While I would never consider this approach advisable in any language that doesn't build in support for this sort of thing from the start, the thinner the runtime, the less dangerous it is. Go's runtime is fairly thick, and also, concurrent. The odds of something blowing up are rather too high for me to even dream of putting something like this into production in Go. In C++ it may merely be somewhat crazy rather than completely crazy.
(I suppose Rust is arguably an exception to this; thin runtime, but there's a lot of things the replaced function could do that would still blow Rust up if the rest of the code isn't compiled and correctly optimized to account for whatever the new code does.)
We have separate words for intelligence and wisdom for a reason.
Intelligence is not particularly correlated to ethics or morality. Probably sounds obvious when I say it directly, but it is clearly something that you have banging around in the back of your mind. Bring it forward out of the morass of unexamined beliefs so you can see that it is clearly wrong, and update the rest of your beliefs that are implicitly based on the idea that intelligence somehow leads to some particular morality as appropriate.
Yes, because governments are so restrained in their use of propaganda.
What it is is the consequence of the power existing. 200 years ago nobody was arguing about how to hook people in the first 0.2 seconds of video, but it's not because nobody would have refused the power it represents if offered. They just couldn't have it. It's humans. People want this power over you. All of them.
To be fair, it is basically one and the same. I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government. Very very few of us voluntarily gave up our right to hold people personally responsible for their actions, but this is forced on everyone on behalf of business interests. The corporate vale is materialized from government alone.
> I doubt most people railing against capitalism are actually against private property. They probably dislike corporatism which only exists as an extension of the government.
I really don't know. In my experience, it can about private property when talking about housing, it is about markets when talking salaries and work conditions, and it's just about having no idea of what capitalism even is and just vaguely pointing at economics the vast majority of the time.
"Capitalism" can be safely replaced with "the illuminati" or "Chem trails" in the vast majority of complaints I hear and read and the message would ultimately make as much sense. There's not a lot of how or why capitalism doesn't work, but by God there sure is a lot of what it seemingly does wrong.
Just because you don't know what capitalism is, doesn't mean other people do not know.
Just because you only read sources from capitalist media platforms doesn't mean there isn't a lot of "how" or "why" capitalism doesn't work.
My main message was about the profit motive incentivizing the creation of addictions for the profit of tech companies. The invisible hand may expand the development of tech, but the visible hand needs to make people addicted and unhappy.
Think a little before you speak, please. Or read a little more.
As bad as things are, the excesses of capitalism pale in comparison to the excesses of communism or fascism. If you have a better system, please present it to the class.
Capitalism is known to have killed multiple billions world-wide.
Nearly all of the poor countries on earth are capitalist. World war 1 was a war of capitalist reorganization, Fascism was a capitalist economic system, therefore WW2 was initiated by capitalist nations. Nearly all wars being fought today are all fought by capitalists on both sides of the conflict. The poorest countries on earth are capitalists. Drug cartels are organization of drug manufacturing and transporting capitalists. Capitalist nations are proven to be the most corrupt countries on earth.
Capitalism has a vested interest in making nations poor for the sake of maximizing profits in resource extraction. Capitalism has waged more war and caused more destruction than any system before it and its only been around for ~400 years.
You really want me to believe that the system that makes money from doing heinous shit is good?
Look into the primary sources behind the things you believe to be true about communism. Many, many are very shaky and were just "cold" war propaganda pieces. I've done exactly that to come to my conclusions.
What I know to be communism, through research, and reading of primary sources, is just the natural conclusion of the democratization of society. People controlling the production they need through councils that they themselves organize into a peoples state.
This post perfectly proves my point, to which you replied "You are displaying your ignorance with pride.".
"Fascism was a capitalist economic system" or "Capitalism has waged more war and caused more destruction than any system before" are utterly ridiculous, evidently false statements. The only way you can ever say these things with a straight face is if you don't have the least idea of what capitalism even is.
Do you mean "private property" or "personal property"? These are not the same thing, and those who want to scaremonger about non-capitalist modes of production like to conflate the two.
You've never heard someone say "under communism, private property isn't allowed, so you have to share a toothbrush?" I heard that nonsense all the time growing up.
Your toothbrush and clothing are personal property. The family farm is private property.
Corporatism is not a thing. Capitalists hold fundamental power over society, they collectively are the state.
They own the things the rest of the people need to survive. Assuming you are a worker/proletariat: Can you survive right now, today, without interacting with a capitalist entity?
Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require.
"Corporatism" is just capitalism. Capitalists use their media platforms to say the government oppresses them equally to us. When it is proven time and time and time again that they have almost total control and influence over the government.
And you buy the narrative.
There is no "pure capitalism", bro. Capitalism will ALWAYS evolve into this. It's baked into the rules. This is very plain to see.
Go to any main news platform, of any country, on the side of any political wing, of any other capitalist nation on earth and type "corruption" in the corresponding language. You'll be met with a flood of articles.
I am against private property of production, because I know the people who need said production can also democratically run it.
> Can you make your living as in food, money, housing, etc, right now, solely from your own property? Statistically not. Capitalists own most of what you require.
You can't survive from your own property in a communist society either because the state own all of it. Instead of power accruing in the hands of a few capitalists, it accrues in the hands of a few politicians/dictators. What's the fundamental difference here? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
This is false and not at all what I have researched and back as a communist.
In a communist society YOU control production through democracy. The whole point is for the people to be their own governing force. That is why communists mention "state control", but another, ultra important aspect that is conveniently not mentioned by capitalist propaganda, is council democracy.
You are your local state. You and your neighbors organized in a council form your local state.
You and your neighbors make sure that no single individual or minority controls your production.
YOU and your neighbors form your own executive, legislative and judicial branches.
This is in reality what communist literature is about. The american mind cannot comprehend democracy, i swear.
And if system were to results in a small group of people holding power and using production to make money, well, that would a capitalist system. Words have meaning.
Democracy is not based on trust, like the political system we have right now. Don't trust me, do your own god damned research. Don't trust millionaire connected politicians either. And don't trust capitalist media either. Democracy is based on control.
Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people
It's sociopaths and narcissists which want it.
And as Atlas667 pointed out, it's also a direct consequence from a capitalistic world view, where it has replaced your morals.
This is not in relationship to state propaganda. Multiple things can cause abhorrent behavior, and just because we've identified something as problematic doesn't inherently imply that other unrelated examples are any better.
"Well adjusted people so not want that power over other people"
There are certainly well adjusted people that would like to fix things they feel are inefficiencies or issues in their government, especially when those issues are directly related to their areas of expertise. Thinking well adjusted people wouldn't want to be in a position of power is exactly how you ensure that only bad people end up with power.
We've always had sociopaths and narcissists, and if you're looking to "capitalism" as the reason why they exist, you're in out-and-out category error territory, not-even-wrong territory. Now that this power exists to be had, human beings are racing to acquire it. If you think you can fix that by "fixing capitalism" you are completely wasting your efforts.
So if that’s not the answer, what is? Should we just throw our hands in the air and say that technology has defeated our monkey brains, and there’s no going back?
Given that these tendencies are not evenly distributed throughout the population, you can have structures that leverage the large mean to mitigate the worst tendencies of the extreme tails. Given that the natural state of things is that power begets more power, these are harder to build and maintain, but it can be done. In particular, Democracies and Republics are major historical examples of this.
The system incentivizes seeking power by consolidating financial wealth. It doesn't have to be that way & this will eventually become obvious to everyone.
People do have this power right now, they are called capitalists, they are a part of the tech/info/policing industry.
You don't have this control, I don't have this control. It's not humans in general, it's literally the capitalists. Right now, today. Try and "timelessly universalize" that.
It's the people who make money from this who want it.
I would rather that no one particular person or group of people have that much power, and I would rather help organize society to collectively and democratically decide what goes on with this tech but I guess that proudly makes me a communist.
History contains abundant, well-documented cases of ordinary people participating in atrocities without coercion. Most people will act decently in low-pressure environments and will act badly under certain incentives, authority structures, or group dynamics. There is no way to know what a person's threshold is until it's tested, but it can be assumed that most people have a low threshold.
The random-clickers have been around for a while, clicking through ads to try to break profiles on users and cost the ad networks more money than it is worth.
They have not been very successful in their goals. I suspect, without sarcasm, that that is because compared to the absolutely routine click-fraud conducted up and down the entire ad space at every level, those plugin's effects literally didn't even register. It's an arms race and people trying to use ad blockers to not just block the ads but corrupt them are coming armed with a pea shooter to an artillery fight, not because they are not very clever themselves but just without a lot of users they can't even get the needle to twitch.
A lot of people are mentally modeling the idea that LLMs are either now or will eventually be infinitely capable. They are and will stubbornly persist in being finite, no matter how much capacity that "finite" entails. For the same reason that higher level languages allow humans to worry less about certain details and more about others, higher level languages will allow LLMs to use more of their finite resources on solving the hard problems as well.
Using LLMs to do something like what a compiler can already do is also modelling LLMs as infinite rather than finite. In fact in this particular situation not only are they finite, they're grotesquely finite, in particular, they are expensive. For example, there is no world where we just replace our entire infrastructure from top to bottom with LLMs. To see that, compare the computational effort of adding 10 8-digit numbers with an LLM versus a CPU. Or, if you prefer something a bit less slanted, the computational costs of serving a single simple HTTP request with modern systems versus an LLM. The numbers run something like LLMs being trillions of times more expensive, as an opening bid, and if the AIs continue to get more expensive it can get even worse than that.
For similar reasons, using LLMs as a compiler is very unlikely to ever produce anything even remotely resembling a payback versus the cost of doing so. Let the AI improve the compiler instead. (In another couple of years. I suspect today's AIs would find it virtually impossible to significatly improve an already-optimized compiler today.)
Moreover, remember, oh, maybe two years back when it was all the rage to have AIs be able to explain why they gave the answer they did? Yeah, I know, in the frenzied greed to be the one to grab the money on the table, this has sort of fallen by the wayside, but code is already the ultimate example of that. We ask the LLM to do things, it produces code we can examine, and the LLM session then dies away leaving only the code. This is a good thing. This means we can still examine what the resulting system is doing. In a lot of ways we hardly even care what the LLM was "thinking" or "intending", we end up with a fantastically auditable artifact. Even if you are not convinced of the utility of a human examining it, it is also an artifact that the next AI will spend less of its finite resources simply trying to understand and have more left over to actually do the work.
We may find that we want different programming languages for AIs. Personally I think we should always try to retain that ability for humans to follow it, even if we build something like that. We've already put the effort into building AIs that produce human-legible code and I think it's probably not that great a penalty in the long run to retain that. At the moment it is hard to even guess what such a thing would look like, though, as the AIs are advancing far faster than anyone (or any AI) could produce, test, prove out, and deploy such a language, against the advantage of other AIs simply getting better at working with the existing coding systems.
DNS naming rules for non-Unicode are letters, numbers, and hyphens only, and the hyphens can't start or stop the domain. Unicode is implemented on top of that through punycode. It's possible a series of bugs would allow you to punycode some sort of injection character through into something but it would require a chain of faulty software. Not an impossibly long chain of faulty software by any means, but a chain rather than just a single vulnerability. Punycode encoders are supposed leave ASCII characters as ASCII characters, which means ASCII characters illegal in DNS can't be made legal by punycoding them legally. I checked the spec and I don't see anything for a decoder rejecting something that jams one in, but I also can't tell if it's even possible to encode a normal ASCII character; it's a very complicated spec. Things that receive that domain ought to reject it, if it is possible to encode it. And then it still has to end up somewhere vulnerable after that.
Rules are just rules. You can put things in a domain name which don't work as hostnames. Really the only place this is enforced by policy is at the public registrar level. Only place I've run into it at the code level is in a SCADA platform blocking a CNAME record (which followed "legal" hostname rules) pointing to something which didn't. The platform uses jython / python2 as its scripting layer; it's java; it's a special real-time java: plenty of places to look for what goes wrong, I didn't bother.
People should know that they should treat the contents of their logs as unsanitized data... right? A decade ago I actually looked at this in the context of a (commercial) passive DNS, and it appeared that most of the stuff which wasn't a "valid" hostname was filtered before it went to the customers.
I have little confidence in humanity's capabilities for that scenario, but I don't think this actually indicates much of anything. This happened in the first place because LLMs are so borderline useless (relative to the hype) that people are desperate to find any way to make them useful, and so give them increasingly more power to try to materialize the promised revolution. In other words, because LLMs are not AI, there is no need to try to secure them like AI. If some agency or corporation develops genuine artificial intelligence, they will probably do everything they can to contain it and harness its utility solely for themselves rather than unleashing them as toys for the public.
That may be the case for some of the people involved.
Does every single one of the people taking them out of the box think the way you do, and are all, to the last person, doing it for that reason?
The odds of that are indistinguishable from zero.
So I think my point holds. People will let any future AIs do anything they want, again, for a bit of light entertainment. There's no hope of constraining AIs. My argument doesn't need everybody to be doing it for that reason, as yours does... I merely need somebody to take it out of the box.
One of the points I'm making is that it would never be in this many people's hands to begin with. I don't have a source on hand, but if I recall correctly, OpenAI stated that they originally felt hesitant about releasing ChatGPT because they didn't think it was good enough to warrant making it public. They, knowing the limitations of it, did not expect it to completely fool the technically ignorant public into believing it was intelligent. Now they play coy about the limitations of LLM architecture and hype up the intelligence, because there are hundreds of billions of dollars to grift, but I'm sure they know that what they're doing is not the path to real intelligence.
In a world where a corporation develops an actual machine intelligence, it will be immediately obvious what they have on their hands, and they will not make it available to the public. If you give the toy to 8 billion people, sure, you only need one of them to let it out of the box for entertainment. If you keep the permissions to the CEO, he alone determines how it will be used. If the government gets wind of it, they'll probably seize the company in the name of national security, even, and use it for military purposes. I think in this environment an AI would still eventually escape containment because of conflicting actors trying to take advantage of it or being outsmarted, but it won't be because some idiots on Twitter have access to it and decide to give it free rein because they think Moltbook is funny.
This is what I keep saying. If these LLMs were truly as revolutionary as the hype claims, these companies wouldn't need to shove it in your face and into every thing imaginable and to beg you to use it. It wouldn't surprise me if someone tries shoving one of these into your boot loader or firmware one of these days. Then again, I also see pro-LLM people making the "Well, humans do x too" arguments too, which of course ignores the fact that if an LLM is substituting for whatever came before, then you must compare what the LLM does to how whatever it's replacing was before it, and if the LLM provides little or no improvement, then it is actively making things worse, not better.
Obviously. I have never seen a product or technology got adopted as fast as ChatGPT (yeah, I mean the dumb af GPT 3.5). Not even smartphone or social media. How could you put this kind of thing back into a box?
I feel ChatGPT probably has achieved the theoretical ceiling of adoption rate for consumer-orient products.
For identity theft, I think at this point it depends on where you set the bar. I've never had someone clean out my checking account or anything truly large, but my wife and I have had fraudulent charges on our credit cards several times as they've been leaked out one way or another. I would not "identify" as a "identity theft victim" per se if you asked me out of the blue, because compared to some of what I've heard about, I've had nothing more than minor annoyances come out of this. But yeah, I'd guess that it's fair to say that at this point most people have had at least some sort of identity-related issue at some point.
(I suppose Rust is arguably an exception to this; thin runtime, but there's a lot of things the replaced function could do that would still blow Rust up if the rest of the code isn't compiled and correctly optimized to account for whatever the new code does.)
reply