Yeah, reminds me of the "Security" xkcd (https://xkcd.com/538/) - a threat from a good ol' 5-dollar wrench defeating state-of-the-art encryption.
Never estimate how state actors can use violence (or merely the threat of it) to force people to do things. The only way to respond to that is not through code or algorithms or protocols, but through political action (whether it be violent or non-violent)
Power. Real power. The power to kill you, take your property, harm your family, tell lies about you on the news, etc.
I've always been surprised by the naivety of tech people with respect to this question. The only possible solution to power is power itself. Software can be a small part of that, but the main part of it is human organization: credible power to be used against other organized holders of power. No amount of technology will let you go it alone safely. At best, you may hope to hide away from power with the expectation that its abuse will just skip over you. That is the best you could hope for if all you want are software solutions.
They first tried to manage it by putting the blame 100% on their pedophile users and obviously absolving themselves of any reponsibility (cue tired analogies with knife makers not responsible for stabbings).
Fortunately this narration did not catch traction.
> cue tired analogies with knife makers not responsible for stabbings
The knife maker will be in hot water if you ask them for a knife and you're very specific about how you'll break the law with it, and they just give it to you and do nothing else about it (equivalent to the prompt telling the LLM exactly the illegal thing you want).
Even more if the knife they made is illegal, an automatic knife or a dagger (equivalent to the model containing the necessary information to create CSAM).
There is no blanket ban on politics. The guidelines only say "Most stories on politics" are off topic. The top guideline is that if it "gratifies intellectual curiosity" then it is okay. Even the tech angle is not mandatory, unless you believe that politics is just inherently unable to be the object of curiosity (to each his own but I would disagree with that).
Nor did I claim there was. My point is simply that there is a very obvious pattern to what passes this subjective "gratifies intellectual curiosity" test among those with the ability to flag posts from the front page.
Case in point, this thread is now being visibly flagged off the homepage:
Everytime there a post containing a whiff of negative sentiment related to the 2024-2028 US administration, a wave of elective sociopaths swoop in to flag posts and derail discussion. Even if they understand the merit of the material, they will bemoan the political aspect. Even if they agree with the sentiment, there is absolutely an audience that prefers to ignore any sense of personal responsibility or culpability, however small, to the environment today-- and choose to attempt to stifle discussion broadly instead of politely allowing others to meaningfully engage with it. I believe this activity boils down: 1) agenda or 2) stubbornly evading shame/guilt
> a wave of elective sociopaths swoop in to flag posts and derail discussion
The biggest vulnerably of the entire social media model is the "engagement pyramid" where the number of viewers is much larger than the number of upvoters is much larger than the number of commenters.
HN gets ~5 million monthly unique visitors, or 150,000 per day (conservatively assuming each visitor only shows up once, so that number is probably much larger). But if you look the top post right now has around ~1,500 upvotes, and ~200 comments (and, if you look, comment sections frequently have single users commenting repeatedly, so less than 200 actual people commenting).
This makes it very easy and very worth it to run even loosely coordinated commenting/upvoting rings. 10 people can easily downvote a new post off the homepage, give the impression that the community disapproves of a certain opinion, disrupt conversation, etc.
What's funny is that proposing this is often treated as a claim of a wild conspiracy theory. But the weakness in most conspiracy theories is that they require high levels of coordination among similarly large groups of actors, often for little reward. In this case it's almost more outrageous to claim that this isn't happening (especially since I have personally seen teams of people coordinate to get their startups work on the front page). I suspect even 3 very coordinated people could do a lot to control the front page (or alternatively increasingly large N of increasingly less coordinated people).
Yeah, the more I look at different articles on here, the more I feel like the flagging is pretty targeted at any ideology at all left of center. Or specifically criticism of the current administration.
All that their "anti-politics" flags really do is to make HN more of a "head-in-the-sand" echo-chamber for right-wing ideologies.
It was completely impossible to post anything about Gaza on here through the entire course of the genocide.
It's not necessarily "right-wing" per se, for example during COVID questioning the party line on masks and vaccines could catch you massive downvotes and flagging. It's this technocratic neoliberal cryptofascist thing the people who have always actually run Silicon Valley adhere to.
To me the most horrible thing about this is the reaction of government officials.
I'd imagine that in a civilized democratic country it would be something along the lines of "Let's make sure there's a fair investigation". That's not what I'm hearing from US.
They’re gloating, they love this. They love being able to spit in the face of the people and tell them that they’re absolutely fine with what’s going on and we should prepare for things to get worse.
I think this was discussed in Jon Bentley "programming pearls"?
Also in the same book it was mentioned that the disjoint cycles method (also mentioned in the article) was worse for paging/caching than the three reverses method.
That's probably true for small primitive types, but if your objects are expensive to move (like a large struct) it might be beneficial to minimize swaps.
Yeah, it might be interesting to run some profiling of both algorithms and see how they perform dependent on the size of the blocks being swapped (which doesn't even have to be equal to the size of the object in the array).
It is discussed in that book. Very fun read, all told. Highly recommended if folks find this sort of thing fun. I think I should thumb through it again. :D
Yep. "Oh grok is being too woke" gets musk to comment that they'll fix it right away. But turn every woman on the platform into a sex object to be the target of humiliation? That's just good fun apparently.
I even think that the discussion focusing on csam risks missing critical stuff. If musk manages to make this story exclusively about child porn and gets to declare victory after taking basic steps to address that without addressing the broader problem of the revenge porn button then we are still in a nightmare world.
Women should be able to exist in public without having to constantly have porn made of their likeness and distributed right next to their activity.
I don't buy the "I only provide the tool" cop out. Musk does control what Grok spews out and just chooses not to act in this case.
When Grok stated that Israel was committing genocide, it was temporarily suspended and fixed[0]. If you censor some things but not others, enabling the others becomes your choice. There is no eating the cookie and having it too - you either take a "common carrier" stance or censor, but also take responsibility for what you don't censor.
If you follow the "tool-maker is responsible for tool-use" thread of thought to its logical conclusion, you have to hold creators of open-weights models responsible for whatever people do with these models. Do you want to live in a world that follows this rule?
But we don't have to take things to furthest conclusions. We can very easily draw both a moral and legal line between "somebody downloaded an open weight model, created a prompt from scratch to generate revenge porn of somebody, and then personally distributed that image" and "twitter has a revenge porn button right next to every woman on the platform that generates and distributes revenge porn off of a simple sentence."
People who say "society should permit X, but only if it's difficult" have a view of the world incompatible with technological progress and usually not coherent at all.
You seem unfamiliar with these things we have called laws. I recommend reading up on what they are and how they work. It would be generally useful to understands such things.
The core issue is that X is now a tool for creating and virally distributing these images anonymously to a large audience, often targeting the specific individuals featured in the images. For example, to any post with a picture, any user can simply reply "@grok take off their clothes and make them do something degrading", and the response is then generated by X and posted in the same thread. That is an entirely different kind of tool from an open-weight model.
The LLM itself is more akin to a gun available in a store in the "gun is a tool" argument (reasonable arguments on both side in my opinion); however, this situation more like a gun manufacturer creating a program to mass distribute free pistols to a masked crowd, with predictable consequences. I'd say the person running that program was either negligent or intentionally promoting havoc to the point where it should be investigated and regulated.
The phrase “its logical conclusion” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Why on earth would that absurdity be the logical conclusion? To me it looks like a very illogical conclusion.
Importantly, X also provides the hardware to run the model, a friendly user-interface around it, and the social platform to publicly share and discuss outputs from the model. It's not just access to the model.
This is still techno-optimism. The architecture of your code will not to that. We are long past the limits of what you can fix with code.
The only action that matters is political and I don't think voting cuts it.
reply