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Comment Re: for mental constipation ... (Score 1) 88

Trump Does Socialism fan, the IRGC was quietly sitting in Tehran bothering nobody, not even Trump's corrupt friends, the relatives of Bin Ladin in Riyadh.

Trump started a war with Iran to show "strength" after the complete failure of his domestic and global economic policies. And also to try to duplicate his "deal" with the Venezuelan drug dealing Rodriguez crime family.

Just like the trump economic policies, his little war failed wrt all announced goals.

So now he's telling zelensky it is Ukraine's fault that US diesel is expensive and that Ukraine should surrender to russia.

What a moron.

Comment Re:Same error often repeated (Score 3, Insightful) 21

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.

Comment Goal (Score 5, Interesting) 21

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.

Comment Re: We are going so fast we need to slow down! (Score 3, Interesting) 93

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.

Comment Re: We are going so fast we need to slow down! (Score 3, Interesting) 93

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".

Comment Re: We are going so fast we need to slow down! (Score 2) 93

They are competitive in quality with American models.

They absolutely compete against lower-end or previous-generation US models. I use GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3 flash a ton, for example. But they do not compete against the top-end US frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

If you can do a normal difficulty, verifiable task with an open Chinese model, you probably should. GLM is less than $5 per 1M tokens out, vs. $50/1M for OpenAI Astra for example. But there are some things that you'll just get stuck grinding your gears on with the former that the latter will have no problems solving. Or it might be a really important nonverifiable task, e.g., not "does this program work".

Also, I'm not sure what "defenses against distillation" is supposed to even mean.

I've never met a Silicon Valley company that decided to slow down for reasons that weren't also aligned with business interests.

These people genuinely are scared of their creations.

Comment Re:for mental constipation ... (Score 1) 88

Great news.

In the meantime, Saudis just found out what "the trumpistan is our ally" means practically.

It means "you're on your own, bitch".

And they already saw from the trumpistani fail in the Iran war that without its NATO allies, trumpistan is basically a paper tiger with no teeth, just like putin's russia.

Comment We all know the real reason (Score 5, Insightful) 93

Training these models is incredibly expensive. In fact it's so expensive that there is no viable economic model to do so. As such, their options are either to drastically slow down the amount of new models trained or to go bankrupt. This is just a nice whitewashing of that. It remains to be seen if even using their models can be profitable, but we know that with the cost of training the next one they can't be.

Comment Re:I have two words (Score 1) 107

I also have some words: "Optional my a*s!" Two weeks ago my LG TV sdid software update. After that it would not let me watch anything until I agreed to all terms, including the ones about collecting and sharing of all kinds of data including fingerprinting what is being played over HDMI from say a laptop. So I either have to agree to being spied on or be unable to use the TV a paid for. I agreed to the terms and then went on to block any known server it pings back to. Since then I am monitoring the firewall logs to make sure it is not phoning a server I don't know of. Anyone know of a TV that is not a snooping device?

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