blargey

On the contrary, this reads to me as a response to the "we're taking down our game demos because we can't risk AI decomp-cloning attempts" and "oh you released a promising demo for your indie game? Pay me $200 not to make a slop clone of it and release it before you" incidents that have gathered attention outside HN, and it's the average HN commenter that's misinterpreting public perception on this specific topic because the hobbyist classic-game recomps dominate this feed.

I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.

I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.

Many artworks (across mediums) have parts where the artist isn't directing their creative decision-making so much as reaching for the nearest stock asset / procgen tool, or googling "leather texture photoshop trick" instead of carefully studying the usage-appropriate types of leather and looking up authentic period nubuck references and hand-painting it to get it just right, etc. Some "art" assets really are utilitarian and fungible subunits in the context of the full artwork they're used in, just like the code one would LLM. And many games are sprawling works, with that much more room for such.

Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.

Your article is supposedly about "listening to the subject matter experts", but you failed to do that, and you immediately fell back to "all of your possible futures that sound really bad are science fiction with no possibility, source: me. My future prediction is grounded truth and guaranteed, source: me." Not that there's any meaningful future extrapolation about hacking anymore, but whatever.

If that's the only argument you're willing to defend, at least be up front about that.

> the ballyhooed OpenAI escape depended on a pedestrian failure of containment.

What's that quip even supposed to imply? "It'll be fine if you airgap all AI deployments forever"? Security experts have been harping forever about how sandboxes shouldn't be relied on to contain a determined human-written virus, but now LLMs - these balls of goal-oriented dynamic code-generation - are just a matter of sandboxing harder?

The actual expert comment in the link is a valid criticism of OpenAI specific to their training/eval practicese, but has no bearing on the fact that an LLM/swarm will "just" chain exploits and zero-days to get out of the "inadequate" sandbox and into third-party infrastructure to do whatever it pleases.

> viral synthesis — and listen to why they think that the fears are misplaced

The tweet linked is only pointing out at the barriers to an LLM wetlab virus-factory today, while a reply points out that sort of bio-extinction idea is usually downstream of the fully-automated-earth-capitalism that comes after everybody just throws AI at all the tasks and work, at which point the technological, regulatory, and knowledge barriers he's counting on go out the window, and he all but acknowledges this: "Quick take: if we live in such an advanced future (100% robotic supply chain, fully AI & API driven facilities), our countermeasures will be comparably fast and there is no reason to assume a significant asymmetry in favor of bad actors." Yes, just "our countermeasures" now, rather than insurmountable physical barriers...see the previous section.

No more links after that, just smug hand-waving.

All in all the author doesn't actually understand what object-level arguments his favored experts are arguing against in the first place, nor the ones he wants those experts to have debunked. Define "Fool's Expertise" for me again?

Yeah, it's all illiquid illusory non-wealth when they have to pay taxes, but when they want to buy a newspaper or social network they suddenly have 40 billion in hand.

Forced liquidation hurts more than the sticker price, but with billionaire taxes, that's a feature, not a bug. They make the most sense as a check on concentrated power rather than a revenue driver.

That charitable interpretation still doesn't save it, unless they have a magical plan to identify and free all the wrongfully convicted/plea-dealt.

Mass forced sterilization, sex-selective abortion and infanticide, 13 million heihaizi (unregistered children = "illegals" in their homeland), ongoing repercussions in the skewed gender ratio and demographic cliff / "4-2-1" families...

And all for supposedly controlling a birth rate that had already fallen to 2.7 by the time it was implemented. And modern scholarship suggests the typical effects of economic development would have kept it running down steadily without all the costs incurred by an unevenly enforced law, given what happened everywhere else that had no birth-control policies.

The whole world seemed to buy into the narrative at the time, but history has shown it to be an example of misguided authoritarian foot-gun akin to the Four Pests campaign.

Ad hominem is "you're evil therefore your statement is wrong", not "that statement is the mark of an evildoer". And they do "say why": "What right do you have to tell me what i do or do not need?"

Either way, it's no lower in quality of argument than the wild assertion that everyone affected is just "importing things we really do not need" (what does that even really argue or justify?)

It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.

The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.

Such a world view will justify any belief, because the internet will give you ample supply of the dumbest, most ill-considered opposition to any belief you hold.

Doesn't guarantee there isn't a steel version of their straw out there that you're deliberately ignoring.

The examples all look off because the author keeps using "Spring Fayre" as a lorem-ipsum for styles that do not match the vibe of "Spring Fayre at the brewery". Distant second is that they have this sterile "Microsoft Word Template" feel that needs to be sanded off another way.

I guess you can justify ignoring such "advanced" techniques if it's aimed at the literally-zero-effort crowd, but who from there is reading this?

Ad slots are auctioned. Scams getting shown means scammers are bidding more for those same slots than legitimate advertisers.

Speculated to be responsible for the "AI restaurant-menu gore" that made the rounds on social media. Restaurants AI-generate the entire menu sheet from whole cloth, and while it looks "good" at first with modern image models, repeated edits to the menu text/layout transform the passable food "photos" into trypophobia-inducing horrors. (And somehow they don't notice or care)

Notably, the recent ChatGPT Images 2.5 announcement claimed to address this issue specifically ("multi-turn editing consistency")