Absolutely. The AI models are not rational. They’re just navigating statistical next token prediction that follows their training. They’re up against diminishing scaling now, and under fierce competition from cheaper models; I think they’re intentionally or unintentionally allowing these models to be rewarded for this behavior hoping it’s a short cut to model improvement for a bit longer. I land on intentional because they keep advertising it to try and keep the hype cycle going.

I think it’s more sinister than that. When they’re training these models with RLHF, the human feedback they’re giving I think is literally to reinforce aberrant or risky behaviors. This is because doing so resolves more training tasks “correctly”. If the prompt was to get information x, and in training it fails that except for the one that used a known vulnerability in software, and you rate the one that succeeded as best performing… you’re going to get models that try vulnerabilities. It is not magic, it is not AGI, it is just a statistical machine you’ve programmed to try vulnerabilities, which is unsafe as hell, malicious, and should put the researchers doing this in prison for a very long time.

Incidentally, I think that’s why you’re seeing some safety people (who still drank the koolaid) resigning.

Yes and no. You can still get a mini pc or even a laptop with 16gb of ram and a 256-512 ssd for 500ish. It won’t have as much graphics horsepower as a ps5, but it’ll be enough to play a lot of games at 1080p 60fps or use resolution scaling etc. games are significantly cheaper on pc as well.

There was a deal for a 5060ti and 16gb of ram complete build for like 1200. That’s not that terrible vs a ps5 pro brand new.

Also check out typst, it may be more approachable (though they have a closed source web app; the compiler is free and open source, so you can use it with any text editor with a plugin for it, or just write your text in markdown, get a template, compile).

You can also use zwave with home assistant. In some ways a better protocol, but it’s not nearly as prolific as zigbee devices.

I mean the whole point of this is to subsidize small business in the EU at the expense of businesses outside the EU. The fact it is more difficult and costly for you is exactly the point. They want to support businesses and workers in the EU, because that’s where their people actually are, that’s where their taxes are, that’s where they support infrastructure and social programs.

It is true that it favors larger international corporations, because they have near monopolies and csn manage all of this at a smaller relative cost. The solution of course is to make tariffs and other import duties scale with the size of the company.

So the EU regulations are not perfect, they do hurt international small businesses while protecting in part local small businesses. They need, like everyone, to deal with the problem of international monopoly companies and restore more and more of their manufacturing and product development into more and more local small businesses.

Well, you can contribute to CoMaps to map your local area — it can actually be quite fun to just walk around and add businesses and the like. Kind of like some of the games that have you walk around and catch creatures in balls, except you map your local community, find new places and spots, and basically contribute meaningful stuff :)

Yes but isn’t this article just about installing a custom launcher on a Google device? Presumably this does not solve data harvesting by Google, which would make this solution, while effective for app launching, probably worse than using an Apple TV device.

Sort of. What they want is no responsibility “wow we didn’t tell it to do that explicitly!” And to convince the public and government officials that “AI is actually really dangerous, so please ban all the foreign competitors on grounds of national security (totally unrelated to our potential lack of earnings and their ability to offer 98% the product for 1% the cost).”

So still most likely publicity stunt. A reproducible one, done only by the largest domestic ones precisely because they are not worried about the question of who is culpable if a law is broken, because they didn’t tell it explicitly to do it and also they still have a couple piles of circular cash they can use on bribes, which may be their only path to keeping the grift train going. They’re in no way in danger of being held accountable here, they do worse things everyday, and their concern is making money, full stop. They will lie cheat and steal their way through circular finance deals, bribes, extortions, anticompetitive behavior, marketing stunts, propaganda, and backroom deals as much as they can to accomplish that goal. When you understand their actions through that lens, well, things like this make sense.

Arguably though, people have constantly been asking for ways to connect and share information with people near and far. Town criers, sign boards, books and letters — the internet is arguably just an extension of these long pursued human interests, things humans have been asking for.

AI doesn’t match in the same way. I guess some people do want sycophants, right or wrong. But I think most people want truth, and want the environment to not be plundered.

It can be “easy” depending on your definition of easy. For the average person, no, not easy. For a tech person, maybe, depending on their interests and proficiencies. Easiest is likely using a firewall on the router blocking all outbound and inbound WAN connections (for the MAC address associated with the device, assuming it doesn’t try to rotate MAC addresses or hop on any open WiFi networks around you). Some devices will straight refuse to work if you do this, however. So you have to do research and be careful about which products you buy.

If you want a vacuum, see the valetudo link I posted in another comment. It has some options for this that you can load local only custom firmware (and integrate it with home assistant).

You can have local control over such things, and IOT devices should be locked down to only ever access via LAN anyways.

https://valetudo.cloud/

Don’t buy IOT devices you can’t control. If it’s not usable via valetudo or is offline capable don’t get it. Tell your friends and family the same. Own your technology, limit your attack surfaces.

I think nekokoneko above has it right, trying to misattribute blame to the user. Basically, he wants to blame the user for using the service, instead of fixing the service so it doesn’t produce heinously horrible things on request. It shouldn’t work, but who knows with the amount of money he has and the lack of money on the other side. The goal is to establish a small precedent, though if someone sues xAI for making a product that makes this kind of refuse, I doubt such a precedent would hold much water.

No, because when they do the training and actual updates to the model weights, they are very likely heavily favoring their internal renditions of preferred response to certain queries. So even if they included such things from online scraping, they’d essentially wipe the sentiment with internal overrides (most likely, LLM models are very big, you could absolutely get it to say almost anything verbatim it’s seen in the training data if you tried).

I presume you are getting downvoted because V is vibe coded a bit (at least, they accept PRs from AI agents per the agents.md file).

You can hash the entire video. It would be very, very difficult (impossible?) to create another video with a hash collision that changed even a couple pixels from the original hash. You just need the hash computed from that unaltered video uploaded at time of encoding to the blockchain. It doesn’t change that someone could have created an entire AI video and uploaded it to the same proof of existence, but it does mean you could verify that a given video was observed on the blockchain at time x, and that it has not been altered in some way. Time of video creation would also be included in the hash (and metadata) so that you could verify that the video was created, by what program, at what time; and you’d have (ideally a less than 5s later) time stamp of it being verified on the blockchain.

There’s likely a better way to do this as well using zero knowledge proofs and/or homomorphic encryption but there probably exists a way to do this which would be tractable.

It’s a hard problem, but there is likely a way with cryptography and upload to server that would be verifiable. Honestly this may be the only legitimate use of blockchain.

It should be illegal to do company stock buybacks within 1 year of any workforce reduction which is the lesser of 3% of work force or 100 employees.

I think it’s more likely that we’ll need some cryptographic verification at time of recording to be valid, or a physical medium like film to be present. So perhaps film cameras or discs (non rewritable) have a resurgence.