I was on the other side of this in League of Legends. They used to have packets leak information to the client about player position. The classic examples are for stuff like particle emission or spell usage. Well at some point they decided that they had enough and did a pretty major rework of their netcode to only send player positions when you were supposed to have vision on them (plus a tiny extra radius). That absolutely wrecked the determinism of the game, as small jitters would cause skill shots to hit you before they even drew in your game, players would become invisible as the packets arrived out of order. Particle emitters would bug out.
This stuff i way harder than people imagine. I think League eventually got it somewhat figured out, but it took a couple of years from what i recall.
> there's nothing you can reasonably do with it in any direction
I wholeheartedly agree. That's why bringing nation state threats into these kinds of discussions is so pointless. If you want security from governments, the amount of security work you have to do is so far beyond what any reasonable person is willing to endure that it makes no sense to talk about on hackernews. That stuff is for real professional discussions at real professional congresses.
> Using e2e from a US-based entity means you are prone to spying from the US government, but at least you know you're reasonably secure against the IRGC, the Chinese intelligence service, the FSB, and so on.
Framing this in terms of governmental espionage is nonsensical. Using e2e from a US-based entity makes you completely sure that the US government is spying on you, because they assert direct control over the software you are running. There is no venue to seek justice against an unlawful contract if the government is in on it.
You should instead take a step back into reality and consider data misuse by normal non-government actors. Facebook claiming e2e encryption is a contractual matter, that you can litigate. That's where the actual protection is. That's also why real business demands not "unbreakable encryption" but reliable marker for access and tampering. It is much more useful to have a record of who accessed the data, than a claim that it's impossible.
As my career progresses, I'm starting to understand just how many developers have trouble comprehending invariants and how they affect system design. If you do not comprehend invariants, then every system is CRUD.
The specific danger of CRUD is that all operations are expressible in it. If your system is CRUD, everything goes. A developer who doesn't understand the system's design might be inclined to assume an application is "just CRUD" and add all sorts of misfeatures to it that violate otherwise constrained states. They will turn the application into CRUD.
All it takes for an application to go from carefully modeled to CRUD is for people to believe it already was just CRUD.
I wasn't trying to make a reliable litmus test for it.
Either way, if you consider animals, LLMs are even more poorly positioned. They can do exactly none of the things my cat can do. An LLM can string together words, but if my cat is intelligent, it's clear that stringing together words is not synonymous with intelligence, since my cat can't do that.
> I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out
I don't think that should be the real fear. The real fear is those 10x engineers still putting in equivalent effort, but now having to spend mental capacity on positioning themselves for future layoffs and worrying about getting fired.
I think we greatly underestimate the performance boost there is in security. When you don't have to worry about plan b, you can be so much more efficient at plan a.
> While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.
You're missing the point, which is that no matter the process involved. The LLM can only ever output one of the tokens in its token vector. It can't invent a new symbol or character. It can't leave and go build a church. It has to output a little piece of data for you.
I would not be opposed to that solution. If that's what we can get passed, I'd be happy.
Personally, I'm more in favor of a version that integrates with a government issued digital id that attests a user can legally see the provided material. The publisher would have to implement the check, because my version also includes the technical capability to disregard the law. You then just have to be ready to be charged with a crime.
I think the reason I prefer this is that my country almost already has the infrastructure for this system.
> A significant part of the cultural value of the internet comes from free anonymous expression.
That's a value judgment. I'm sure it's true for some on this website, and certainly most on 4chan, but I would caution against broadening that into the general public. For my mom, the value of the internet is sharing dog pictures and clubhouse opening hours with people she known in real life. For my dad it's browsing web shops that have physical presence. None of those things offer any sort of anonymous expression.
I would also argue that presenting 4chan as more interesting than it is troubling or disgusting is pretty telling. The internet would not be culturally poorer for 4chan shutting down.
Sure, maybe that's true. Who knows, maybe it will also actually just work and solve the problem. There's no argument there.
The argument that touches on "those in power" must also contend with "those in power" just abusing that power anyway, no matter what legislation is passed. People in power are usually pretty crafty.
I know systems thinking, and am in favor of a version of these types of legislation. Give me your best argument from systems thinking, and I'll give you a thoughtful reply.
Lead author is a crypto guy. Having written any paper on crypto, especially as an economist, is negatively correlated with my interest in reading your arguments.
He's just making a general "efficient markets" argument. He's arguing that whatever happens in a couple of years will be the right thing, no matter what is happening now.
That is essentially not an argument in any direction.
Importantly, "adjusting budgets" here is for most companies, you know the ones you have to fight to even get an IDE license, a euphemism for zeroing the budget.
Marx had a way to think about that. He would distinguish between labour as in generalized socially necessafy labour, and specific skilled labour.
Value is measure in generalized labour, since that the universal measure of human effort. The genealized amount of time a human being must spend to produce something from its parts. Generalized labour is also what's bought from labourers. You don't pay them to do something specific, you pay them to labour in general.
This contrasts against specific labour, which is whats actually required in the moment. Generalized labour power must be the right kind of specific labour to actually produce anything of value.
The AI leaders have been told that AI is labour. To the extent that it currently is, which I believe is only the case because the market hasn't adjusted, it's not the right specific labour to male anything valuable.
My what now? What privacy do I have on the corporate internet? I'm already being observed. My data integrated in vast "AI" models that try to predict me. We have seen tons of examples of the current tech giants farming out content moderation, hiring empoverished workers in the 3rd world to view all my videos and listen to all my conversations.