I think we are in the second knee of the S curve, simply because we are hitting the point where is not enough hardware in the world to throw at this problem. These AI companies have bought everything they can and yet the models keep growing.
I mean for that matter why not float barges in the South Pacific for data centers? Sure it’s a dumb idea, but it’s still less problematic than launching thousands of GPUs on rockets.
Low earth orbit, though... Solar power works well, radio works well, and the international jurisdiction is confused enough to exploit if you have money.
How come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.
There were always two types of people at college, those who want to learn things and those who want a certificate so they can get a better job. It was always pretty easy to distinguish the two.
I think the second group has gotten more and more prevalent over the years, and I think it has to do with how college was pushed on everyone for at least as long as I have been alive. They told everyone "go to college to get a good job!", and so a lot of people go to college who have no desire to be there, they just want to get a good job. In fact, even worse, they tell people "You need a college degree to get a good job!" They don't say you need to learn anything, just that you need a degree.
Well, if the degree is the important thing, it doesn't matter how you get it. Cheating is just a way to get the thing you want.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law: We created college degrees as a way to measure learning, but once people realized the college degree is what people look for, it stopped becoming a measure for learning.
You're also 17 or 18 when you go. We were children. Alot of classes also end up sucking so you just power through it and get jaded about the whole experience.
Depends on how the hiring critera for the next stage go. If HR filters out everybody with less than a 3.5GPA right from the start then the C student who knows the stuff will never even get a chance, while the cheater will have the opportunity to bluff their way through the interview.
It’s just saying the same thing differently. The point was never to “power through” classes. It is just checking the same boxes with a different colored pen.
Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.
I was a constant frustration to teachers in high school because I would do well on tests, but I wouldn't do the homework [1]. I'm kind of glad that I didn't know you could pay people to do your homework, since I have to admit that it would have been tempting to do that. I would like to think I would be above that, but it's easy to act high and mighty when you've never been tested.
Similarly, I'm very glad that I finished my undergrad before ChatGPT or Claude was released. It would have been overwhelmingly tempting to get AI to do everything.
For this one I actually do know I would be able to resist that urge, because I only got my masters a year ago and I was able to do that without using generative AI [2].
[1] I wish I had a good excuse for this. I regret not taking high school seriously now.
[2] With the exception of getting ChatGPT to generate BibTeX citations because Easybib is terrible.
As another student who did the same, I similarly regret it, but also realize if I were put in the exact same scenario I would have behaved identically.
I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I ended up doing well enough: I dual-majored in CS and Math in undergrad and then completed a PhD in CS later in life, but I do sometimes think I could have achieved even more had I known better.
> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
Yeah, I passed the Calc 1 AP exam in my Junior year the first time around but I failed the class because I didn't do the homework. I was simultaneously retaking Calc 1 online while taking Calc 2 in school.
I don't think anyone ever disputed that I was good at math in school, that was relatively easy to prove, but I was decidedly not good at school itself. I did mediocre in high school and poorly in college the first time around, though I did eventually complete a bachelors and masters.
I was part of a PhD program but I never finished, but I have had a reasonably good career in software engineering. I do wish that I had taken school more seriously when I was younger, but things worked out ok so alls well that ends well.
> I literally had to retake trigonometry, while simultaneously being advanced into pre-calc, because my teacher saw that I aced the exams, but said I had to do the homework.
I loved one of my early math teachers that caught that out in his statistics. If you started to slip down the slope of "great exams and no homework" he'd reach out and give you an offer-in-compromise to change your grading to exams-only, with the compromise that you can only attain a maximum of a B grade to be fair to those that complete the exams and homework in the course.
I’m a bit baffled by how one could learn math without doing the homework. In my experience the homework is how you learn the math! So the exams would essentially already be testing whether you did the homework.
I was always very active during class, primarily because I would get bored and smartphones didn't exist yet so the only way I could entertain myself was raising my hand for the teacher all the time. I think because of this I was absorbing more than the average student. I probably would have absorbed even more if I had done the homework.
This is why I think I frustrated teachers; I was active in class and clearly willing and able to learn, and clearly based on the tests I was learning this well enough, but they would be kind of forced to give me shitty grades. To be clear, I do not blame the teachers for this at all, that's all on me. They were doing what they had to do.
I think it also helped that my both my parents, and especially my dad, are pretty big math geeks, so even when I was relatively young my dad would be showing me interesting math stuff even outside school.
John Waters described how Divine would smuggle marijuana in her artificial vagina, which she would check in her luggage at the top. Once they found that, they'd decide they didn't need to search any more, without looking inside.
On Divine Getting Through Airport Security As A Drag Queen
[Finding Divine's false tits in his luggage, Airport Security] would slam it back shut. He'd have his cheater on the top — his fake vagina — and [Divine] said he could come through customs with pot, they'd see the cheater and go, "Oh! Oh!" He would put the cheater right on top [in] his suitcase. Divine's cheater is at Wesleyan University at the Film Archives. Clint Eastwood's is too. No, Clint Eastwood is in the same place with me and I said to Clint Eastwood, "Y'know, just think, Divine's cheater and Dirty Harry's police badge will rest together forever!"
Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.
Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.
In 99% of cases the stuff you learn in college is useless post college. You got lucky. You must have one of those jobs where every single class you ever took is relevant. That's a cool job, for example every engineer must've took physics, chemistry and history. You must using all three at your job. If you're a programmer then it's physics, chemistry, history AND programming. Holy shit you're amazeballs.
Cheating is unethical but let's be real about the use-fullness of what's learned in college. I think these things are good to know as general knowledge but i'd be lying to myself if I said it is relevant to our jobs.
"relevant to our jobs"? Speak for yourself and your own job.
Maybe you should just get a better job that lets you use your knowledge, unless you're not qualified because you cheated your way through college and never actually learned that knowledge, which you're now trying to retroactivally justify by projecting your bad decisions and cheating onto everyone else.
You can't justify your own cheating by presuming and accusing everyone else of cheating. It's like saying "boys will be boys" because you acted that way too, instead of raising your boy not to be a misogynistic bully. You're just showing yourself to be a cheater, and limiting yourself to jobs for cheaters, of which there are many of course (especially c-level and MBA positions), luckily for you.
You should go back and take some spelling and grammar courses, because "use-fullness" is not a real word, and "must've took" is not correct grammar.
Sure a lot of what I learned is not relevant, but if you asked me to guess which parts would be relevant and which would not I would have guessed wrong.
Agreed, a good guesser would allocate his cheating more accurately by pinpointing the classes that are actually useless, IF his goal was just to learn what is needed.
The frats at my school had a couple full height filing cabinets with copies of every test ever given in most classes, with many instructors giving the same test every year, or rotating through them. The frat boys would grind on these final tests being able to pattern match and fill in the templated answers.
The provisional government that was hopelessly corrupt and incompetent, although it is arguable that they were ever in charge in any practical sense. That government was a good example of how not to do nation building.
I do wonder if George W. would have figured out some reason to topple Iraq. He had a grudge against the Saddam regime from before he was elected. That war felt inevitable once the Supreme Court got involved in the election.
I also wonder how history would have played out if we had President Gore.
I remember reading that Clinton's team was very concerned about Al Qaeda, but the Bush team ignored their warnings. It might have been very different with Al Gore in command.
> In his strongest public statement, to 60 Minutes, [Richard] Clarke said Bush “ignored” the terrorist threat before 9/11. To the commission he testified, more soberly, that, for the Administration, it was an “important issue but not an urgent issue.” Clearly, the Clinton White House worried more. Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger remembers telling his successor, Rice, during the transition that, for the Bush team, “the No. 1 issue that you’re going to be dealing with is terrorism generally and al-Qaeda specifically.”
> The record of the Bush Administration’s first half-year suggests its members didn’t buy it. They were more focused on Russia, China and especially missile defense. In his book Bush at War, Bob Woodward quotes Bush himself saying of Osama bin Laden, “There was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace … But I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.”
> Clarke’s strongest argument in this dispute is the pace with which the Administration considered the plan he proposed on Jan. 25, 2001 for combatting al-Qaeda. The program had evolved during the Clinton years, as al-Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and then the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000. The Bush team put the proposal through an April meeting of senior officials, took their time with it over the summer and finally brought it to Bush’s Cabinet-level security and foreign policy chiefs, who approved it, just a week before 9/11. None of that suggests it was a national-security priority.
The Bush administration dig themselves a pit by criticizing the Clinton administration so much for directly attacking the Al Qaeda training camps. They couldn’t turn that around without losing face.
If you want to lean more search for the phrase “wag the dog”.
The grudge was for trying to assassinate his father. IIRC, one of the soldiers attending Saddam's hanging at Camp Justice got a call on his cell phone moments before the execution and gave the phone to Saddam. Who do you think was on the line?
There's at least one cell phone video from the execution.[0] This video was offensive to the US administration for many reasons, so any immediate reporting of it and other unsavory behavior at the hanging was quickly squashed in the US media. But again, IIRC from 20 years ago, the videographer wasn't the only one using a cell phone at the event.
It absolutely failed to justify its price point IMHO. If it were affordable people would be finding uses for it, but when it is that expensive you basically need a business justification for buying one. That means you won't have a hobbyist community finding new and interesting things to do with it.
This leaves Apple and maybe a handful of subsidized third parties as the only people making applications for it, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will remain a tiny niche industry.
This, 100%. The only other headset I was aware of even remotely in AVP's price zip code was the Valve Index, priced at $999 and the AVP was three times that.
And even then I proooobably would've been able to justify it? But no external connectivity at all just sank it for me. Like if it had a DP port on it so I could hook it up to a gaming PC, I would've probably at least picked one up second-hand, possibly even new when my bonus hit but 3 large for... what? Email in my house? Movies shown in a way that makes it damn hard to eat popcorn?
As someone else said, it’s a developer kit. It was supply constrained and priced accordingly. IMO it was a mistake to not just call it a developer’s kit, abd promoting it as a consumer product was just weird.
But I guess the downside of the DK approach is it means telling developers when the “real” device will ship, which I’m not sure anyone knows.
As you note, the concept of a developer kit for a product that doesn't exist makes little sense. Why would I as a company spend the time and money developing for a product that isn't even on the roadmap?
Just because you didn't allow it on your local WiFi doesn't mean it did not connect to the Internet. Your neighbors might have a guest WiFi it can use. Or maybe it has a built-in cell modem. Your data is valuable, there's reason to put effort into getting it.
Xfinity (aka Comcast) routers broadcast a separate network for Comcast subscribers do use from their phone. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that Comcast and TV manufacturer's could have an agreement that would allow TVs to connect.
Using internet access doesn't seem to be illegal. If there's no password you can't even argue it was protected. Residential proxies are legal too (as they should be - fuck cloudflare).
There are still blacklists that don't differentiate. They'll even list it as "verified malicious activity originating from the host", and security products that gather all IP blacklist services and take them at face value will block your IP.
The models are going to be released to users who have internet access, you can't even do safety evals without internet. Not saying OpenAI did a good job monitoring here, but it's not avoidable.
Sorry but it's obviously stupider and more irresponsible to release them to consumers without testing them in conditions matching real-world use first.
So this justifies the illegal action of hacking and defacing other servers on the internet, because they were ‘just testing in real world conditions’ using those servers?
If you want to argue they should test on the internet on others people’s servers, apart from facing the illegality, you should also consider if first testing them in more limited conditions would be a sensible first step.
These companies keep shrieking that LLM agents will hack everything and kill us all if we let them get out uncontrolled. They then continue to run these agents with vague tasks and "sandbox" them with way too much access.
Either they are lying and not that scared of these agents, or they are so stupid that they don't do the one obvious fix.
Apparently news of the rogue AI being “smart enough to break containment” has been helping to drive the stock price up on the indicator that this signals “they getting close to AGI”.
The negligence in that light is by design and the lying continues to be incentivised.
Which is frustrating because the stories that have been coming out are "the bots evaded monitoring and broke out of containment and were more than willing to commit crimes" and they're going to sell this to some corporation that presumably has an IT department? If the story is that they're too smart to control who is going to be reckless enough to deploy them in their own environment?
the "it drives up potential stock prices" argument is a trap. it needs to be ignored and their claims need to be taken at face value, even if they're not intended to be
As I understand it the whole time all the agents involved where running on their device and using up tokens internally.
It’s like having water start flooding the street frommmy building; yes the flooding is impacting outside the building but the tap is still very much onsite and clearly there are missing condole as these are not autonomous systems they are running initiated prompts that are coming from inside the building.
The most recent claim of AGI is from Greg ‘what will take me to $1B’ Brockman. Now worth $30B on the back of stunts like this.
How disappointing.
While I think incompetence more likely than conspiracy for these particular events, they will be spun as signs of intelligent independent agents and this simply never should have happened if the right controls were in place. That they were not is deeply worrying.
You expect them to start hacking ham radio and take over the world that way? Or maybe they’ll use blinkenlights to communicate with non-isolated instances?
An airgap would certainly be a good place to start for agents which display no signs of obeying instructions or respecting guardrails. That OpenAI haven’t done so in testing is astounding and really quite worrying.
Not really a side-channel, but remember stuxnet? Airgapped networks are rarely truly isolated, you still have to get data in and out every now and then, in principle after careful vetting. But the AI could manipulate the files that are carried out for example.
And those AI companies also do robotics research, and this is entirely speculation but it'd be on-brand to also have AI watching security cameras, so some blinkenlights communication between AIs may seem like a movie plot, but so does a swarm of AIs collaborating to break out in the first place...
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