This! $1.6+ TRILLION in infra spending from the big frontier labs. The earnings needed to drive a reasonable ROI to recoup that investment is simply not going to happen in a time frame where the numbers make sense.
The other insanity in all this the smartest computer scientists in the world are asking Congress to regulate them. Come. On. Really? Do we remember “The internet is not a truck, it’s a series of tubes…”
Why can’t the big labs form a Save The World Consortium and self-regulate?
Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage. It’s naive to think so.
What this conversation lacks is enough discussion of how these models can cause us harm—we are are so worried about AI but we allow Windows in critical infrastructure; we build JS/TS apps with thousands of dependencies; we generally don’t segment networks well enough; we don’t have adequate (sometimes any) detection capabilities in our systems, and so on.
In a prisoner's dilemma the players can't rely on one another to self-regulate. This is why Mafias kill snitches, so when their members are in a prisoner's dilemma they can rely on the knowledge that if themselves or the other party snitches they have more to lose than gain.
The problem is that there can not be any outside party to regulate this on a global scale
> Non-democratic counties (hey there China) will not abide by any agreement that constrains their advantage.
The main counterexample to this was nuclear weapons. Atom bombs have not been used to kill since the US did so. However today, the two largest nuclear powers have no legal agreement on arms control because Donald the Trump declined Russia's offer for an extension to the existing agreement. Now other countries are looking at Ukraine, Iran (attacked for wanting nukes) vs NKorea (not attacked because they have them), and Donald's own musings about the US nuclear umbrella being a bad idea (France is going to build more nukes now too)... and we now face nuclear proliferation again on a global scale, with tech that is nearly 100 years old now.
This isn't about individuals. The Republican Party is completely complicit and as long as members of that party hold office they will continue. I would love to have multiple qualified candidates to choose from across the spectrum but right now the system has been co-opted and a hard reset is the appropriate response.
> Atomization is a fact, and the best road out of it might be to connect with other like minded people wherever they are, but it seems that the Internet hasn't lived up to this promise. Why? What have we done wrong?
The Internet itself is just a way to transfer information. Humans are the ones manipulating that information for commercial and ideological reasons. I would say as several posters above have implied we have not evolved filters that protect us from this manipulation. Quite the opposite we have biases baked into us that are being actively exploited.
What we have done wrong is not find a way to manage this for the benefit of society rather than its harm, sadly that describes much of human history. When an environment exists that amplifies self serving behavior and concentration of power it is not surprising to see it come to reflect the worse rather than best of humanity.
> I think we’ll see new newsrooms emerge that reinvent what journalism is, are unafraid to build real, lasting, two-way relationships with the people they’re trying to serve
I agree with the idea, but there is a lot of subtlety. Journalism is a profession. Journalists must understand context and research while also finding ways to convey often complex concepts in an unbiased and comprehensible way. The average internet voice trying to fill this role is just spouting opinion and often with undisclosed motive.
If we do not solve the credibility gap that currently exists and let professionals be adequately compensated for doing good work in a difficult profession most of the suggestions here are just bandaids on a mortal wound.
Kagi search filters. I've had medium blocked since I first signed up. Occasionally I search from other peoples machines and realize how much crap on Medium I've just forgotten about. There are a lot of things to like about Kagi but the ease of removing junk sites from search results is near the top.
> This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.
They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.
The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.
A 7U cabinet in an overhead space that is difficult to access. Installation and configuration were a bit of a headache but ended up being worth it. There was a NAS in the office and they stripped 7 drives, sleds and all, out of it.
I'm guessing with such an obvious endpoint for the camera storage it never occurred to anyone there was a second box. I had something like this in mind when I wired the building. It seemed like a good idea to make onsite security footage much harder to find given the cameras were obvious and anyone breaking in would probably look to damage or destroy the system.
I really thought the cameras themselves were the deterrent, but these guys gave it a shot anyway. Cutting the cable to the starlink and walking off with the NAS drives seemed to be the plan.
In the future I'm going to add a local battery backed alarm connected to external siren and strobe that is immediate on opening the office door to draw attention. I was driving down to WWDC when the starlink went offline and saw the notice on my phone but wrote it off to equipment failure which gave them enough time to clean the place out pretty well.
The hole in my strategy was thinking nothing could happen without notification, but being in a car in the middle of Norther CA with spotty cell coverage and lots of distractions blew that up pretty hard. I'm also thinking one of ubiquiti's cellular backups is in my future. Starlink offline is annoying but not the attention grabber that a still of a guy walking in the door would have been. Cellular backup would have gotten me that.
I've read through your story and I think you're on the right track with what you're doing.
But, re: alarms, I'd like to add a suggestion: Indoor sirens. They can be intolerably, painfully loud for not very much money (because piezos are cheap and square waves are easy). Using a small, random mixture of them can let them beat at different frequencies and periods, which can make them very unpleasant to behold even with hearing protection.
If you feel like being clever, you can even run them with a local battery that activates when they're disconnected. If you feel like being extra-clever, you can make them activate when they don't have the correct termination resistance at the far end of the line, or exactly the correct voltage: This way, whether the wire goes open or short, the sirens activate.
Super-extra bonus points for using a combination of methods. Any time that a thief spends figuring this out is time they aren't carrying stuff out.
And if that still seems incomplete, then: Fill the shop with smoke. They can't function when they can't even see their hand in front of their face. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPgcysyFUiI
This seems like a good set of ideas if you can guarantee that you'll never have false alarms. I've had too many birds in warehouses and employees forgetting their codes to feel comfortable going full-hell-interior on alarm.
Birds? Yeah, perhaps. We didn't have any trouble with false alarms that I recall at one shop I worked at with a (relatively small, alarmed) warehouse space where the overhead door was usually open during warm days. I can see it happening, but the false alarms would happen regardless of the intensity of interior alarms.
And the system should not be armed when desirable people are inside, so that problem seems like it is for the birds.
When employees forget their codes and trip the alarm when they're the first ones into the shop at whatever time, they can just go outside to escape the hellish indoor torment. Not perfect, but not so bad either when the goal is to keep people out. :)
Perhaps the smoke should have a harder trigger than the noise, though, if for no other reason than it's a consumable that eventually needs to be fed more money every time it is activated.
> I have found that the fog generating alarm systems are the ones that will stop burglars in their tracks.
We have one of those at our vacation home (well it's more than a vacation home: I used to live there but it's now house we use for vacation, several times a year but anyways...).
We've got that system connected to the alarm. It's amazing and the system did evolve: in the early days the fog had to be projected in the middle of the room or it'd leave traces on the walls. Now it's a fog that doesn't leave any trace anymore.
The reason it works so well it's that it means: "Now you cannot see jack shit and in a few minutes the police is going to be there".
It kicked in once: the bad people quickly left.
> If they can't see, they're not going to hang about ...
No indeed...
> and if they've tooled up with NV then that's a whole different threat model.
In my case the alarm is still there and if the company monitoring the alarm system tells the police "there are people dressed up like it's war with night-vision system", then they'll take it even more seriously.
I've had a house without my alarm on (because kid had a medical emergency and was between life and death: I left in a hurry and forgot to turn the alarm on) visited by burglars and it ain't a fun thing.
I highly recommend alarm systems that generate a fog. It's a wonderful thing.
And that fog doesn't last too long: by the time your back at your home, it's like the would-be-thieves: gone.
NV isn't going to do anything to help with a thick fog. Honestly, with a thick enough white fog, ultra bright flood lights might be the move. Cause a white out basically.
Better still, fill the room with the same scent they add to town gas. Anyone with an ounce of self preservation will get out of the building VERY FAST.
That would legitimately be horrifying - you break in somewhere, suddenly all is dark and fog spreads everywhere, then the growling begins and then you're Ewok'd from behind by a tree.
Cutting Starlink and stripping drives from a NAS? This seems like a pretty sophisticated operation, much more so than the usual copper thieves and the like. Do you have reason to believe your shop was specifically targeted?
I'd be alarmed that they seemed to know you were going to WWDC. Like, they were tech-aware if they took the drives while you went to tech event... how did they know any of this / scout you?
> In the future I'm going to add a local battery backed alarm
Wait, you have an office full of expensive equipment but decided to half-ass DIY the security? No wonder you were targeted.
A proper monitored alarm system would have prevented this. They pretty much all have built-in cellular backup now. Do yourself a favor next time and call a professional.
Don't blow your entire budget on cameras then wonder if you need an alarm system because the only good the cameras will serve is to watch your stuff disappear. You mentioned California so expect these guys to be roaming free in short order if they see any jail time at all. Good luck with seeing any restitution or getting your stuff back.
You'd think. However, this is a rural area with a sheriffs department that has budget constraints. I know of 2 shops with monitored alarm systems that were successfully robbed over the last 5 years because by the time anyone followed up they were gone.
Your statement that "a proper monitored alarm system would have prevented this" is optimistic. I never had any particular expectation that if somewhat intelligent criminals decided to break in when no one was there that I wasn't going to lose whatever they could get at. The cameras let me document what happened and when and what was taken. If the imagery ends up having any other value that's a bonus rather than the point.
Yes sheriff's dept response times can be terrible. But someone could have been there a lot sooner, and it does put pressure on the perpetrators. I would suggest trying to find out why you were targeted, if the establishment was cased beforehand, etc. These crimes are not usually random.
Chances are, the thieves were monitoring the local dispatch over the radio (rural departments are not usually doing anything fancy) and knew exactly how long they had.
Any video surveillance system is foiled by a simple mask. Thieves who know to plan a break-in when you're away usually do their homework and come prepared.
> Any video surveillance system is foiled by a simple mask.
Do not under-estimate the number of thieves on the left-hand side of the bell curve: if you can deal with those that's half the population that's less of a problem.
(The thieves on the right-hand side of the bell curve generally work on Wall Street and generally don't do break-and-enters.)
This is why I think someone should market a cheap SIGINT tool that collects BT/BTLE/Wi-Fi data from nearby devices.
I've got this setup running on a Raspberry Pi near my front door and it collects all sorts of useful data, even from people walking by on the sidewalk, 30 feet and two walls away.
At some point, I'd love to explore vehicle emissions more, too.
I've worked on something to do this, it' not perfect. It listens for 24 hours, learns what is 'normal'. Calibrates strength of signal (dogwalker on sidewalk, ignore) getting closer than that, between 10pm and 5am, turn on a light or two. Not meaning to spam, but it's at wispyalert.com . Any thoughts, I'd be interested to hear.
Funny enough a router collecting this data near a busy enough highway can bog itself down by collecting unique Wi-Fi identifiers from all the passing cars' networks, not to mention all the hotspots on passing commuter trains.
It never occurs to router makers a static base could see a million Wi-Fi networks come and go every week.
I've lost track of the number of times Claude has basically said "it was like that when i got here" in the face of a clearly bogus choice and easily disproved explanation.
They should add a feature called "auto-really" that just automatically says "really?" after the chatbot answers a question to check if it's going to 180 upon this tiniest bit of scrutinity.
You joke but this is almost literally what Chain-of-Thought does, at least in the early days. They basically just added "Wait," to the model's output and fed it back to the model iirc
I tried asking about how my state treats violations of updoc. It replied with a long ass wall of text about how serious the Updoc statutes were in my state and how judges punish harshly.
I pointed out that updoc is nonsense and asked why it didn't catch that. The answer was that it was my fault for giving it bad info.
You need to hit the retry/regenerate button more, it's there for a reason.
While the "stochastic parrots" thing is a bit overblown, IME most LLMs tend to surprisingly different responses even without changing the context, especially if they're hallucinating or doing something "wrong".
> i guess i don't blame a writer who's job is threatened by this technology to write a piece like this
> it's the same as toll booth operators complaining about fastpass
I think your analogy would work better if toll booth operators built the roads, the cars, the toll booths themselves, and then were all replaced by fastpass.
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