5,858 karma · joined August 20, 2014
But of course it sounds way more sinister if you tie his political donations to it.
As a technical person, I did not feel patronized by the article. My non-technical wife forwarded it to me, and she also did not feel patronized by the article. If he said "you're too stupid to understand", then, yeah, that'd be patronizing.
I'll just conclude this way- when I used to sit in IDA Pro all day reverse engineering malware, I didn't expect to carry on a conversation with a perfect stranger talking at length about the intricacies of static and dynamic analysis. I have myself made similar comments about how my job involves staring at thousands of lines of assembly code and that would probably be mindnumbingly boring for them. We both have a laugh. Sometimes they do have an interest, and I can make it sound really interesting by focusing on the outcomes of the work rather than the toil and frankly mindnumbing grind; but other times, they say, yea, that sounds crazy, and we move on.
Nobody ever felt insulted- it's as they say "different strokes for different folks." I have had folks in other fields say similar things to me about how I would find the details of their work boring. A lot of times I am intrigued and hold a conversation to learn more, other times I agree and move on. At no point am I offended or feel patronized, though, because I am confident that if I truly cared I could learn more myself or ask questions.
I don't understand what people wanted to be covered in this article? At what point would there be sufficient technical detail to suffice yet still keep the layperson interested enough to read the rest of the article?
On the other hand if you feel somehow slighted by the flippant attitude in the article, give it a rest! Why are you so sensitive? It's not like he's personally insulting you! The tech community is hardly the underdog any longer, so let's just take a joke once in a while, no? As President Eisenhower quoted[0], "Always take your job seriously, never yourself"
[0] https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/file/w...
The US has made more than its fair share of policy missteps. But to try and argue that the actions of the US somehow “forced” Russia to invade its neighbor and former satellite state to rid it of “nazis” (Putin’s quote not mine) is absurd.
Therefore the corporation hosting the chatbot expects the chat bots speech to be “aligned” with its corporate image. Chatbots are not public goods. The sources you mentioned have their own editorial styles and the anarchist cookbook is a reflection of the values of its author just as much as chatgpt is a reflection of OpenAI’s.
I like diversity and this is one of my concerns is we basically turn the information ecosystem into the mental equivalent of grey goo due to the proliferation of mundane, inaccurate AI generated content.
This is absolutely absurd. The model has been trained on thousands of lines of ai short stories. No wonder it parrots back its “consciousness”. We are just staring at a reflection of our own creative writing.
Glad you’ve had an interesting life! Best of luck in your future endeavours.
How do you know Microsoft was even “hacked”? I mean if you want to get super pedantic about this, I haven’t personally seen any proof.
So yes while a computer provides a convenient mathematical abstraction upon which we can reason, we aren’t talking about how a computer boots. We are talking about figuring out - within a certain confidence level - the group of individuals that likely carried out an attack. We are now firmly outside the scope of the neat little mathematical abstraction of the machine. Even within a machine, there’s more nondeterminism than you or I would like to admit. But that’s a topic for another day.
The methodology is not secret, you can google for threat actor attribution. Private companies do this work as well as governments. You are welcome to go join one of those companies or organizations to learn how it works and work to improve the process if you are so passionate about it!
You are the one putting some political agenda on this. China, Russia, as well as North Korea, Israel, Iran, and many other countries have robust offensive cyber capabilities. Attribution is not an exact science, and if you actually read any raw intelligence report it is clearly marked with a confidence level for that exact reason.
Look I can’t summarize how threat actor attribution works in a hacker news comment. Does that mean the people who do it are quacks? Nope. I know people who do it, who build tools to help, and they are exceptionally sharp technical minds.
And I see you have casually dismissed an entire industry because you may not understand how someone could draw conclusions from imperfect data?
Hate to say it but this happens all day every day as human existence is filled with imperfect data. Not everything can be summarized in a neat mathematical form.
Does that mean you don’t try? I choose to try my best and continually improve methods. Otherwise what’s the point? Just give up because we can’t model human behavior and geopolitics as a pure functional state machine?
“Buffering” absolutely happens for a variety of reasons.
Tracking down the money or owning the operations infrastructure of the hosting companies along the way can help. Try to expand past bits on the wire- people set this stuff up at the end of the day.
Now you need to send the large amounts of data back to yourself, preferably without giving away your own location in the process. That’s the exfiltration phase of the cyber kill chain.
In order to do that, you’ve already established a set of listening posts and command/control sites across the internet. That’s your infrastructure. Setting that up in a pseudo anonymous way is hard, so you don’t do it often and may need to reuse it for multiple targets.
It’s that infrastructure that is hard to replicate if you’re trying to “look like” another threat actor on the Internet.
As you can imagine, it’s harder to reuse someone else’s infrastructure. Easy to copy code patterns but you can’t exactly reuse domains, listening posts etc.
I totally get your frustration, it's because you've seen the pattern before. Enjoy the ride as we all rediscover these fundamental truths we learned decades ago!
However, isn't this a signal that we shouldn't subrogate our own ability to think and make decisions to some set of floating point weights out there in the cloud somewhere? I think we're learning the wrong lessons here; I care less about what some AI "thinks" about politics or current events and more about keeping our own ability to critically think and reason in the face of dissenting views.
Former NYC mayor Ed Koch said, "If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist." Put another way, there is no way for any single LLM to achieve 100% agreement across all political spectrums for all people. We will see balkanization of this market as LLMs take "sides" and are aligned to different viewpoints, it's the only way out of this mess.
IMO it boils down to, your web site, including interactive elements (such as a chat bot), should reflect accurate information about your brand. If your chat bot goes off the rails and starts insulting customers, that's bad PR and can be measured in lost business/revenue. If your chat bot goes off the rails and starts promising you retroactive bereavement fares, that's a potential legal problem and costs $$$ in legal fees, compensation, and settlements.
There's a common theme there, and it's $$$. Chat bot saying something bad == negative $$$. That's kryptonite to a commercial entity. Getting your rocks off to some random business' LLM doesn't make $$$ and in fact will cost them $$$, so guess what, there will be services that sell those businesses varying levels of assurance preventing you from doing so.