ChatGPT says all of this is completely possible.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6add...

How likely is it that Flock is not already using its network this way?

Why would they bother?

Why bother using NASA a civilian, largely open space agency when they could use y'know, the actual, specific, designed-for-task military space agencies that were designed, structured, and staffed PRECISELY for secretive military projects? Like DARPA, the Space Force, or the Dept of Defense programs.

I'm not saying the US doesn't have secret space launches, OBVIOUSLY they do.
What I'm mocking is the absolutely ridiculous assertion that the Chinese program is "open" to any degree, except very-calculated revelations...you know, like a military based program. From the bottom to the top. The ENTIRE Chinese program is purely secret, except for the shit they're trying to manipulate you with.

I get it, the concept of a major government program that's not secretive has to be incomprehensible to Chinese.

Datacenters provide a service, that service is charged against their customers, and revenue is generated, and that revenue is taxed.

Self-owned/private datacenters may be harder to tax, but ultimately something will be charged a fee and tax revenue will be collected.

As soon as money gets into your hobby, it will ruin your hobby. Not that PHP could get much worse, but that's my opinion and some people like it. (Personally if I had made PHP, I would have written it in FORTH, with syntactically significant colors).

Since the AI can literally copy humans at any time if it 'chooses' to, it can therefore sound exactly like a human when it 'wants' to.

That is, even if you wrote a 100% perfect human/AI distinguisher, there are times when it would be wrong because the AI produces words that were exactly produced by a human.

Ukraine is the 'bread basket' for Europe, huge agricultural exporter...

I fully admit that this might be a 'me' problem, not a them problem; but I just don't understand why this agent monitoring setup was so vulnerable and is being treated as so novel.

Sure, the monitoring of whatever goes on inside the LLM is comparatively new and exotic; but when you set it loose on the internet it's going out through one or more of your WAN links, presumably with your router and firewall and so on in the way, and is mostly doing HTTP(s) stuff. Keeping an eye on what an internal host is doing when you can insert whatever trusted roots you want for TLS MiTM and you 100% own the pipe that it is using to communicate is not necessarily a desperately enjoyable task; but it would have been a relatively banal requirement a quarter century ago.

I'd also think that, when you are spending $$$$$ on the exercise in Nvidia compute gear, and it's a test of a 'frontier model' whose behavior and capabilities you are trying to better characterize and refine, allocating the handful of terabytes necessary to just store a full packet capture of the session in case it is relevant would be a no-brainer item.

Is there something I'm missing that makes this case more complex? I'm not talking about the 'grubbing around in the LLM's vectors and such' side; just the "a host is doing HTTP stuff through a WAN link we control, can we observe what it is doing?" aspect.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

imagine how flock personnel uses flock network every day...AI allows drawing conclusions from mass movement information that can provide information far beyond just someone's location. It is probably possible even to figure out market moves based on movement of groups of people.

This is not just about following any one person, this is about information movement, following a group of people who work on the same project for example to undersrand when they are going towards the same site / goal. This is beyond dangerous.

Obviously in 2026 most of the posts are going to be about how stupid Trump is just making meaningless goals for his own ego.

To be clear, he absolutely is.

Then again, I would point out that it seems pretty common that every president since the 1970s* has seen fit in the latter stages of their presidency to "talk big" on space commitments ... and then proceed to fund none of them.
Until I actually SEE $50bn flowing into NASA or space investment, I take ANY presidential assertions about expanding space programs as what they are: publicity bullshit.

*In fact the only one I can think of that didn't was Biden, but he was basically non compos mentis the last 12+ months anyway.

OK, OK we'll let Xi know you're earning your paycheck today.

The chinese space program is a fundamentally MILITARY program and thus its budgets, priorities, and developments are secret UNLESS there is deemed a value to public revelation.
The Chinese routinely withhold basic data that is generally shared across space agencies globally such as expected precise trajectories of vehicles and discarded stages.

Project 921, Shenlong, Or perhaps the 2007 ASAT test that was COMPLETELY unannounced and blew what, 3000+ of orbital debris?

Do you know what those TJS "communication" satellites are doing migrating into specific geostrategic orbits and then suddenly adjusting to park next to US or Euro satellites?

How's Yang Lewei feeling today?

https://undark.org/2019/01/29/...

What's chinese for "shut the fuck up, comrade"? I'm pretty sure you know it.

... But my request to the IT security mavens would be to extend your rigor beyond the employees to the programs that directly contradict your rules themselves.

I am told strictly: NEVER click on a blind link, yet I get constant emails from departments - including IT! - that are LINKS to training videos, educational resources, mandatory bullshit that when if don't click on it, I get stern warnings that I'm not doing mandatory things. (Oh, and all external email urls are replaced with unparseable 200-character strings that supposedly route the link through "URL defense" or some such.)

Or how about all the consultants? I work for an EU multinational and we have at least 3 REGULATORY-required systems that I have to log into to comply with EU bureaucracy that are myCompany.kpmg.com or whatever - and then I'm supposed to give that EXTERNAL pop-up my *corporate* user and password while it authenticates through our corporate cellphones.

I'm reasonably savvy, I believe, but when policy & security rules contradict, which am I supposed to follow? I can tell you that corporate IT doesn't appreciate being shown it's own use of blind links.

Well, it would be interesting to hear why you disagree with anarchy so profoundly.

My basic principal is that "illegitimate hierarchies are bad." In particular, having a hierarchy without consent is bad (ie, no taxation without representation sort of thing).

I would like to say I have a full system for how a very good anarchy system should look, but I fully admit it's not an easy problem. So instead I focus on general principals, and trying to find incremental changes that will improve things with high probability.

Realistically, modern democracies are already a massive improvement on the situation in most countries 300 year ago, with a much weaker hierarchy. Since a full revolution carries significant risk, it's better to make incremental improvements one at a time (unless the problems in the current system are severe). But simplistic "left-right" thinking and political parties are both a net negative, as they are both a method employed by bullies to to increase their power over others. So I feel confident getting rid of them would be an improvement (although I do admit there are some benefits to parties, like recruiting candidates to smaller, less important offices or recruiting election observers. So we need to be aware of the positive and the negative).

I thought we lured them all onto Facebook then ran for the hills?

Maybe the jacket has a kevlar fiber for support?

Of course they would do that.