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Comment America.gov is a DOGE Scam (Score 4, Interesting) 111

This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.

I first read about the effort here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedreydossier.substac...

Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedreydossier.substac...

Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.

From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.

Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.

In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.

Submission + - Regulating AI Like Aviation or Nuclear Weapons (yoshuabengio.org)

puzzled writes: Yoshua Bengio, the founder of LawZero, "a nonprofit startup developing technical solutions for highly-capable, safe-by-design AI systems", recently addressed the U.N. Security Council. The AI companies themselves are positioning their work as a potential existential threat, and Bengio argues that they should be subject to a similarly strict level of regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would not even issue General Electric a permit to build a breeder reactor in 21st century America, but Anthropic and OpenAI's creations are running wild.

We had the wisdom to stop atmospheric nuclear testing after the 1954 Castle Bravo incident, but that took until 1963, and we have incrementally reduced total nuclear weapons since 1991 via the START treaty and its successors. AI is moving at internet speed; we need results here in months or quarters, not years to decades.

Comment Re: Simple answer: "No." (Score 1) 59

One of the cool things with open source is that we get to see that play out in a real world environment. My sense is that the open source projects who figure out how to use AI effectively to maintain a consistent vision and direction will probably beat out everything else. Maybe the purist human ones will land in the middle and the ones that allow a bunch of slop in will be below that - but maybe the all human ones will stay on top, idk.

I kind of feel like the code contribution path is sort of the wrong direction. What we've been doing at work is having non-technical people use claude to write what are effectively gold-standard change requests - they have detailed steps for whats wrong, risks, criteria for acceptance etc - then i feed those into my claude who converts them into code with all of our required standards and conventions and I can answer any missing pieces as they make sense for the broader project.

I can't help but feeling the human purists will end up looking more like Richard Stallman with his perfect ivory tower. Ideologically pure but moving so slowly by comparison that they are left behind.

Comment imminent nationalization (Score 2) 90

The AI bubble bursting will wreck the economy far harder than the Dotcom bubble did. And the dynamic is OBVIOUS. This is not an "if" problem, it's a "when" problem.

If AI produces a maximal result along the lines of what the frontier labs suggest, it'll eat fifty million jobs, which will wreck the economy far harder, and for far longer.

The constant chatter about AI breakout is half legitimate concern and half positioning to nationalize it, shielding the circular dealing crew from consequences.

This will not be Skynet; as a society we are far too primed to envision events that can be told in a single two hour action adventure with a clear, satisfying ending. When the historians get to this they will note the breakout happened 2025 - 2027 -- because that will be the time where human network threats enhanced by AI will starting further enhancing AI.

There are no "sides" to this, it'll be like the African savanna - lions, leopards, hyenas, cheetahs, wild dogs, servals & caracals, clear down to my personal favorite, the black backed jackal. A network of carnivores of various sizes pursue networks of herbivores. Nation states, corporations, non-state actors, activist groups, talented individuals; all are making use of AI in conflicts already.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle, the open models are only a little behind the frontier, and things are going to keep happening no matter what bellicose policy pronouncements come from an increasingly irrelevant Washington, D.C.

I'll be riding the Claude subsidy until it ends, then hopefully have acquired a potent professional GPU or unified memory setup of my own. Won't be nearly as quick, but it'll keep me moving.

Now scale that thinking up by whatever percentage of eight billion people have technical capabilities. That's the future.

Comment Re: Which is it? (Score 1) 128

I just wanted to let you know that you have successfully driven me off of /., after some 25 years.

Not just you, obviously, the site has been in steep decline for a long time, but you were such a huge asshole that you managed to be the last straw. So, congrats for that. I won't be back.

Comment Not mutually exclusive (Score 1) 113

The worries are coming from every level within the companies, from junior developers to safety officers to the C-suite and board...also from people who left the companies.

It's possible for the stated high-level worries to be a combination of fear of rogue bots AND angry investors, and thus they got together to collude...I mean agree to a slowdown.

Comment Avoiding bubble collapse consequences (Score 4, Insightful) 372

The AI industry has blown a spectacular bubble via circular dealing - Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, etc are all doing monopoly money deals. Nvidia "sells" some GPUs, then "invests" the proceeds back into OpenAI, nothing got done, no money changed hands, but their stock values zoom. This looks exactly like the Dotcom bubble in the late 1990s and such things always implode - the market doesn't just correct, it panics, it liquidates, nobody can tell what's real, so everything is for sale at pennies on the dollar.

The industry's strategy to not go to prison for this stunt is to make AI equivalent to nuclear weapons. When the bubble begins to burst, the Trump administration will "make a deal", what you see is the beginning of that process. This will work about as well as the attempt to shake down Iran for their oil, but cause and effect are not the Trump administration's strong suit.

Comment Re:kudos (Score 5, Insightful) 75

what's the point?

The point is to be able to use your hardware in the manner you deem appropriate, and to ensure it is not doing sneaky shit behind your back.

If, instead of a Playstation, we were talking about rooting LG televisions to run custom Linux builds stripped of pervasive privacy-violating code and "apps," I suspect your opinion might be rather different. (And no, when the entire industry has turned to the Dark Side, voting with your wallet doesn't work.)

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