> HAHN [discovered nuclear fission] was completely shattered by the news and said that he felt personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, as it was his original discovery which had made the bomb possible. He told me that he had originally contemplated suicide when he realized the terrible potentialities of his discovery and he felt that now these had been realized and he was to blame.
> HAHN: I must honestly say that I would have sabotaged the war if I had been in a position to do so.
> VON WEIZSÄCKER again expressed horror at the use of the weapon and HEISENBERG replied that had they produced and dropped such a bomb they would certainly have been executed as War Criminals having made the “most devilish thing imaginable”.
> WEIZSÄCKER: History will record that the Americans and the English made a bomb, and that at the same time the Germans, under the HITLER regime, produced a workable engine. In other words, the peaceful development of the uranium engine was made in GERMANY under the HITLER regime, whereas the Americans and the English developed this ghastly weapon of war.
Fascinating. You definitely must post it, I'd enjoy reading a discussion about this, as would others in this thread.
Is this the same mansion that the war office put a bunch of high ranking PoWs in? Same idea - butter up the generals, bug the entire building and wait for them to spill secrets (which they did so often, and with such value, that military intelligence ignored Churchill’s request to shut it down).
> Mrs Fry also says Winston Churchill was outraged when he learned the generals had been bussed into the lavish Simpson's-in-the-Strand in central London for lunch. He ordered what he called "the pampering of the generals" to be stopped.
> But spoiling the generals and boosting their egos was providing so much useful information that the British intelligence officers decided to carry on, and simply stopped telling Churchill about it.
That would be a false similarity in some important ways.
This was a very specific single technical problem, requiring a silo from basic science to theoretical physics to advanced engineering, etc., with each layer having its own space of failure modes.
Something like the reverse is true with sufficiently-capable and sufficiently-efficient AI, which we are rapidly evolving to.
In our current situation, the attack surface is quite literally our entire highly interdependent civilization and its components. AI does not need to be autonomous, it just needs to employed, either will wilful bad intent, or, poorly stated goals, or, poor alignment, or, simple mistakes and errors, to break things.
The challenge with security is always that the attacker need only succeed once.
This does not mean doomerism has it right, especially in narratives based on poor understanding or extapolation beyond what is now konwn. The chance of "extinction" in particular is overstated.
The chance of one or more compounding "Chernobyl scale" gray swan events however is ever increasing.
Personally I don't think that's remotely contestable.
As a civilization and society and industry we need to have process, and public process at that, about the nature of the risks faced.
That process has not yet emerged in any coherent way; a hundred letters have been signed and such but to no actual effect, bar one performative "executive order" this week.
Yup. The race-to-AGI-because-China in particular. I’m basically a China Hawk and generally in favor of AI development, but I can recognize the same pattern.
It allows you to flow through lines and play best book moves naturally. You can tell it that you want to focus on particular lines or line and it will let you know when you've made an incorrect move.
Great to see this on HN and great work grondilu! Many users of memchess yearned for it to return and it really did disappear suddenly. It fills a great gap between a strategy book/guide and pure tactic trainers. Next step is for it to be refined as it was always a little clunky.
I've posted a top level comment as I felt it was worth it, but the last surviving prosecutor passed away April 2023 and wrote multiple inspiring works on the topic. Lookup Ben Ferencz' 'Parting Words' . While the book doesn't spend its entire time on the trial, it discusses the difficulties of holding people accountable for war crimes (even today).
The last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials passed away on April 7, 2023 at the age of 103. It was Ben Ferencz' first case after he learned of the Eastern fronts 'Nazi death squad' (Einsatzgruppen). All other tribunal prosecutors were committed to other cases when he described the atrocities to his superior, so he took the case on himself. It both validates the top comment of allies not seeing eye to eye, but also how understaffed and underprepared the tribunal was.
He later helped start the Hague and dedicated his life acting as a voice for the voiceless due to war crimes and genocides.
Despite the horrors he witnessed, Ben was a beam of light for all around him. I highly recommend his works. Especially "Parting Words: 9 Lessons for a Remarkable Life"
His sort-of blog[1] is also fascinating, documenting stories from childhood until retirement and beyond. He travelled through Switzerland by bartering sugar (a rare commodity after war, but he had bags of them from the US army mess halls) for Swiss francs ... and missed his boat home[2]!
It's amazing how easily my brain skips a subtitle like this. Years of subconsciously parsing advertisements has won over my elementary school teachers encouragement to "read the whole passage."
Y'know, I've been wondering lately what's been going on with my reading comprehension. I just wrote off all these errors over the last few years as part of getting old.
I've been so busy patting myself on the back for succeeding in not giving any attention to ads - I never stopped to think there might be a cost.
The exchange you are referring to is IEX [1]. Michael Lewis (author of The Big Short) wrote Flash Boys about the intricacies of low latency trading and this exchange [2]. One of the primary "unfair" aspect of HFT is Front Running and has been illegal even before electronic trading (the name comes from traders racing ahead of big buyers in the trading pit). It was a big problem during the advent of electronic trading but has since been tamed. Exchanges arbitraging off their clients order books is another matter. Trading fast in reaction to real time (public) events is a market efficiency. Not accessible to the masses, but neither was traveling to wall street to place a trade.
Not sure why you are being downvoted. This article provides credentials then as the interviewer asks questions O'Mara makes unbacked claims (that he would like to test). Would need to read his book "In Praise of Walking" to determine the sourcing of his research.
Recent intermittent issue asked me if I would like to log the restart of the application. Selecting yes provides a host of interesting configurations and logs.
Some interesting logs most people can understand:
[REDACTED] info: [OPPORTUNISTIC_RELOADS] User has been blurred for 1200000 ms, evaluating whether or not we should reload opportunistically
[REDACTED] info: [OPPORTUNISTIC_RELOADS] Client is still visible to the user even though it is not focused, will avoid updating
