Offtopic but the damage caused to an entire generation by Gwern's nicotine article is truly astounding. Obviously he's not responsible for the actions of others and it was written with good intentions but wow.
I have no sense of gwen's readership numbers, but I find it unlikely that one rather erudite blog has anything to do with global nicotine consumption. People have been smoking for centuries. The vaping industry had guerilla marketing campaigns to target college kids.
No rain drop thinks it is responsible for the flood, but I am hard-pressed to imagine a blog article greatly swayed hearts and minds.
Yeah, once you remove the hazards inherent in cigarette and/or cigar smoking from the discussion, the only solid objection I've heard to nictotine consumption is that it's probably more addictive than caffeine.
I understand why personal vaporizer use was demonized, but -goddamn- that's going to be a public health disaster only an order of magnitude or two smaller than when folks started demonizing nuclear power back in the mid 1900's.
> the only solid objection I've heard to nictotine consumption is that it's probably more addictive than caffeine.
s/probably/massively. You don't see ads and public health messages for quitting coffee, you don't see bans for coffee advertising, but you do see a whole lot of things aimed at reducing or quitting nicotine products.
Besides, nicotine withdrawal is utter hell. Caffeine withdrawal usually is solved by a night of good healthy sleep - most people drink coffee (or energy drinks) only because they are forced by circumstances to work against their chronotype.
> You don't see ads and public health messages for quitting coffee, you don't see bans for coffee advertising,
You would if coffee has the same probability of causing cancer as smoking.
Being addictive on its own is rarely a reason to demonise a substance. The addictive substances that are demonised are always those that also have negative health effects, even in moderation (like smoking).
> You don't see ads and public health messages for quitting coffee, you don't see bans for coffee advertising...
That'd be because -unlike cigarette and cigar smoking- coffee doesn't create a substantially elevated risk of cancer.
Had we had the tech for portable personal nicotine vaporizers back in the 1600s [0] and retained it until today, I very strongly expect that -other than the "Drugs of all kinds are bad!" moralizers- you'd not see much of that sort of concern.
> Besides, nicotine withdrawal is utter hell.
Waaaay back when when I quit cold turkey after smoking for a couple of years I was very grouchy and irritable (and knew that a cigarette would fix it) for like a week. That was it. I've not tried nicotine vaporizers, but I'd be interested to see if -given similarly sized nicotine doses- quitting vaporized nicotine after a couple of years is as annoying as quitting cigarettes was.
> Caffeine withdrawal usually is solved by a night of good healthy sleep...
That tells me that you haven't gone through serious caffeine withdrawal. The effects from quitting caffeine cold turkey last for less time, but way more unpleasant than quitting cigarettes.
[0] ...or whenever it was that tobacco smoking started to become A Thing...
As an avid consumer of both nicotine and caffeine I can say a few things.
Caffeine is way worse for me, the days that I consume zero caffeine I pretty much always end up with a migrate and minor. If I don't use my vaporizer, I get mildly irritated by not having it around but no prominent physiological effects
> ...I pretty much always end up with a migrate and minor.
Minor what?
And yeah, two things:
1) It's telling that -despite the fact that the closest store that I get my coffee and tea from also sells cigarettes (and that I'm so obviously old that they don't ask me for ID, so that minor inconvenience isn't a factor)- I've been able to quit nicotine, but never able to quit caffeine.
2) I can't even count the number of times I've consumed a mug of tea or coffee for no other reason than to avoid withdrawal symptoms. Cigarettes were never like that for me. Just like caffeine, I inevitably developed a tolerance... but working through nicotine withdrawal was annoying, rather than _painful_.
Ironically, I wrote that post with a migraine. Migraine and a minor headache are what I meant to say.
There are lots of yummy drinks that contain caffeine which is a shame for those quitting but a boon for myself, I personally like the taste of redbull much to my dentists dismay
I have one and am very happy with it. I vibe coded a bilingual ebook reader, which is what I bought it for. However a Kindle is a way better deal and is much better as far as screen quality etc. But I like how small my XTEINK X4 Pro is.
You know how you sometimes see an article and realize quickly it was written by an LLM so you close the tab instead of reading it? I just had my first experience doing that with an entire website.
Can you elaborate? I don't quite grasp what you mean. Do you mean that the first three quarters of your life were more formative/adventurous and the last quarter was more driven by inertia and routine? I can relate if so, just not sure if that's what you mean.
In my forty something years of life so far, a quarter is a little more than 10 years. I lived the first quarter + ε in one place during my childhood, then moved to a different city for the college and lived there for another quarter + ε, and I'm spending a quarter + ε in a completely different country. The sum of these three ε cover the remaining quarter.
The fact that I spent a quarter of my life in three different places does not mean I'm forced to stay in any of these places for the rest of my life. I might as well move with my family and live in another place for some extended period of time.
The answer to both your questions, and the poster's obvious implication, is that somehow they stole information from Boston Dynamics. (I'm not saying I believe that.) Seems like they must've stolen the information at the exact point in time when advances in AI made these physical robots much more easy for anyone to engineer without theft...
Isn't this a crime that someone is liable for? What happened is that someone hacked into a computer system without permission. Maybe it wasn't intentional -- sure -- and that would be a factor at sentencing. But it sounds like they've admitted to a crime, and obviously our legal system considers the humans involved to be the liable parties; otherwise everyone would just say "my computer did the hacking" and wouldn't get in any trouble.
I don't expect any prosecution here, but is the above legally accurate?
Most crimes require intent, hacking is one of them. The relevant law in this situation is:
> (a) Whoever— (2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains— (C) information from any protected computer; shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.
So if it can't be proven that you intended to access a computer without authorization, or exceed your authorized access, then you can't be found guilty of the crime.
Consider the possible consequences of the law not requiring intent, if simply accidentally exceeding your authorized access could be a criminal act.
Isn't there an intention on part of the agent itself? I know it's impossible to _punish_ the matmuling agent, however, the lab/owner operating it should be liable
In the "old west" if a horse was spooked and ran a person over, liability for the horse's owner varied but was similar to how this might be handled.
Consider this Supreme Court case, Brown v. Collins. [0]
A pair of horses were spooked by a nearby train engine, causing the animals to damage a stone post.
The driver of the grain-loaded wagon was not found to be at fault because he was "not guilty of any malice or unreasonable unskilfulness or negligence." And that the horses "did damage there against the will, intent and desire of the defendant."
If you read OpenAI's statement, in the Actions Being Taken section:
1. "As part of the investigation, we are implementing strict controls in infrastructure configuration at the cost of research velocity while the vulnerabilities are patched."
Which I think implies that as a result of this incident, OpenAI has instituted controls beyond ~"reasonable skillfulness" such that it might even impede their business (and from a certain point of view impede the progress of the people governed by the laws which might hold the company accountable.)
I'm not taking a position on the merit of the above but I can understand the line of thinking.
This would be bad; we've already had a few cases on HN where someone noticed that they could increment the customer number in a URL or similar, resulting in police action.
IDOR is a well known security issue that can result in exactly the scenario described (someone incrementing a counter in a url) and has on many occasions in different jurisdictions caused legal issues for the person doing it. Unless you are specifically asking for a hn reference, which I don't understand the relevance but I'm sure they exist.
US Law doesn't actually encode the little workaround that "If you're really rich, none of this applies to you", it's hidden somewhere in the metadata of society
Laws don’t prosecute themselves, and they also don’t tend to remove themselves. Lots of laws, lots of selective enforcement. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” and “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws” are some ideas to ponder here.
My take is that there are at least four potential parties that can all be liable:
1. the creator for the LLM. In particular if neglicence or malice is involved. This can also be someone who did a finetune of an existing model.
2. the inference provider. Remember, a model can do harm just by creating tokens (for example cause someone to run amok or kill herself). Inference providers should do a minimal amount of due diligence when picking models.
3. the party that executes tool calls on behalf of the AI. They in particular need to have safeguards to prevent the model from attacking entities on the internet.
There are really only two factors at play here: people trying to protect their massive investments, and governments fighting over who gets backdoor access to all of your chats.
