mtlmtlmtlmtl

Renewable doesn't mean unlimited.

Same thing with data centres in Norway. We're planning to waste heaps of our renewable energy on generating profits for a small cabal of assholes in SV. For what? Luckily there's been more political pushback against it here recently, but it's so tame. Just for once I'd like to see some conviction. Pause all ongoing constructions, and launch corruption probes into all the local politicians that pushed this stuff through. I bet there's lots of corruption there. On a national level, we don't have corruption on anything near the systemic scale you see in the US. Some bad apples, and lots of mole hills made into mountains by the press, but nothing like the US where it seems like most of congress is pretty much openly corrupt.

Local politicians though? Oh boy. Seems like every time there's some ongoing project in a smaller municipality involving commercial exploitation of natural resources(like undeveloped land, minerals, hydropower capacity, etc) there's a mayor and/or municipal council members who profit from it financially or otherwise. They have shares/board seats in a holding company owning the land, local contractors, etc. Seems like this is very widespread, and rarely leads to serious consequences, and even when it does, it happens so late that the project is already built, or so far underway it doesn't get stopped. Shit pisses me off.

I'm sure data centres are no different. Because I can't imagine a cost-benefit analysis of them that makes any sense from the point of view of the local community.

I'll never understand this point. It's not as though that slogan is the entirety of OpenBSDs security posture. It's just a damn slogan, but OpenBSD naysayers will never stop talking about it.

And no, OpenBSD is not the most secure OS out there, and very few serious people claim it is. What OpenBSD is, is the most secure option if you want a simple, no bullshit, well documented unix that can still run on obscure legacy hardware using a potato as your RAM. As such, when you actually compare it to other options in that space, I would say it is the most secure. They care about security very deeply, but they do it within that context. So yes, they still use C, because they need to compile on a bunch of dead platforms. And OpenBSD is never gonna be something like Qubes because Qubes needs things like VT-D and a boatload of memory/cores, it's never gonna be GrapheneOS because they can't rely on having MTE, TPM, etc. And that's fine.

They also deserve a lot of credit for contributions to the wider ecosystem as well. Just to give one example, making sure the OS can provide high quality entropy in all contexts with arc4random, which eventually percolated to FreeBSD, Linux, and even MacOS.

But sure, keep talking about the two holes if you want.

No it isn't. It doesn't matter how real the technology is. The bubble will still pop, because when a technology is seen as revolutionary, you get rampant overinvestment. And only a fraction of those investments will pay off(or, indeed, none, in the case where frontier labs are eventually made irrelevant by open models, which seems very likely to me).

The internet and web were revolutionary, no one can deny that. They completely transformed our society. Nevertheless, the bubble popped. The current bubble is no different.

Yeah, I'm also switching away. They're very sluggish on features. I went through all the rigamarole of setting up my own domain for the email service. Specifically with the idea that I could them automatically filter all my mail into folders by service. But, as it turns out, Protonmail has very limited support for sieve extensions. The crucial one is being able to create mailboxes from sieve scripts. So I can sort emails into folders, but I'd have to go create a bunch of folders, and make a new one every time I sign up for something. I'll be switching to fastmail, I think.

Though, if ProtonDrive became fast finally, I might still be convinced to pay a smaller fee for PD plus their VPN, which is completely fine for my purposes anyway(mostly just torrenting).

Last time I tried ProtonDrive(years ago), the speeds were complete dogshit, I could barely surpass 10 MB/s on a half gig fibre line. Anyone used it recently, and if so has it improved?

Yeah, I'm not convinced either. I'm just saying that's what I think the AI labs believe.

If you look at their actions, they're not the actions of someone who both A) believes their technology to be an existential threat and B) doesn't want humanity to go extinct

If they truly believed both of those things, they would just shut down their companies, because being a billionaire is entirely pointless if you're dead.

I can only conclude that they don't believe both A and B. I'm gonna assume they believe B because actually wanting to exterminate humanity is too comically supervillain esque even for Altman. Therefore they must not believe A. And it makes sense. If they believe A, why are they so incredibly sloppy about security? Why did they outsource part of it to some external firm instead of leveraging their own expertise on the technology? I'm not buying it.

Instead, I think they believe C) that AI will create enormous economic value, D) that value will be distributed across the whole economy by making everyone more productive. Assuming C and D, you get E) for them to capture this value, they must maintain proprietary control of the technology in order to be able to charge everyone else for the privilege of using it.

Assuming they believe E, open models are an existential threat, not to humanity, but to OpenAI and Anthropic.

Their solution: make everyone else believe A, in order to achieve regulatory capture and somehow stop open models from advancing by banning their development, or something. This is a hail mary pass. I can just about imagine them achieving this within the US and maybe even Europe, but China? That ship has sailed.

Not true. Wiles presented his proof in a series of lectures in 1993. The error was found by a reviewer, and he spent over a year trying to fix it. Once he did fix it, he asked colleagues to review it again, and only once it passed that review did he actually publish it.

I'm not familiar with the paper you mention. But it's also worth pointing out that afaik the n log n algorithm itself isn't particularly practical. It's one of these "galactic algorithms" that is asymptotically more optimal, but is so complicated that it's only a real improvement for comically large n. And that's without even considering the mental overhead of implementing and maintaining the thing.

Of course, that's not to say the research is necessarily useless. It's still theoretically interesting to find "better" algorithms if only to shed some light on lower bounds, and so on. And who knows, maybe the line of research could lead to more practical algorithms later on.

Withdrawing it isn't irresponsible. I don't even think releasing it is, because that is often the best way to find problems with it; expose it to the wider research community. Doing PR victory laps based on unverified, unfinished work, on the other hand, is. It is well known, even scientifically demonstrated, that retractions or refutations get much less attention than the initial exuberant PR announcement. And thus this practice contributes to misinformation.

And just to preempt the kneejerk whataboutism: Yes, all of academia does this to varying extents, and the mainstream media are also complicit. And that is also irresponsible. And no, that is not an excuse for OpenAI. Especially when you consider that OpenAI actively portray themselves as some kind of moral arbiter on AI and "doing good for humanity". They should be held to the extraordinarily high moral standards they purport to hold themselves to.

Would you care to share your research? What was your methodology? Did you write it up? Is it published?

Or is it the kind of research you'd prefer to keep shrouded in mystery?

Agreed. There are just too many unknowns. Certainly about how life started here(if indeed it did start here). But even more so about what's out there. There's so much we don't know even about the planets and moons in our own solar system, let alone other star systems. It's only recently we've become able to detect exoplanets in significant quantities at all, and we've still only scratched the surface really. And what we know about those planets is very limited. For most of them we don't know much except their distance to the star and estimated size. For a handful we have some information about their atmospheres, usually only enough to narrow it down to a couple of equally plausible models. It's hard for me to imagine us being able to conclusively detect life on an exoplanet. I think the best we'll be able to do in the next several decades is say we're pretty sure a planet's atmosphere contains chemical compounds for which there's no known abiotic origin. But there will be so much uncertainty there in terms of possible unknown abiotic origins that it would never feel conclusive.

This is such a common HN trope, and it's tiresome.

Yes, lots of things will at any point be beyond the technical ability of most people as long as they remain niche. But as soon as a sizable market exists(e.g one created by a law, like in this case), products and services that close that gap will appear.

Hell, there's even stuff for doing this already, which is not that hard for non-technical people to set up, like Tailscale. I can easily imagine a Tailscale-like product that easily allows friends to use eachothers networks as a VPN with zero configuration or Wireguard knowledge required. I mean, when you think about it it's just Tailscale but more streamlined for that particular purpose.

On what planet is it similar? The labs are taking the copyrighted material and attempting to make billions of dollars from it. And this, in your mind, is "similar" to me downloading a TV show simply to watch it?