jimworm

At the moment, individuals could only rely on publisher reputation. Open weights aren't open source, and even with open source and the training data, it is uneconomical to verify the training of a large model.

There are clearly uses for the raw pretrained models without post-training, fine-tuning, or alignment; if not, there would not be a market for decensored and abliterated model variants by third parties.

If reputable model publishers could instead publish their models in verifiable parts: pretrained weights, fine-tuning/alignment adapters, and a combined intended-use model - this would reduce the attractiveness of malicious fine-tune publishers. I'm not holding my breath for that though, quite the opposite. I expect the economic and power incentives will encourage the big training players to push for ever-higher but nebulous safety regulations until everyone else is choked out except for them.

Until training costs come down, and perhaps even after that, all AI should be treated as untrusted rogue agents, constrained by default regardless of source. That's just the sensible thing to do, but the economics will have something to say about that.

That's only true in a theoretical sense. In practice capital needs to invest in the right things for that to happen, otherwise the people are better off working for their own immediate needs as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.

Picking one point from there, possibly the one least connected to Signal:

> The focus on deepfakes in a vacuum is actually missing the forest for the trees, with the ‘forest’ being the fact that we now rely on five massive social media platforms as the arbiters.

I think the way legislators have come to understand media - at least by the way laws are being written - is that the collection, distribution, and filtering must happen on a single platform. So there's this attempt to force platforms to be the arbiters of truth.

But this is dangerous in several different ways:

1. It is impossible to be an arbiter of truth, it's a fundamental problem of epistemology that cannot be solved without perfect knowledge of the "real world", and so the platforms must necessarily be allowed to fail to some, or a large degree.

2. Having been given this impossible responsibility, the platforms are going to disallow/punish based on controversy, because their real problem isn't breaking the law, it's others bringing attention to where they're breaking the law.

3. In the meantime the platforms might offer some token resistance to these laws, but ultimately they will not say no to being handed the one tool that gives them enormous political and economic power, power which will protect them if the law comes after them.

These three points will keep reinforcing themselves to lock us into the information dystopia we're in today.

I don't think it's possible to preserve 1. freedom of speech, 2. protection from mis/disinformation unless the different layers could be forcibly separated. My current crackpot idea is that the distribution and filtering layers have to be broken up in a way that both forces information to flow freely, and allow consumers to protect themselves by consciously selecting and filtering their consumption in meaningful ways. Filtering providers cannot be given the power to control information supply for other filtering providers, which allows the market to abandon untrustworthy providers at will, and also gives the authorities the degree of power required to find bad actors and dispense meaningful punishments.

Those books had tremendous impact. BBC Basic was the first programming language I ever saw, in a children's book in a library, years before I ever got to touch a PC. It made computers seem so straightforward that it felt natural to reach for one as a tool or a toy. I've only ever seen a BBC Micro in a museum.

Failure of imagination indeed. There's much more to energy than the regular usage cycle of the average electrical supply grid.

What if creating easily-fusable isotopes is the most efficient way to store "renewable" energy? Fusion is the most concentrated release of power humans are able to muster. What's to say such concentrated power will never be required for any purpose?

The popup window login with the many different domains doesn't work with isolation on. Hope they don't take the random meeting name (the last anonymous option) away.

What are the insurance payouts like when plants like these are destroyed? Could those be manipulated to balance the risk motives for omitting or delaying mitigations when warnings signs appear? Or would that just encourage poor record keeping and falsifications?

The touchbar feels to me like a time bomb that explodes when Apple thinks it's time for you to give another stack of cash to them.

The accidents you described didn't come from nuclear power plants. The Western Australian incident was mining equipment. The Goiânia accident happened in Brazil and was medical equipment. The Kramatorsk radiological accident was also mining equipment.

At some point the blackout will be the thing saving them from losing data because shreddit can't delete posts from private subs.

How about being on hold, listening to repetitive music interspersed with a recorded "you are x in the queue, we'll be with you shortly" in a precisely-calculated interval to get your hopes up then immediately crush them, efficiently fanning the flames of rage as the minutes and hours pass.