I’ve always treated my home server with public facing services as presumptively compromised. I don’t put any data on there I wouldn’t want to see become public, and any data I actually care about losing is backed up to the cloud with an append-only key. The NixOS config lives in a git repo not on the server. If something bad happens, I can wipe the machine clean, redeploy the image, restore my backups, and we’re back to the status quo.
So, my threat model hasn’t changed much!
They really want people scared, ehh?
Right. Fair. Trump was always Ukraine’s enemy.
Right now America is betraying Ukraine by letting Trump do this.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing our political system can do about it at least until the midterms, but hopefully we’ll see some real change after that.
Probably though, in 30 years, reactions towards the current automation of certain jobs will be seen similarly as frivolity.
Honestly, it already looks ridiculous.
To be clear, I think the automation of jobs is, at least in the immediate, a serious problem, with real consequences. The problem is real. The issue is that objecting to the technology itself is idiotic. That’s not a fight you’ll win. The technology exists. People are going to use it. And in the long run we’ll all be better off for it.
There’s serious conversations to be had about how we use AI, and how we deal with the consequences of its use, and especially how we manage the transition. But you can’t have those conversations with someone who insists that AI is the devil and that we need to stop it, and who gets mad at you when you suggest otherwise.
note that you probably need to trust the remote household with your data
Probably not actually. Borgbackup (and any sensible encrypted backup system really), does client side encryption. So the data should be encrypted before it’s even sent down the wire. The remote household shouldn’t be able to access the data without the encryption key/password.
I mean, they will have to trust the remote household not to destroy the data, but that’s pretty much an unavoidable limitation.
You’d better give us money and not try to regulate us.
Actually, right now, the western AI companies desperately want regulation.
An unregulated environment is one where they’re forced to compete on price against the Chinese companies and startups running open-weight models. All signs point to them losing that battle.
OpenAI/Anthropic’s wish list right now is a bunch of regulation to prevent the use of foreign models, and to require expensive to implement “safety” requirements that make it hard for startups to compete.
You absolutely shouldn’t be angry!
The existence of powerful open-weight models is the single thing that’s going to prevent us from descending into the full corporate dystopia everyone’s afraid of.
It’s going to hit the stock market hard once everyone figures out what’s going on though.
[forget]
keep-daily = 10
keep-weekly = 4
Daily backups are cheap because of de-duplication. I keep a few weekly backups in case it takes me a bit to notice something went wrong. I don’t usually back up logs.
I could probably drop the weekly backups without much risk, but I’ve got the space.
So… your evidence for slop is that he made a patch, they caught an issue in the review process, and then he had to go on vacation so he asked another maintainer to take over to get the change done correctly in the merge window?
How is that not the process working exactly as intended?
The hilarious part is, yes, I don’t care how fast my launcher is.
But… also, Steam is by far the slowest, least responsive program on my computer.
“Faster than Steam” feels like a joke.
I don’t use a lot of non-open source applications (and not a lot of desktop applications generally). Have they gotten so bad that the slowness of Steam doesn’t feel bad to people anymore?
I really hate that that comment is getting upvoted.
People love to hate on things a lot more than they like to understand how things actually work.
To make your point more explicit, CEOs often don’t have to sit for depositions because they legitimately aren’t the people who know the facts the cases turn on. When the CEOs are the right ones to talk to, courts don’t hesitate to make them show up.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate big corporations plenty. Don’t get me started about Meta or Microsoft. But can we please hate them for actually good reasons instead of making reasons to hate them up?
the models only need to be right some of the time and they still constitute a threat.
Right!?!
And with how cheap and fast they are to run, they don’t have to be right that often as long as a separate run can verify/validate claims. In a lot of ways what the LLMs do should probably be thought of as just a very sophisticated sort of brute force approach. You’re effectively just searching the space of combinations of known vulnerabilities. It doesn’t require particular cleverness, just an encyclopedic knowledge, a reasonable way to prune the search space, and the ability to put in the compute time.
I must be missing something, because you’re getting a bunch of upvotes. I don’t disagree with anything you said, but it feels like a total non-sequitur to what I was saying.
Yes - proper air-gapping is a good idea. But asking the big AI labs to air gap is kind of pointless. Liability already gives them legal incentives to avoid incidents. If that didn’t stop them, a letter signed by a bunch of academics sure won’t. More importantly, open-weight models capable of doing all the things that we’re concerned about are already in the hands of bad actors around the world.
This letter is asking us to lock the front door of the house when the back wall is missing.
The ones in Russia definitely are. They don’t have to be local models - you run them in the cloud like anyone else.
The idea that the frontier labs have LLMs with special capabilities that make them dramatically better than the top open-weight models is largely marketing.
The reality is that most systems are poorly secured, and LLMs make exploiting vulnerabilities fast, cheap, and easy. What would have taken a trained security researcher weeks before can be done by a much less skilled attacker with an LLM in a few hours.
This is stupid. Open-weight models that can largely do what the OpenAI/Anthropic models did are already out in the wild.
Do these people not understand that you can’t put the cat back in the bag?
Also, Julius Caesar from Xena!
It’ll be really interesting to see how this dynamic changes post-midterms.
Right now it’s pretty clear Trump is doing his best to just avoid having Iran in the news.
After the midterms, incentives change a lot. Trump will never be up for re-election, and I’m not sure at that point if he cares much about public opinion. In some ways, he’ll have a lot fewer constraints. But… he’ll probably lose congress. He likes to ignore congress though.
I don’t know how this is going to play out, but I think we’re in for a real shit-show after the midterms.
I think people are right that the solution here isn’t to try a different project.
Instead of being confrontational about it, though, I’d recommend a different aproach.
evelyn: .lol 😜
you: I know! I know. The branding is pretty silly. But this really is the right tool for the task. Unesco and Wikimedia use it. And we can do our own branding for $50/month. 🤷
A lot can be fixed by just acknowledging people. They’re trying to evaluate something they don’t understand, and having a reaction. It’s not even unreasonable. The right thing to do is just acknowledge and move on.
Usually that’s all it takes. Don’t let yourself be embarrassed when you’re being reasonable. If they won’t move on, that’s the point where I start thinking about job applications somewhere else.
Doesn’t mean they’re wrong!
I’ll just upvote the both of you. We all need to be more aware of our echo chambers.
Is France… ok?