As far as I can tell nobody really has any consistent idea what "kill switch" is supposed to mean. Eg. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.scientificamerican...

OpenAI and Anthropic already have kill switches, from the power cord through to account bans. If they don't want anyone using their model they can do that. Likewise, if the US government is sufficiently motivated to order a service provider to stop providing that service, they can absolutely do that. I get the feeling the actual companies are hoping they can implement something that has lots of buzzwords and does sort of what their "guard rails" do, and everyone will stop bugging them about it.

Naturally the FSF imagines some hypothetical technology that allows the government to reach into your home to shut off the matrix multiplies running on your own computer.

Yeah that's some old shit. Anyone look at the case enough to know what the evidence was? Was it just quantity or was it packaged?

Oh look, it's the hipster maggot come along to tell us all how great slavery was.

No, it's reasonable. It's not safe.

The other part of that is that you're not necessarily doing the same equation, they may be solving for something something different.

The US has been oligarchic and authoritarian all along, and has behaved towards some other nations much like a fascist nation would do, but in general has not subjected the general citizenry to full blown fascism. It's been horrible to everyone other than landed white males all along, though.

Excellent pedantism sir!

Not everyone shares your personal passtimes.

Technology isn't really the problem. We've got most or all the technology to do what the GP suggested. What we lack are engineering experience, infrastructure and good economic reasons to do it.

Europe had all the technology required to build a casino in the Nevada desert in the 16th century, but it took four hundred years to get around to building the first one in Las Vegas.

There's lots of desert where nobody really cares what you do, and even more ocean. We don't like building in those places because they're far away from where we want to use the services, difficult and expensive to access, and have issues with cooling, power supply, etc.

But all those problems are worse in space, and you generally need to rebuild your entire infrastructure, from power plant to GPU, every five years or so.

What? Presumably are what? No one can hear you over your cowardice.

If you can recognize that, then you should be able to do the math and figure out why it won't work. A quick napkin-based computation is sufficient. If I can do it, you can do it.

If we had reasonable regulations then a data center could go anywhere and not be a problem, but since we don't, they can only go into unpopulated places with lots of water and power without causing harm. Normal DCs can just go into ordinary commercial zones because they use, while elevated, not completely obscene amounts of power and therefore water. And to return to the topic, this illustrates why AI DCs don't make sense in space, because cooling is harder in space than it is here.

That sounds like malarkey. What people love to do more is dump on other people, and what they can't help doing is trying to rationalize. They also on average don't spend much time thinking. So if you give them some missing blanks, they will fill them in whichever way makes them feel good.

Simple experiment. Put a garage sale sign out when the forecast shows some rain. The largest group of people think haha fucking idiot. Followed by people think maybe it's just in case or things might look better on Sunday. Then you have people thinking it's all just to fuck with them personally. In the last and smallest bucket you have the correct answer, the forecast was not even looked at; they were too busy planning a garage sale.

The reason dumb things like Hanlon's Razor and Buy Low Sell High work and need to be repeated is because of human nature. It's not because they're particularly brilliant axioms.

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)