RevEng

There was no cyber attack here. They released a cert with a trivial key. They sold a lock with no pins. When people realized what was being delivered, they blew the whistle. They were killed by a self own of epic proportions.

Passive voice is a common technique to avoid taking responsibility.

Yes it did help, at least back in the day when they weren't doing tons of RL. If you just train on random text, your prior probability is to return the average of everything. Ask for software, get average software, or worse yet, randomly get either gold or shit. By adding constraints to your prompt like "you are an experienced engineer" it will prefer to return answers like an experienced engineer would give and less like a random noob would. It doesn't suddenly make it smart if it never was, but it helps to reduce the variance and bias towards the good outcomes.

They certainly are! Nvidia creates and maintains an awful lot of software. Selling GPUs is what gives them revenue but they produce a lot of software to generate additional pull through demand for their hardware.

Any examples of such schedulers?

That's how Nvidia works. They make arrangements with lots of companies to produce demos that use Nvidia products, especially ones that Nvidia is about to announce. That gives them lots to show at GTC. Companies are happy to work with them because having your name said by Jensen adds three points to your stock price.

Is this for real? If so, that's a major institutional and managerial failing.

AI is already taking many lives and ruining many others just by providing text responses to humans. The AI only needs a way to interact with the world and humans can be that conduit. The better AI gets, the more blindly people will do whatever it says.

From TFA:

> The second common variant is, instead of centralizing a service so that everyone in the company uses it, every department does it on their own. Department managers like it because it’s one less party not reporting to them to depend on (and nothing scares managers more than needing things from people not reporting to them.) And the people managing the department managers like it because they don’t need to deal with the centralized service department allegedly failing — and having to figure out if that’s really true and how to fix it, or if it’s an excuse made up by the other departments for failing at their own job. Here, too, if outcomes are what concerns you rather than what's easiest for senior leadership, standardizing on something across the company vs having everyone roll their own variant is a hard decision to make.

The argument is that centralization is the better outcome, even if it's less appealing to leadership. My counter argument is that centralization has downsides that need to be considered; it isn't inherently better.

I disagree with the centralization thought. I'm working on a project to create a central AI platform for a very large corporation. As you can imagine, such a large company already has several different platforms made by different branches within it. Each branch has something they are relatively happy with. But corporate sees this redundancy as waste, so they want to consolidate it into one.

The problem with one is the same with any other single source: you are stuck with whatever they offer on whatever timelines they provide. You are sharing this with a hundred thousand other people, so it's not tailored to your use case, but either made as generic as possible, or full of irrelevant features. Both of these cases make it worse for you.

I have often made in house libraries either based on or completely replacing a free equivalent because the free one doesn't meet our needs and has extra complications we don't need. Yes, it comes with its costs, but sometimes it's worth it for something that genuinely meets your needs.

By forcing everybody to use the same common platform, you are either forcing them to work around the mismatch between the platform and their needs, or your are forcing the platform to provide for everyone's needs. Neither is efficient and it harms every other user.

If you are going to make your own, you had better have a good reason for it, but you shouldn't be forced into a single solution for everything - it can end up being more expensive than making a few special purpose applications.

I'm almost certain it was parody.

There is a big difference in the cost of a 5-nines up time system in a heavily space constrained environment compared to a home hobby white box used for some coding. The GPUs alone cost 10x for the data center versions compared to the gaming versions even with similar specs.

The cost of online services is also largely a result of the cost of training (though hard to say exactly what that number is). Assuming you are using open weight models at home, you aren't paying for the training - someone else is.

There's a fine line, as with alcohol. A single cup of tea might feel refreshing. A monster energy drink is going to feel like a fight or flight response. Some people are also more sensitive than others and some are addicted more really than others.

I could perhaps understand ending the reporting rule, but deleting all existing records? That's very suspicious.

Each person takes turns. One person sings alone, then the other sings alongside their recording.

I store my belongings with a storage company. They rent facilities from a property owner. The storage company goes under while my stuff is still in the storage unit. I go to the property owner and say my stuff was in there. They say, no, that's owned by the storage company. Incorrect - the belongings were owned by me the entire time, the storage company was just holding it for me. I need to prove it was mine, but I don't lose property rights just because it's in someone else's possession.

Likewise if I store data with a cloud provider. Sure, Iron Mountain shouldn't just offer it up without proof, but if I give them notice of a legal case they should be sure to hold on to it, and if I win the case they need to hand it over to me. All I need to do is provide proof that I am the rightful owner of those goods.

I don't want them to. I'm not giving them that data myself and I don't consent to McDonalds giving them that data either, where that data is something I have to McDonalds. It's about information asymmetry.

Targeted advertising. That can be banner ads, notifications, featured suggestions or anything else. Knowing what your are most likely to accept tells them what they should offer. The goal is always conversions: turning ad impressions into sales.

I think this will become ever more common as AI improves. We used to joke, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," but now that is clearly true for AI agents. They can automate every part of the process, from domain and hosting registration, to web content creation, to responses to emails and even phone calls. Entire personas are trivial to create and maintain. This is what many companies are openly trying to do as cost cutting measures, but taken to its extreme you end up with entire companies generating income that are entirely agent driven. So long as the tokens cost less than the revenues they can generate, people will deploy these to passively make money for them, just like the early 2000s when there were entire webpages just present to show ads to unsuspecting visitors.

He explains that the field he is shooting towards is over 5km of empty field. He also started his tests with much lower weight and speed to ensure proper behavior before getting up to full speed.

They know exactly what they are doing. Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others, only himself. He has always considered the technologically well educated to be superior. He is also an egotistical narcissist. You can't believe anything he says he believes because he projects what he wants others to believe of him, not what he truly believes. The same is true of many of the techno bros whose actual technical abilities are heavily accentuated by their salesmanship. They lie and manipulate and call it human progress while actually being focused on their net worth. It's exactly what these sci-fi stories warned us about, but they used it as a playbook, not a warning, because they envisioned themselves as the tyrannical leader, not as the repressed masses beneath them.

It didn't happen in Canada, unless you mean the part where we rounded up all the natives and put them on reserves. I'm a white Canadian born and raised in Canada and I am far from being a minority no matter where I go, from the prairies to the GTA. Conservatives keep talking about this like it's a thing, but they do so from their majority white communities. The only places you see large numbers of immigrants is in low paying service jobs and you can thank the exploitive hiring practices of major companies like Tim Hortons - the people there are slaves living under the constant threat of deportation if they disappoint their employer/owner.

It's also worth noting that those white people concerned about becoming ethnic minorities are themselves immigrants. British and French colonists; German, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Irish; Hutterite and Mennonite - all immigrants, many within just the last few generations. For as long as Canada has been a country, it has been made up of many groups of different ethnicities, all immigrants. "White" isn't an ethnicity.

That's becoming less common. The issue is that, if training only contains examples of CVE reports, then asking for one will get you one, even if it's not grounded in reality. But if training consists of many negative cases with the response, "I can't find one," them that will become the default unless evidence pushes it towards a report. It's a classic class size problem. SOTA models seem to have this largely solved, though a determined person (just like a determined boss) can prompt one into giving a false answer just to satisfy the request.

Much of it comes from the same place. Depression, ADHD, and many others affect our ability to concentrate and plan. When you are in those situations, long term doesn't matter - you are fighting to live in the short term. Part of using medication is helping to get those effects under control so that you can be forwarded looking and disciplined.

Simply saying "exercise more" to someone struggling with mental health is like telling a person who is bleeding to death that they should stop bleeding. Yeah, chances are they really want to, but they don't have control over it in the moment.

In the US hacking is a federal crime, not just a civil matter. There are famous cases of people being imprisoned for hacking.

It doesn't matter how much good it can do if it can act independently and take over the world. That's worst case scenario, but the point stands - if the potential for such dangers exists, those dangers are far more important to consider than what good it could also produce. Consider the history of nuclear fission and the atomic bomb. Regardless how beneficial nuclear power generation is and other uses of radioactive material, it's highly regulated for fear of people making nuclear weapons, to the point that the wars in Iraq and Iran were started under the pretense of preventing another country from possibly developing one. AI should be considered as being possibly at least as dangerous.

No, that doesn't mean I'm in favor of this scaremongering over open weight models and Chinese sources. US companies aren't to be trusted to develop AI responsibly anymore than any other source and they shouldn't be the only ones allowed to wield its power. This is just anticompetitive behavior by a company who sees new competition entering their market, threatening their market share.

It is scary how often I'll mention something in a face-to-have conversation and suddenly it's showing up in ads. It's way too often to be coincidence, especially with how unlikely some of those topics are. They are definitely monitoring everything and feeding it into their ad system.

Those things it can do by putting a sleep in the script or command line or executes, but that works for external shell calls. It doesn't have an internal sleep tool or rate limiting that it can apply to itself.

They said "the" human kind, not "one" human mind. Even with structures, rules, and other tools, we are limited in the amount we can abstract, comprehend, and communicate. As projects get larger, we inevitably see a friction develop where coordination breaks down and we turn to isolation and responding to failures at the boundaries. This is where complexity in design of an individual system ends. Larger ecosystems aren't designed or coordinated - they emerge organically as each tries to adapt to the other. If only we could handle such complexity, we could design efficient systems that don't suffer from the same waste.

Private mode assumes you choose in advance. If you are suddenly approached, you can trigger the quick exit without any prior planning and it can be done inconspicuously.