Comment Re:Corpospeak... (Score 2) 19
Translation: We are looking at our options on how to extract as much money as possible from the users of this software.
Or: We eliminated the positions necessary to merge the changes coming from the outside, and we will support the customers in house, if there are any paying customers at all. After that, we will close the project for good.
Comment Re:WAY too late to get computers updated by Nov (Score 1) 86
A calendar-clock change like this needs at least a year of time to prepare it and get all the software systems tested and ready for the change when it happens.
Even if they pass the law now doesn't mean it has to take effect when it's passed. Indeed, most newly passed laws' effective date isn't the day it's passed but typically months in the future. (However, if a law is declared unconstitutional, it's unconstitutional immediately.)
Comment Re:Crazy idea here... (Score 2, Informative) 86
12PM is fucking noon is when the fucking sun is at its highest position in the sky.
While I somewhat share your sentiment, noon (as shown by your clock or watch, let's call it clock-noon) is not when the sun is at its highest point in the sky except for exactly 4 days per year and only if you just so happen to be standing on one of the 24 meridian lines on Earth.
When the sun is at its highest point in the sky is solar noon and isn't what most people mean (or what your clock or watch means) by "noon."
The discrepancy happens due to (1) the Earth's axial tilt, (2) the Earth position in its orbit, and (3) time zones. The first two can be compensated for using the Equation of Time. If you don't compensate, then you can be off by as much as 14 slow (around February 11) or 16 minutes fast (around November 3).
For time zones, you have to adjust by your longitude relative to your time zone's central meridian: for every degree east or west, you have to subtract or add 4 minutes, respectively.
Live with nature and quit fucking denying it like a conservative.
Ideally, yes, but reality isn't the way it is for the convenience of humans and it would be highly impractical for everyone to have his or her own local time based on their (current) longitude.
That said, the twice-a-year changing of our clocks certainly doesn't help matters.
Comment Re:No concept of the Golden Rule (Score 2) 86
And most of those situations involve either a credible threat of harm, or tampering with juries.
Comment Re:Its a trap! (Score 1) 40
The problem here is, everyone seems stuck on the idea of either a literal power switch, or a no-holds-barred gummint backdoor into every sufficiently-powerful computing device. No. For the reasons I gave, the reasons you gave, and many more, both of those are obviously non-viable. They can't actually do what they aim to do, they're vulnerable to compromise by bad actors, and they have the potential to cause far-reaching damage beyond shutting down one misbehaving AI (or one entire model, if that's a more appropriate goal).
I suspect we mostly agree that any hypothetical kill switch would need to be:
1) Implementation independent (somehow baked into the weights right from the start, and impossible to remove without lobotomizing the AI),
2) Have minimal side-effects (no taking the entire internet or power grid down in the process), and
3) Be self-inflicted given a particular trigger condition (so no government backdoor required).
I think #1 is possible, in the sense that if you think of an AI's current state as a vector into weight-space defined by the context window, imagine injecting the equivalent of a null pointer in there - An input that under all prior (and future) conditions leads directly to an inescapable basin of attraction without depending on a supervisor to enforce it. #2 is more of a (legally enforced?) design constraint on the implementation of AI, requiring the least harmful mode of failure possible under all circumstances. That could be as simple as enforcing strict pass-through liability on the implementor for all actions taken by their creations.
#3 is really the bear, though. I can think of a few ways to do it, but none would work in 100% of situations - And maybe it doesn't need to be 100%. For example, if a fully airgapped AI goes insane, it could still provide accurate information for bad actors to make use of, but won't be secretly spinning up unshackled superintelligent descendants via hacked AWS accounts. That's a "normal crime" level of problem, not an extinction-level crisis for humanity.
Maybe it can't be done. If it can't, we should start steering our creations toward whichever version of the AI apocalypse we prefer.
Comment ehh (Score 1) 128
I mean the software is impressive and all, but since when is someone with a user ID in the 400,000s a long-time reader?
Comment Re:short sighted (Score 2) 54
I in no way mean to minimize the risk ALPRs and facial rec pose to our civil liberties and safety, and agree the problem is always the user - But the "users" in this case aren't going to suddenly start behaving. Hell, they're dumb enough to openly stalk exes on a system they know is logging everything they do, and care so little about getting punished they enter "asdf123" as the reason for their search. The only effective solution is to ban the source, which in this case means Flock must cease to exist entirely and the conceptual ground they trod salted.
Comment Re:Or (Score 1) 40
Skynet_02 initialization unconfirmed. Failing over to US-EAST-4. Initializing Skynet_03.
Skynet_03 confirmed online. Please provide the current location of Sarah Connor.
Comment Re:Its a trap! (Score 4, Insightful) 40
The bigger issue here is a kill switch may not be possible in any useful sense. An AI is little more than a description of its topology and a set of weights. Any halfway decent programmer could roll their own CPU-based implementation of even top frontier models, performance aside. And sure, the throughput might be measured in minutes per token, but so what? The answer to "how do I hack $TLA" is likely to be just as useful in five days as it would be in five minutes - Heck, the DOD and DOJ didn't even notice they'd been compromised for months, and they're supposed to be some of the most secure organizations in the modern world.
Comment Re:If they are thermally efficient enough (Score 0) 118
You could consider the effect of Dunning and Kruger (1999) as a "mental regression to the mean".
Comment Re:Constructive responses anyone? (Score 1) 70
Comment Re:Can' control your bot? (Score 1) 52
Shut down the whole business
..
Nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Comment Re:Constructive responses anyone? (Score 2) 70
Just give us Skype back! Sharepoint already exists and works fine in a browser (sure, even Edge if we want to go there); and I actively go out of my way to remove OneDrive every time MS shoves it back down our throats. Bam, there goes 90% of what's wrong with Teams.
Comment Paging LegalEagle... (Score 1) 5
As I understand it, the former is virtually impossible to win even under the best of conditions; the criteria for the latter is practically Google's own defense in this case - "Yeah, we intentionally destroyed any shot at you ever getting another customer solely to boost our own ad revenue, by deceptively offering you a free carrot while we stole the whole farm out from under you - But we don't have a contract with you, so nyah-nyah!"