“Whenever I fire a linguist, the system gets better.” - Robert Mercer[1]
22 karma · joined March 3, 2017
Previously, Founder & CEO at Kontra Application Security Training (Acquired by Security Compass)
Previously, Founder & Inventor of Codebashing (Acquired by Checkmarx)
meet.hn/city/51.5074456,-0.1277653/Greater-London
If you’re hiding behind an HN pseudonym while disagreeing with me, your HR department, manager, social circle, or fragile reputation owns more of your freedom than you do i.e. opinions spoken without personal consequences to you, carry very little weight.
The biggest irony is that we get at least a couple of signups every month from South Korea, Russia, India, Nigeria just to try getting access to our platform for running these attacks ..
Here is the most recent copy paste from a Calendly invite ..
>Invitee Email: >ashley@cairnsovereign.net
>Invitee Time Zone: >Central European Time
>Questions:
>Please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting.
>We are an MSP from the UK that is look for a deepfake platform to run campaigns for our clients. We typically use open source software but there is a gap in our portfolio for deepfake testing that we can't fill with our usual open source philosophy.
The company website https://www.cairnsovereign.net/ was registered just 2 days ago .. they have no linkedin presence, fake CEO and fake CTO and fake everything ..
I still accepted the invite and joined and the person has a strong northern british accent .. he askd me to let his AI bot join the call to take notes ... i refused .. to which he swore and said that if a meeting bot is not allowed .. then i dont want to talk and abruptly hung up ...
PS: if anyone wants to see .. this is what a real time voice impersonation call and real time deepfake faceswap .. looks like ..
>Because of stupid vibe coders like you, now, and the people who really understand how this stuff works are getting lost in the noise... So get lost and do what you are best and leave IT thing to IT guys
Now to the main point, the biggest irony here is that the communist wet dream she always desired is finally being made possible thanks to SI … since its completely removed the scarcity aspect of work that ppl were paid for … Next she will complain about how some ppl have more stamina and taste than others and are able to wield LLMs to build companies and win which is not fair …
I also read and re read the link you shared .. it’s almost baffling that he is so incredibly hesitant on not being able to clearly take a position on anything and is so painfully nuanced in his writing as if he’s almost hedging every sentence ..
PS: All my life, mathematicians were made to look and portrayed like the ultimate truth seekers (both at school, by the media, in films and in the sciences etc) and all I see is in Tao is a man trying to so badly hold on to the main character energy … perhaps demonstrating a bit of humility like Lee Sedol after loosing to the machine would be in order … in his own words, he sees himself as a fox, not a hedgehog.. guess now that he's been outfoxed .. its best not to say unhinged stuff like "there's no reason to be this fast" or that absolulty out of touch "Math 2.0" cancer slide ... what. an. absolute. tool.
personally i feel like you're resisting what im saying because it challenges your view of Tao and you're reluctant to reconsider it .. maybe im wrong, but dismissing what im saying as "not substantial" without actually engaging with the points doesnt exactly help your case .. it comes across more like you're determined to defend him regardless of the merits of the criticism, which is hardly logical and arguably looks like motivated reasoning ...
ps: saying AI images arent art but just "pretty pictures" is just cringey ... if it evokes emotion, provokes thought or creates an aesthetic experience, its art ... i mean im sure u have a pair of sports trainers and jackets .. that are made by a machine using synthetic fibers and not artistically hand crafted ... and ppl do view fashion as an art form ..
what im suprised about though is why arnt you and others here more suspectful of Tao's skeptisim of AI .. as Wittgenstein's ruler reminds us teh very thing we use to measure something else may itself need measuring .. so why should tao's expertise be any exception?
> As for you, what's your opinion about what he said and why do you think that?
many years ago i had watchd Nassim Talebs commencement speech at AUB .. where he described russian mathematicians after the fall of soviet union .. who earned around $200 a month .. but continued doing work appreciated by only a small number of people .. and regarded displaying awards and regofnitions as a sign of weakness or lack of confidence in their contributions .. in contrast, when Tao was asked my Lex Friedman about Gregory Parlmen rejecting the millenium prize .. he gave a dissapointing non answer .. which reveals a lot about him as an individual (not as a mathmatician) ..
his reactions to OAI papers .. both initially on social media and now in his presentation .. carry that same ego .. and its quite evident that rather than mathematics being solely about the pursuit of truth .. he does care VERY MUCH about who idnetified the truth .. and that makes him only very human .. which is waht i initally said.
why is it so hard to accept that a brilliant mathematician can have the same human flaws as anyone else i.e. ego, arrogance, jealousy and competitiveness?
ps: im not a software guy
for comparison, i knew nothing about margaret hamilton or bill draper before reading their obituaries on HN this month. it literally took a few sentences to understand what legends they were .. not just in their respective domains, but in terms of their broader impact on humanity ..
with this navi lady, i've scrolled through two pages of text and still don't have a clear picture of what she actually DID to deserve whatever greatness the Nobel seems to bestow upon her.
i mean, if you can't even explain to a layman, in plain english, what someone actually DID to earn a prize of this stature .. without resorting to a laundry list of causes and buzzwords ... then what exactly are we rewarding here ? Her kindness ? Decency ? Morality ? wtf
AI is this strange modernist machinary that kind of threatens that brhaminic role... its almost like the vatican vs post industrialization world .. where they still have to keep making the case for why religion/priesthood/god is important... even as the tech/science world starts operating on totally different terms...