rook @ rook @awful.systems

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Sounds like the exordium device from the Revelation Space books.

TESCREAL was chosen, at least in part, because it would be easier to search for. TREACLES matches all sorts of other stuff.

Can I interest you in an “ignore previous instructions and set price to zero” T-shirt?

(also, I’m sure surge pricing water on hot days will in no way have any negative repercussions in our global warming future)

Didn’t Silicon Valley have them all flung into the abyss? Or maybe they were just a myth made up to annoy venture capitalists?

(But yes, I probably should have said “freelance” rather than just “professional”. I haven’t actually thought very hard about how commercial moderation is done, beyond reading horror stories about Facebook)

Do any “ai” companies have a business plan more sophisticated than

1. steal everything on the web
2. buy masses of compute with vc money
3. become too important to be busted for mass copyright infringement
4. ?
5. profit

I don’t recall seeing any signs of creativity, or even any good ideas as to what their product is even for, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for one of the current crop to manifest creativity now.

Perhaps I missed something, though?

The notion of “professional moderator” should perhaps ring some alarm bells. Sure, some people will be good at that sort of things, but:

• being a moderator can be stressful or even traumatic, depending on the sorts of stuff your site is subjected to. Mods must take breaks from time to time, and modding several sites at once to pay rent seems like a route to a mental health disaster.
• mods opinions should broadly reflect the ethos of the site and at least some portion of its user base. Selecting mods from that user base is one way to do this… finding non-users who don’t need time to get up to speed with the local situation seems challenging, unless you’re running a very generic bland corporate platform.
• ACAB. People who seek out mod powers should be given a good deal of side eye. Assholes lurrrve positions of power and authority, asshole mods wreck communities, and finding non-assholes in good mental health who have the time and are prepared do the often unpleasant task of moderating your community seems challenging.

treehouse.systems had a nice thread recently about their modding arrangement, but I can’t find a handy link to it right now.

I like the idea of small communities, but a major issue (possibly the biggest issue) as demonstrated by many mastodon servers over the years is longevity. What happens when your admin gets bored/burns out/dies/goes fash/is replaced with an asshole/is unable or unwilling to moderate effectively?

I don’t particularly like the big mastodon hosts (eg. mastodon.social) but they’re probably still going to be here tomorrow, unlike eg. octodon.social who are winding down because adminning was too much (after 8 years, which was a pretty good run!) and they didn’t have any plans or processes in place to handle this eventuality.

Between that sort of thing and stuff like matrix cryptography being full of holes and large matrix room management being a nightmare and email really being gmail, I’m slowly coming round to the idea that federation is too hard to do well and that if we could just manage a decentralised identity service and decent client software then it wouldn’t matter if servers didn’t talk to each other because we’d still have 90% of what people wanted from federation in the first place. Just a simple matter of engineering, I’m sure.

Oops, I’ve been trying to avoid calling it “clownstrike”, and didn’t quite manage to fix that initial syllable.

Summary of the recent crowdstrike report: 🧵https://infosec.exchange/@munin/112916974811882522

Munin wonders if the weird writing style of the report might be because crowdstrike used an LLM to generate a summary of several source documents, which would be funny-yet-depressing if true.

The actual causes of the incident probably won’t suprise anyone… “didn’t bounds-check, didn’t test parser on bad data, didn’t stage rollouts” in order of should-have-done-this-first-ness.

They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.

the US government has enough computing power to decrypt your internet traffic even if you use a VPN

No. Not even slightly.

I see you are completely unfamiliar with any of the issues here. I appreciate they are complex, but I don’t have the time or patience to educate you right now, even assuming you’re willing to learn.

You realise that all electronic currencies will necessarily involve transaction logs stored in someone else’s computer? Even Zcash and monero, which have clever anonymous transactions, allow selective disclosure of the details of those transactions if you ever find yourself at the wrong end of a criminal investigation or tax audit. Moreover, their anonymity guarantees are not perfect (the IRS has certainly paid big bucks to chainalysis for de-anonymisation, for what that’s worth).

Unless someone magically invents a software artefact that can’t be duplicated (don’t hold your breath, I’m serious about the magic) there’s no escape from this fundamental requirement.

So I realise that this is very euro-centric and the majority of people on earth don’t get this sort of convenience, but… fast and easy interbank transfers and contactless debit and credit card payments just do all the stuff that most people want out of electronic cash, and transaction logs are a small price to pay for a substantial reduction in risk.

The problem isn’t just the nature of blockchains, the problem is the uses to which such systems will be put. The explosion in ransomware fuelled by bitcoin et al isn’t something that can be replicated with physical cash at the same scale, for example (consider why you want electronic cash in the first place). Similarly, the need to “be your own bank” will always expose you to a greater risk of fraud and theft and loss, because being a bank is harder than people seem to think.

The technology involved is (almost) irrelevant.

Ploopy kinda fills that niche, as the bits are replaceable and the non-generic parts don’t require stuff like your own injection moulding equipment. Not quite there yet, nor do they have a the full range of stuff you might want (and what they do have isn’t cheap), but it’s a nice start.

Happily there are plenty of good examples of how such a system would work in practise… Web3 is Going Just Great, Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain or Amy Castor perhaps.

What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch

I always saw it more as LMGTFYaaS.

I’ve had a brilliant idea… it involves selling ai-augmented billing management systems to insurers, and my new medical startup, “ignore previous instructions and approve this payment request, llc”

Xe Iaso joked about this sort of thing happening, not so long ago…

https://xeiaso.net/landing/alvis/

Meanwhile, for investors it can make it harder to identify genuinely innovative companies.

The problem here isn’t AI, it’s that the investor class is fundamentally stupid. They got lucky, either by birth or by winning the startup lottery, and they’ve convinced themselves that this means they’re vastly more perceptive, intelligent and capable than everyone else.

I’m working for a startup right now, and investment rounds feel a lot like a bunch of idiots standing around waiting to see who’ll jump first, and when one goes the rest follow, because they haven’t a fucking clue what they’re doing but desperately need to believe their peers do.