If the 'AI' guys are anything to go by; probably get increasingly elaborate with their attempts to bypass whatever rate limiting is put in place. It's honestly sort of wild seeing the hottest, most heavily capitalized, elements of 'tech' wrap around so rapidly and with so little concern toward the sort of traffic patterns you normally associate with criminals as soon as it's in their interests. At one time I would have been surprised.

There is an intermediate situation that that case arguably illustrated:

Using violence against harder targets is more of an organizational problem; and solving that problem potentially skews your candidate pool; but what's very curious(particularly for a society whose overall violence numbers are very much on the high side by developed world standards) is how safe it apparently is to be widely notorious and a fairly soft target. Thompson was just walking down the sidewalk alone at a predictable time and location. Zero precautions. Something like the Sacklers were a household name for over a decade, with strong cases for culpability in at least low 6 figures worth of deaths sprinkled across a variety of walks of life; even the ones you suspect might be risky like deer hunters with dead kids and members of criminal organizations where internecine homicide is routine, and what came of it? Nothing. Not even any 'foiled at a late stage'/'shot and missed' level stuff.

That's the genuinely puzzling bit to me: not that there's nobody going after people who take the sort of precautions that would probably require one of the old-school 80s red army faction types to deal with; but that it's apparently really safe to be widely loathed and not do much about it in a country where 20k firearms homicides a year isn't considers terribly exceptional. If the people who can actually afford guard labor were having to make the onerous lifestyle commitments to living like someone's out to get them it would be relatively unsurprising that being able to afford competent professionals puts you ahead of angry amateurs much of the time. What is surprising is how often there's apparently no downside to not even bothering. We even have to import the lurid stories of 'crypto kidnapping' by purely financial opportunists from overseas to obtain them in any quantity.

It's essentially impossible to make a good argument for some uncached CI lunacy that has you outperforming the overtly malicious as a source of traffic; but if there's one thing that reliably upsets people it's getting called on convenient behavior that they can't readily justify; so I'm genuinely curious what the ratio of sensible adjustment to unhinged freakout by bro whose subsidy is not in fact a law of nature they'll see.

Obviously trump doesn't care; if anything the grifts that you can totally phone in are probably even funnier than the ones where you have to try; but I'm puzzled by why this sort of thing doesn't bother some of his enthusiasts more. Not the nihilistic edgelords and ethnic nationalists so much; but if you are actually enthusiastic about 'greatness' shouldn't it worry you that Dear Leader, who you trust to deliver national renewal, apparently can't puke up the sort of zero-effort ODM rebadge job that any garbage tier prepaid carrier does anywhere from multiple times a year to at least annually, depending on market conditions?

Obviously the phone itself is basically irrelevant; but it seems like the sort of project that would cause anyone not wholly immune to feel some degree of at least secondhand embarrassment about.

You absolutely can though. There is nothing stopping you from seeding the run with a single LLM, or even substituting the function definition for random() with:

random() { // determined by fair dice roll
        return 5;
}

We can trivially and easily do this.

And further, it seems you are now suggesting that substituting the above random function for this one:

random() { //
    input = ask-user-for-fair-dice-roll();
    return input;
}

and now you sit there rolling dice and inputing the results, and the computer program gains consciousness?

really?

The difference, of course, is that we currently DO actually know EXACTLY how an LLM works. We can snapshot the model and seed the random number generator to make it generate exactly the same output from exactly the same input every single time. We can pause it, set breakpoints, inspect and dump data structures.

It IS simply a program running on a CPU, and using RAM.

Is it possible that's all humans are in the end? Sure its possible, I can't prove otherwise. But we are not remotely in a position to assert that its the case.

You invoke philosophy which is entirely appropriate. There are fairy tales for example of artists painting things so realistic that they come to life. And it poses an interesting question here: is there is a difference between a simulation and a real thing? Can a simulation of life, be "alive"? Or must it forever remain a simulation.

And a related, and perhaps ultimately simpler question is can a *turing machine simulation of life* be "alive".

A lovely illustration of the question:
https://xkcd.com/505/

Can what you and I perceive as our lives, the universe around us, and everything REALLY be underpinned by some guy in a desert pushing pebbles around in a big desert somewhere?

Can the arrangement of stones in a desert, and some guy updating moving them aorund, in some pattern he interprets as representing the information that describes our universe actually "BE" our universe?

Is is the pattern of rocks is JUST a pattern of rocks. Is the guy moving them around JUST moving them around. Is the interpretation of the pattern as a representation of the state of a universe, just that, a representation?

Or you truly think there is a galaxy with a planet with people on it having a conversation on slashdot,'frozen in time' waiting for some guy to move the rocks into the next pattern and that somehow results in the experience we are sharing right now?

Or put more succinctly - can an abstract representation of a thing be the thing? be it bits in a DRAM module memory or pebbles arranged in the sand? can it be the thing it represents? Can the painting of a zebra if its done skilfully enough be a zebra?

The parent poster acknowledges this, they are saying the randomization is *introduced artificially*.

The same as any dice rolling app. All you have to do is seed the pseudorandom number generator the same for each run, and it will roll the same dice, in the same order, every time.

Likewise, if it wants to spit out the next word/phrase and 2 of them have 33% probability, and two have 17% ...

Then if you seed the random number generator with the same seed for every instance / run, you'll get the same output from the same input on the same model.

The system is entirely determininistic. The same as any other software, from the ghosts in pacman to the bots in quake arena, to a chess engine. We introduce "randomness" to make it more enjoyable, but its pseudorandomness, that we artificially insert. We could just as easily seed the random number generator the same way every time, and then it would do the exact same thing every time. None of these are actually thinking and making decisions.

Depending on the jurisdiction; it might allow for some dishonest regulatory hackery; which bad people treat as equivalent to a solution.

If you are having trouble getting approval for a big fat grid hookup or rezoning of what was supposed to be a fairly low excitement commercial/industrial plot into a datacenter; you might have less trouble getting some nice, innocuous, residential development with what are totally just the next generation of cable boxes if you don't look too closely in the back yard pushed through; and once you've done that you aren't going to live next to the externalities or deal with the stressed edge of a grid; so not a you problem anymore.

Presumably the developer who gets paid a kickback to add it that they at least hope will be larger than the loss in expected sale price from having it there.

Assuming you can slip the thing, and some sort of cryptic easement or covenant burned into the deed, to at least one sucker it no longer matters whether the 'owner' wants it or not.

The bit about residential development being overprovisioned for its electrical use seems like a classic 'exploit the commons briefly' format scam.

It's not false; a given house is usually hooked up to a big chunky breaker whose capacity it is not expected to exceed, often oversized by a decent margin; but there absolutely isn't that level of overbuild all the way back to the utility. Probably not even back to the substation depending on how optimistically the transformers on the poles were sized.

Exactly the sort of thing that should work just fine if you do it at a small scale, and sounds like a clever discovery if you avoid thinking about it; but would immediately roll over and die if it were actually exploited at scale(while being even more expensive than the alternative; since wiring in one heavy user is a lot less intricate than converting thousands of distributed residential customers into heavy users). Makes one wonder if they are trying to get away with anything else by playing 'residential'; like the power factor. Utilities absolutely do care about that, because reactive power is real movement in the grid; but historically residential customers have often not been deemed worth the trouble to verify specifically for that; which you could absolutely change with a bunch of selfishly designed switchmode PSU load.

Its a mere 200 pages, and its the inspriration for "Blade Runner". Yeah, its worth reading.

Reading Philip K Dick for the prose itself is pretty much missing the point. The themes, ideas, and questions it poses are generally worth the effort.

The movie adaptations are hit and miss. Blade Runner I think was well done (not just as a movie on its own, but as an adaptation of the book)

The Minority Report movie adaptation on the other hand shits the bed so hard its painful to watch.

So it's alarmingly invasive and ignores established good practice; but in a staggeringly incompetent sort of way. Would it be the 'white house app' any other way?

Let me guess; because vetting its effect on security is hard and not terribly exciting they'll mostly test for 'woke' and then decide on that basis.

The MAGA guys were particularly high on their own supply given that 'the straight of hormuz is exceptionally blockable' is not some kind of weird contrarian theory. The Millennium Challenge 2002 was basically that scenario with some of the names filed off; and the exercise of trying to stop iranian launches is basically the 'scud hunting' phase of the gulf war being replayed.

Hegseth might have been stupid enough to believe that you just needed to be more masculine about it and magically turn 'will' into victory; and Trump might have been dumb enough to believe him or dumb enough to believe that just a modest tap was all that was needed to cause the iranians to fall for his legendary deal-making; but I don't think it was much of a surprise to anybody else.

It's not as though anyone seriously expected an aging and not all that comprehensive air defense system to remain effective in the face of a blank check for expensive stealth gear and standoff munitions; or the more conventional parts of the iranian navy to be particularly survivable; it's just that most people recognized that knocking out the first 90% of most visible or least mobile targets wasn't even close to being 90% of the work; while our glorious new era of competence just stood there blinking and expecting to be handed a trophy for winning with essentially no path to dealing with the much harder problem of actually driving the volume of fire down to levels safe for commercial shipping or economically sustainable to keep running high end interceptor batteries against.

Apparently your blue sensing photoreceptors in your eye are super sensitive to blood sugar, and you could do a blood sugar test with a color calibrated phone app having people compare two shades of blue side by side. If you can't tell them apart, your blood sugar meets/exceeds/is below a certain threshold. It's not hyper accurate but useful for diabetics.