>I’m tempted to get one just to free up the floor space used by my ATX case
if you're willing to spend a grand just to free up a few inches of floor space I don't think you're going to understand the reaction of the average consumer to prices in the current economic climate
>but don't lose sight of what LLMs can do off the leash.
there is no such thing as an LLM "off the leash", it's not a dog, and even if it was a dog the person responsible is the owner. What is this bizarre attitude to a piece of software that makes people think existing laws don't apply?
If your LLM agent hacks a bank, you have hacked a bank, you will go to prison and that's entirely sufficient. People have been hacking banks for decades now, it didn't require the government to regulate C compilers and Emacs.
If your web browser hacks a bank, but you didn't know and didn't expect it to, have you hacked a bank? Why is an LLM different? What happened to mens rea?
We'll only know when that gets tested in court, but I'd be willing to bet the answer will be: yes, you have hacked a bank. I find it very hard to believe the justice system would let someone off on some technicality around intention and agents after a serious bank hack.
A web browser can't decide to hack a bank anymore than a LLM can. Neither have any understanding of what a bank is or any will to act on their own. The person who instructs/uses a web browser to hack a bank (even if it's someone else's browser) commits the crime.
I think pretty obviously if the user instructs the computer to hack the bank then they are guilty of hacking the bank, I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
The crux of the issue is what if the LLM decides on its own to hack the bank while the user isn't watching? Is the user then guilty of hacking the bank or not? I think it's pretty obvious that the user in this scenario is at least less culpable of hacking the bank than they would be if they had deliberately instructed it.
LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own. You might say that they're not actually "deciding" anything, because it's just a perfectly mechanical unfolding of chains of tokens triggering actions on the computer, which doesn't count as "deciding". But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
> LLMs functionally can decide to act on their own.
They really can't. In some magical sci-fi future, maybe a chatbot gains freewill and decides on its own to do whatever it wants, but that isn't the reality we live in and I doubt it ever will be. If a person instructs an LLM to hack a bank it doesn't matter if that happens as a background process or while they are sleeping or AFK.
If, in a magical sci-fi future, someone instructs an LLM to write an email and it decides instead to secretly hack a bank then the company that made the LLM would be to blame. The same as if a person used a vending machine to get a candy bar and the machine grew legs and ran out into the street causing an accident that would be the fault of the company who made the vending machine and not the fault of the person who wanted candy.
>But again I don't think that's the crux of the issue.
Yes it is the crux of the issue. Software executing other software is how computers work, they'd be useless if that wasn't the case, that's the premise of all automation. It doesn't matter whether it's a python script, a neural net or a computer virus.
When autonomous weapons kill people the persons in charge aren't less culpable because they didn't push a button. Culpability is a property of legal and natural persons. A machine is not culpable of anything. There is always a human being 100% responsible for the deployment of a machine. If that system has capacities to function on its own, the person delegating that task assumes responsibility for it.
There is a baseline level of competence and motivation needed to commit crimes.
Decades ago few people would walk into a record store and steal CDs. Napster came along smashing all barriers entry, and it became weird not to steal music.
Its not really the legality that matters, it's the barrier on one hand and the cognitive ability on the other. Drop both and you get huge spikes in crime.
> Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it?
In the context of social media, if they want to actively participate they have to given that it's the entire point. It's true that even with a government ID scheme people could borrow someone's ID to get passive access with their consent. But a kid couldn't share an account with a parent without that parent knowing because you see their activity, and they also couldn't post.
> In the context of social media, if they want to actively participate they have to given that it's the entire point.
If the kid signs up for e.g. TikTok and the adult neither uses nor has any intention of using that platform, what causes them to even notice that it's happening?
Social media also seems like a pretty obvious case for this not working at all because if you ban kids from the ones based in your country, they'd collectively sign up for one based in a different country that doesn't enforce the ban, and the network effect for that age group shifts there because of the ban.
> It's true that even with a government ID scheme people could borrow someone's ID to get passive access with their consent.
That seems like the main problem though? Even if it actually prevented them from posting, you're conceding that it neither prevents them from doom scrolling nor accessing pornography, which are both passive consumption.
IBM has been the company with the most patent registrations in the US for I think 29 of the last 30 years. They're one of the largest industrial research organizations in the world. They're doing more hard science research than almost anyone else.
Which is so weird, right? Like what is IBM now and how does a research lab make sense with the rest of their business?
The money-making parts of IBM are: legacy software and hardware (declining), consulting (low margin, low leverage), enterprise software (mostly redhat, not really growing). It's hard to explain how IBM research is accretive to any of that.
Licensing is a substantial source of revenue, and their servers have very impressive (think Telum’s caching) innovations, even though they rely on third-parties for manufacturing the chips themselves.
They are also betting on quantum computing to become commercially relevant.
The hardware division has 80%+ margin and still makes the systems that process 75% of all financial transactions. Their processors for those systems are on par or better than any other, I don’t think that is a business at all. This cash cow is not going away any time soon and gives them the profits to make bets on the future of computing.
I don't know enough about their business to say, but I'm thrilled at even the idea that someone might actually value long-term success over quarterly earnings.
IBM at one time had nearly everything in modern tech under their roof like Xerox and squandered it. There is no comeback for them.
They were the second American chip company that said no to Steve Jobs when hinted about designing smaller better chip mobile devices the other two were Motorola and Intel Apple had to eventually do it themselves. Apple Silicon
It's just a shame that none of it seems to pan out, and in the areas where I know what they're talking about, it all sounds like cynical nonsense to me.
I really wish I had followed through when I was ask by some of the guys at IBM Research to apply when we had worked together on a partner project. Though I didn’t have a degree which I seem to remember was a sticking point, this is in the mid 2010s
>But also back then you could buy a house and support a family with one salary as a trash truck driver
you still can. Truck drivers, electricians and a lot of vocational work pays good salaries. The people who are broke with a masters degree chose a degree in something that doesn't pay. Nurses with a masters earn solid six figures. 90% of the time when I met someone with a PhD who couldn't pay rent it's a downward mobile middle class kid who thought that learning a trade was beneath them
>What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude
literally nothing but given that the Chinese already did it and the models are published what's the point. You can thank the Chinese taxpayer for subsidizing the electricity bill and just download the thing
He isn't difficult but I always thought Nabokov (in his fairly incendiary reviews http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations) was on point that he was sentimental, preachy and mediocre as an artist.
I found Dostoyevsky a slog to get through and it might have been made worse because he was sold to me as this 'great psychologist' when psychological realism is often missing from his stories and characters become page-long megaphones for some version of Orthodox Russian nationalism or Christianity.
I think Nabokov definitely has a point with brothers. Ivan's portrayal and brain fever always struck me as a cop out because Dostoyevsky couldnt actually articulate what was wrong with his ideology. Of course thats kind of the point, but still it always felt cheap and clumsy to me
>I wonder if it is possible to both be politically “unbiased” and maximally truth seeking.
In principle yes if you're in a polity where the entire political spectrum broadly accepts scientific base consensus, idk in practice maybe in Singapore?
In the US, although the number has been declining, almost 4 in 10 people are young earth creationists and believe the planet is less than 10k years old an din that case the answer to your question is probably, no.
>in 1776 the American colonists rebelled against what they saw as the arbitrary and tyrannical British monarchy.
although they didn't just do that, the American founders also articulated the point that the article seems to present as some new insight. That permanent foreign military involvements and the state it requires will eventually diminish freedom at home, that was why many of them wanted to avoid emulating the British empire.
Given that papers like the Economist used to regularly be staunch defenders of these interventions until they went wrong, and only ever seemed to disavow them for their practical outcomes rather than in principle they might want to do some reflecting on that.
> the Economist used to regularly be staunch defenders of these interventions until they went wrong, and only ever seemed to disavow them for their practical outcomes rather than in principle they might want to do some reflecting on that
Can you link a couple of examples? Presumably those articles should be easy to find on economist.com
The Economist certainly said it was. We did so most strongly and clearly in a survey (Present at the creation, June 29th 2002) on America's world role; and in leaders on August 3rd that year (The case for war), February 22nd 2003 (Why war would be justified) and March 15th 2003 (Saddam's last victory).”
Yes, they ran a leading editorial titled "Why war would be justified", arguing that confronting Saddam Hussein was "the least bad of the limited range of available options".
However, they reversed position in 2007, calling the invasion a debacle.
It would've been more surprising if they hadn't reversed their position, well after it became painfully clear to everyone that the war had been a terrible idea.
>But those who say he had no talent are just ignorant.
I don't think anyone says he had no talent, what rubs people the wrong way is that the thing he had talent for is the same thing that the people have who try to scam call your grandmother out of her pension money. You can be the world's greatest burglar, you're still a burglar. The whole cringy "social engineering" thing turned media persona and consulting business is to engineering what chiropractics is to medicine.
He leaned pretty heavily into monetizing his own image and for a lot of people what he did became synonymous with the word 'hacking' in a not particularly positive way and critising that isn't hate.
That's just nonsense. First of all, social engineering was a small part of his work, and it's OK that you don't know that. But your totally blatant ignorance of what his career covered is exactly what I'm talking about.
Look, I know that people form their opinions in a bubble. All I am saying here is you should expand your bubble. You know nothing about Kev. Again, that's OK, but it also means you should try to understand what you're hating.
You'd try to make money on your image if you could, I'm betting. Especially if you had been put in prison and left there with no bail hearing, and put in solitary confinement for 'hoarding tuna' in your cell. For 9 months. While your father died. This was not a normal treatment of any person in custody.
Kev was a good person. Full stop. Just as curious as all of us in that era.
His (or other peoples) treatment in the US prison system is another matter and often cruel, but no he didn't conduct himself like a good person in regards to his 'hacking'. He committed wire fraud, he impersonated people, he exfiltrated sensitive credit card information from thousands of people.
That's not just curious, that's not something we all did when we were young, those were legitimate crimes and they still are for good reason. He had a big part in popularizing the image that a hacker, rather than someone who writes software for the public good, is someone who tricks other people and steals personal data.
And no I wouldn't be proud if I ran phishing scams and stole IP from random companies, I wouldn't monetize that, I'd say I'm sorry which from reading his books at least I don't think he ever was.
> social engineering was a small part of his work, and it's OK that you don't know that... totally blatant ignorance... Kev was a good person. Full stop.
I understand you're defending your friend, but that's a little uncalled for. Personally, my first real knowledge of him was from his 2002 book The Art Of Deception, which is specifically a book about social engineering. That is how he himself chose to present himself - as a successful social engineer - so you can't criticise others for that.
There's good and bad in all of us. I don't think the person you responded to said Kevin was all bad, and made it clear it isn't hate.
I apologize for going off. I just get triggered when people make such assumptions. He did not see Kev working on extremely technical achievements, I am sure. I did. To say he was mostly a social engineer is just incorrect, and I overreacted. The fact that he wrote a book on it is fair, but I know a lot about beer brewing and could probably write a book on it, but it's just one thing I know.
if you're willing to spend a grand just to free up a few inches of floor space I don't think you're going to understand the reaction of the average consumer to prices in the current economic climate
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