I did bother reading the article, and so with my 13 years of theoretical physics research well behind me, I say:
Good. Fantastic. Wunderbar. Magnifique. "Maybe", "might", and "possibly" are all words that should be banned from scientific papers in all sections except "Future Work", and even there the reviewers should be on their guard for authors trying to sneak them in.
I read way too many papers back when I was a researcher where the authors did not have the proper evidence for claims they made, and they fell back on bullshit weasel words like this. It does NOT show that you're humble or retrospective. It shows that you didn't do your job but you really want your pet theory (or more likely, theme of your next grant's research) to be true, so you're going to act like it is anyway but with a safety hatch if you get called out on it.
The real elephant in the room, that the scientific community still refuses to address except when they think they can work it into a grant, is the reproducibility crisis.
That's the fundamental platform with all online platforms. It's their own form of carcinization.
The problem is that to outsiders, the initial set of gatekeepers who arose naturally in the early community as "the people that knew what it was about" will themselves appear to be "the toxic assholes", so every community will naively eventually cut out its gatekeepers to be more inviting to newcomers.
Only to have the actual toxic assholes flood in, become the new gatekeepers, and dominate the discussion, and suddenly your Faces of Evil speedrunning Discord must have a stance on the war on Gaza and the US election because we clearly need to keep out the neo-Nazis according to our CoCs, right?
And no, I don't have an answer to this other than to largely disconnect from online platforms and start engaging in your local community. Something I myself am not guilty of doing.
We can quibble about whether a "hacktivist" group can even exist at all or if it's a convenient lie the Internet has collectively told itself to justify groups of thugs attacking the targets they don't like as "the good ones", but they fit the modern definition of a hacktivist group.
In retrospect, the fact that Intel and AMD's stock prices both closed slightly up when Microsoft announced the Snapdragon X on Windows 11 was a dead giveaway that the major players knew behind the scenes that it was being released seriously under baked.
The reason why the Automattic/WP Engine fight has become the tech industry's daily soap opera isn't because we're all passionate about website hosting solutions. It's because the ramifications for open source are dire.
This fight is essentially the legal version of the xz-utils supply chain attack. It's a shock to the system that rocks the fundamental assumptions of open source to its core, here, "you can build your product on top of open source and as long as you follow the license you agreed to, you'll be legally fine."
WordPress.org could self-implode tomorrow, and that doesn't matter in the slightest, because the good will of the legal community (if there is such a thing) that the open source community spent decades trying to build up is being destroyed by one unhinged man. Matt may have ended up doing to open source what Bill Gates wasn't able to do in decades at Microsoft.
They're not "flesh-and-blood compute" you absolute monster, they're human beings with their own hopes and dreams. Reading this comment has given me a strange new respect for crypto, because if slaving under you is what those kids' alternatives were, then they made the right choice to take the pull on the influencer slot machine.
The motto of anyone under the age of 30 should be "fuck you, pay me", and I say that as a middle aged man with a Big Tech salary. It is precisely people like me that have the financial and career stability that we can (and should!) start contributing to open source projects out of a sense of civic responsibility, but that is because we are already in a position to do so.
This continuous obsession with making the younger generation "prove themselves" by "putting in their time" otherwise they're "entitled", only to keep yanking up the "make it" age, has damned multiple generations at this point. We need to re-normalize 22 year olds buying their first home with their first baby on the way, NOT the 27-year-old working yet another unpaid internship while making his open source contribution to your open source project in a frantic attempt to get noticed.
"I'm sorry ModernMech, but you're in violation of our CoC with your overly negative and toxic tone. We're going to go ahead, close your issue, and merge the PR to add Torment Nexus integration."
This is what happens in the real world when you're a stuck up prig, not the Hollywood movie ending you've constructed in your head.
> One example that comes to mind is the security person who wanted our logins to expire so frequently that we had to log in multiple times per day. He insisted that anything less was below his personal standards for security and it would violate his personal integrity to allow it. Of course everybody loathed him, but not because they lacked personal integrity or ethics.
Speaking as a "security person", I passionately despise people like this because they make my life so much more difficult by poisoning the well. There are times in security where you need to drop the hammer, but it's precisely because of these situations that you need to build up the overall good will with your team of working with them. When you tell your team "this needs to be done immediately, and it's blocking", you need to have built up enough trust that they realize you're not throwing yet another TPS report at them, this time it's actually serious, and they do it immediately, as opposed to fighting/escalating.
And yes, like the original poster, most of them think they're the main character in an suspense-thriller where they're The Only Thing Saving Humanity From Itself, when really they're the stuck-up side relief character in someone else's romcom, at best.
If the issue here was "just" training LLMs, like some AI bros want to deflect it to be, the conversation around this topic would be very different, and I would be enthusiastically defending the model trainers.
But that's not this conversation. These are companies that are trying to fold our permissively-license content into weights, close source it, and make themselves the only access point, all while pre-emptively perform regulatory capture with all the right DEI buzzwords so that the open source variants are sufficiently demonized as "alt-right" and "dangerous".
The thing that truly frightens me is that (even here on Hacker News) there is an increasing number of people that have fallen for the DEI FUD and are honestly cheering on the Sam Altmans of the world to control the flow of information.
IANAL but this is textbook unauthorized access of a computer as has been drilled into me in every boring corporate training I do for my security work and thus is "hacking".
Telling the judge "but I wasn't wearing my black hoodie while listening to K-pop while doing it!" is going to be about as effective as telling the judge the legal code can't be trusted because it's not backed by a CI/CD system adhering to Agile practices. (Which a non-trivial number of Hacker News posters probably think would work.)
Yudkowsky is a human LLM: his output is correctly semantically formed to appear, to a non-specialist, to fall into the subject domain, as a non-specialist would think the subject domain should appear, and so the non-specialist accepts it, but upon closer examination it's all word salad by something that clearly lacks understanding of both technological and philosophical concepts.
That so many people in the AI safety "community" consider him a domain expert has more to say with how pseudo-scientific that field is than his actual credentials as a serious thinker.
The thing that especially infuriates me is recruiters in this article turning around and trying to throw LinkedIn under the bus.
No one likes the nightmare dystopia of a platform that is LinkedIn. The only reason most people I know have LinkedIn accounts in the first place is because HR types have outsourced so much of their job to LinkedIn that it's viewed as professional suicide to not have a LinkedIn profile with 100s of contacts in this industry.
Recruiters don't like the GenAI and Easy Apply features on LinkedIn, it makes their jobs more difficult? Then stop making LinkedIn a mandatory account for tech workers. You have NO ONE to blame but yourselves.
It looks like he started regularly writing for The Intercept in January 2021, soon enough after Glenn Greenwald got kicked out for having the audacity to actually do investigative journalism and publicly sounded the alarm that The Intercept had been co-opted, that he would have known what he was getting into.
Furthermore, he doesn't once mention Glenn Greenwald's ouster, which would be a very obvious topic of discussion given the context.
I'm not giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one. This is a naked career move, and he's using his side's lingo buzzword salad to appeal to his potential readers.
There is a very strong professional code of conduct within security circles that you should monetize the security of your own product as little as possible, because your own security is not a revenue stream, it's your most basic obligation to your customer.
Like everything else in life, there's always trade-offs here, say, promoting your security practices to attract customers, but the general rule is that moment you start having different tiers of protection, you start venturing into some seriously morally grey areas.
Microsoft didn't just start venturing into morally grey areas, they decided to set up their entire business model there, to the point that they didn't even know that they were hacked because they couldn't generate revenue from that knowledge.
THAT'S why Microsoft deserves every piece of bad press it's getting right now. Not that they had a security incident (everyone will have security incidents), it's that they deliberately ignored accepted industry standards to do so, and to this day they're stonewalling efforts to assess the full impact.
Yeah, I don't like that we're at the point that we need licenses like this, but in a world where AWS has decided to "disrupt" the methods for open source monetization that the open source community has generally agreed upon as being in the spirit of open source, I don't see any other option.
You can find a plethora of critical viewpoints on Hacker News and the various blogs it links to which are well cognizant of the dangers of the tech industry.
The problem isn’t that Wired is critical, it’s that they’ve gone weirdly reactionary and their writing has gone so mass market dumbed down that Some Random Guy’s Blog is likely to have a better written and researched viewpoint.
I fiercely despise Google and want them to go out of business legitimately, but this argument is right up there with “the defendant used encryption, that proves they must have child porn on their computer Your Honor!”
It is not the responsibility of any company to make it easier for prosecutors to CTRL-F their emails to indict them, especially given how prosecutors can and will go on fishing expeditions.
Good. Fantastic. Wunderbar. Magnifique. "Maybe", "might", and "possibly" are all words that should be banned from scientific papers in all sections except "Future Work", and even there the reviewers should be on their guard for authors trying to sneak them in.
I read way too many papers back when I was a researcher where the authors did not have the proper evidence for claims they made, and they fell back on bullshit weasel words like this. It does NOT show that you're humble or retrospective. It shows that you didn't do your job but you really want your pet theory (or more likely, theme of your next grant's research) to be true, so you're going to act like it is anyway but with a safety hatch if you get called out on it.
The real elephant in the room, that the scientific community still refuses to address except when they think they can work it into a grant, is the reproducibility crisis.