Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!
Valsorda was on mastodon for a bit (in ‘22 maybe?) and was quite keen on it , but left after a bunch of people got really pissy at him over one of his projects. I can’t actually recall what it even was, but his argument was that people posted stuff publicly on mastodon, so he should be able to do what he liked with those posts even if they asked him not to. I can see why he might not have a problem with LLMs.
Anyone remember what he was actually doing? Text search or network tracing or something else?
Looking at both cohost and tumblr, I don’t think the funder has an asset that’s worth very much.
One or more of the following:
- they don’t bother with ai at all, but pretending they do helps with sales and marketing to the gullible
- they have ai but it is totally shit, and they have to mechanical turk everything to have a functioning system at all
- they have shit ai, but they’re trying to make it better and the humans are there to generate test and training data annotations
WONTFIX: system working as designed.
Summary of the recent crowdstrike report: 🧵https://infosec.exchange/@munin/112916974811882522
Munin wonders if the weird writing style of the report might be because crowdstrike used an LLM to generate a summary of several source documents, which would be funny-yet-depressing if true.
The actual causes of the incident probably won’t suprise anyone… “didn’t bounds-check, didn’t test parser on bad data, didn’t stage rollouts” in order of should-have-done-this-first-ness.
the US government has enough computing power to decrypt your internet traffic even if you use a VPN
No. Not even slightly.
I see you are completely unfamiliar with any of the issues here. I appreciate they are complex, but I don’t have the time or patience to educate you right now, even assuming you’re willing to learn.
Happily there are plenty of good examples of how such a system would work in practise… Web3 is Going Just Great, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain or Amy Castor perhaps.
Careful not to conflate things like hash trees with Blockchains. The former do get used for stuff like certificate transparency logs right now, because it is a sensible technology. Blockchains could do exactly the same thing (because they’re based on the same underlying principle), only with much more expense and waste, so there’s basically no point.
And the exact details are simultaneously trivial yet too dangerous to share with this world but trust them it’s bad
I like that this has the same shape as the classic bullshido lines about joining the dojo to learn the dangerous forbidden technique.
I asked chatgpt how to do the five-point-palm heart-exploding strike, but for obvious ethical reasons I won’t be repeating that information or the necessary prompt engineering to get it.
This reads to me more like assuming all terrorists are fundamentally incapable of anything remotely intelligent
The first paper you linked there lists 9 deaths and 806 injuries across 50 years. Conversely, you can look at a single example like the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 and see deaths and more injuries from a single event using simple techniques where materials and instructions are readily available. It isn’t unreasonable to look at the lack of success of amateur biological and chemical attacks and assume that plausible future attackers will be intelligent enough to simply take the tried and tested approach.
On the other hand, there might be some mileage in hyping up the threat of diy countertop plagues in the hopes that would-be terrorists are as credulous as so many politicians and media figures are, and will take the pointlessly inconvenient and inefficient option which will likely fail and make life a little safer for the rest of us.
rook
joined 1 year ago
Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted
and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.