The confusion is, in part, because one of the functional underpinnings of capitalism is “make a bet” as a method of allocating resources.
Those whose bets paid off didn’t “earn” the money, they “won” it. Calling it “earned” confuses “being morally deserving” with “receiving”.
The positive functional effect of “take a risk and get more money if it pays off” is that folks who allocate capital well end up with more capital to allocate.
Of course, this is imperfect ; there are those who allocate capital poorly (by some definition) yet win returns anyways, and some who allocate it well while being unable to capture the value they create.
It is, but… you’ve seen the marketing material being put out?
“AGI is just around the corner and could destroy humanity if we don’t solve alignment” is something AI leadership at multiple companies have publicly said.
Sure, but the same is true of nuclear reaction research.
One camp, using the same mechanism, is trying to make devices that end the world. One camp, using the same mechanism, is trying to save the world.
That nuclear/AI COULD end the world or COULD save humanity is exactly the reason that a truly neutral party would not describe either tech as a doomsday device but would instead describe either as technologies bearing massive potential.
No one building an LLM has ever publically stated that they aim to build a doomsday device and in fact have only ever specifically said that they are trying to avoid doing so. We've no reason to beleive that their interest is any different from any other corporation with agressive shareholders: increasing profits. Dooming humanity leads to lower profits. Lower profits is outside shareholder interest. They will do anything they can to maximize profit, just as any other profit driven org does.
No objective, neutral, observer would apply such loaded terms.
It's okay to have an opinion, but having an opinion makes you...opinionated. Not neutral. The opposite of neutral.
Your example kind of proves your position wrong, no? Nuclear power--another device you are yourself admitting is widely understood to be a doomsday device in the wrong hands--is also highly regulated and I cannot just create a company that sells a nuclear power device and I extra cannot do so and sell it to foreign nationals. If you make a device that you claim is capable of ending the world, you can and should be regulated.
I think you might be thinking that I'm making some other argument than the one I'm making.
I make no claims as to the need for regulation.
My argument is entirely that the observer described as neutral in the original comment cannot possibly be neutral if their description of the company they discuss is "Doomsday" anything. That's not neutral, it's loaded.
What the comment is describing is an opinionated observer, not a neutral observer. Someone who's opinion is that the company they describe is in the business of creating doomsday devices.
That's a real opinion that real people do have. But, you can't call yourself, or any portrayed character, neutral if they share that opinion.
I am unsure, then, as to what your actual goal is? Like, what would you have someone come away from your comment having learned? The comment did not even say the tech IS a doomsday device, it was trying to remove the actual description entirely--so it didn't matter if it was AI or nuclear energy or what--and the placeholder was "doomsday device", as that's what a person who only hears the rest of the sentence is ever going to take away from it.
I do, in fact, think that, if someone says "my technology -- call it what you will, and I won't bother to tell you what it is -- is so dangerous that in the wrong hands or if it isn't carefully contained in a way that I am going to great lengths to try to accomplish it can end the world" -- which is what these people at these companies are saying -- that it would be hard-pressed to not be willing to call that a "doomsday device". I would even go so far as to claim that the exact opposite is more likely true: that to not want to do so requires you to have some extremely awkward bias yourself.
Sure: me using that label to ascribe something related to this product makes some people, seemingly you included, feel bad, and so maybe we can say it involves a "bias", as I clearly can avoid that label, but chose not to, and in so doing colored the discussion in a way that makes you unhappy... but it doesn't make it untrue anymore than any other purely descriptive term is now-a-days often said to be biased. As they like to point out: "reality has a liberal bias" (even if it is just as often liberals annoyed with the terms being used by people ;P).
Again: the bias against the use of that term seems much more fascinating than being upset at the idea that the parable -- which of course is trying to make a point, and so is inherently biased towards that point -- could be attempting to temporary apply it, particularly so as it seems to lead to blindness to what actually happened: people will hear you saying your tech is dangerous, and it will be banned and regulated.
And that's related to why I maintain that I think your example disproves your own attempt at a point: you try to draw a parallel to another technology, as if once we find out it is nuclear reaction research we of course know that that isn't a doomsday device... and yet that is one of the few things that is most obviously to the most people a doomsday device, it is a thing that even the people working on it have always felt might not just be a doomsday device but might be "the" doomsday device (as in, the one that actually does us in), and there has not only been countless people out there worried about what can and will happen in its usage, but it was in fact weaponized and a very very large number of people died due to it, so to try to make the argument that it would be biased to call it a "doomsday device" itself feels very awkward.
But, sure: we can decide that that's biased and throw out the "dunno it sounds like a doomsday device and should be regulated" argument as the argument itself has a bias in it, and that leaves us with... what? A world in which people make these things, talk about how dangerous they are, and then feign in shock and frantically try to backpedal when governments step in to prevent it from being released without careful analysis and regulation and study and planning?
It's a technique I created (someone else must have done it first??) for a sandbox demonstrating a web UI framework I made. https://mutraction.dev/sandbox
To see it work, click "Download self contained .html" from the menu.
The idea is to use <script type="inline-module" name="foo">...</script> to define modules. That's something I just made up. For each such script, provision a blob URL. The main blocker is usually the same origin policy. Crucially, these blob URLs count as the same origin. So then you need to rewrite the imports from the named modules to the blob URLs. I used some regex rather than a proper parser, but it was more than good enough for me.
It seems quite doable to make some proper bundling tools around this concept.
Those provisions would broadly be civil (not criminal); the vendor would have to identify you had reversed the blob and then take you to court, and then win.
They could also try for criminal charges if you’re in a relevant jurisdiction.
In the Postgres version, you can use a rangetype or multirangetype over any base type (integers, inets, frammishes, etc). This is a generalization of SQL:2011, where PERIODs have to be on date/timestamp/timestamptz columns. I have ambitions to support non-range/multirange types as well, even user defined types, but I'll need to add a way for them to communicate a few things to core Postgres, like how to do intersect/contains/overlaps. I talked about that in my "roadmap" talk linked here if you're interested in details.
They showed up when the AI money did. The evidence is circumstantial, but… some of them are remarkably well engineered (from a “how difficult is it to identify this traffic” perspective, in a way that never existed before (I have been running a quite sizeable site for 8 years, over 200k registered users, and you don’t need to register to use 99% of it).
I run a quite large website and there are a few patterns.
The usage is extremely quick, and follows easy-to-spot patterns. We noticed a spike in bounce rate.
They never come from Google, and the bad programmed ones just crawl several pages at a time, faster than a user could do.
Then there's the crazy spikes in visits from specific countries, pretty much scraping the entire content. Often from pools of IPs. In some cases had 30% unexplained (meaning: it wasn't viral or a marketing campaign) random sustained increases in traffic.
There's also the fact they don't interact with the complicated widgets, so zero XHR requests other than analytics pings.
They also don't cause spikes in Google Analytics, so I assume it's blocked, but they show up in logs and in the internal analytics.
It's not enough to DDOS the website at all, but it's a lot of noise in statistics that we gotta learn to filter.
> They never come from Google, and the bad programmed ones just crawl several pages at a time, faster than a user could do.
I’ve triggered this kind of “bot protection” right here on Hacker News many times. I did that by having a bunch of Hacker News pages open and then closing and reopening my browser. I’ve also triggered it by opening a bunch of links in the background too quickly. I’ve also triggered it by reading the article, then clicking back and upvoting/favouriting too quickly. I’m also located in Singapore, which people have started to advocate for blocking here recently.
A single non-bot legitimate user can easily trigger these kinds of heuristics just by using the site in a way you don’t expect. This can affect some users disproportionately more than others, e.g. disabled people who need to use assistive technology.
It's circumstantial evidence, but Occam's Razor also applies.
It's not a hostile DOS in the traditional sense (I've mitigated a few of those) - no "pay us to make it stop", no pattern to the requests other than "fetch every unique URL a few times".
It wasn't happening until financial incentives to gather large datasets for AI training appeared.
Bad actors (using residential proxies & claiming to be a real browser) mostly showed up after folk started blocking ones that identified themselves as AI scrapers.
It's obvious to blame AI training because there's a shortage of better explanations. Who else would be paying for these (expensive) residential botnets, only to use them to (eg) web-scrape wikipedia (which offers free downloads of its content in a structured format)?
The simplest explanation of the technical behavior is "a bot coded to follow every link it sees & save the results", and the simplest explanation of the motive to run such a bot is "to train a large language model".
Exactly. They (and most of all, Big G) stand to profit greatly from this browser discrimination. What better than to make more sites use them by launching DDoS attacks in the name of "AI scraping".
Biggest peeve so far: It's very easy to build the 'premium' version of a building (eg police HQ instead of police station) and utterly annihilate your city budget - with no ability to cancel / undo.
"Click on the correct-looking-but-actually-wrong button functionally ends your game" is... not great.
I more meant "I had 200m in the bank and accidentally spent 170m of it to start constructing a police HQ".
If you bulldoze a building when it's only 2% of the way through being constructed, you should probably be able to get 98% of the resources spent back - whether housing demand, money, whatever you spent.
Possibly 100% back until you hit 5%, just to allow for those mis-clicks.
Those whose bets paid off didn’t “earn” the money, they “won” it. Calling it “earned” confuses “being morally deserving” with “receiving”.
The positive functional effect of “take a risk and get more money if it pays off” is that folks who allocate capital well end up with more capital to allocate.
Of course, this is imperfect ; there are those who allocate capital poorly (by some definition) yet win returns anyways, and some who allocate it well while being unable to capture the value they create.
reply