Off-and-on trying out an account over at @[email protected] due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.
No problem. Yeah, it’s an invaluable off-site resource that new users don’t get informed about. Indexes all of the Threadiverse instances, whereas any given instance can only search the communities that are local or at least one local user has subscribed to.
Honestly, even limiting it to, say, the WiFi network, having a default admin login is not great.
Like, Android isolates apps from the rest of your Android system, but not from touching the rest of the network. If any random app I install on my phone can reflash my WAP’s firmware or something like that, that’s not great.
I think that, TP-Link aside, consumer broadband routers in general have been a security problem.
They are, unlike most devices, directly Internet-connected. That means that they really do need to be maintained more stringently than a lot of devices, because everyone has some level of access to them.
People buying them are very value-conscious. Your typical consumer does not want to pay much for their broadband router. Businesses are going to be a lot more willing to put money into their firewall and/or pay for ongoing support. I think that you are going to have a hard time finding a market with consumers willing to pay for ongoing support for their consumer broadband router.
Partly because home users are very value-conscious, any such provider of router updates might try to make money by data-mining activity. If users are wary of this, they are going to be even more unlikely to want to accept updates.
Home users probably don’t have any sort of computer inventory management system, tracking support for and replacing devices that fall out of support.
People buying them often are not incredibly able to assess or aware of security implications.
They can trivially see all Internet traffic in-and-out. They don’t need to ARP-poison caches or anything to try to see what devices on the network are doing.
My impression is that there has been some movement from ISPs away from bring-your-own-device service, just because those ISPs don’t want to deal with compromised devices on their network.
Axie Infinity
I’m not familiar with Axie Infinity, so I can’t tell you off-the-cuff.
It’s showing cell phones as marionettes. Marionettes are sometimes used as a metaphor to indicate that someone else is, behind the scenes, controlling something. Here, the company is controlling social media accounts.
A16Z should be shut down
No point. I’m sure that they’re not the only ones, and there will be more.
One possibility is that we just have to have expensive identities — the “Reddit model” where anyone who wants to can just create a new, anonymous identity doesn’t work. We can maybe be pseudonymous, but we might not be able to create lots of identities the way we do today.
Or maybe we’ll have to have a more-elaborate reputation system.
pyramids schemes
Pyramid schemes are not legal in the US.
There are some systems that have some aspects in common with pyramid schemes that are legal (Social Security sometimes gets called a “pyramid scheme” by people that don’t like it, for example, and MLM schemes are legal, though they can, in practice, partially work something like pyramid schemes).
That’s possible.
That being said, John Maynard Keynes also made a similar prediction:
The economist John Maynard Keynes once wrote an essay titled “Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren.” It was 1930. And in the essay, he made a startling prediction. Keynes figured that by the time his children had grown up, basically now, people might be working just 15 hours a week.
The specific quote:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes
For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930); appeared in the Nation and Athenaeum (1930)
Basically, had we decided to leave our standard of living where it was in 1930, we could have worked two days a week. But…that’s not generally what people wanted to do. We wanted to take advantage of new stuff that people produced to appeal to us, jack up our standard of living.
In the past, we’ve always managed to come up with new, appealing things that wind up making use of that new productive capacity. Climate control or anime video games or more space per person in housing.
Is it possible that in the future, we will be unable to make use of scarce human labor to provide something that humans want? Maybe! And that’s something to think about. But simply the fact that human labor is finite, that things that involve human labor can be used like a status symbol, might itself fill the problem. We shall see.
One thing that I do agree with is that transition from the world of today to a world with AGI is going to be a very disruptive transition.
I guess it’s a little more compact to make it internal, but I’d think that an external USB drive would be a much better option, not compete for space in the laptop. I mean, people can’t be using the thing all the time.
considers
Though there was a point in the past when laptop vendors would design the laptop to support a secondary battery in the optical drive bay if you didn’t want an internal optical drive, and that would be something I’d like. That’s the only way you can exceed the 100Wh maximum on flights, if the battery is a spare removeable, not built-in.
Thanks for checking.
The overwhelming majority of users will use whatever’s preinstalled on their platform. I dunno if OpenAI can go pay some cell phone manufacturer to preinstall their browser, but if they want marketshare, I’m pretty sure that that’s the only realistic route to do so.
Oooh, neat. I didn’t know about that. Thanks. That better not have been around since the 1990s or something, with me always searching the bash(1) man page to find builtin information.
$ help help|head -n2
help: help [-dms] [pattern ...]
Display information about builtin commands.
$ git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/bash.git
$ cd bash
$ git log -S "Display information about builtin commands."|grep ^commit|tail -n1
commit 3185942a5234e26ab13fa02f9c51d340cec514f8
$ git show 3185942a5234e26ab13fa02f9c51d340cec514f8|grep ^Date
Date: Mon Jan 12 13:36:28 2009 +0000
$
Well, it’s not the 1990s, but still. Dammit.
If you’re not familiar, there’s a chsh command.
That sign won’t stop me, because I can’t read!
$ man ls | spd-say -e
EDIT: If you run the above, it looks like speech-dispatcher splits the thing up into a bunch of different consecutive blocking requests, which means that it’s a pain in the neck to stop with a single command. You might want to leave while true; do spd-say -S; done running for a bit to make it actually stop talking.
Well, yes, but after that.
looks dubious
Altman and a few others, maybe. But this is a broad collection of people. Like, the computer science professors on the signatory list there aren’t running AI companies. And this isn’t saying that it’s imminent.
EDIT: I’ll also add that while I am skeptical about a ban on development, which is what they are proposing, I do agree with the “superintelligence does represent a plausible existential threat to humanity” message. It doesn’t need OpenAI to be a year or two away from implementing it for that to be true.
In my eyes, it would be better to accelerate work on AGI safety rather than try to slow down AGI development. I think that the Friendly AI problem is a hard one. It may not be solveable. But I am not convinced that it is definitely unsolvable. The simple fact is that today, we have a lot of unknowns. Worse, a lot of unknown unknowns, to steal a phrase from Rumsfeld. We don’t have a great consensus on what the technical problems to solve are, or what any fundamental limitations are. We do know that we can probably develop superintelligence, but we don’t know whether developing superintelligence will lead to a technological singularity, and there are some real arguments that it might not — and that’s one of the major, “very hard to control, spirals out of control” scenarios.
And while AGI promises massive disruption and risk, it also has enormous potential. The harnessing of fire permitted humanity to destroy at almost unimaginable levels. Its use posed real dangers that killed many, many people. Just this year, some guy with a lighter wiped out $25 billion in property here in California. Yet it also empowered and enriched us to an incredible degree. If we had said “forget this fire stuff, it’s too dangerous”, I would not be able to be writing this comment today.
That’s one issue.
Another is that even if you want to do so, it’s a staggeringly difficult enforcement problem.
What they’re calling for is basically an arms control treaty.
For those to work, you have to have monitoring and enforcement.
We have had serious problems even with major arms control treaties in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention
The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), officially the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, is an arms control treaty administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental organization based in The Hague, Netherlands. The treaty entered into force on 29 April 1997. It prohibits the use of chemical weapons, and the large-scale development, production, stockpiling, or transfer of chemical weapons or their precursors, except for very limited purposes (research, medical, pharmaceutical or protective). The main obligation of member states under the convention is to effect this prohibition, as well as the destruction of all current chemical weapons. All destruction activities must take place under OPCW verification.
And then Russia started Novichoking people with the chemical weapons that they theoretically didn’t have.
Or the Washington Naval Treaty:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty
That had plenty of violations.
And it’s very, very difficult to hide construction of warships, which can only be done by large specialized organizations in specific, geographically-constrained, highly-visible locations.
But to develop superintelligence, probably all you need is some computer science researchers and some fairly ordinary computers. How can you monitor those, verify that parties involved are actually following the rules?
You can maybe tamp down on the deployment in datacenters to some degree, especially specialized ones designed to handle high-power parallel compute. But the long pole here is the R&D time. Develop the software, and it’s just a matter of deploying it at scale, and that can be done very quickly, with little time to respond.
https://www.investopedia.com/warren-buffett-s-massive-war-chest-11826399