fwn

The official signal.org blog post I linked does actually explain how it works. They write that the client sends parts of hashed phone numbers to Signal:

> The client transmits those truncated hashes to the service. The service does a lookup from a set of hashed registered users. The service returns the intersection of registered users. The obvious problem with this method is that the hash of a user identifier can almost always be inverted. Regardless of whether the identifier is a phone number, a user name, or an email address, the “keyspace” of all possible identifiers is too small.

Also: Signal messages are currently never P2P. They always pass through Signal servers, which see (but apparently not retain) your IP and timing metadata. The Signal WebRTC calls are partially peer-to-peer, that is what the relaying in the Signal settings panel is about.

Discovery is important and a hard problem, worth making some trade-offs for. Signal published a good blog post about this, including this passage:

> In order to turn the address book on a device into a social graph for Signal, the Signal client needs to be able to determine which of the device’s contacts are Signal users. [...] The obvious problem with this method is that the hash of a user identifier can almost always be inverted. [...] This method of contact discovery isn’t ideal because of these shortcomings, but at the very least the Signal service’s design does not depend on knowledge of a user’s social graph in order to function.

Src.: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

edit: Also, Signal is not peer-to-peer. It is a centralized, client-server architecture.

(Not to object the degoogeling, but:) To create a Signal account, you have to validate a phone number. So Signal is currently largly about privacy, not anonymity.

FWIW I wouldn't know why to message someone if I didn't know who they were. The same goes for them not knowing who I am. What would we even talk about?

Federation between instances is nice, but it's not necessary for the Fediverse to deliver freedom from Big Tech censorship.

Even in the extreme, theoretical case of full defederation you could just browse your communities by having a sperate account on every relevant server using a multi-account client.

It also reduces the impact if you lose an account: Since they are all single-purpose, you can easily create a new one replacing the one you lost.

Many professional service firms do not allow BYOD. Depending on your job, you may end up with per-mandate phones.

I once had to take four phones with me for a short while and ended up looking like an absolute clown, stacking them on the restaurant table.

Not having to do that is a privilege.

I am curious: Why would you assume that I am intellectually dishonest? Why not assume good faith?

As for the actual argument: There are no ideology-free actors. Therefore, the best way for an organization to become more independent is to reduce its reliance on a single source (or cluster) of funding by diversifying its financial backing.

The more backers who are not closely aligned between each other, the more independent the organization is. Conversely, the more the backers share the same alignment, the more they tend to act similarly, reducing the benefit of the split.

This is a fruitful and well studied concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_dependence_theory

HN is not one person, but a diverse set of users. HN the aggregate therefore will be consistently wrong and consistently right all the time.

...and yes: Accountability should not be stripped just because the actor did wiggle their deeds through an LLM.

If Anthropic attacks a company again, I think this should be prosecuted.

It is a standard corporate register. If you are an employee responsible for communication at an organization, you must either write like this or take ownership of your work and accept some creative risk.

... However, you often don't receive anything in return for taking that risk, so you end up producing standard corporate PR content.

> ... a project devoted to free speech as such shouldn't be associated with a political, ideological group that favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another

Just think this through: Since its beginning, the Tor Project has heavily relied on US government funds.

The U.S. government trivially favors one set of publicly presented ideas and strongly condemns another. That is not a bad thing. Just ask them about Al-Qaeda.

It would be an unlikely luxury if all of one's donors were ideologically aligned with one's project. Now, some people want every important employee of every donor organization (or just Mullvad?) to be ideologically aligned as well.

This becomes more complex the further down the relationship tree you go.

The whole current PR campaign (it at least feels like a campaign) against Mullvad rests on absurd double standards as a method.

Problematic opinions at the top of Apple, Google, Microsoft? That's all fine. Problematic opinions at the top of some dissident tool? Sin! If they are not heaven they are hell! We must never stop pushing.

I do not know that person, but her views in the linked video seem great and vastly underrepresented in the current media landscape.

She lists many valid AI risks, discounts the doomsday PR and instead talks about the accountability gap that current AI frontier companies profit from.

I'm sure her Twitter timeline is awful, as you noted. But do you have thoughts on the arguments she presents in the linked video?

edit: I think she is absolutely right about the percentage risk numbers. Apparently, those numbers are not particularly meaningful beyond their functional use of communicating a sense of urgency. I think p(doom) is very similar to the Cold War doomsday clock. An instrument of irresponsible, fearbased PR.

For most people, it is far easier to pay with cash than with Monero.

And yes, whoever invented cash was a genius. It's an amazing technology that, in some ways, is far ahead of almost all digital payment systems.

OTOH, I did the cash envelope thing only once, out of curiosity. It was fun but now, for convenience, I just buy regular vouchers online.

Yes, you are right. My reply was written for a different comment on the same level. Sorry for the confusion!

No one claimed any case would be "thrown out for spying." The legal definition of spying is also not particularly relevant to the argument in the initial comment.

The initial comment instead questioned how someone could be accused of making a threat if they did not realize anyone would read their private content. You probably also can not insult someone with a statement you never expected anyone but you will ever read.

Was it claimed that the police did any spying?

Presumably, Anthropic did the spying and the reporting.

You argued that it is not spying, since the spying may have been made sufficiently explicit in the ToS/EULA.

This raises the question: Does announcing a spying operation mean that it is no longer spying? I've never heard that perspective before.

It really depends and I often struggle with it. How do you do it?

The German Melderegisters, for example, are now far more interested in the stated reason for your data request than they were ten years ago. (Which is a good thing!)

Many things that are trivial in theory, given the right conditions, etc. are anything but trivial once you actually try to do it.

Just because we cannot identify any disadvantages does not mean that there are none.

Imagine a foreign state-sponsored agent waiting at the door of a public or private decision-maker, convincing them to cooperate. Home addresses are no joke. Especially if you can grep through the whole family tree.

It entirely depends on the strategy you try to implement through your communication.

That is generally true: prior to any professional communication you have a goal, assumptions, messaging, etc. Why would you produce communication at all, if you had not?

Marketing people often think there is a cookie-cutter rulebook you should follow, but there is not.

We are living in the "the bird is freed" and "nice genes" era of corporate communication.

It seems that you can have a protected address in Denmark as well. Apparently, the protected address is even a field in the current leak.

Whenever classic p(doom) sentiments are explained through a text with obvious LLM markers, I wonder whether I am looking at a superhuman persuasion attempt.

..or maybe the commenter did look at superhuman persuasion long enough to believe it would be best to channel those ever the same fear fantasies from the LLM through their account to the reader.

On a more serious note, just look at the doom premises here: "Large parts of US society suddenly going criminal" is from the movie "The Purge", I think. It is fiction.

The idea that generative AI takes away our ability to find out reality. ... I don't know. People write about that a lot, but it still seems very far fetched.

Maybe through some terminally online overconsumption, like with social media? I wouldn't know.

With new AI capabilities we will have to adjust, I am sure. Media, science, education and law are changing very visibly right now. Those p(doom) narrations just seem to be pre-IPO hype though.

It is just so so dangerous. That is why they want to go public and only want to care about optimizing for the next quarter ...right before breaking into AGI. /s

I am sure there are quite a few people out there who have avoided getting a mainstream smartphone setup or other big tech services.

As you wrote yourself, this is not the majority. Quite the understatement.

However, this is only a tangential notion in my comment. What do you think of my (probably not unique or novel) observation that calls for ethical purity seem to be very selective in a way that (in effect!) benefits big tech?

For example: The other person in this very thread who pointed out that Mullvad is not perfectly pure recommended iCloud in their previous HN comment three days ago. Did their attitude change in this three days? Unlikely.

iCloud is a service from a company that deplatforms ICE transparency apps, among many other things. Its then CEO, Tim Cook, personally gifted one million USD to Donald Trump for his inauguration. (The very thing they criticized: "... their CEO is directly funding a far-right ...")

Humans are rarely pure or heavenly. Double standards help incumbents.

Calls for ethical purity are usually very selective, serving to protect incumbents.

For example, every big tech company supports the current US administration in some capacity, either with funds, their surveillance stack or both.

Almost noone has stopped using big tech products and services because of that. (Unfortunately!)

But beware! There is someone in one tiny, privacy-preserving company who is doing something that not everyone agrees with!

That is a big problem, right? I think this is a big problem, everyone!

You see those comments in every Mullvad thread, but not necessarily in every thread about big tech products or services.

This comment specifically was also auto-collapsed for me, without being marked as flagged or dead.

It might help to ask moderation about this. Could be an artefact of brigarding or something similar.

I also wouldn't worry about individual accounts so much. Asking for others to be banned, linking mirrored profiles, etc. That is just not the stuff many users like to read on HN. I think your technical content is truly amazing on its own already.

No. And no alignment, guardrails or slowdowns will ever secure our insecure infrastructure. Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI.

The only way to secure infrastructure is to actually do the work needed to secure it. Our waste water treatment facility might not actually need to be able to tweet its status.

Cybersecurity is such an important topic for a country, dreaming about global alignment just to avoid fixing insecure infrastructure cannot be serious.

A Russian state backed hacker will not ask Dario for permission or argue with his LLM about ethics. That train departed long ago.

If we focus too much on the world domination fiction, we really might, in a moment of lapsed attention, end up plugging essential infrastructure into the public internet, hoping some dream of global alignment might save us.

That's like giving a gun to a monkey and hoping the monkey is trained well. ..a frontier monkey though.

The biggest AI risk, by far, is the concentration of power in a few companies, located in the US.

There is a lot of fear marketing about our text generators turning into Terminator. But other than the centralization of power, such fears are largely fiction. (Actual fiction, stuff like ai2027.)

And the labs know it: If Anthropic or OpenAI believed in their own narrative of being on the brink of world dominating superintelligence, they absolutely would not plan to IPO rn.

The slowdown narrative is probably just a hedge, or a face-saving way to lower expectations in case they can not keep improving at the same speed until they actually IPO.

I made the same transition, and it felt very seamless. I didn't look into the Obsidian first-party sync service, since I was already using Syncthing at that point.

For even more contrast with Evernote: the fantastic Obsidian application lists eight employees and one cat on their about page:

https://obsidian.md/about

You seem to have conceded the "is it deterministic" argument only to sidestep by declaring determinism irrelevant. Your original claim was that LLMs are deterministic "in the same sense" as brains.

We can write down an LLMs full register, and that register/book contains the whole output universe of the text generator. That book does not act, it is morally neutral. That the brain has such a register at all is just restating the determinism axiom, which you treat as fact.

A text is not conscious, and we can not wish it into consciousness, no matter how many human-like patterns we find in the book / the generated text. It has not been shown that running the text adds anything over the text written out. Researchers are super motivated to find machine consciousness but cannot find it, while a company months from its IPO keeps pitching shadows of consciousness all day. It really is a PR strategy.

No, that is not at all something we can just state as a fact. Whether the brain is deterministic is an open question that just inherits the good old, probably unsolvable determinism debate.

The LLM pseudo-randomness from above is engineered by us humans and fully understood, much like an algorithm playing a video frame sequence.

You could theoretically record a full register of all states of an LLM setup with all the possible inputs and environment parameters, and it would fully describe everything you would ever get from a given LLM setup. It would be a very large, convoluted book.

I understand that Anthropics PR department wants to see truth or reason behind every "I'm alive" the LLM generates. Even the term "self-report" is anthropomorphizing, as an LLM does not do anything on its own at all. (It also does not hack any company on its own.) That is just one of the narratives they spin probably at least until the IPO.

LLMs are deterministic, though. Much like the video.

AFAIK using the same input tokens, weights, and numerical operations will lead to the same probability distribution for the next token. It uses pseudo-randomness to enable temperature, etc. Like a fuzzy video.

"Markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism" just does not mean very much. A PR phrase used to hype the IPO.

I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station.

It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.