Unionizing takes several steps. First, you have to sign enough interest cards to even begin the process. 30% is about right - you show there's a significant interest in people joining the union. Then you have the certification push - that is, a general vote on if you want to join the union or not. That takes a simple majority - if it fails, then no union. It's basically 30% of people saying they're interested in joining a union.

As for a "monopoly on labor" you have to realize the power mismatch that's going on here. Basically gig workers are disposable - they have no power at all the employment relationship. It's take it or leave it. (This applies to most other workplaces as well). The company holds all the power and your option is to either starve or work at whatever the company says they'll pay you.

Unions basically try to combat that power inequity. Progressives aren't against monopolies, they're against unfairness. The key is fairness - everyone has a fair shot at getting a job. The fact you're about to be homeless shouldn't be a determining factor in what you'll accept for a job.

Trump's vision of how the 50s and 60s were - that was the era of the strong union where the C-suite was paid less than 20 times the janitor. Where even the janitor was paid enough to own a home.

Of course, that's why we're never going to return to those times unless the politicians start reversing course on greed and start giving workers power through unions. Union busting is basically why they make up only 10% of the workforce in the US today through right to work laws and other things.

Progressives aren't generally in favor of monopolies because they generally lead to unfairness. But in the unbalanced power dynamic of employer-employee relations where for most employees they have little to no power to dictate working conditions, a monopoly on labor suddenly becomes a powerful thing to equalize the power dynamic and strike a fairer deal.

YouÃ(TM)re not wrong, but the issue with flock and similar is not so much being witnessed in public as it is being algorithmically analyzed and suffering consequences as a result. Which is an erosion of the presumption of innocence. It also provides a an easy tool for stalkers/oppressors/paychopaths that is really difficult to defend against.

The big thing with Flock is the Flock "social network" of cameras. That is their heavily advertised feature and what makes Flock cameras different from all other ALPRs out there.

You see, when Flock started, they sold their cameras to private individuals to monitor vehicles passing through their property (HOAs, parking lots, etc). But each was basically isolated from each other - just because Home Depot had Flock cameras doesn't mean your HOA could get information on that.

But then Flock started selling to governments, and they realized they could offer a big network. If your city joined the Flock network, then your city LEOs could search across the entire Flock network. The more cities that joined, the more valuable this access was.

And that lead to the problems of today where the network is abused by people for purposes that were not law enforcement related, like stalking romantic interests, exes, etc. Because the network was nationwide, this mean if your ex moved to a new city with Flock, they could be tracked just the same. No justification beyond some arbitrary "case" needed.

Flock sells it as "track a stolen vehicle across the nation". Which is far less effective since a single license plate can hit many different vehicles because many states have similar license plate number schemes. A stolen motorcycle lead to a takedown of a family in an SUV because their license plate matched except state. Because of oddball New Jersey license plates, Jaguar (the car company) have to re-plate their entire fleet of vehicles because the Flock camera only reads the big numbers on the Jersey plates, which match another stolen vehicle. Studies of the effectiveness of the alerts reveal it to only be about 20% effective.

All the other ALPRs like Axon(Taser) and such, either record it local to the city, or limit the network to where they are, so the city only has access to the city's network of cameras. Sure you break the nationwide stolen vehicle thing, but honestly do you think car thieves are stupid enough to ride around with stolen plates for more than a day? It's one of the first things they change.

And Flock knows the problem - as cities cancel their Flock subscriptions, the network gets less valuable. It's why when cameras get taken down, they're often replaced by Flock. A city who cancelled their Flock contract reclaimed all the cameras, only to find new ones put up. Basically it's like the city loses access but Flock retains the right to keep spying. Either that or they're like weeds.

Fair enough, and the feedback is always appreciated. All I can offer in return is to bold what I wrote...
"On the gripping hand, there could be individual-level cases that do have society-wide impact."

Thank you.

What is "it" in this sentence?

Are you talking about the minuscule Google RAG model whose weights are probably measured in megabytes to lower-gigabytes and which you could run on a cell phone with capacity to spare, and comparing it to the multi-terabyte frontier models in question?

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

OM NOM NOM BOOTS

THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE DOING, BOOT LICKER.

You're a traitor in spirit, if not in law.

Wow. Brutal.

I was very careful in my choice of words. This isn't about understanding. It's about feeling, which is why I used the word "feel" instead of "think" repeatedly.

I understand the role of the US Supreme Court and its equivalents in other countries. It's just that I'm uncomfortable with it being triggered in this case. I'm sure that doing so will be technically correct if allowed, but I don't feel that this case is a witchhunt... it's a witch. Yes, that means I've convicted Bankman-Fried in my heart. Granted. The courts to date have done the same, so it's not like the conclusion of guilt is absurd.

They are a safety concern. They are creating an opportunity for a foreign adversary. Does anyone really believe these clowns are capable of maintaining security?

WordPress would probably improve if he did

I have mixed feelings on this.

On the one hand, someone who believes they have been wrongfully convicted of any crime should be allowed to have that conviction reviewed by every level of justice that exists.

On the other hand, I feel something like a supreme court should spend its time on law matters that impact a large portion of their country. Issues and topics that refer to policy and fundamental law. Spending their time examining a single person's case feels like a use of their time that is unjust to the rest of the country.

On the gripping hand, there could be individual-level cases that do have society-wide impact.

In the end, this is only happening because there's a lot of money involved, which also feels unjust. A random citizen wrongfully convicted of theft or fraud could never get their case before the US Supreme Court, so why should this guy? I hate it all.

at least the person downloading such a component is responsible for "looking over it" before using it.

I'm sorry, but since when? You absolutely should not be tasking every single user of major projects with the responsibility of doing a code review on the whole thing before installing it. There needs to be a clear distinction between "fly-by-night thing that some rando uploaded" and "library that a million people depend on". In the traditional approach, the latter was something tat you installed with a package manner, while the former was something you went and fetch off e.g. Github or whatnot - and if you did the latter, then you were accepting that it was untrusted software. But now we have both (including the potential for "soundalikes") installed by the same means with no distinctions made by the install method. That is not good.

The funny thing about all this is that their only goal appears to have been to download publicly-available data off of UK government websites. I'm betting that they were (A) being tested on a knowledge-related task, and (B) not given direct access to the internet, but their tool capabilities involved access to the "gem" command (so that they could install Ruby packages for their work), and so decided to abuse (B) to cheat on (A).

Once again: training a model with the reward being "does it solve the task?" without looking at how it solves the task is very, very dangerous. This is basically the plot of Universal Paperclips.

I know a LOT of software that could use that as a pull request...

Of course the third bomb probably wouldn't have gotten used regardless of the order, as the next bomb (made from the infamous Demon Core) was scheduled to be ready to drop on the 17th, whereas Hirohito announced the surrender on the 15th (wasn't signed until 2 September, but it's hard to imagine that the US would have dropped the bomb after the announced surrender).

One of the amazing things is that the atomic bombings didn't shift the vote in the 3:3 deadlocked Japanese war council at all; the hawks (Anami, Umezu, Toyoda) remained focused on adaptation, not surrender. But it did make the doves (Suzuki, Togo, Yonai) more desperate, and Suzuki met with Hirohito. Hirohito had already been looking for an opportunity to surrender, having had plans to send Prince Konoe to Moscow to ask Stalin to function as a neutral broker to end the war (with secret instructions to accept "peace at any price"), but the trip was delayed by the Russian side, ostensibly by the Potsdam Conference (but in reality, to prepare for the invasion of Manchuria). When the terms of the Potsdam conference came out, Togo told Hirohito that they "were the most reasonable to be expected in the circumstances", to which Hirohito replied, "I agree. In principle they are acceptable." But the urgency to accept that in July wasn't present. Everything started collapsing in August, with the loss of their mainland and Pacific territories, the Soviet invasion, and the atomic bombings. What the bombings achieved was to help stir Hirohito to imminent action (which risked failing, as there was a coup attempt against him (the Kyujo Incident) to stop Japan from surrendering). The hawks saw unconditional surrender not as agreement to the loss of their sovereignty, but as agreement to enslavement.

But this is getting rather off topic. :) Main topic: if you think your AI is as much of a risk to the fate of humanity as the atomic bomb, which many of these people truly believe, then you can expect similar hesitancy as with the developers of the atomic bomb. They felt an urgent need - ending a brutal war - but at the same time had deep apprehension about what they were doing and how the fruits of their labour would be used.

And if you want a past example of scientists who feared their creation wanting to slow down, stop, or even undo it, BTW, let us consider the atomic bomb. Farrington Daniels took a poll of the Chicago nuclear scientists in 1945 asking what they wanted to happen with the atomic bomb. Remember that these were the people whose literal job was to make a weapon. Only 15% - 1 in ~7 - wanted the US to use it as it actually did, e.g. just start bombing cities just a couple days apart. Only a small majority wanted it even used in Japan, even against military targets without the Japanese first being invited to a demonstration in the US and being given ample opportunity to surrender. 13% - nearly as many as those who wanted the US to use it as it actually did - didn't want it used at all under any circumstance, in a war that had already caused a million American casualties.

The problem that they faced was that people like Groves** really wanted to bomb cities, and they, as the rank and file, didn't get a vote.

** - It seems dubious that Truman really understood what he was signing onto. While he never shirked from responsibility for authorizing it, the paper trail shows that he didn't seem to understand what he was approving at the time. In his diary before the attacks, he writes about the weapon, but about how he insisted it not be used against civilians, killing women and children, because he didn't want to sink to what he saw as the barbarism of the Japanese. In his first speech after the bombing, he refers to Hiroshima as "a military base", not a city, and says it was chosen to, insofar as possible, avoid the killing of civilians - but that if Japan did not surrender, then the US would bomb Japan's war industry, and then thousands of civilian lives would then be lost. Earlier drafts showed that it didn't contain the "insofar as possible" caveat. He genuinely didn't seem to realize what he was authorizing at the time. But Groves absolutely knew what he was doing, and deliberately selected sites for maximum civilian casualties. Truman seems to have come to understand what was going on by shortly after Nagasaki, where he gave the order to cease use of atomic weaponry, saying that the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible and that he couldn't stomach the thought of "killing all those kids".