I've already equipped agents with access to credit cards that I generate at privacy.com and give budget caps to. It's just experimental amounts ($5-$50) and usually for paying for APIs or services to support the task. But it's all about risk management–I don't use models that train on my data, keep account and access contexts separate, and rely on service accounts for risky work instead of using my identity. We have to remind people that it's still the early days and things are changing rapidly. It reminds me of the early 90s and the flurry of innovation and the chaos that comes with change; this is all happening a lot faster.

Should we email Microsoft and advise them on how to install Linux and FreeBSD on their servers?

Though realistically, because 240Pu (from waste) is worse in a fission bomb than 239Pu - generally no more than ~20kT, and challenging to get more than a few kT - still enough to take out a city centre but not a metro area - you'll generally want a fusion weapon, which means deuterium and tritium supplies. And Ukraine doesn't run CANDUs, so you're not going to get tritium from the coolant. They'd need lithium targets / lithium in the coolant to breed tritium. Separation of tritium and deuterium are a mix of chemical, electrochemical, and/or physical separation, but are much easier than uranium isotopic separation (deuterium is double the mass of protium, and tritum triple the mass, so the chemical / electrochemical behavior is actually notably different in a lot of situations, unlike uranium).

For a fusion bomb they'd also want a depleted uranium tamper, but Ukraine probably has ample access to that, whether from weapons, armour, old Soviet stocks, etc. Even spent nuclear fuel is mostly 238U, if they don't mind the tamper being highly radioactive.

My personal best guess would be that Ukraine's unstated policy is to have "sprint capacity", like Japan and South Korea do. That is, to not make weapons or anything that would get them flagged as having a weapons programme, but to have everything needed that, if the word "Go" was given, that they could nuclearize very quickly.

Unlike your typical rogue state that seeks to get nuclear weapons, Ukraine has no need for mass centrifuge facilities or anything like that. They already have plutonium en masse, as they're a major nuclear power generation state with extensive waste supplies. Plutonium extraction via PUREX is merely metallurgy (it's not a simple metal to work with, but it doesn't require isotopic enrichment). You need nitric acid (bog standard, nobody will blink an eye), a reducing agent like ferrous sulfamate (not much of a red flag, it has tons of uses), and an organic solvent like tributyl phosphate (a little bit of a red flag, but it has other uses, and there are alternatives), and a bit of gallium (~1%) for alloying - not a problem. Ukraine could very readily have all of this on-hand, an underground lab ready to go, and a rolodex of people to staff it if the order is given. They'd need high explosives like PBXs or TATB, but nobody would blink an eye at Ukraine buying them. High speed switches for the detonators used to be a big red flag item, but today they increasingly overlap with power electronics for motors and power grids. You need neutron initiators, but there's a number of options for that. And running bomb physics simulations and doing small component tests is something they could easily have under the radar - if they don't outright have old Soviet design plans dusted off and ready to go.

The biggest red flag would be Ukraine inexplicably removing nuclear waste (for processing) and/or trying to defeat IAEA monitoring, so that would likely be not done unless nuclear tensions looked severe. Because if it looks like you're sprinting to a nuclear weapon, it increases the odds of a preemptive nuclear strike against you.

Glad you enjoyed FarCry, I worked as a prog on a bunch of them

If society is so fucked, you fantasise about dropping out and breaking it

uh, it's a fucking videogame bro. it's fun to play because it's fun to do things you generally are not allowed or able to experience in real life - even if it's a very distance simulation of it - be it steal sports cars and drive them off the top of an office building, or jump down a warp pipe and stomp on some squids' heads

it's one of the same principal reasons people watch movies or tv - it's different than your normal routine and produces emotional responses, which is a thing humans seek out

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange...)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia's population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia's nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There's also this myth that "if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war". Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They're effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today's front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia's estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they're hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn't actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

I look forward to the unplanned broadcast of Swan Lake.

"expect an LLM itself to implement any actually reliable security mechanisms"

I don't think you understood his comment at all, but it's okay, when it comes to LLM, you're just raging against the machine. It's cool.

gweihir's kind of an idiot, but I do recomment not starting comments with "I'm no expert" followed by the words "but I know .."

It's really not a good way of communicating.

Kinda sounds like humans, really. I don't want to make a direct comparison, but the last X years of history is an entire network of adhoc - okay maybe not 'excessively complex' but it'd be weird to describe humans that way - poorly integrated collection of interconnected social/state/military systems (paperwork or otherwise) with fragmented security and accountability.

Look, yes, it's scary and dumb but the people who are like "this could be fixed if only they did A or B or listened to me" are people who view the world through a lens that is reductively simple.

All major shifts/progress/changes in technology and communication have resulted in new kinds of damage. The medium is the message indeed.

The NY Times review made it sound fascinating. I do love fiction that doesn't spell anything out, and it sure sounds like that's the case with The End of Everything. I really wanna check it out.

It's really not that fun to live life seeking joy in being a small person.

To be clear: you can still totally argue about qualia, sentience, things of that nature. What is not up for debate is that they work through unimaginably-complex chains of logical reasoning on superpositions of conceptual states and engage in forward-planning and metacognition. These are just demonstrable facts.

There is no 'sentiment' in an LLM or internal state equivalent to 'thinking' anything.

Yes, there is.