> GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.
I had no idea they charged you to run your own runner. I am immediately of the opinion that is wrong.
Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product. Or maybe "your actions only run when we have spare compute". I've personally given Github money (back when private repos cost $$) and wouldn't be concerned about doing it again.
They don't charge you for your own runner but they wanted to. The downtime hasn't really impacted me and not really a reason for me to leave github, but making me pay for using my own infrastructure would quickly encourage me to leave github.
> Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product.
This is a real problem for acquiring customers. CI/CD / Actions in general has a low initial perceived value and a high perceived value after use while being primarily a commodity product (serverless compute). To acquire customers they need to offer a free tier, to make money they need to charge their heavy users more, but because it is a commodity their heavy users will self-host runners or jump ship.
Action minutes is a really good proxy for value gain from cloud git services, where repo count, user count, file count/size, etc isn't.
I think a reasonable amount is fine for them to serve as the orchestrator, queue, and control plane for self hosted runners, has to be reasonable though. Think monthly utility service cost to maintain service vs usage.
> There was also a paper years ago that showed a tweaked model coming up with 20k novel pathogens each deadly to humans in some number of hours
> If you disagree with it, where do you disagree with it?
How would a malicious actor:
1. Successfully turn these 20k pathogens into actual reproducing viruses / bacteria / etc (in a lab)
2. Successfully turn that lab prototype into something weaponized (i.e. as a bio-terrorism drop in NYC)
And then
3. How is this materially different from today? If we can produce these pathogens in a lab and they can be successfully turned into a weaponizable bioweapon, what is AI accelerating?
1 and 2 have had simple, proof-of-concept answers for more than a decade now:
> 1. Email sets of DNA strings to one or more online laboratories which offer DNA synthesis, peptide sequencing, and FedEx delivery. (Many labs currently offer this service, and some boast of 72-hour turnaround times.)
> 2. Find at least one human connected to the Internet who can be paid, blackmailed, or fooled by the right background story, into receiving FedExed vials and mixing them in a specified environment.
Those routes haven't gotten any more complicated for an AI to use in the intervening time.
And that's just one set of ideas. You can read the comments for dozens more creative ideas, and likely for responses to every objection you can think of. The key is that AI is getting better and better at problem solving, so anything a human can come up with in a few minutes is likely already within its reach.
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> How is this materially different from today?
Because the should-be-uncontroversial assumption is that AI is going to keep getting better at every step of the process, and be able to do it faster and more at scale. Currently it might struggle, but with a thousand agents? It's already able to find novel math results and cybersecurity flaws. It would be incredibly naive to believe "social engineering" is somehow a unique and unsolvable problem for a sufficiently advanced AI.
For #1, I would seek a laboratory capable of _actually_ creating a _live virus_. That link to lesswrong, while interesting, does not actually indicate how and broadly reads as incredibly speculative.
While this is far out of my wheelhouse, I am not aware of a commercial venture doing actual organic creation or manipulation of material (I.e. capable of creating a modified strain of COVID). This broadly still seems in the nation-state level of lab.
But, just to get this goalpost out of the way, even _if_ such a venture exists, then would it not hold a bunch of doomsday cultists would already try to do this? This is what I’m getting at by my third question. What changes? Why don’t we see modified anthrax attacks in Palestine or Ukraine _today_?
I take no contention with the social engineering argument. I fully accept that LLMs, today and for a while yet, are capable of social engineering their way into anything. I likewise take no contention with the sheer amount of effort LLMs could wield in pursuit of this.
Your argument is that NASA could launch 18 rockets for ~$160 million total or ~8.8 million per launch?
Or is your argument that the "real" cost of this $1.6B SpaceX / Space Force contract is in fact closer to ~$16B or ~$160B after accounting for tax subsidies and investment fraud?
It is a for profit company. Therefore profit margin must be achieved. What is profit margin but waste? Government is allowed to actually run at cost or under cost. Contracting with for profit entities therefore makes no sense, other than to further the profit of those entities.
So your argument is that NASA, by virtue of being a government entity unburdened from profit seeking, could launch 18 rockets for less than $1.6B total or $88 million per launch?
Theoretically, absolutely. Of course it gets messy in reality. But theoretically there is no reason they couldn’t. If someone in a certain office snapped their fingers they could nationalize spacex for example and remove profitability requirements while preserving institutional knowledge and team structure. Just musk will no longer be the richest man on the planet.
> Theoretically, absolutely. Of course it gets messy in reality
That’s like saying “theoretically you could get to space by flapping your wings”—you just need to ignore inconvenient laws of physics. Economics describes forces of the real world, you cannot just wave them away.
So what? I'm guessing spacex can be even lower dollar per kilo if they didn't have to make profit. That is my whole point. People are missing that point and going "well nasa doesn't have the talent blabla" that just misses this point entirely. Profit is a cost. You can never convince me profit is not a cost.
This is now an argument I can start to get behind. There isn't a need for profit seeking or "dollar optimization" and I fully subscribe to the argument that the government can just "do things". I likewise fully subscribe to the argument that the ability for the government to just "do things" has been eroded over time systematically.
But, like, that's divergent from "This SpaceX contract is pure grift" that OP was not so subtly implying.
Look, you’re absolutely technically right, but SpaceX is one of capitalism’s best examples.
Because… is the Falcon launch business profitable? SpaceX has spent massive amounts of money to launch their rockets hundreds of times to bring the cost this low. Because they have economies of scale and can learn from their mistakes at a volume no rocket manufacturer has ever achieved.
So your question should actually be: can NASA build a rocket that can do 18 cargo launches for less than $1.6B? The answer is probably no. Because Falcon 9 isn’t a one-off design, it’s the cheapest launch system ever designed. By a massive margin.
A bigger point here is that, sure, you’re right, there are many late-stage capitalistic businesses which basically only exist to increase profit and cut corners as much as possible, to customer detriment. And probably scam the government out of huge amounts of money.
Compensation for the risks taken and opportunity cost lost by doing this instead of something else.
Are you serious? I suggest you re-evaluate your priors because you're spouting things that demonstrate a severe lack of consideration for 1st, 2nd and 3rd order effects.
Brother the government just labels "profit" differently. Most people would call it grift, pork, or "inefficiency". Government waste dwarfs private sector waste by orders of magnitude. The utopia where governments efficiently and wisely put our tax dollars to their best use doesn't exist, never has, and likely never will.
Mostly because government today pays out the nose for contracted labor rates as doing anything in house has been blown apart by free market reaganists over the years.
The soviet union, the only non-capitalist country ever to have a technology comparable to ours, was really fucking inefficient. E.g. Soviets had 50% higher CO2 output per ton of steel than the U.S. due to poor energy efficiency.
It exists here too in small subsets of government. A parks dept that hires their own landscapers instead of contracting with a landscaping company is such an example of this utopia. A municipal power company with greatly reduced rates in comparison to a private utility. A university that runs its own prep kitchen facility over prepackaged GFS/cisco.
I had no idea they charged you to run your own runner. I am immediately of the opinion that is wrong.
Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product. Or maybe "your actions only run when we have spare compute". I've personally given Github money (back when private repos cost $$) and wouldn't be concerned about doing it again.
That is to say, I think you've nailed it.