vektor's recent activity
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Comment on OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis in ~tech
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Comment on OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis in ~tech
vektor Link ParentOoof But yeah. I can see the common read here being some big skynet conspiracy. Which it isn't. This isn't so much "let's try to avoid human detection" and more "here's a cheeky way to maximize...people tend to… hallucinate details of their own.
Ooof
But yeah. I can see the common read here being some big skynet conspiracy. Which it isn't. This isn't so much "let's try to avoid human detection" and more "here's a cheeky way to maximize the reward function". It's sad to see -though perhaps not surprising- that OpenAI keeps bumbling about like clumsy amateurs. I've built a paperclip optimizer that gamed a reward function during my bachelor's thesis, and that was better sandboxed.
Like, the alarming part here isn't "AI does a thing", it's "and the AI company didn't notice them doing the thing" - alternatively "and the AI company didn't bother to stop it doing the thing" (which is worse, on account of it being evil rather than incompetent). If they thought this was interesting behavior and they wanted to see it play out, stop the experiment, host that wiki within the sandbox environment, then resume. Should be a no-brainer. If you don't notice your AI stepping outside the sandbox (or not having one...?), what are you doing?
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Comment on EU packaging regulations land another blow to an already precarious tabletop industry in ~games.tabletop
vektor Link ParentAlso should just have a base list of permitted-everywhere packaging that if you abide by you're good in any member state. If that's premium eco packaging so be it.Also should just have a base list of permitted-everywhere packaging that if you abide by you're good in any member state. If that's premium eco packaging so be it.
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Comment on AI text watermarking is free and good in ~comp
vektor Link ParentI think that might be read in a way that's uncharitable to LLMs and/or the method. Even if writing quality was good. There's still arguably a lot of variation in how any given human could write...So if the writing quality isn't that great to begin with, this doesn't make it worse.
I think that might be read in a way that's uncharitable to LLMs and/or the method. Even if writing quality was good. There's still arguably a lot of variation in how any given human could write any given piece of text, depending on minute factors that basically boil down to pseudo randomness. Or in other words, even best-human level performance on the task of writing general text carries enough randomness that a perfect machine replica of it allows for this method at no loss of output quality. Wherever output quality of LLMs is currently lagging to the degree that humans use a lower-entropy next-token distribution (i.e. are more confident about the next word - let's just say in poetry. Also, this is a proper subset of "LLMs lag human performance"), there this watermarking mechanism will stop applying if/when models catch up to humans.
It's really quite ingenious. I lowkey fear what some people will do with the results of this watermark, mostly in over-interpreting that a text is AI to mean that the thought behind it is too. And/or applying the slop label by default, which is also common. But I think it's still a net-positive move.
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Comment on Arch User Repository compromised, 1500+ packages affected in ~tech
vektor Link ParentCorollary: stay away from arch for anything serious, because you will eventually need something that's only on the AUR.Really the advice should be to stay away from the AUR because it’s fundamentally insecure,
Corollary: stay away from arch for anything serious, because you will eventually need something that's only on the AUR.
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Comment on What do you think of robots in the military? in ~tech
vektor Link ParentNot part of the treaty: USA, Russia, China, India. After the invasion of Ukraine, the European land border with Russia collectively suspended their participation or left. Which, by the way,...Not part of the treaty: USA, Russia, China, India.
After the invasion of Ukraine, the European land border with Russia collectively suspended their participation or left. Which, by the way, Switzerland complained to the UN about Ukraine's suspension. Which... come one, why does it always have to be Switzerland?
It's a feelgood treaty. Much like any international humanitarian law on war, if any of the countries actually thought they'd benefit from mines, they wouldn't be in it. It's also only anti-personnel mines - which to be fair covers the worst humanitarian excesses.
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Comment on Can helium-3 create a gold rush on the moon? in ~space
vektor LinkWikipedia has some data on the Helium 3 market: 2000$/liter price, at a yearly consumption of 70000 liters per year in the US; that's during a shortage. Make that 140 million dollars per year....Wikipedia has some data on the Helium 3 market:
2000$/liter price, at a yearly consumption of 70000 liters per year in the US; that's during a shortage. Make that 140 million dollars per year. Recycling has improved since then, as has production, so prices have supposedly recovered while consumption is down. Using 114g/m^3 (also from that WP section), that's about 8 kg of traded He3 per year, times 20M$/kg from the article roughly matches the total yearly. So that all roughly checks out.
Even if the world market is ten times that, and it likely isn't, that's 2 billion a year, max. Assuming prices don't deflate from you dumping substantial amounts of it.
That stuff's just not useful enough until we reach commercial nuclear fusion. I'd see more potential in rare, but high-demand commodities. Say, rare earth elements. We trade a shitton of the stuff, it's available on the moon (not sure if feasible to get to, but that's beside the broad strokes argument here), and we'd use more of it here if it were available. Yes, per kilo it's more expensive. But it's not the return trip that's expensive, it's getting all the mining equipment up there, which means if it's easier to mine than some elusive, trace isotope, that's a win.
The return trip could just be a catapult, or a chemical rocket. Getting stuff off the moon is substantially easier than getting stuff off earth. Like, 2km/s dV vs 9km/s. And fuel mass is exponential in dV required. => a 60s tech human rated lunar ascent stage required 50% of its mass be fuel. That's nothing, in rocketry terms. The same program's Saturn V had about a 90% ratio on earth ascent, per stage, across multiple stages.
Basically: You don't care that much how heavy it is to ship it back. In fact, if it's just a slug of metal you might not even worry about heat shielding it, just drop it in the desert. Can't do that with a gas. What you do care about is the complexity of extraction, because launching stuff (humans and their support equipment, and/or the actual mining equipment) is what's driving the cost.
I'm not saying the case for mining other stuff is great, all I'm saying is the case for other minerals is likely better because there you can actually go for some semblance of scale.
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Comment on The boy that cried Mythos in ~comp
vektor Link ParentSaw on reddit the other day that firefox released a graph of security-related fixes, and that thing positively went to the moon. Think 10x increase in the "Mythos month". I don't know where I saw...Saw on reddit the other day that firefox released a graph of security-related fixes, and that thing positively went to the moon. Think 10x increase in the "Mythos month".
I don't know where I saw it, but it's a lead if someone wants to chase it down.
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Comment on When Richard Dawkins met Claude in ~health.mental
vektor Link ParentFor human-human interaction this is doing a lot of work: I know the existence of my mind, therefore by similarity (functionally, materially, take your pick), I have an easy time convincing myself...I have to infer the existence of your mind, but I can experience the existence of mine.
For human-human interaction this is doing a lot of work: I know the existence of my mind, therefore by similarity (functionally, materially, take your pick), I have an easy time convincing myself of the existence of yours.
I think that's doing a lot of work to explain why the discussion of consciousness is always so intuitive and "vibes": Because we're used to doing it in a very shorthand way. IOW: No one has reasoned themselves into the position that other humans are conscious; we're brought up with it, and the best proof we have of it is "I think, therefore he thinks too".
Anyway, I feel massively disconnected from most of the rest of the discussion here. I have been, for I don't know how long, a "functionalist" when it comes to mental phenomena. "If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck". Simply because due to privacy (thank you for the technical term, btw.), I don't see another way of evaluating intelligence or consciousness of non-me systems. If it behaves like it's intelligent, then it must be intelligent. And yes, that gives LLMs at least a limited but nontrivial amount of intelligence. No, they're not just regurgitating training data, or at least if you lead them out-of-training-distribution, they don't do so qualitatively differently from humans IMO. They are genuinely recombining information in novel ways. As for consciousness? Hell, if I had a duck test for it to apply to humans, I'd be a step farther, but I don't think consciousness as a concept is even reasonably testable in humans, so what are we doing trying to apply it to AI?
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Comment on Why I find woke criticism of veganism and effective altruism so outrageous in ~society
vektor Link ParentI disagree with that... most EA orgs I know of are pretty transparent about where their money goes, and allow even rather small donations. There's no reason for me to give up my wages to some...I disagree with that... most EA orgs I know of are pretty transparent about where their money goes, and allow even rather small donations. There's no reason for me to give up my wages to some billionaire to then route some of that to my preferred EA org to then end up aiding the goals I support. I can just take a bigger paycheck and donate it myself, knowing that I have better control over the money and probably a tax advantage through the lack of additional intermediaries.
Like, the conspiracy that this is all to justify billionaires makes no sense if it doesn't actually need (or encourage) billionaires being in the loop kind of falls apart.
Yes, they're using it to whitewash their wealth. But they'd find another way of doing that.
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Comment on Why I find woke criticism of veganism and effective altruism so outrageous in ~society
vektor (edited )Link ParentLet me, butting on from the sidelines, put it like this: Upon starting my first job earning the kind of money that enables setting something aside for later, I decided I probably want to donate a...Let me, butting on from the sidelines, put it like this: Upon starting my first job earning the kind of money that enables setting something aside for later, I decided I probably want to donate a smidge of that. Some time previous to that, I must have heard, one way or another, of Effective Altruism. Can't have been in the context of SBF, or any other billionaire for that matter. More of a grass roots thing. So, I go look for the biggest lever by looking at a few EA and EA-adjecent organizations and what they recommend putting your money towards. The org I end up at, pretty much explicitly wearing the EA label, recommended at the time: Global poverty (among which mosquito nets in Africa), animal suffering and climate change. For each of those goals they recommend different orgs with slightly different goals and different approaches. Just today, I found they've added two more big-picture goals to their list: Safeguarding democracy and "preserving the future and AI risks". Looking into it, because I know the mere mention of AI risks will cause people to associate certain things: Their first recommendation is a broader longer-term existential risks: Pandemics, nuclear war, and yes, AI. THeir second recommendation is AI-only. AI-related disbursements from those funds are mostly towards lobbying and policysetting and less so about pouring money into AI research. This category also has roughly a tenth of the donations for this org as compared to poverty, and about a fourth of the donations to climate change. It's a small, small part of what they recommend.
That's my background with EA. I've met people who are active in EA organizations that (presumably) have even less money to give away. I've never seen/heard anyone with fuck-you money recommend or advertise EA philosophy; except perhaps indirectly Bill Gates when he talks about how he allocates his donations.
I have also occasionally read internet drama about SBF<->EA. It does not color my judgement of EA that someone else would use a good thing as a shield to deflect from their bad deeds. People do it all the time. What, is a bad person going to just declare themselves a villain? Of course they'll try to hide behind something.
So I urge you to look at this entire discussion from that perspective. In particular, I'd like to call out this statement of yours:
I don't know what EA billionaire nerve I hit
You didn't. But maybe you can now imagine what non-billionaire nerve you hit by -basically- painting my small contribution towards climate change mitigation as billionaire bootlicking. Because judging from the comments here, my EA contributions towards climate change are perpetuating a system that justifies the existence of rich people. Because I route donations through an organization that in turn routes most of its donations to addressing global poverty....???
And I get it. It's easy to go through life never hearing about EA in any capacity except billionaires shilling how morally good they are. That's understandable and I see how that would inform your views on the topic. But that's also just your perspective. To take a deliberately pointed comparison: It's similarly easy for a young man to go through their adolescence never knowingly meeting a feminist, but hearing a lot about feminism through 4chan level caricatures. That's not necessarily a good basis for decision making about feminism.
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Comment on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent in ~tech
vektor Link ParentThose are two massively different things. P2P update distribution makes a lot of sense from all kinds of perspective. Torrent and related approaches are just ridiculously efficient. If MS didn't...Those are two massively different things. P2P update distribution makes a lot of sense from all kinds of perspective. Torrent and related approaches are just ridiculously efficient. If MS didn't do that, people would complain that they were leaving emission reductions on the table...
Offloading LLM processing to other users is not at all comparable, and I think it's a bit conspiratorial to expect that until privacy-preserving LLMs are here. (The cool stuff, were you encrypt data, run a computation on it, then decrypt the result and it's all homomorphic. The computer doesn't actually know what it's computing.) Everything else is a massive user privacy nightmare for Google. They take on that "burden" because they trust themselves not to compromise your privacy too badly (or too noticably if you're being cynical) and to keep your data safe. Give user data from one user to another, and you have no guarantees of any kind - a malicious user could compromise any of it at will.
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Comment on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent in ~tech
vektor Link ParentExactly my thinking. By the way very convenient thinking if you want to make someone your enemy. The enemies of fascism are simultaneously weak enough as to be undeserving of any sympathy or...Exactly my thinking.
By the way very convenient thinking if you want to make someone your enemy. The enemies of fascism are simultaneously weak enough as to be undeserving of any sympathy or rights, and strong enough that "we must all band together". Migrants are simultaneously useless unemployed mooches and they're taking your jobs. Google is simultaneously very forward about its on-device AI efforts, and snuck this model onto your device without anyone's knowledge. Then what is it? The answer depends on what the author wants you to believe.
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Comment on Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent in ~tech
vektor Link ParentNot quite general purpose; there's only so much behavior you can plop into an NN, and whatever I/O harnessing there's built around this NN is the actual potential for abuse. But curiously, nary a...Not quite general purpose; there's only so much behavior you can plop into an NN, and whatever I/O harnessing there's built around this NN is the actual potential for abuse. But curiously, nary a mention of that. If the I/O code around the model unnecessarily and unpromptedly sends data to Google, that's bad. But the 4GB blob has nothing to do with that.
I get that 4GB of space on-device isn't nothing. But as far as malware concerns goes, this is very unsubstantiated. On-device LLMs are generally privacy friendlier than cloud, you have a very clear overview of ecological impacts, what's not to like? Oh, it's opt-out instead of opt-in? I haven't seen anyone make the case that this model somehow is activated without a user request, and even then I'd be indifferent about it as long as no sensitive telemetry is triggered.
I think it's a safe bet there's bigger privacy violations of opt-out telemetry without any AI involvement buried in the Chrome settings... Sometimes I forget how to even.
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Comment on US begins blockade in Strait of Hormuz in ~society
vektor Link ParentRight, but they lose that from their protection racket falling apart, so revenue neutral in the end.Right, but they lose that from their protection racket falling apart, so revenue neutral in the end.
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Comment on Am I German or autistic? in ~health.mental
vektor Link ParentWhen I'm thinking about my internal monologue, the monologue starts to form very slight movements of vocal cords and tongue.When I'm thinking about my internal monologue, the monologue starts to form very slight movements of vocal cords and tongue.
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Comment on Megathread: April Fools' Day 2026 on the internet in ~talk
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Comment on US Federal Communications Commission bans imports of new foreign-made routers, citing security concerns in ~tech
vektor Link ParentEven to a blind moron in a rush, it should be painfully obvious that this kind of intervention would require a grace period. If the US government went "alright, stop importing this shit. It'll be...Even to a blind moron in a rush, it should be painfully obvious that this kind of intervention would require a grace period. If the US government went "alright, stop importing this shit. It'll be banned in two years. Get some domestic alternatives onto the market within two years." instead of "stop importing this shit now". If you don't want imports to surge in anticipation of the ban, put a cap on imports or some shit.
Like, this should be obvious to people not in IT. I could forgive them for neglecting some technical detail, many of which you mentioned, but this fuckup isn't even funny. They didn't even check if the alternative they want people to buy even exists.
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Comment on LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy in ~tech
vektor Link ParentUsername: Goose. In hindsight, a bit on the nose.Username: Goose.
In hindsight, a bit on the nose.
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Comment on Cory Doctorow | AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. in ~tech
vektor Link ParentTo clarify once more, duck testing like this isn't necessarily a short and simple thing. Let's stick with Ohm's law for an example. I wouldn't be convinced by simply regurgitating a formula. I...This implies that the process under the hood doesn't matter, only the outcome does, and I just can't agree on that.
To clarify once more, duck testing like this isn't necessarily a short and simple thing. Let's stick with Ohm's law for an example. I wouldn't be convinced by simply regurgitating a formula. I wouldn't be convinced by an LLM solving a college level homework exercise. Those are easily in the training data, and I wouldn't be convinced if the answer is plausibly just regurgitated from somewhere. [If the training data were infinite, it might satisfy me because then I don't run the risk of going beyond the training data.] At least if I'm testing for knowledge beyond those particular quotes. Then I'd want to see some understanding that goes beyond the source material.
But if you have an arbitrarily long conversation with an LLM about Ohm's Law, and you can't find any flaws with its conception of Ohm's Law, IMO at some point you must concede that it knows Ohm's law. Knowledge is IMO a functional property, the process ultimately does not matter if the results are there. Yes, I can easily acknowledge that one might be easier convinced of someone's knowledge if the process is known. I (presume to) know you are human, therefore I get certain axioms for free about how you work and think. I don't get that for an LLM. But to say the process does matter in a way that no evidence that does not include internal insights will always be insufficient is basically saying that no non-human entity of any kind can ever know anything. Do ravens know how to use tools? Do elephants know what death is? Does your Roomba know the layout of your home? Does chatGPT know Ohm's Law? These are all categorically "no", if you put too much weight on processes rather than results. And I'm not saying the answer is necessarily Yes, but the method of determining that answer must at least in principle permit either answer.
As an olive branch of sorts, a middle ground if you will, I will easily concede that any artifacts of process that are observed in results are also fair game. If I explain to you my reasoning, or you see a raven experimenting with tools, or an LLM puts it's thinking
capmode on, and you read those thinking tokens, all of those are useful in getting a glimpse of the process.But the process line of thinking is often restricted to -more or less- something subjective or human-centric: They're human, therefore I know the process, therefore knowledge is possible. And that implicitly and often categorically excludes non-humans.
Put another way: Say we had the AIs of science fiction. The good ones that is, not the faulty ones. Think, perhaps, more Data and less HAL. How would you make the judgement that they know things? If your answer is "I wouldn't", pick a better AI. I hope you're convinced that for some AIs, the answer must invariably be "it knows things", and that's where we need to think about a judgement that doesn't rely on process.
Last I checked, their open-weight models are also much less restricted from producing anti-social content. Try getting even OpenAI to produce CSAM or CSAM-adjacent content. (Don't, for gods sake! Absolutely don't!) Then compare the outcomes there to results by chinese open-weight models. Or replace CSAM with any other issue where US companies try to stay clear just to avoid liability or bad press. Proliferation risks, vulnerable user demographics, protection of PII. Personally I don't enjoy those safeguards because I've only experienced false positives, but on a society level they're absolutely necessary. Chinese companies OTOH release models that will deny that Tienanmen square is a place, but otherwise they'll tell you what you want to hear.