You're applying an early adopter approach to products which are no longer early adopter category. At the start of any new technology you can expect precisely the problems you described, it was an incompatible cluster**** of problems.

But that was close to a decade ago now. The reality today is that anything that works on the Quest 3 that supports the hardware of the Quest 2 still works on that 6 year old headset. The reality is that anything you bought on PCVR for the a Rift CV1 back when you connected cables to your headset from your GPU in 2016 still works today on the current line-up.

Time to update your knowledge of the industry.

And frankly I've never head of Half-Life Alyx not running on *ANY* headset. Being a PCVR game targeting SteamVR means it runs completely independently of anything any headset manufacturer does. If your headset still supports the Oculus API, or Revive for the Vive API, or supports WMR, then there's zero reason that Alyx would crash for any reason other than you screwing up something on your PC. Alyx doesn't care what hardware you use, it only sees the SteamVR API.

There's nothing "foolish" about this. One of the biggest problems with early VR was tethering via cable. It was a miserable experience in every way and on that not infrequently caused people to actually ruin their headsets.

As for the latency, sorry but you are talking rubbish. VR is one of the most latency sensitive things we do. The slightest latency causes motion sickness and makes any fast paced gaming impossible to play. And yet both work perfectly fine with countless PCVR fans happily using the system from everything to high speed rhythm games to fast paced shooters.

The latency issue is something complained about by people who have not used the product. What you want is something you made up in your head, not a realistic requirement.

I accepted your CISA reference. I'll accept references from other similar organizations or law enforcement. I am unwilling to defer to Anthropic as they have a clear conflict of interest with billions of dollars on the line and a track record of manipulative behavior.

Having said this I remain disappointed in the continued failure to read your own references. This is a report titled "Detecting and countering misuse of AI" it speaks in general terms about AI and misuse of AI services for crime. It is not focused entirely on the distillation issue by leading Chinese AI firms.

The quote you referenced:

"These groups then often sell that access through brokers, which often feed into fraudulent AI reseller networks that rotate in new stolen API keys and session tokens until they exhaust their usage. Malicious actors also use or purchase these stolen API keys and session tokens from brokers for their cyber attack operations."

Is in reference to the section on crime and the use of AI to commit crimes under the heading "AI supply chain as target, loot, and attack compute". This is separate from the Chinese distillation allegations.

In fact NONE of the named distillation campaigns described on pg147 thru the end of the report GTG 16005, GTG-16002, GTG-16001, GTG-16006, GTG-16008, GTG-16012, GTG-16003 say anything whatsoever about stolen credit cards or stolen credentials. I wonder why that is? Why does CISA not mention the stolen credit cards and stolen credentials? Perhaps because it never happened?

This is general language that speaks to "unauthorized labs" without naming names and incurring associated libel per se liability. It is impossible from the language to link stolen cards and stolen credentials to any particular or any subset of AI firms because no such linkage is present in the text.

If you separately have credible evidence of stolen credit cards and stolen credentials being used by the relevant leading Chinese AI firms I am interested in learning more about it.

Please just stop digging. You obviously just CTRL+F for keyword and cut and paste without even bothering to understand the context of the statements. This same sloppiness is pervasive throughout your statements.

The underlying argument you are peddling is also rather crazy in its own right. A "distillation attack" does not require stolen credit cards or stolen credentials. The modality of access to the teacher model is not even relevant to its definition. It doesn't stop being a "distillation attack" even if the lab paid the normal rate for access to the model.

That someone somewhere performing distillation to improve their models uses a stolen credit card to do so is irrelevant... It doesn't in any way justify calling distillation an attack.

Imagine if I decided going to a supermarket and filling the shopping cart up to the brim would be called a "shopping attack" ... when someone calls my bullshit term out I turn around and point to some rando who filled their cart and didn't pay on their way out to justify the attack terminology... even though most people who fill their shopping carts to the brim and do pay are still performing a "shopping attack".
This is the exact same logic you are attempting to peddle here. It make no sense.

Most people hit by the "AI revolution" that I know have degraded rapidly by the daily reliance on their best friend.

And it will get a lot worse. But on the positive side, the AI is ready, once I asked it something like "mmhhh ggghhh rrhhhrmmhhr?"

It immediately replied, "what would you like, a greasy burger, an energy drink or a cool tune to rave to, give me one number and I'll tell you how to get one".

We'll be getting there fairly soon.

This is an oxymoron. A market that peddles in stolen shit isn't a grey market it is a black market.

Yeah, I used to do that too. Decided to stop bothering with the quotation marks a couple months ago.

We're not going to spend the rest of our lives putting quotations around words when talking about models. "Think" and "reason" the words we have in English for what is going on. No need to tiptoe around it. Again: models are not humans. They are not the same as us. But those are the words we have in English for what they're doing.

They are, by definition, Markov chains.

Even in your attempt to be pedantic here (in which the universe and everything within it is a Markov chain), no, it's not. The hardware state is Markovian but the linguistic processing is a Nth order autoregressive process; it depends on the N previous states. Also, your argument is akin to saying "a Boeing 747 is just an arrangement of quarks, so don't get hung up on aerodynamics." it entirely ignores the relevant architectural details, and instead substitutes a model that blows up exponentially explodes in size within a small number of states.

If you tried to build a Markov model to do what LLMs do, and could store one probability in every unit of Planck space across every unit of Planck time, it couldn't handle a prompt longer than about 2/3rds of the first sentence to A Tale of Two Cities.

All of this equipment is a fire risk... panels, wiring, connectors, high current electronics and batteries. Personally I wouldn't keep any of it in my home. Seen enough shit burn down because a bug crawled into the wrong section or a weak crimp lead to catastrophic failure.. a solar panel develops a hotspot due to micro cracking and catches fire. It's insane what the smallest defect can cause in high current DC environments. Large LFP batteries while much safer than EV batteries can still fail and when they do off-gas hazardous flourides and insane amounts of hydrogen gas.

There are risks people are willing to take in exchange for something of value to them. People are willing to accept dangers of driving in exchange for being able to get around and do the things they want to do. Home storage on the other hand provides no substantive benefit from any sort of policy or grid architecture perspective... it is suboptimal from a cost perspective and an unnecessary safety risk.. Utility scale ESS and PV have in excess of a 2x cost advantage over residential without any of the commensurate risks to residential dwellings. It isn't something I don't understand how anyone can justify.

I do understand some people do it as a hobby or want to be off-grid to prepare for the next zombie apocalypse. Beyond the fringe bullshit it makes no sense from either a safety or cost perspective.

You start off ok then go off the rails. Yea, early adopters got better deals in many cases, but they paid more for their systems.

The "other poor people who could not afford to retrofit solar to their houses" isn't really true any more as solar has got so cheap that the ROI is really short in most countries, less than 5 years is common. Of course the USA with its broken tariffs etc is going to have a longer ROI but it will still pay off.

Your rant about fires is just that, a rant. Fires are rare for both house batteries and EVs, with exception of some very specific US brands and models of EVs. Generally having an ICEV and petrol cans for ICE gardening stuff is a far bigger risk. You need to stop treating one off news reports or viral videos of battery fires as a general indicator of risk and look at the actual stats. House batteries and EVs have mandated standards designed to minimise risk. It is cheap low quality battery powered consumer products that are the real fire risk.

Energy rates have increased 70% over the same time. Good job California.

The reference you provided does NOT support your statements. There is no assertion made credentials are being stolen.

This is getting weird. The data is being used to train an external model Anthropic does not control. Of course people with control over that model can do whatever they want to it because it is their model not Anthropics. No safeguards are being removed from Anthropic or being bypassed at Anthropic.

Your statement "when you use industrial-scale to intentionally break guardrails and get the AI engine to essentially spill its secrets" lacks a nexus to reality.

Again it does no such thing neither does the reference you provided support your assertion. To quote the reference:

"Further, China-based AI companies use a gray market of proxies known as âoetransfer stationsâ to bypass U.S. AI companiesâ(TM) geographic restrictions, breach terms of use, evade safeguards, and undermine traceability."

It says nothing about stolen or hacked credentials.

The stolen / hacked credential claims seem to be entirely an invention of your own mind. Further there is no universe in which distillation constitutes IPR theft.

Stick to the facts and stop peddling bullshit.

lolwut hasbara bro? your lot support irgc, you helped them stay in power like it is 1979.

Many years ago my first time in SF and that was exactly what I had found. I was expecting it to be warmer based on TV and LA. I was disappointed to find it was as about cold as back home. Not a problem, just disappointing.

I have found this very much depends on where people grew up. I had one coworker who wore a full on thermal puffer jacket etc when the temperature was in the low 20's C outside. He was from the middle east and was used to temperatures over 30C all of the time. On the other hand I had a coworker from Minneapolis who claimed that above 0C was tee shirt and shorts weather.

A t shirt?

Maybe a jumper. Maybe when a light jacket at the lower end. But a thick jacket at 12 degrees? Nope!