That's horrifying. I'm glad my kids are almost out of school if that's what's coming.

The algorithm seems to have been failing to scale correctly, yes. On closer inspection, it looks like the billing software treated the bytes used as K used.

Did AWS use Grok to generate the billing sheets or the code for handling billing?

I'm serious. The errors reported look suspiciously like AI hallucinations or a signed integer being treated as unsigned.

There is an uncomfortable truth here: trojan horse LLMs.

It is possible to use data poisoning to insert special keycodes into an LLM, such that the presence of the keycode will totally change its behavior, throw off its guard rails, and motivate it to do things that harm users to benefit the LLMs creator.

Here is an article about a tool designed to detect precisely this. Though the recommendations leave me feeling like this tool is not guaranteed to find them. There may be clever ways to make them hard to find.

This is still very much emerging tech, so reputation is going to play a role in adoption. A modern version of the red scare could be enough to prevent widespread adoption of Chinese models, and keep people (or at least Americans) using models made by American businesses.

So far, experiments have shown that one cannot expect people to remain as diligent after extended periods of LLM use.

This is absolutely a problem if you work in a shitty sweatshop that forces you to be a sin eater for robot code.

The way we do it is, the tools are available, but you're not required to use them in any specific way or really, at all if you don't want to. You do, of course, have to get your work done and be responsible for your code. We have a spectrum of use, from all-in cascades of agents through folks who use it as little more than a search engine.

We had a few incidents where people were caught out and couldn't explain why their code did what it did, but that seemed to be enough to warn the rest; that hasn't happened in a while. I don't see our "velocity" stats, so I don't know if/to what extent the robots are speeding us up, but knowing our bean counters we wouldn't be maintaining our spend at this point if there weren't a visible bottom-line result. I do see our bug and incident metrics, which haven't seen any impact from LLM use.

If you work in a shithole, yeah, they're going to burn you out. But that's about sociopathic management, not the robot. They'd wear you down a different way if LLMs didn't exist.

Yes.

Some months ago we were reading articles here on Slashdot about how we had already reached peak AI by current methods, based on many industry experts and an event where a next-level bump in training data and resources was used and produced a model that was only barely better than the prior generation.

I guess the industry experts were just wrong? Or did we change training methods?

In any case, current evidence suggests that we have yet to hit peak, and so it would be reasonable to assume that some other country, possibly even the USA, could take yet another step and leave Kimi K3 in the dust.

I am happy that China is sharing this with the world, though.

Oh but being all moderate and reasonable like that is boring!

I just figured fleecing rubes was considered the retirement plan for this band of raiders and whores.

Dude's crime wasn't playing the inside, it was getting caught while not having enough dirt on the boss to make him care.

Lessons to be learned here include:

1. Don't store important things in any cloud storage, it might all be lost at any moment for reasons beyond your control. Use a different backup strategy.
2. Don't store sensitive or embarrassing things in cloud storage, it might all be hacked and stolen at any moment. Use a different storage strategy.
3. Always assume that anything you store in cloud storage is available for training by all AI models and available to every criminal organization in the world including all foreign and domestic governments and businesses. Also assume that you give up copyright rights by putting in cloud storage, since those policies could change at any moment.
4. Never rely on Microsoft for anything that you can't afford to lose. Video games are fine. Anything else is too risky.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

When other people use HP, it makes me angry. It's like giving money to a powerful mafia; even if I am not the one dealing with the mafia the power others give to them makes them a threat to me.

The more HP succeeds at consumer-hostility, the fewer options I have that are not consumer-hostile. Even Brother will start to look with envy upon the kind of money that HP makes through customer abuse. Someday, new leadership will inherit Brother and see no competitive forces keeping its quality of service high, and it will become HP's mini-me.

Spread the word. Every time you use an HP device, the terrorists win.

And who's credentials, precisely?

Who's testing intentional bias in OpenAI or Anthoropic?

This is a very multi-faceted issue with many overlapping issues compounding it.

It has been repeatedly observed that wealthy nations experience declines in birth rates. And we presently see this happening in wealthy countries across the globe, right now, and we have been seeing it for decades. And it's getting worse.

Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause. It's easy to read an anecdote like yours, maybe attach it to one's own similar experience, and get dismissive and say "women just want it all, and that makes them insufferable, so relationships are done." There really is quite a lot more than that going on, for both genders, and it isn't possible to cover it all in a short post.

But the upshot is that modern-day relationships are really hard to build and harder to keep. They are legal minefields and financial minefields. A failure of a relationship can be utterly life-destroying (not just emotionally, but socially and financially and legally). It is as if our governments and culture don't want there to be relationships, and so have built a world that is outright hostile to them.

The opposite is true, the world by and large wants there to be marriage and family. The hostility largely arises from profiteering, and from a repeated pattern of "well this possibility is bad so lets mitigate it with this solution (which sounds nice but winds up being even worse)".

When we see people walking away from all this, we result to scolding and shaming and trying to deny their access to whatever they are turning to instead, hoping the raw misery of not having their needs met will drive them to plunge right back into the minefield, and somehow not step on a mine. It's not going to work. It can't work. Until we are ready to take a serious look at how we are the problem (and by "we" I mean everyone and everything that is being justified as not the problem, a huge can of uncomfortable truths that we vehemently reject), this breakdown is only going to get worse.

Addiction and dependence ARE dangerous things and given China's very high sensitivity to the dangers of emotionally charged groups with charismatic leaders, I can see why they would reject this even apart from a desire for there to be more babies. But this measure is not going to get the birth rates up, it will just take away another coping mechanism that people want.