socializer

We had to build the Torment Nexus, because otherwise, someone else would have built the Torment Nexus.

> Even if you couldn't have predicted the lengths to which it would go.

Not obviously? In the US, there are some crimes of strict liability (you're guilty if it happened), but most require intent or at least the ability to foresee consequences (i.e., it must be shown that you neglected to take due care).

For example, you're generally not liable for freak accidents, like if a tire comes off your vehicle and kills a pedestrian, even though you're the one who set the vehicle in motion and therefore are the one most directly responsible for creating the circumstances that led to the outcome. Now, if you knew the tire had issues and you secured it with zip ties, that's another story.

I think this will get litigated to figure out where "you could not have seen this coming" ends and negligence or deliberate malice starts, but it's not black and white right now. Normally, I would say you don't want to be patient zero, but with the attitudes shown by frontier labs, I guess YOLO is the way.

> I don't see the irrationality here?

You're replacing juniors with AI to save money (because again, I doubt there are velocity gains to be had at MSFT), and then you're spending money to keep junior SWEs on payroll and train them in a parallel program.

There's no way this is cheaper than just letting some junior SWEs actually do the coding on the actual projects you're building, right? And gain experience that way?

OK, so let me get this straight: Microsoft replaces junior SWEs with AI... and this presumably doesn't really let the company execute any faster, because bottlenecks at MSFT are mostly unrelated to kLOC/hour. But okay. And then they establish a parallel program for people who are kept on Microsoft payroll... while coding in an academic setting... so that they can progress through the rungs of the SWE ladder and eventually be the ones supervising the AI.

This is really what we're doing? This makes sense? Am I taking crazy pills?

Eh. I don't like these bans, but I think there are at least two good-faith arguments you can make:

1. People who decide to go on murder sprees are usually not high-functioning individuals, so even modest barriers can improve outcomes.

2. Fewer weapons in homes means fewer heat-of-the-moment acts involving these weapons. For example, there are very few firearm suicides in the EU, compared to the US.

Because these companies have large legal departments essentially in charge of minimizing regulatory and reputational risk. It's the same reason they've been progressively cracking down on firearm accessories, BB guns, knives, fireworks, laboratory chemicals, erotica, pill presses, and a bunch of other things over the past 20 years. All of that is generally legal in the US but makes lawyers and PR people queasy. It's not just marketplaces, Paypal has asinine rules on what you can and cannot pay for. So does Google Pay, Zelle, Venmo, and so on.

I don't think it's useful to point out inconsistencies; the bottom line is that lasers will be on the chopping block within our lifetime too.

If, in this era of constantly dealing with overly verbose verbal diarrhea from LLMs, your complaint is that a human write up is too terse... then may I offer a simple cure: you can ask an LLM to turn it into as many pages of slop as you like.

> is pretty meaningless because the default install doesn't really do anything

Which is a good thing. An important thing. The reason you're stuck in a perpetual update cycle for most Linux distros and for Windows is that they ship with an insane number of things that most users have no need for. Yeah, every laptop definitely needs NetBIOS and iSCSI and UPnP turned on by default.

It's true that everything you add on top of the OpenBSD baseline increases your attack surface, but it's a saner approach than shipping with a gigantic attack surface and then forcing you to know about and disable the things you don't need.

> Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.

Which is almost certainly a combination of the complexities of govt IT procurement, the needs of non-technical users who may only be familiar with Windows & MS Office, and the enterprise management features of Windows that aren't as good in most other OSes.

They clearly have some AI-generated write-ups, which I guess is fine for utilitarian stuff like that, but the post in question appears to be entirely human.

There's really no reason to make accusations like that without checking. We now have good tools for checking for AI prose and this ain't it.

> He tells spooky stories on the internet to make money.

I mean, yes, but so does the author of this article. It's literally his business. The article is, in part, an advertisement for what he sells.

I disagree with Yudkowsky on almost everything and I think the philosophical movement he co-founded is a pox on the SF Bay Area tech culture, but I don't think we can deny him credibility that's comparable to the credibility of the author of this article (who, as I understand, is a young guy who spent some time at OpenAI). They both know what they're talking about and both are motivated to reach specific conclusions.

Because people want to normalize their own backhanded use of AI-generated content. It gives you an edge over human content creators, simply because you can produce more with less effort, but that edge disappears if the content is shunned.