Exactly. Most of us can recall an era where script kiddies had similar unreasonable success even if they had no actual skill or thinking behind the attacks. Just canned toolkits designed around known vulnerabilities, common password databases, understanding of common, bad security practices, and bundled up in easy to use harnesses.

So whether it not an agent can actually "think" or is just putting together a potentially workable narrative of how hacks can happen and running it against real world targets doesn't matter too much. If you wired up the script of Terminator to the real world and it somehow launched nukes, it wasn't that skynet was thinking, it was that the systems folded easily to a movie script. Either way the distinction would hardly matter.

To the extent lack of thought may matter, compromising security is a use case that heavily favors AI systems that repeatedly "get it wrong", as it can have nearly limitless tries to get it right and even if it utterly fails, no one will really notice or write about it. It only takes a few successes, even if rare, to be pretty critical.

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" ?

Well, one scenario is letting the hype get ahead of the capabilities, and do the 'AI store' experiment, but for real with responsibility for something actually important.

Another is that it is far easier to just screw things up than it is to make things work. I may not have it in me to make a house of cards, yet I can trivially even accidentally destroy a house of cards someone else built without a whiff of understanding.

The assessment of the capabilities based on bottom line certainly is subjective, which is precisely why Jensen Huang is so aggressively gung-ho about we must do everything we possibly can to spend more money on nvidia stuff. The motivation for Anthrophic seems either they have legitimate concerns or are looking to rationalize a plateau after promising the world. It certainly doesn't serve their bottom line to slow down otherwise.

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.

Of the big players, I'd say OpenAI is at the biggest risk of not really able to even stumble straight ahead, presuming stumbling/charging straight ahead is in the cards for the companies in general.

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.

Actually I'd probably not be too interested in an unspecified new tech, as with things *that* open ended I end up stuck in a demo of some sort of warehouse inventory management software. Thinking back to the people that got all excited for the 'IT' product and then the massive letdown when it turned out to be a scooter.

I would have to at least know a more specific area to figure out if I'm going to get excited or not. The mere rarity/exclusivity of an experience doesn't hold much appeal to me.

I'm not a film festival sort of guy, but in analogous cons that would hold my interest, I can't imagine an event being so vague and getting my attention for the one event. I feel like I'd not want to risk my limited convention time on such an unkwnown, unless it at least had some familiar facet that was known.

I could not imagine giving up three hours to watch something I have *zero* idea about, not even genre.

Show me when we *ever* built significant 'double decker' freeways? We have, obviously, been willing to build, rebuild and expand roads beyond what we had before. The problem is that we are seeing diminishing returns for our efforts. We give up more and more resources and land and get less and less benefit out of it. We expand 3 lanes to 4 and after tolerating *years* of even worse traffic to facilitate construction and then it opens up and... still jammed up because an additional lane didn't help *that* much. The problems aren't solved by more lanes, and more new roads means lots of people lose their property to serve the attempt.

There are other areas where I think you have a point. For example we somehow had the will to build out electricity and telephone to reach the middle of nowhere, but when you say we should build out fiber in the same way, it's just not affordable. But we have consistently been all about throwing more at roads, and have way more and better roads than we have *ever* had, but they just don't work as well with scale.

Funny. Spam is all I use my gmail account for. It's the e-mail I use to sign up to places I don't expect to visit often or that make me sign up for no discernible reason (well, obviously the reason is that they want to send me spam). My entire gmail inbox is spam, newsletters and the occasional "here is your activation link" mail.

It's really useful as a spam-sink.

Nebula is actually the one streaming service I ever subscribed to for a while, mostly because I like documentaries and for all I've heard their business model is more in favour of the actual creators.

Dude, what is your problem?

I mention not owning a TV because it's topical - it means I didn't not notice the quality going down slowly over time, so I might notice the difference more than those who did.

Nowhere did I imply that not owning a TV makes me better in any way. It's a personal choice, that's all.

Why you jump on that so aggressively - maybe ask yourself why that is.

Actually, from what I've read broadly George Lucas' work was really only decent by virtue of everyone else kind of fixing it up around him. Which is a prime example of some critical mass of human involvement being useful to refine creative outcomes.