nfh

Technology is famously hard for the law to keep up with, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. We have laws for when a person uses a technical tool to obtain unauthorized access, exfiltrate data, or do other malicious things. These don’t necessarily require any specific intent. If you’ve set up an AI tool and pointed it in the direction of hacking without proper airgapping, you’ve probably violated the CFAA if you’re in the US when it’s successful. Other countries generally have similar laws. Prosecutors don’t need to try someone if it’s really ambiguous or unclear what they actually did. Is this really unreasonable under the legal system?

To the extent there’s a gap, it’s the system around the law. Lawyers and judges aren’t technical experts, and may not recognize “it wasn’t me, it was the ai” as the same argument as “it wasn’t me who shot him, it was my gun”, in that it’s usually foolish and unserious, but there can be a convoluted scenario in which it’s a good argument.

VLAN? Why would you let a monitor have a network connection? Grab the Mac address, and put it on a denylist so you don’t accidentally give it an IP address as part of your setup procedure.

Every day they put their list of features into copilot and let it set the new name for the product, whatever it says goes. This could be an improvement over their current strategy

Even if it’s nowhere near a majority of the power, I’m surprised passive cooling from solar plus some electricity isn’t worthwhile enough to be universal. It’s a small impact, but also cheap enough it’ll pay for itself, and many orders of magnitude more efficient than trying to get a datacenter into space, and figure out how to cool it

It depends.

If the threat is “we’re about to have a fight you won’t survive”, your critique is valid. If the threat is “you’ve just been poisoned, and will succumb within a few days”, then giving them the time to put their papers in order really won’t harm the speaker at all. Though maybe it isn’t entirely effective as a threat. If the threat is “I can take actions that will end your life, but all I’m telling you is it’s happening soon” it works as an ominous threat, and a sincere offer (though they’d probably better hurry).

I know a few people though work who are interested in self-hosting LLMs. There are people in real life who are some amount of pro-LLM.

Most people here are somewhere between neutral and very opposed, so I wouldn’t say the community is split, but there are certainly a range of perspectives, and I can understand where a large chunk of them are coming from, even beyond those I agree with.

Insofar as “modern societies” refer to the people who hold power in them, I’m not so sure modern societies are interested in handling these kinds of problems.

I remember 5 years ago when Linus said he would work to show more restraint in swearing out vendors… and it’s just hit me how well that worked. He didn’t use a single swear word–in English or Finnish–and kept his negative sentiment focused on the implementation, rather than the people who did it, or their intelligence.