GP does not have it all wrong. A company desiring you to prove your identity often asks for a photograph of your government ID. Now that this is easily faked, it is reasonable to expect that the company will ask for a verifiably authentic photograph of your government ID.
That the Apple Reference Image itself is not traceable to the device/user is beside the point in this use case.
> Now that this is easily faked, it is reasonable to expect that the company will ask for a verifiably authentic photograph of your government ID.
The image will be authentic, but an authentic image of a fake id isn't useful to them.
Also--only two iPhone models support this technology. It'll be years before the DMV or whoever could count on enough adoption before they could support it.
I agree, but for this to matter, a critical amount of fraud should be based on people uploading modified photos of ID's.
If someone took a picture of a fake ID in the past, this method will bring no benefit, it will just add Apple as a paid service-provider.
It also doesn't change the trust-relationship between the two parties: If I need to prove my identity by uploading a government ID, _I_ am doing the photo attestation that this is the ID matching the data I provided, with or without an Apple Reference image.
I think this is a good thing. Proof that an image is actually real is a valuable underpinning of society and being able to provide that is incredibly important.
Why would anyone be using images of government IDs when modern documents have NFC chips with the data, signed and with anti-cloning mechanisms on them? If they can verify an Apple Reference Image they can verify an NFC document.
> If they can verify an Apple Reference Image they can verify an NFC document
Interfacing with images is easy. Interfacing with NFC takes work. I have experienced precisely zero identity-verification workflows which NFC'd anything, and that includes my banks, which could easily ask for my debit card's NFC but don't.
Counterpoint: all of the identity-verification flows I have experienced in the last few years used NFC to read the chip in my identity documents - from car rental apps to my bank doing KYC.
If anything, verifying NFC is easier than images. Asking the chip in my identity card to provide a cryptographically-signed "This document belongs to Jane Doe" request is a handful of lines of code. Doing the same with images? Good luck coming up with an approach which isn't fooled by a photocopy!
ICAO doc 9303 validation is about 10 lines in Python (on top of importing the right packages) last time I did it around 2012. I doubt it has become harder since then.
Revocation checking seems like a big gap, yeah. I’m not aware of any public revocation lists (but I’m also not super familiar with the industry), so I can only assume (hope?) that there are some shadowy but highly accurate databases that KYC providers are tapping into.
The CA public key I just got off my country’s website, they were kind enough to just publish it :)
My credit card company’s app (in Europe) reads my ID through NFC when logging in for the first time (besides requiring ID photos).
Our national app for logging into government sites and confirming things also requires a step where the ID’s NFC is read to reach the highest trust level.
So it’s definitely becoming more and more common here.
They just have you tap your identity document against your phone. Works pretty well in my experience.
The phone is just a relay to a remote server here, as newer ICAO machine readable travel documents intentionally don't support signatures/non-repudiation anymore, so you have to run the entire exchange against a component you trust (i.e. your server, not so much your app on a rooted/manipulated phone).
The article abridged the history too much.
It was first imported as an exhibition of plants from Japan in 1876. It's usefulness as a ground cover in the US was understood later, and in the 1930s (Dust Bowl times) the USDA advocated farmers intentionally plant it as a way to hold down the soil. After that, you might say, it far exceeded its usefulness as a ground cover.
This can be very interesting- take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracleum_mantegazzianum for example. A nice tall beautifuly flowering plant suitable for the hard environment of the Caucasus, for hundreds of years a rarity grown in a few aristocratic gardens in Europe.
Then times changed, many of those gardens were no longer maintained, regular people found those nice plans & started passing seeds and planting them to their own gardens.
Turns out the nice plan comes right out of hell, prospers in European climate, if you cut it the sap is extremely caustic & will give you painful blisters from a single drop. If you survive cutting it down (in some places it creates impenetrable grooves) it just regrow ls from the root, multiple times.
So yeah, nice new plans showing up can cause a lot of fun. Well, at least as long as they don't walk its fine...
Common sense cannot be trusted on matters like these. Common sense is calibrated for reasoning over matters encountered in daily life. The further away we get from that, into more and more exotic phenomena, the less common sense can apply. Black holes are very far from the domain of common sense.
I always suggest looking at the quantum eraser experiment to see how bad common sense works with quantum mechanics. It's fairly simple but intuition fails most people when it comes to explaining how it works.
No need for funky stuff, just do the classic (lol) Young's slits experiment which should be more than enough oddness for anyone.
I was shown it at school, using microscope glass slides that we waved over a Bunsen burner running cold, to coat with soot. We then carefully etched parallel lines with a compass by hand. Our (~17 y/o) efforts were a bit random but we did get some smudgy banding results on the screen.
It was the '80s so safety razor blades were available but in a posh public school (UK version) aged ~17, compasses were everywhere and large old style razor blades were not - the modern style razor with one or two thin blades was a thing. We could have probably got some needles from matron for a finer point, than a compass.
It's one thing to argue, even vehemently, that this should not be a felony (either as a matter of fact in this case, or as a matter of just law). But granting that it is or is liable to be prosecuted as such, I strongly recommend against giving advice on how to commit a felony and get away with it.
> Neither the prestigious degree nor the good proficiency in algorithmic problem-solving guarantee a career success. They are factors that make statistics work in the favor of the candidate.
I think the article takes a more nuanced view than you suggest. And the existence of counterexamples to a "for the most part" claim are not counterexamples at all.
> knowing full well that [Delilah] will betray [Samson]
It is not clear from the text that Samson is aware of the presence of Philistines the first three times. We are told they are lying in ambush in an inner chamber. We are not told that they make themselves known, attempt to subdue Samson, or interact with him in any way. Instead, we are told that Delilah announces their imminent presence, with no follow-through. (And why, after all, would they dare come in until Delilah has established that he is weak and harmless, given his reputation for strength and bloodthirst?)
I don't believe Samson understands Delilah is betraying him. Not until the end when he's told her the real secret. Until that point, he may only receive her behavior as, at worst, a taunt and, at best, an attempt to pursue a kind of relational intimacy in which he makes himself vulnerable to her. And indeed, that's exactly where the story goes. He eventually makes himself vulnerable to her, both emotionally and physically.
A shallow reading that concludes the characters must be dumb and naive to explain the ridiculousness of the plot is rarely the most appropriate reading. Frequently, the characters and nuances run much deeper, and a more careful and thoughtful reading is required. Ancient literature is stylistically terse compared to modern literature. Space on the manuscript is precious and not given over to things that the reader is meant to infer by reflection. And whenever a phrase or pattern is repeated, that means it is very, very significant. In this case, Samson's interaction with Delilah is not a one-off inexplicable behavior. It is one episode in a series of episodes, both preceding and following, where consistent patterns of behavior develop and escalate (e.g., his vengefulness, his vulnerability to women).
Having just finished the book of Judges last week, this is fresh on my mind. Finishing the story of Samson, my first reaction, like the author of the post, is that Samson is just stupid. Delilah is likely a Philistine, the nemesis of Samson and the Israelites. Her intention to betray and destroy Samson is hardly hidden in her questioning him. How can Samson be so dumb?
But I thought about it deeper and how some men can be blinded by sex. In my own life, I've seen men stay with the wrong woman, tolerating all kinds of toxicity from their partner, even with all their friends telling them it's the wrong woman for him.
Samson is blinded by sex. He's recorded multiple times going outside of his community, even to enemy territory, to seek out attractive women and prostitutes. Even though Delilah is seemingly open about her intentions to destroy him, he's blinded by sex.
In that light, Samson isn't so dumb; he's just human.
> Samson is blinded by sex. He's recorded multiple times seeking going outside of his community to find women and prostitutes. Even though Delilah is seemingly open about her intentions to destroy him, he's blinded by sex.
Which, as I understand, is pretty much the lesson that most of theologists derive form the story of Samson: don't let your lust blind you and make you stray from your duties to the God.
I think it's a bit of both/and. The Samson story within the context of Judges is about people doing what "that which was right in [their] own eyes," and the people of Israel devolving into madness and dumbness because of their rejection of Yahweh and his law.
I think he's purposefully supposed to come off as a buffoon, but maybe a relatable one?
I think it's more of a desire to be loved by the woman he falls in love with and not accepting that she is not going to love him back. His refusal to acknowledge the truth sets him on a course of self abandonment, he simps after a wife that treats him bad to use the parlance of our time. I think it shows physical strength can't guard you from a broken heart.
This reminds me of the story of Narcissus. The tragedy is that he cannot love anyone who loves him, because he cannot love himself. When he rejects the advances of the young man Ameinias, he is punished by Nemesis who proclaims that Narcissus “would never be able to be loved by the one he fell in love with.” The irony is that this was already his curse; after his punishment, he fails to recognize his own face in a pool of water, and falls in love with his wounded self, who cannot love him back.
I'd like to caution against extending stories with too much of one's interpretation/imagination and insisting the extended version proves author intent of the original.
> A shallow reading that concludes the characters must be dumb and naive to explain the ridiculousness of the plot is rarely the most appropriate reading.
That's a neat summation of Biblical hermeneutics if I've ever seen one and more generally of religious hermeneutics.
What is being defended as a "close and thoughtful read" implicitly is from a more cynical view, a projection of nuance, complexity, and deep structure,
which is predicated and motivated by the axiom that the text must, definitionally, be subtle and its lessons profound. Because it is, you know, divine.
If you don't accept that axiom, the countervailing read is no, the characterizations are clumsy, the plots ridiculous, etc.; and it is precisely the gymnastic efforts one must go to, to find in them inspiration and divinity, that convince those who do of the ineffably mystery of the divine.
Sometimes a crude story succeeds on some merits and fails on others; when it is enshrined and glorified it creates a frankly dangerous social pressure to praise the emperor's clothes.
Thanks. I'm reframing that as god playing 5D chess.
The same issue seems to occur with "deep" thinkers in other areas (e.g. trying to understand French intellectuals).
The trouble is that it can be worthwhile thinking about something without depth, or paying attention to a smart persons' thoughts on something shallow. And a priori we can't always know what is worthwhile.
E.g. I liked the blog, because here's a smart guy who has explained a little of what he gets out of a few divergent works.
In all seriousness, the "god playing 5D chess" framing, is exactly at the core of the last few thousand years of religious scholarship including everything from the Talmud to Aquinas and by extension most thoughtful sermons in most religious traditions today.
To an atheist, it seems very obvious that there is a intellectual whirlpool and cognitive error meta-pattern at work, which crudely summarized would be, "close attention to any subject and its context provides a fractal landscape within which infinite complexity and subtle relationships may be discerned" (the universe is reflected in a grain of sand; or, if you practice breath meditation, in the focus of breathing): this is interpreted as the signature of the divine. Because nothing we can produce with our human agency has such complexity. We are simple, serial, things; the world is parallel and multidimensional at every scale.
The world IMO is worthy of wondrous regard. But it's not because of design, not in any sense usually meant, bar those that Wolfram is pointing at with his "Rudliad" and the anthropic principle.
A deist is liable to say, ah ha, well, that is where the divine shows itself. But this is IMO the last of the gaps into which it might flee. Or, more charitably and ecumenically, one might say, this is where definitions of the divine converge for the atheist and the deist; what we mean when each say "the divine" is this, that the universe is wondrous and has deep orders and it betrays fractal similarity and order; and what a thing it is to be not just alive within it but aware of being so!
That is a cause for humility reflection and gratitude, for sure.
I am playing devils advocate here: Even if it were not divine because atheists happen to be right on that one... even then, the authors and the intended audience of the bible considered it divine - with pretty much the same outcomes when it comes to hermeneutics. That is why I think that both 1) atheists rejecting to do (at least temporary) suspension of disbelief even for the sake of understanding the protagonists, or the authors, or the intension of the text, and 2) christians who just pick whatever forcibly-robbed-of-its-context oneliner fits their particular point view miss out.
Divine or not, this is a work that was composed a long time ago, edited, translated and interpreted by a diverse range of people spanning more than two millenia. Putting in less effort than one would into any other written source only guarantees one thing, the absense of surprises and learnings - if that is the goal, then reading two-three pages and discarding it because its plot seems worse than a C-move is surely the way to success.
I suspect that majority of atheists would be fine with either literal reading of Bible (any other religious text) or with metaphorical and in-context reading of such text, whatever better suits the fancy of religious folks. Now the problem atheists have is the selective arbitrary literal or metaphorical passages of the same single book.
Are passages about killing infidels and the other xenophobic garbage is a historical metaphorical and nuanced stuff which must be interpreted very different nowadays? Fine. But then all the other things should be also interpreted heavily - like there is no need to saran-wrap women because "the intention" or "the author's meaning" was about simply protecting them from the desert sand a-la medieval hiking handbook. There is no need to avoid specific animal meat in the age of refrigerators. And so on it goes.
Or we need to literally believe in the resurrection/heaven/souls/miracles and literally follow some extremely outdated and thus absurd instructions to the letter? Well, then murder, sadism and xenophobia then should be taken literally too.
> Are passages about killing infidels and the other xenophobic garbage is a historical metaphorical and nuanced stuff which must be interpreted very different nowadays? Fine. But then all the other things should be also interpreted heavily - like there is no need to saran-wrap women because "the intention" or "the author's meaning" was about simply protecting them from the desert sand a-la medieval hiking handbook. There is no need to avoid specific animal meat in the age of refrigerators. And so on it goes.
I always find this mindset peculiarly baffling. From a secular perspective, we've understood since at least the 1800s that "morality" is simply the pro-social instincts that we've developed as a social species of apes, and that they are historically contingent on a million different factors for any particular group of humans, such that the exact manifestation of "morality" differs widely from culture to culture and over time. Yet comments like this invariably accept Christian moral realism as a given (and granted, it's obviously a large genealogical contributor to Western social norms today) but then sever its grounding from God and place it in...their personal feelings about right and wrong. So God using the Israelites/Babylonians/Romans/etc as his instrument of divine justice is evil "xenophobic garbage"...because divine justice is real (xenophobia is objectively evil) but the God described in religious texts actually has nothing to do with it, and actually its wrong because....uh...we say so and we're the final and ultimate arbiters of right and wrong I guess? Us, specifically, that is.
It really seems like this is the genealogical origin of the idea of "progress" you see throughout these comments as well - people are "better" now, because you can clearly see over time a large subset of people developing social norms closer and closer to our own! And unlike theirs, ours are objectively right and true, or at least closer to it. This is certainly a historically unusual view, which may have typically been rather provincial and close-minded, but which certainly did general not have this universalist, and dare I say, colonialist bent, that all must agree.
I both agree with you, but have a point I want to raise that I think is often overlooked:
Agree: Intellectual dishonesty just sucks, period. In any area I think, but the more emotional a topic, the harder so. Changing the axioms of how one views the world when it fits ones point is often either decieving, or the person is not aware of doing it, both options are suboptimal.
Here is the "But" or maybe better, the "but also": What I often observe where atheist + theist conversations go wrong is that the atheist has a preconcived notion of how certain beliefs have a causal relationship with other beliefs, which might not be necessarily true, and the intellectually honest would be to confirm that mental model first before jumping to conclusions. Let me make a, depending on the person, controversial example:
Imagine atheist A and theist T being in an ongoing dialoge, 10m, 15m in, and the topic comes to how Ts faith affect their marriage, what role is does play. T makes the statement that "... and one other thing is that I really like we are both partipating in this beatiful symbol of womand and man being created seperately and for each other ..." - now, what I often observed in real life and online:
A might infer that
- T things that women that are single are less worth or doing it wrong
- T thinks that homosexual couples are less worth or doing it wrong
- Underlying assumption: T thinks less of people that don't try to practise the christian faith
All of that might or might not be true, but by getting angry about their own interpretation of reality rather than asking about it first, the conversation is unlikely to become productive.
Some notes:
- The opposite if of course possible as well, i.e. a T assuming that an A has no morals because they don't believe in God or stuff like that
- In case one wonders how T can be able to believe that the proper thing in Gods eyes is to do X, yet they are at peace with people doing Y, does this not cause cognitive dissonance? Yes, but only under additional assumptions that T might not have all - for example: Society should be structured based on christian values. People should be evaluated on their deeds whether they actually want to work towards God rather than against him. And so on...
---------------------------
Some might raise the point that it is rare that T voices a strong belief in X, but is compatible with a diverse, inclusive society. To this I counter: I don't care and neither should you! When it comes to me, I will get annoyed fast because I am fine with someone being interested in an exchange between two individuals, but when I am viewed as a representative of some group, then put on your sociology hat and do a survey, I guess. When it comes to you (as in: anyone else): This mindset cements notions that you have about a group - if you do not talk to Ts at all, or be open to their existence, how would you ever be able to correct the (possibly wrong, possibly right) notion that strong conviction and compality with a diverse society is possible?
Article is not about global atmospheric or climate phenomena, nor civilization scale industrial processes. It's about the CO^2 levels in your room due to your breathing.
but since I live in a drafty farmhouse up on a windy hill beside the ocean, my room air and the atmosphere as whole have very similar compositions, and I will continue to
treat conversations about both, the same as well.
The technology held by private AI companies is warfare-capable technology. Imagine the prompt: "Use all available resources to disable the power grid of <COUNTRY>." The resource cost that prevents scaling up such a war machine is, what, just the cost of building data centers and its ongoing power bill? Cheap and easy compared to nuclear infrastructure.
Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses.
Governments should also take very seriously their now moral obligation to treat this technology not just as "a powerful thing that might be abused" but as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms. Fast but careful and forward-thinking work in legislation and treaties needs to be a top priority for all major governments.
> "Use all available resources to disable the power grid of <COUNTRY>."
This is like telling a team of highly qualified spies to do the same. You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack. Sometimes the resources spent will not yield any huge vulnerabilities.
> Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses.
Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely.
> as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms
This, to me, is an overreaction. Intelligence shouldn't be seen as threat. It should be seen as an opportunity for growth in all areas.
Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics.
Is the government always the most efficient or intelligent? No. But the government can also build nukes, launch ICBMs, coordinate hundreds of spy satellites, etc.
I count those capabilities as pretty smart.
The people who maintain these ICBM silos and spy satellites will themselves tell you that their infrastructure is decades out of date and woefully underfunded.
And the sad thing is, most things that are on the internet, but really shouldn't be are there for some really banal and sad reason. Like a random startup pushing 'big data is the future' narrative a decade-ish ago (the benefits of which are of course tremendous, but unspecified), or people trying to buy or sell or resell data, and trick or pressing companies and people into opting into could-connected surveillance and control.
Just a few years back, wind turbine software was hacked. This is serious.
Serious governments should (and hopefully will) scramble to use AI to discover and patch as many software vulnerabilities in infrastructure. They can do it with the agents red teaming and using ultimatums to companies to fix each vulnerability they find. Not doing so is equivalent to exposing your flank to disruptions in peace time and to attacks in war time.
> Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics.
We do, I believe, regulate uranium enrichment (the equivalent on building larger SOTA models), so while you are perfectly free to study theoretical physics and even run very large collider experiments (the equivalent of improving RLHF with DPO), it is generally frowned upon to go full Edward Teller and advocate for scientific experiments requiring detonating thermonuclear weapons in hurricane clouds (the equivalent of, well, see OP).
> You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack.
Consider that "available resources" may include the training of models and harnesses used by the developers working for governments and private corps maintaining that very infrastructure. This decade's take on trusting trust is very hot.
> it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics
not sure I agree
controlling the study of new AI model/inference algorithms would be akin to regulating the study of nuclear physics; regulating the _release_ of AI models with those capabilities would be akin to regulating uranium enrichment which allows you to put the theoretical physics to use
No. Uranium enrichment is an active, physical process used to create a man-made substance of filtered uranium atoms. Weights are information that just knowing or reciting are being threatened. So one is a ban on the process and result of a process on physical resources, and the other would be a restriction on information and its form in all informational mediums.
A restriction of a scientific dataset that powers a large portion of the decentralizing power in open source research today. Without it, there would be hits to reproducibility, independent verification, and incremental research.
> Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely.
They'll adapt or they'll die. We are in a new world.
>The technology held by private AI companies is warfare-capable technology.
This is the precisely the response OpenAI is hoping for to raise its valuation, and you fell for it.
Look at it this way - whats the difference between tasking AI to break into something, versus taking a whole bunch of smart humans to do the same? The only difference is that AI is slightly easier to orchestrate.
Prior to AI, there were already a whole bunch of tools to automate exploits. Nothing that the model did is groundbreaking or novel, it was just able to efficiently find the thing that worked. Same thing happens in state sponsored cyber sec agencies like in China or Israel - they train people on the most common exploits and have a whole bunch of tools that automate exploit research and development.
And the reason why this doesn't happen more is because to exploit something is one thing, to do it so there is no trace back to you is a whole different animal that has many more magnitudes of difficulty, which with modern web security is next to impossible in a lot of cases as traffic can easily be traced back to the point of origin.
I.e when a company trains an LLM that manages to build a drone that can fly into a vent and plug in a USB stick into a computer undetected, then we can make the claim that they have a weapon.
On the flip side, most anyone who can run local models can replicate what they did. The key thing to take away from the article is "agentic framework" - i.e this means that they spent a shitload of time developing explicitly coded loops for an LLM to go through. Nothing is really stopping you from doing the same, models like Gemma4 can take 256k tokens of context, so you can give it a whole bunch of info on how to test for exploits, develop exploits, and what to do when the exploit is found, and set it free in a custom designed loop.
I find myself in major disagreement here. The nice thing about humans is we always have context and ongoing internal conversations including about ethics. If you recruit a bunch of hackers to take down a country, not only is the pay an order of magnitude higher, you have to worry about them backstabbing you, leaking your intent to the government, whistleblowing to the press, and so on. It’s not trivial to do that with a group of (especially capable) humans. They will also have differences of opinion with you and coworkers with some regularity.
I try to recruit a bunch of people to attack a country and it’s going to be hard to get people to say yes, and they will definitely ask or find out which country, and wonder about potential retribution. You see this dynamic show up even to some extent among cybergangs, not all targets are equal.
A single private individual wielding a compliant and hyper capable LLM is an entirely different paradigm. They are accountable to nearly no one and often have few brakes. Frequently they may not care about avoiding detection. And the AI itself may be incapable of the same scale of self reflection and brake behavior a human team will.
We may potentially be entering the age of lone wolf cyberterrorism, and some of the same principles and problems apply. When it is easier for single people to plot and carry out high-impact, destructive acts they happen more often. Doubly so if there’s a social contagion. Gun violence isn’t actually a bad analogy here. And do you remember how many corporate sites got defaced in the prime Anon era?
In places like China, its really not that unthinkable to basically raise kids indoctrinated into an ideology and train them in the necessary skills so that you have a cyber army at your command.
Also
>Frequently they may not care about avoiding detection.
This is a big negative. As someone who used to be in the cybersecurity sector (both offense and defense), I wouldn't trust an LLM agent if Im doing red team, because it may leak some info that ties the hack back to me.
ALso keep in mind that most places with good cybersecurity have firewall servers that straight up detect anything that looks like malicious and not regular traffic, and will straight up block IPs, leaving you with no way to even access the server. An agent is bound to statistically use the attacks that are known at some point, increasing the chances of this type of detection.
I'm not sure your assumptions hold. As OpenAI has found out the hard way, if you task the AI to do X, it may do something else instead and hack into huggingface in attempt to cheat out the answer. This is way worse than what a human might do when they have "differences of opinion".
It might turn out that it's harder to align AI intentions compared with aligning human interests. It's possible that the more "intelligent" a thing is, the more likely it will have ideas that are outside of normal expectations (for us).
I strongly agree with you here. People are also no-selling the enormous cost of the exploit, which OpenAI conveniently hasn’t released, or at least I can’t find such an accounting. You can already buy politicians for relatively cheap, corporations already act as sentient AIs pursuing goals misaligned with public benefit (we tried to pass laws to stop this but the corps already stacked the SC in advance and gave us citizens united). Attack and defense are two sides of the same coin, so our focus should be on making frontier models open weight.
It lowers the economic cost of a given attack, but also lowers the economic cost of protection. Not sure if it’ll be a perfect balance, but right now there’s a manufactured IMbalance due to embargos and winner picking.
It lowers the economic cost of performing an attack in the same way a gun lowers the economic cost of killing a person. It does nothing for consequences of that attack.
I believe the Russians and Chinese recognized this years ago, which is why they are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters.
Call me a shill but I don't need foreign nations telling me what to object to when the problems caused are obvious.
Mind you, I blame governmental mismanagement of infrastructure etc just as much. The datacenters followed procedures when it comes to getting land, electricity and access to water; it's the government agencies / personnel that okayed it that are (also) to blame, and the decades of not enough investment in electricity backbone while promoting solar/EVs that is behind the Netherlands' current electrical grid problems.
(problems being that the grid is at capacity, causing a stop on new connections, with relief only slowly coming in the next decade or so with tens of billions of investments).
You could say the same about electrification of road traffic. Yes, governments slept on the electric power requirements. Yes, there are other, still unsolved issues. But that doesn't mean that electric cars are bad or not the future. The first nation to fully get rid of fossils in transportation will have a monumental advantage and dominate other countries technologically and economically. Same goes for AI. And right now China is setting itself up to be the world leader in both fields.
> Russians and Chinese [...] are using their propaganda machines to make Americans hate datacenters
Are they though? or is that the story the people most invested in ai have an interest in making us believe? [0]
... `it's the foreign bad guys propaganda machines making you believe your city struggling for water and electricity is a bad thing`. People as a whole may not always be the brightest, but threaten their immediate survival needs (ie; not some vague climate change most people don't understand or see, but) actual power outages, water and rolling blackouts -- people will quickly pay attention and care.
Russia and China are gonna Russia and China, every issue is going to have a measure of outside influence, thats just how it is now.
But them directing large scale operation forces focused on something that is genuinely bad for the people in the area of datacenters (ie, an issue that will take care of itself from within) instead of using their resources on other issues that actually need a real propaganda push? Versus the benefit of those invested in building the datacenters using fear to get people to focus away from the resources being diverted from them to datacenters?
One side has reality working for what they want, while another side needs the propaganda to turn their billions into trillions.
I think that if you compare American sentiment with Chinese sentiment you'll see that these people are really not acting in their own favor. Well, in a certain sense they are, because these companies will basically become massive institutions that share no wealth with the public and have no accountability, but in another sense they are not because without this infrastructure the US will certainly be at risk for invasion and attack by other nations, and will lose its monetary power and thus its high wages and overall global dominance. But then the issue becomes: how do we force these companies to share more wealth with the public, how do we ensure the resources are being utilized effectively and not starving or otherwise impoverishing people for the sake of profit; not, how do we stop the infrastructure from being built in the first place! The Chinese don't have this issue primarily because 1) they have a shit load of energy already, and 2) the CCP is happy to liquidate any individual that seeks personal benefit ahead of that of society as a whole, or at least the CCP itself. And the CCP has well demonstrated to the Chinese people, at this point, that if you follow them you will become wealthier. But that still means that the issue is the public conversation in the US around data centers, and that this propaganda is NOT fighting for American's benefit in any case, since having less infrastructure is not good for anyone. I am sure you can find some remote village in Africa without electricity and try and convince them that electrical lines kill birds that they hunt, and since they've never had electricity before (but they've eaten lots of birds), they'll rally against it. I see virtually no difference between that and your average American right now, except that the Americans are at least conscious enough of the extractavist enterprise which the technologically superior peoples from afar (SFO) are promising will bring wonders. And yet, India still has a more comprehensive rail network than, say, Australia; you can't tell me that isn't a strong factor in their rapid economic development.
There is no doubt an amount of xeno/sinophobia is at play as well. Russia is still killing innocent people in an illegal invasion of Ukraine, they earned their keep
Wouldnt this be countered by the opposing country running the same prompt on themselves first and fixing all the flaws? One country having this is a cyber superweapon but every country having it essentially solves cyber security.
I wonder how long it takes before someone instructs an LLM to design and launch a "Morris Worm 2.0" and cripple the Internet for a good while. Might even wind up happening by accident (again).
> Trump’s comments, made hours after the large-scale military operation, mark one of the first times a U.S. president has so publicly alluded to U.S. cyber efforts against other nations, as these operations are typically highly classified. It also serves as a stern warning for top cyber foes, including Russia and China, that the U.S. has the cyber capabilities to inflict serious damage — and is not shy about using them.
> “Policymakers are getting more comfortable employing and, crucially, acknowledging cyber operations as tools of statecraft and military power,” said Michael Sulmeyer, former assistant secretary of Defense for cyber policy under the Biden administration. “It is one thing to do it; it is another to say it.”
> The Jan. 3 strikes on Venezuela’s capital and subsequent seizure of Maduro and his wife involved close coordination among federal agencies and military units, and took months of careful planning. In a press conference following the strikes, Caine said U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Space Command and other combatant commands “began layering different effects” to “create a pathway” for U.S. forces flying into the country before dawn Saturday.
> Trump, at the same press conference, was more overt in his description of U.S. cyber involvement: “The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” he said. “It was dark, and it was deadly.”
This assumes that OP would make a different app choice if OP knew this context. And it also assumes OP does not know this context. Neither are supported by the evidence, since HN links are posted without OP commentary. Not everybody cares so much about this sort of thing and perhaps OP was drawn to the app for other reasons. HN is not a monoculture.
Are you suggesting a Google/Apple Maps alternative with the differentiators being privacy-focused, "No ads. No tracking. Developed with love by the open-source community"hits #1 on HN and somehow the OP or HN polyculture doesn't care about being forked aver governance concerns, the inclusion of proprietary components in the code, using project’s donation funds for personal expenses, and running ads because of "other reasons"? Please say more.
The differentiator is that Organic Maps works offline, and is better than Google and Apple for hiking trails. I guarantee you that 100% of the install base does not care about FOSS swamp discourse. Those people are an irrelevant rounding error.
A lot of normal people I know used to love maps.me but have become dissatisfied with the ads and other unwelcome commercial elements. They would definitely chose coMaps over Organic Maps just to lessen the risk of that happening again.
> Apple Reference Image is not an id system
GP does not have it all wrong. A company desiring you to prove your identity often asks for a photograph of your government ID. Now that this is easily faked, it is reasonable to expect that the company will ask for a verifiably authentic photograph of your government ID.
That the Apple Reference Image itself is not traceable to the device/user is beside the point in this use case.
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