3,061 karma · joined November 26, 2014
I hope someone else finds it useful.
I honestly see some sort of automated whole codebase auditing and refactoring being the next big milestone along the chatbot -> claude code / codex / aider -> multi-agent frameworks line of development. If one of the big AI corps cracks that problem then all this goes away with the click of a button and exchange of some silver.
Perhaps a chunk of that token spend will be porting legacy codebases to memory safe languages. And fewer tokens will be required to maintain the improved security.
Going to work? No worries about forgetting a USB stick or portable SSD. I can always just fire up Wireguard and grab it from home.
Sharing Jellyfin access with family and friends has also been fun.
You said AI works were easily distinguishable via em-dashes and "not this, but that"
I said I have witnessed humans using that metric accuse other humans here on hackernews. Q.E.D.
You've asserted that they are easily distinguished. Practitioners in the field fail to distinguish using the same criteria. Is that not dispositive? Seems like it to me.
I claimed much earlier in the thread "I think there's demonstrably very little difference at all between human and AI outputs" which is consistent with "I think all the humans I know and all the LLMs I've interacted with exist on a multidimensional continuum of intelligence with significant overlap."
Two ways of saying the same thing.
Both of them suggesting that sometimes you may be able to tell it's the output of an AI or Human, sometimes not. Sometimes the things coming out of the AI or the Human might be smart in a way we recognize, sometimes not. And recognizing that humans already exist on quite a broad scale of intelligences in many axes.
Is that a claim I've made? I don't see it anywhere. I think a lot of people think that because they can get the AI to generate something silly or obviously incorrect, that invalidates other output which is on-par with top-level humans. It does not. Every human holds silly misconceptions as well. Brain farts. Fat fingers. Great lists of cognitive biases and logical fallacies. We all make mistakes.
It seems to me that symbolic thinking necessitates the use of somewhat lossy abstractions in place of the real thing, primarily limited by the information which can be usefully stored in the brain compared to the informational complexity of the systems being symbolized. Which neatly explains one cognitive pathology that humans and LLMs share. I think there are most certainly others. And I think all the humans I know and all the LLMs I've interacted with exist on a multidimensional continuum of intelligence with significant overlap.
I hereby rebuff your crude and libelous mischaracterization of my assertion. How's that? :)
I've literally seen humans accusing other humans of being AI here on hackernews for these. Q.E.D.
What do you consider a counterexample? Because I've been involved in local politics lately, and can say from experience that any foundation model is capable of more rational and detailed thought, and more creative expression, than most of the beloved members of my community.
If you're comparing AI to the pinnacle of human achievement, as another commenter pointed to Shakespeare, then I think the argument is already won in favor of AI.
The Thesis of Everything is a Remix is that there is no difference in how any culture is produced. Different models will have a different flavor to their output in the same way as different people contribute their own experiences to a work.
All possible numerical representations come with inherent trade-offs around speed, accuracy, storage size, complexity, and even the kinds of questions one can ask (it's often not meaningful to ask if two floats equal each other without an epsilon to account for floating point error, for instance).
"Toward an API for the Real Numbers" ( https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3385412.3386037 ) is one of the better papers I've found detailing a sort of staged complexity technique for dealing with this, in which most calculations are fast and always return (arbitrary precision calculations can sometimes go on forever or until memory runs out), but one can still ask for more precise answers which require more compute if required. But there are also other options entirely like interval arithmetic, symbolic algebra engines, etc.
One must understand the trade-offs else be bitten by them.
Only if you upload your data to that cloud server you rented. Then, by definition, you are.
> AWS and GCP are copying all private data on servers?
Every computer copies data when moving it. Several times, in fact. Through network card buffers, switches, system memory, disk caches, and finally to some form of semi-permanent storage.
I don't have to think Amazon is stealing my data to be aware that Amazon S3 buckets containing privileged information are routinely found open. I don't have to think that Google is spying on me to know that operating equipment my business owns on prem and does not share requires me to trust fewer people and less complex systems than doing the same work from the cloud.
You are very quick to make foolish assumptions and assign them to others.
Look to the video game mod chip industry for your answer. Consoles obsessively verify system integrity from boot ROM to game launch. Most firmwares and OSes are encrypted, signed, hashed. Flipping bits in transit and perhaps only at specific times like system power on allows for the ROM to be read, verified, and checksummed correctly without detection of the implant. This makes the implant not only persistent, but stealthy. Even pulling the ROM chip and replacing it with a different IC would not remove the implant. And if the injection point were chosen carefully, implant functionality may reasonably be expected to persist across ROM updates. This is exactly the case with the PSNee mod chip I mention above. If I had to wager a guess, it'd be because the target, like console makers, was known to update and verify ROMs, which is SOP is any large org.
In terms of being physically observable... barely. You'd need an X-ray to find such a thing buried between PCB layers or inside another component. And not only that, you'd need to be routinely X-raying all your incoming equipment and comparing all the images. And even if you dug the thing out, you'd get a few dozen bytes of ROM out of it with no clue about who made it or how. Perhaps you might be able to determine origin for the silicon based on doping ratios and narrow it down to a few facilities operating at the right feature size. How many of us, upon receiving new equipment, immediately disassemble it to bits, individually x-ray each, then re-assemble it? Not many.
It's not a dumb idea. And whether or not actual evidence exists, exploiting the firmware on the board management controller is exactly the place where you can poke with the least effort for the greatest reward. That alone makes the attack plausible. Honestly surprised we haven't seen a BMC worm yet.
Additionally, folks don't like to rely on free use because the tests, though they have been well articulated, are inherently subjective and must be decided by a judge or jury. It's the sort of defense one wants to have available, but not depend on if possible, as a result.
Re: commercial use, in the US, just because a work is commercial does not automatically mean it loses fair use protection. Commerciality is only one factor of the four to be considered. Commercial parodies, for example, can still be fair use, especially where the work is transformative. IOW commerciality may weigh against fair use, but it is not dispositive. Google v Oracle involved fair use which was clearly commercial, for example.
GN's case would also be helped by the nature of the information being factual as opposed to artistic.
There are a lot of factors in whether or not an org can successfully take something to trial. Venue, judge, representation, jury selection, evidentiary rulings, all kinds of stuff. An imbalance in representation could easily swing it. So when I say that I think GN has a reasonable case, it's just me using the Supreme Court's rubric and some theoretical idealized court room which doesn't really exist. All I can say is that a good job could be done in arguing it. Whether or not GN could afford that work, or would want to, IDK.
A practical way to think about it is this:
What is the new use for? Courts look first at whether the secondary use serves a different purpose from the original, not just whether it looks different. Uses for criticism, commentary, parody, scholarship, search/indexing, or other new functions often have a stronger transformative argument.
Is there new expression, meaning, or message? That still matters, but after Warhol, a claimed new meaning by itself is usually not enough, especially when the secondary use is being exploited in a similar commercial market as the original. The Court emphasized that the inquiry is tied to the specific use at issue and whether that use has a distinct purpose.
Does it substitute for the original in the same market? Even if the new work has some new meaning, it looks less transformative if it is serving basically the same licensing or audience function as the original. That overlaps with factor 4 as well.
How much was taken, and was that amount justified by the new purpose? A use is more defensible when it takes only what is reasonably needed for the transformative aim. In parody, for example, some copying may be necessary to “conjure up” the original, but not more than needed.
All of which I think can fairly be evaluated in GN's favor. Though as you point out, the lawyers are paid to argue each point.