skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Inside The US ‘kill chain’ that destroyed An Iranian school in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Within hours of a Feb. 28 missile attack that hit an Iranian school, some Pentagon personnel knew the US was responsible, according to officials involved in an internal investigation of the incident. That probe found what the officials now describe as a cascade of preventable failures.

    [...]

    United Nations investigators said Thursday that there were reasonable grounds to conclude that the strike on Minab and another US attack that took place on the same day amounted to war crimes. The US has yet to publicly accept responsibility for the school strike, and President Donald Trump has previously suggested it was Tehran’s fault. As recently as July 14, he told Fox News, “I don’t think anybody’s going to ever be able to say what happened there.”

    But in interviews, officials with direct involvement in the Pentagon’s internal investigation have offered some of the first accounts of the probe. The strike didn’t result from a single catastrophic decision but an accumulation of smaller ones, they said, and their review has identified a series of missed opportunities to prevent the disaster. The officials, like more than two dozen others who provided descriptions of targeting procedures or background information for this story, asked not to be named to discuss sensitive matters.

    [...]

    A report on the full Pentagon investigation, which commenced in March, hasn’t been released — though the officials said it has been all-but-complete for several months.

    [...]

    US officials have said that outdated intelligence was a problem. Although the site in Minab had been identified years earlier as a military compound, there was clear evidence that it had been modified and undergone a change of purpose, the officials said. Physical changes reflecting new construction — visible on satellite imagery — dated back almost a decade, they said, and the site operated openly as a school.

    [...]

    Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting.

    Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.

    In the past year, the Defense Department has rapidly made Maven a cornerstone of the US military apparatus. Several former senior US military officials now work for Palantir, including some with high-level security clearances in Centcom’s Tampa headquarters. Their role is to keep the software functioning inside secure military environments.

    Some Centcom personnel expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets, the officials said. It’s not clear why they had such expectations.

    [...]

    After the Minab strike, Palantir built new capabilities into Maven that “re-review underlying intelligence to identify factors that would disqualify a target and flag inconsistencies and inaccuracies that human review may have missed,” according to a person familiar with the matter. That work has already caught some anomalies, the person said.

    [...]

    In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets — work that includes assessing how they align with an operation’s objectives — had taken hours for staffers to complete. Ahead of the US attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into several minutes via Maven, people involved in the Pentagon’s internal review said.

    Officials involved in the investigation pointed to gaps that they said were left after Hegseth dismantled most of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation, or CHM, units — cutting headcount across a number of teams by roughly 90% to fewer than 20 staff members, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. Centcom’s team was reduced from 10 to 1.

    No CHM team member reviewed the Minab site before the strike, according to officials involved in the internal investigation. That was a consequence of the cuts in staffing but also a decision not to involve the group in planning and operations, the officials said. While not mandatory, that sort of review had become routine in recent years, they added. It’s unclear whether such checks, which include mapping the civilian environment, assessing noncombatant presence and developing lower-risk strike options, would have been enough to raise questions about the Minab site.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Is your Internet profile really your identity? Do you lose your identity if you choose to keep some things off the Internet? Most people here post under pseudonyms, which could be thought of as...

    Is your Internet profile really your identity? Do you lose your identity if you choose to keep some things off the Internet?

    Most people here post under pseudonyms, which could be thought of as "losing your identity" if you wanted to feel bad about it, but there are good reasons for it, too.

    5 votes

  4. Comment on What are your current pain points with Linux? in ~tech

    skybrian
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    Late to the party, but I’m very happy writing web apps in a Linux VM in the cloud. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to doing that kind of coding on a local machine. On the other hand, I have little...

    Late to the party, but I’m very happy writing web apps in a Linux VM in the cloud. I don’t think I’ll ever go back to doing that kind of coding on a local machine.

    On the other hand, I have little interest in running Linux on my laptop. Sometimes I dislike new versions of MacOS, but it would have to deteriorate a lot to be worth switching.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This seems like a recommendation to keep posting the equivalent of negative ads? But with the audience in mind.

    I would post about immigration carefully: brutal ICE raids on sympathetic targets yes, open borders and “No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land” no.

    This seems like a recommendation to keep posting the equivalent of negative ads? But with the audience in mind.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on Mindful posting in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    It is important, for the preservation of American democracy and maybe the world, that the Democrats take the House and Senate in November.

    (If you don’t agree with me about this claim, I wrote a blog post about it here.)

    I recommend donating to high-value political candidates. But I want to bring to everyone’s attention an equally important thing they can do to improve Democrats’ chances in November: practice mindful posting.

    “Mindful posting” is making sure, whenever you post about American electoral politics, that you post only content that is going to persuade your American followers to vote for a Democrat in November.

    [...]

    I’m not saying that you should never despair, rage, guilt-trip strangers, or argue in favor of radical and unappealing changes. I myself have been known to harbor the occasional violent revenge fantasy about Elon Musk. But the appropriate audience for these sentiments is a group chat with fifty people who already agree with you, a locked social media account, or if you must Bluesky in December.

    It’s difficult to generalize about how to engage in mindful posting, because people’s followerships are different. If your followers are mostly evangelical Christians who vote straight-ticket Republican, you’re going to need different content than if your followers are mostly leftists who think Trump and Biden are indistinguishably evil. No advice I can give you will outperform thinking seriously about the undecided voters in your own audience.

    [...]

    My advice is to prioritize posting about health care, which has long been the Democrats’ best issue, as well as the economy. Israel/Palestine is one of Democrats’ best issues, but I’m not sure what the American public even understands Democrats’ position on Israel/Palestine to be, so maybe be cautious about that one. I would post about immigration carefully: brutal ICE raids on sympathetic targets yes, open borders and “No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land” no. I have no idea how to interpret the findings about AI but probably if you’re inclined to post a lot about AI your top concern isn’t whether Democrats win in November.

    I would recommend being positive about the Democrats. The Democrats are unpopular, just not as unpopular as Trump—which is a fragile position going into the midterms. In particular, when posting about corruption in Washington, I’d recommend listing off positive things about Democrats and not just the endless litany of Trump authoritarianism and crimes.

    For the love of God, please save being weird and offputting about the culture war until December. There will be plenty of time for trans people to freak the mundanes when we don’t have an aspiring dictator in the White House. For now, make like the 2010s gay rights movement: if you’re going to talk about trans rights, be wholesome and sympathetic.

    Of course, these are generalizations, and you know your own audience best. If most of your followers are libertarian, posting a lot about open borders and very little about healthcare might be exactly the right move. Maybe posting freaky shit about trans people will make you seem more credible to your leftist followers when you tell them to vote.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of social scurvy in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The article is confirming what I already believe, so I don't know if it does all that much for me. But it might be an important message for some people because, if you think the problem is...

    The article is confirming what I already believe, so I don't know if it does all that much for me.

    But it might be an important message for some people because, if you think the problem is loneliness and you don't feel lonely, you might just say "I'm an introvert" and not do anything about it. Similarly, if you know people who don't get out much, you might not do as much to encourage them if you're not sure they need it.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of social scurvy in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I'm a big favor of teams having lunch together regularly, but it's difficult when they aren't local, and it's hard to justify a commute just to have lunch. I wonder what the alternatives might be....

    I'm a big favor of teams having lunch together regularly, but it's difficult when they aren't local, and it's hard to justify a commute just to have lunch. I wonder what the alternatives might be. Small, very local companies that do contracts?

    Now I'm retired and we moved a year ago to a new neighborhood. We know some of our new neighbors a little, but I was hoping for more. And I know I need to go beyond hoping and actually organize things, but it's easier not to.

    4 votes

  10. Comment on There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of social scurvy in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Good point. Updated.

    Good point. Updated.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on The doomsday cult inside OpenAI in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    In retrospect, my "aren't trying very hard" remark was attributing motives to you and that's the same thing I was complaining about. I guess it's easy to do. I'm sorry.

    In retrospect, my "aren't trying very hard" remark was attributing motives to you and that's the same thing I was complaining about. I guess it's easy to do. I'm sorry.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on Researchers used Anthropic's Claude to hack into OpenAI in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    A three-person security team at startup Hacktron AI carried out the attack as part of an OpenAI bug-bounty program. Hacktron reported its findings to OpenAI, which gave the startup a $6,500 award. The team managed to chain together two critical vulnerabilities to gain access to multiple OpenAI employee ChatGPT accounts, which gave them entry into the company’s software.

    OpenAI says it has resolved the issues Hacktron uncovered, which happens to come at a moment when top AI companies are under growing pressure over safety.

    [...]

    The researchers found a path into OpenAI on July 25 via a flaw in Discourse, the third-party software powering OpenAI’s community forum.

    [...]

    According to a blog the researchers published, the entry point was a mundane image upload. When users posted HEIF or HEIC image files (the format iPhones use by default) to OpenAI’s community forum, Discourse passed them through a chain of behind-the-scenes tools to convert them into standard JPEGs. Its first stop was ImageMagick, a decades-old, open source utility used to resize images. Because ImageMagick’s usual toolkit can’t deal with Apple’s format, it handed the file off to another library called libheif to do the decoding.

    Buried inside libheif was a memory bug that exposed a path for an attacker to sneak in their own instructions. In this case, feeding the library a specially crafted image caused it to miscalculate where one image was positioned on top of another, which proved enough to hijack the server.

    What may be uncomfortable for the cybersecurity community is that bug had already been fixed months earlier by libheif’s developers. But the fix was never formally flagged as a vulnerability, meaning it never got a CVE (common vulnerabilities and exposures) number, the industry’s standard way to track known security weaknesses. Hacktron says that may explain why the software used by Discourse was still running the vulnerable version.

    Notably, the researchers said the Claude model they were using — a special version of Opus 4.8 made available for cybersecurity researchers — couldn’t build a working exploit at first. That changed overnight, when Anthropic released Opus 5.

    8 votes

  14. Comment on The doomsday cult inside OpenAI in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't believe this. I think people refute weak arguments because there are other people out there making that argument (often repeatedly), and it bugs them. I see it all the time, and I do it...

    So when an author shreds an unrelated or weak argument to demonstrate their superiority or whatnot, it sends a strong signal that their perspective is based on weak theoretical foundations and is not worthy of further analysis. Otherwise they'd attack the strong argument and uncover a flaw in it.

    I don't believe this. I think people refute weak arguments because there are other people out there making that argument (often repeatedly), and it bugs them. I see it all the time, and I do it too.

    And a particular thing that bugs me is assuming motives without evidence. Like, you've made up a theory about why Tabarrok wrote the article I shared, and what is that based on? I don't know why he wrote either, but I'm not making claims.

    You say you don't really care about sincerity or motives. Maybe that's why you aren't trying very hard to get them right?

  15. Comment on There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of social scurvy in ~life

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Although the data does not show that people are more lonely, it does show that people are more alone. (Derek Thompson has made this point particularly well.) In the US, time spent with friends on the weekends has fallen by half in the past 20 years. According to the American Time Use Survey, pals are out and solitude is in:

    This is mainly a recession in hanging out—most of the increase in alone time has come from people spending less time with folks outside their households:

    [...]

    We’ve got a puzzle here. People are more alone than ever, but they’re not feeling much lonelier than they used to. So maybe all this extra solitude is...fine?

    No, it’s not fine. Isolated people are more likely to get depressed, suffer a heart attack or a stroke, develop dementia, and catch a cold; they straight-up die sooner. (The “loneliness is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day” meme is a bit dubious, but it’s also not crazy.) Those findings all come from correlational studies, but when you inflict isolation on someone instead, you quickly see some massive and concerning effects. Prisoners in solitary confinement often sink into a stupor, their thoughts become obsessive and delusional, and they get agitated and irritable. (I’ve heard many people complain of similar but milder things happening to their elderly parents who live alone.)

    [...]

    Too much alone time is clearly bad for us, but it doesn’t seem to bother us as much as it should. So the real mystery of the loneliness epidemic is: where is it? Why are we all sitting alone in our houses and slowly melting into puddles of slime, like the “this is fine” meme dog, but without the fire?

    [...]

    Social deprivation looks a lot like vitamin C deprivation. In both cases, humans can lack an essential input without realizing it. In both cases, they can suffer for its absence without desiring its presence. And in both cases, this is probably because we evolved in an environment where we never needed that desire.

    [...]

    The hallmark of a strong control system is that it resists perturbations. If you pilfer everything out of my fridge and pantry, my food-stat will send me scrambling to the Chipotle down the street. And if the Chipotle is closed, I’ll resort to the Qdoba next door. Our social-stats do not seem to display this property. According to a recent paper, people who got shifted to remote work in the past few years spent more time alone compared to people who stayed in-person—meaning they did not seek out additional ways to make up for their newfound alone time. It’s as if, upon encountering the closed Chipotle, they just went home hungry instead.

    [...]

    It makes sense that our social-stats would be a bit feeble. Just as our default diet probably staved off scurvy most of the time, our default desire to stay alive probably fended off most of our solitude. If our ancestors wanted food, shelter, warmth, protection, etc., they needed to be around other people. No hunter-gatherer had the option of working from home, DoorDash-ing some Thai food for dinner, and spending the evenings watching Survivor.

    [...]

    So what should we do about it? We actually have a good example of how to compensate for a semi-defective drive, namely, our sense of thirst.

    Human hydro-stats can be laughably bad. Case in point: I used to get terrible headaches as a kid, and after several doctor’s appointments and failed medications, my parents realized that I just...wasn’t drinking liquids. They plonked a big glass down on the counter and told me to fill it and down it several times a day, which I’ve done ever since. My headaches didn’t go away entirely, but they did get less frequent and severe.

    [...]

    We need a similar intervention for our social-stats. We need periodic PSAs that modern life can leave you chronically people-deficient. We need to be pushed toward one another slightly more than we want to be. Your demented thermostats may tell you that the most pleasurable way to spend your evening is alone on the couch with Peacock on one screen and TikTok on another. They are wrong. Some solitude is necessary and salutary, but too much is poison, and by default, too much is exactly what most of us want. If we let ourselves have it, we’ll end up with Jello for brains.

    [...]

    That suggests the best prescription for an inadequate social-stat is a bit of brute force. Just as you must sometimes drink even when you’re not thirsty, you must sometimes hang out even when you’re not lonely. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in a commencement address in 1978:

    I recommend that everybody here join all sorts of organizations, no matter how ridiculous, simply to get more people in his or her life. It does not matter much if all the other members are morons. Quantities of relatives of any sort are what we need.

    10 votes

  17. Comment on The actuary's final word on algorithmic decision making in ~science

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: ... ... [...] [...] ... ...

    From the article:

    Where do we draw the line between where statistics applies and where it doesn’t? If you are in a casino, and you trust the house to play fair, we’d probably all agree that the outcomes of future card games can be statistically analyzed. When creating actuarial tables to price insurance, the risks and prices are all based on carefully computed relative frequencies. The insurance company has found this mindset useful enough to build a business on top of it for centuries. But if a doctor is operating on a patient with an extremely uncommon condition, is that statistics too? In a sense, we can only define the term ’uncommon’ in statistical terms. It refers to a relative frequency of occurrence. However, in these cases where experiences do seem wholly new, how can we map past rates onto how to act?

    There is clearly a spectrum between when pure statistics can guide action (e.g., betting on blackjack) and where perhaps there is something else that must be applied (e.g., surgery on a novel condition).

    ...

    Meehl highlights a dozen other studies in his book and continued to track examples throughout his career. No matter how much he looked, he kept finding the same thing: statistical rules were seldom worse and often much better than clinical predictions. In a reflection on his book, Meehl wrote in 1986, “There is no controversy in social science that shows such a large body of qualitatively diverse studies coming out so uniformly in the same direction as this one.”

    ...

    What can we make of these results? Many feel like a doctor can assess more than what is fed into the computer. That a counselor can see subtle cues that are valuable for prediction. That there are edge cases that statistical algorithms can’t catch. Why does the empirical evidence not bear this out? Why does clinical judgment repeatedly fare worse on average?

    The key to the entire clinical-statistical puzzle is those last two words.

    The trick that Meehl plays is in the quantification of “better.” By better, we of course mean on average. This is a subtle point: Meehl discusses in Chapter 4 that a clinician may be able to detect a variety of exceptional cases that don’t appear in the original data seen by the statistical algorithm. His famous example is where an actuarial table determines that Professor Glotz attends the movies 90% of all Fridays, but this Friday he has a broken leg. The broken leg impels the clinician to change their predicted probability to near zero. What if clinicians are adept at finding such idiographic oddities as broken legs? Meehl doesn’t deny this possibility, but asserts that, regardless of how clinicians incorporate new knowledge, their performance should be evaluated actuarially. [...]

    Actuarial evaluation seems innocuous: how else would we compare two decision-makers but by the body of their work? However, once all parties decide that predictions will be evaluated by averages, the game is up. If prediction is possible, meaning that the past and the future are similar, and the evaluation is based on rates of future success, then the best predictor will be the one that maximizes success rate among some class of possible algorithms. You should find a rule that accurately predicts the past and use it to make predictions about the future. Since you will be evaluated based on averages, this is effectively the optimal thing to do.

    [...]

    If I pick a statistical evaluation, I can derive the optimal decision. I call this phenomenon, where the metric fixes optimal actions, Metrical Determinism. The evaluation ties our hands. Once we decide what is best in the future, the problem of optimal action is mechanical. It should thus not be surprising that statistics wins when we evaluate predictions and decisions using statistics.

    [...]

    Meehl provides clinicians with clearly delineated conditions for when statistical methods are useful: answering clear, multiple-choice questions about simple actions from machine-readable data. This characterization is useful in of itself. Moreover, I cannot emphasize enough here that just because statistical prediction is never worse and often better than clinical judgment, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to poorly implement statistical prediction. Careful statistical prediction remains a delicate skill. You can have too few features to make accurate predictions. You can have too many features, making it hard to find consistent patterns. You might be in a situation where you have completely uninformative features. We don’t have particularly effective methods to deal with missing data, and missing data plagues many prediction problems about people.

    Most worrisomely, the predictions trained on statistical counts have limited temporal validity, as the population of people changes faster than the statistical prediction rules can be updated. Statistical prediction relies on past counts being reasonable predictions of the future. We have plenty of experience that tells us this is often not a safe assumption.

    ...

    Data scientists and software engineers at technology companies refer to this degradation as staleness [...] and constantly retrain their prediction systems to prevent predictions from becoming less accurate. Not all fields are as diligent about the maintenance of their prediction systems. Medical risk assessments may remain static for decades, although they become ineffective within a matter of years.

    ...

    Moreover, statistical rules need to be targeted at interventions with simple outcomes. Trying to shoehorn every decision into a simple statistical decision narrows the possibilities of the world we inhabit. The Meehlian actuarial game transforms the world into machine language. This is explicitly part of the problem setup, which demands machine-readable rules, data, and outcomes. The game is rigged because we organized the problem to be mechanical. Once the problem is mechanical, it can be solved by a machine. However, if machines can’t function, they have no role in decision making. We can only compare human to machine decisions on the problems where we level the playing field for the machine.

    Nonetheless, one of the primary impulses of the modern state is to translate human experience into data readable by machines. Bureaucracies render humanity in a simplified state in order to make decisions about it. And, as explicated by Farrell and Fourcade [2023], our massive technology companies aid, abet, and profit from helping with such rendering. These systems remove the discretion of people in the decision making chain. These people, be they your primary care physician or a trial judge, often consider benefits not captured in actuarial evaluations.

    8 votes

  19. Comment on The doomsday cult inside OpenAI in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The threat from China is why many US AI leaders aren't advocating for a halt. When they talk about "pacing," it's a middle position between full speed ahead and a complete halt. They're saying,...

    The threat from China is why many US AI leaders aren't advocating for a halt. When they talk about "pacing," it's a middle position between full speed ahead and a complete halt. They're saying, maybe let's not speedrun AI like we could try to do, because it seems more dangerous than doing things at a more moderate pace.

    1 vote

  20. Comment on The doomsday cult inside OpenAI in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, I didn't mean "you" in particular. Sorry about that! "Only person in the room" doesn't seem right. Which room? Who do you imagine he's responding to? I've seen many people online claiming...

    Yes, I didn't mean "you" in particular. Sorry about that!

    "Only person in the room" doesn't seem right. Which room? Who do you imagine he's responding to?

    I've seen many people online claiming that when the leaders at AI companies asked for more regulation, it's to their own advantage, because they are attempting to exclude competition and they will somehow control the regulators to do that. (And such comments often get lots of upvotes, too!) There are people who write articles claiming this and they get shared approvingly. This position seems popular? And populist.

    There are often better and worse versions of an argument, though. For any argument you can think of, there are probably people online doing it badly. So, refuting the bad version of an argument isn't wrong, but there may be more to it. It's okay to not to care that much about refuting the bad version.

    Also, I'm a big believer in mixed motives. I think that's the normal state of affairs - people are often "talking their book." They stand to gain from something, but may also think it's the right thing. Neutral experts are rare. Liking money doesn't mean you can't also care about the "future of humanity" or whatever.

    And besides, if some of the people making an argument are financially conflicted, there may be other people who don't have the same financial incentives. It seems wrong to dismiss an argument because some of the people who take that position have mixed motives?

    So, I think pointing out financial incentives isn't wrong, but using it as a stick to dismiss arguments is. If the "wrong" people are in favor of something, that's reason to be suspicious, but not enough in itself to take the opposite side. The "wrong" people can sometimes be right about things.

    2 votes