trying to catch you, e.g. I took...
> and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)
...to mean they push out changes just to detect the clients who don't conform. I'm sure they could be very sneaky about it in a way that would be hard to "just do better" For instance: have some client behavior change that's hidden behind a feature flag or even calendar date, wait a long time until all official clients are updated, then trigger it and ban the laggards who can be assumed to be using an unofficial client.
Maybe the alternative is equality-before-the-law, but the judgement amount won by the Chinese company gets put in escrow until there's legal reciprocity, to create pressure for it.
They are young and think they are very smart. What could go wrong?
Betcha that means there was "consent" language on page 55 of some click-through EULA.
Aren't they almost always run unknowingly, by people tricked into running them?
Under certain dogmatic economic assumptions. I'm fucking sick of TINA.
> What you can do is make sure the datacenters being built in your area benefit the area, otherwise they can go find somewhere else. If some other sucker state/county takes a one-sided deal, unfortunate but it's on them. Just don't be unreasonable and turn down actually beneficial offers.
The end state of capitalist AGI logic is to make nearly all existing people and their descendants obsolete, disempowered, and marginalized. We need to stop that change. It's perfectly reasonable to turn down an offer that throws you a couple bones to bait you and your kind down a road to an eventual bad outcome. And ultimately what needs to happen is some power (the government) needs to beat these companies and their leaders into submission and probably implement more fundamental economic and social change on their backs.
Take action early, when you still have power to, instead of the last minute when you're bound and gagged, just before you're led off the edge of a cliff.
The alternative is eventually having either yourself or your kids reduced to the level of pets. Sure, pets (often) get fed and lead easy lives, but they're almost totally deprived of agency. Do you want to be a pet? Would you even accept a nonzero chance of becoming a pet?
That's nice list, but it doesn't go far enough. It only addresses problems with the data centers themselves, but they are also a point of leverage against the entire AI industry. It's that industry that makes them so controversial and hated. If they were just power-hungry factories making bolts or solar panels or something, no one would care.
The rules should include something about preserving interesting, meaningful work for people; and making sure the economic benefits are genuinely dispersed and not concentrated. I don't want a repeat of "You lost your respectable, stable factory job, but here's some cheap flimsy shit from Walmart to make up for it. Why aren't you happy with the deal!?"
If big tech achieves true AGI, expect public education to be completely gutted within a generation, or perhaps ended entirely. Whatever is left will be little more than indoctrination for an idiocracy-like population.
If the wealthy elite has no more use for educated workers, they'd rather take a tax cut than pay to educate your kids.
Words have meaning. I really hate PR that just has no respect for language. To me that reads like "Toxic waste, lovingly dumped into the river with a dump truck."
> The only way to do that is to make your code provable. That again is only realistically doable using AI.
If you're code is "provable" doesn't that only mean you've proved the code meets its specification? The specification can still have bugs.