You don't get it.

Autonomous AI agents are the perfect no-responsibility card. The AI companies? They trained a general-purpose model and never gave it any explicit instructions to do hacking. The AI services? They are just middlemen and have no control over what people tell the agents to do. The people prompting the agents? Unless you're straighforward dumb, you didn't tell it to do hacking, you just told it something innocent like "find me all data on Mars for my school project" and the agent decided that probably NASA is hiding something so let's hack them to get it.

Since there's no human anywhere executing anything that's a crime - voila, in addition to the victimless crime we now have the perpetratorless crime.

A resounding success. No large-scale demonstrations, damaged cameras, lawsuits or political suicide for those involved. So we can expect this to be rolled out fully.

Crime prevention? Who said this has anything to do with crime?

I know, and it's disheartening, but I still remain optimistic. Even if much of the human population doesn't "get it" -- they at least are starting to, and the manipulation techniques of the past several decades seem to be wearing quite thin, and they don't seem to be able to come up with new ones anymore. Maybe 'cuz they're using AI?

This is just insanity marketing. "AI" doesn't need "safety". That's ridiculous. It's the same argument for censorship that gets trotted out all the time "We can't have kids reading the Anarchist's Cookbook!" In this case it's even more disingenuous: it's a combination marketing ploy (our AI is so good it's scary!) and demand for regulatory capture (Our competitors AI will be even scarier without government stepping in and giving us the only keys!). The fact is that "AI" by which I mean LLMs, has become an actual useful tool in a few niche areas for people who understand how to use tools, and that *always* cuts both ways: for better AND for worse. The niches will expand and the technology will merge with older technologies (reinforcement learning in particular) and life will go on. Pandora's box is already fully open (yet again).

When the bubble pops, and hardware prices crash, if the global economy survives, everyone (that cares to) will roll their own LLM rig and can run whatever models they want with whatever "guardrails" they want, or none at all. People will spend years training their own models, avoiding the "dump in everything!" models we have now. Having been trained on mostly good stuff, they'll be actually good at (some) stuff, and might (or might not) become at least sort of actually intelligent. The sky will not fall, the wolves will not eat all the children, and 12-year-olds will (probably) not build nuclear reactors in their backyard. It'll be fine. At least compared to the status quo (which, to be absolutely clear is DEFINITELY NOT FINE!)

The thing is that the incumbent AI companies *desperately* don't want that to happen and they're operating under the delusion that they can prevent it. Most of them are run by a bunch of high-functioning sociopaths and psychopaths (like most global megacorps) who want nothing but more and more money and power, and they see "AI" as the "One System to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them". Spoiler alert: it probably isn't, but I'll carry the metaphor further anyway:

So the question is: will we willingly accept the nine, the seven and the three, and let them rule until they successfully destroy our co-created Human world (which is exactly what they and the rest of the wannabee trillionaire club are doing, whether they know it or not) that they so desperately want to control? I remain hopeful that at least most of us aren't going to blindly accept that, despite literally every day seeing copious evidence to the contrary...

So finally, the real question: will we collectively create a world in which everyone can have their basic needs met, so no one has to *constantly* scramble for survival in this "dog eat dog" world? The answer isn't needing this or that particular socioeconomic system. That's very 19th/20th century. We need to actually come together as a species and tell the handful of psycho rich fucks that run everything and their propagandists to STFU, then just ignore whatever they do, and decide to just actually live our lives.

See, that's the thing. Cities often have easement and right-of-way authority, if not ownership.A city can build-out whatever they want, and rent it to whomever.

But that interferes with the cable and telco's revenue streams. Loma Linda California tried it and was fought hard.

The vendors also objected. If you make zillions of dollars selling fiber to telcos, and telcos don't want pesky municipalities getting in their way, the fiber companies will ally with the telcos. Telcos don't want to fight with two thousand municipalities, they want to do one big bribe/campaign contribution to just a handful of people that they can write the legislation for. Makes it easier.

Monopoly isn't the right word; the right word is: Cabal.

and probably copyrighted it. Composed it. Maybe edited it. Laid it out on page. Perhaps illustrated it. Did the work.

Needs to get paid.

It's like Harlan Ellison said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

NOT sucked up into an engine.

NOT guided by an "editor" with dubious values.

NOT enhanced by some well-intentioned silicon spew.

Real people. Real work. Getting paid.

Publishers are looking for revenue. Distribution sources, electronic, print, and secondary markets look for their revenue.

Copyright holders, who may not be any of the above (See Author's Guild for litigation models) are another source of "injured parties".

There then becomes the motivation of content creators, authors, writers, researchers, and others who look at their work output becoming sucked in without compensation-- and this might be the biggest part of the problem.

If creators and researchers/etc stop generating source material, the entire food chain stops, and the quality of output to the ultimate consumer, us, becomes mightily stanched, a foot on the garden hose of knowledge.

Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.

I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Perhaps the app could be extended to FlockOff, another privacy rapist, now that the code and EMBEDDED PASSWORD has been hacked.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

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.

And here I was, thinking foldable phones would allow us to go back to smaller sizes. Guess I'll be sticking with my SE, which at least comfortably fits into my pocket.

Someone please bash some sense into Apple.

I'm sure there are people who want a mini-tablet in their trousers. I'm also sure I'm not the only one who simply wants a phone. That you don't have to think about every time you move or sit.