This is a serious misunderstanding of the Bartz case, which resulted in a $1.5B settlement on the part of Anthropic to authors whose works they pirated from LibGen
What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?
What if they hide a laptop in a wiring closet and then try to come back for it while covering up their face to hide from a camera inside of it?
What if they run from the police who try to stop them?
In any case, we don't have to have quibble over shades of gray, it's all in the well-documented write ups and court docs. Mens rea is easily established here.
> What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?
If you think anyone who makes a new account in a videogame for getting an old account banned should be charged with felony hacking, that's certainly a position you can take...
> What if they run from the police who try to stop them?
Running from police officers isn't generally considered hacking.
What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?
Was your response facetious? The AI labs literally do this, right now.
And ultimately, we'll never know what a court of law would have said because he chose (to the extent that anyone wrestling with the mental illness that is suicidal depression really chooses) to never have his day in court, unfortunately.
Are you trying to make the case against Anthropic stronger? Because these are not arguments against Swartz (and other people) but they apply much stronger against Anthropic.
But we all know: billionnaires don't have to face responsibility for their actions, and the justice system is fundamentally dishonest. To REALLY drive that point home, let's do what you suggest and go over the worst crimes of Aaron Swartz. You know, the reason the FBI drove him to suicide to force him
> What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?
Anthropic has done this, and a LOT more than Aaron Swartz ever did.
> What if they hide a laptop in a wiring closet and then try to come back for it while covering up their face to hide from a camera inside of it?
Anthropic has done this, and a LOT more than Aaron Swartz ever did.
> What if they run from the police who try to stop them?
Anthropic has done this, and a LOT more than Aaron Swartz ever did.
But why stop there?
* What if despite all the above they KEPT hacking more?
Anthropic has done this.
* What if they did not just hack system, but tried to deceive humans into publishing malicious code into government systems, both succesfully and unsuccesfully
Anthropic has done this.
* Same as the above, but with physical treats against the safety of the software maintainers?
Anthropic has done this.
* What if after all that, they state that they would develop bioweapons?
Anthropic has done this.
Can you imagine a human hacker without money doing this? They would have been shot on the spot rather than arrested. Yet, somehow, I don't think Dario Amodei will face that sort of attention ...
mitnick also just logged into shit with default passwords and got ppl to send him source codes and give him access to stuff. by todays 20-stage crazy ass exploits its also not really hacking... these things change over time.
If you leave the door to your house unlocked, am I welcome to come in, pop on into your utility closet, plug into a switch port and take everything your machines allow me to fetch?
I don't disagree with what he was doing from a moral standpoint or a hacker standpoint, but it's very easy to convict him.
This discussion typically devolves into an argument about what is "publicly accessible." No reasonable person (i.e. those who serve on juries - not autistic software engineers) would agree that someone who isn't even a student at a school is legally entitled to enter a building (unlocked or not), venture into their utility room and access protected computer resources.
Everyone loves to make this about JSTOR: they weren't the only victim. MIT was far more aggrieved; JSTOR blocking his Harvard account access and him proceeding to breach their TOS ("clickwrap agreements aren't law!!!") and circumvent their defenses isn't required to convict him of CFAA violations.
Why can't I go into a bank, sit down at a personal banker's desk who is away on vacation, plug into a switch port and do whatever I want? There's no lock on his cubicle, the door was open! This is the legal equivalent of "neener neener, I'm not touching you."
Mens rea is an important thing people love to sweep under the rug with this case:
• First and foremost: Why did he have to go to into a closet at MIT to fetch documents? Why not do it at home or a public library?
• Because of rate limits and/or authentication requirements. He *knew* he could not obtain the access he needed through other means, so he had to trespass to do it.
• Why did he cover his face with his bicycle helmet... just when passing by cameras?
• He wasn't some weirdo who liked to wear his helmet that way: he stopped immediately when he believed he didn't need to conceal his identity any further. He *knew* he shouldn't be there.
• He registered his guest account using false credentials: "Gary Host" and "Grace Host" - "Ghost"
• Why wouldn't he just use his real name if he believed what he was doing was legitimate?
• When MIT blocked his IP, he released/renewed and fetched a new one. Fine, no problem on its own, hard to prove intent there. When MIT subsequently blocked his MAC address, he proceeded to change one character and kept on downloading.
• Computer people will try to reduce this to "MAC addresses aren't legal identifiers blah blah blah." The beliefs of zealous third parties are completely irrelevant: direct measures were taken to prevent his access, he recognized and immediately circumvented them. He *knew* what he was doing. That's what matters.
• Why hide his hardware under boxes? In absence of all of the other facts, sure, one could argue that he didn't want students at this ultra-prestigious Ivy League school to steal his shit, but to a reasonable person weighing the totality of the circumstances: he was again concealing his actions because he knew they were wrong.
No one is sweeping mens rea under the carpet. That he knew what he was doing isnt in dispute - its that the punishment didnt fit the crime. If that standard were applied evenly, then the CEOs of certain AI companies would each be facing millennia in prison for the volume of copyright infringement they knowingly and wilfully performed.
If you had them on camera doing it and proof they did it knowingly and willingly, then you could.
Discovery forces evidence to be turned over, but only if it exists and you know about it. Does the evidence exist?
It did in Swartz’s case, unfortunately for him. We don’t excuse an individual just because it’s harder to hold a corporation accountable. States have immense power over corps old and new, btw, it’s a failure of the people to not demand that be exercised, but this whole discussion is a non sequitur already.
> you conceal your actions if you believe others will try to stop you
Which is conveniently exactly what the statute requires to establish criminality: knowingly exceeding authorized access. They have a lawful right to stop you (revoking authorization), you do not have a right to proceed anyway. This is the "wrong" and is accordingly a federal felony.
putting morality to the side in favor of legal pragmatism , certain jurisdictions classify the act of accessing data without prior authority as data espionage
What annoys me is that when I asked Claude to use code I had already written with selenium to scrape a web page, it refused and told me it wasn't going to get into an arms race with cloudflare. One rule for them and another for us.
Disclosure: I'm not a Debian Developer, yet I have worked on Debian derivatives and I'm somewhat familiar with internals of Debian from technical and human perspectives.
While I'm perfectly on the same page with the critics of the LLM generated summaries, I'm a bit torn on the issue.
For anyone not familiar with Debian ecosystem, there's a helper tool called Lintian. Lintian does all kinds of checks from package formatting, licenses to dependency management (which can detect both unnecessary yet included and necessary but missing dependencies via static analysis of your tool if necessary).
It's expected that your package to be "Lintian clean" to be able to included in Debian with minimum friction and wait. Even though it's Lintian clean, your package also checked by teams which are severely understaffed, and composed solely of voluntary people.
NEW queue also receives tremendous influx of packages (which can be considered a torrent, even). Since noon, there are 10 more ITP (intention to package) bugs open in my inbox.
As a result, at one hand, these people need every help they can get because getting new trainees and getting them to learn the intricacies is hard, on the other hand LLM generated text rightfully generate negative reactions from people. However, giving developers an automated check of what looks right and what looks wrong is helpful, in my perspective.
I wonder what people would have said it was a deterministic tool generating these reports and sending people these summaries as a "hey consider this feedback until a human has time to see your package".
This is a hard question and we need to think before impulsive reactions. I even don't have all or any of the answers, but at least I have some insight why this is there.
That's true, but if the LLM is calling a tool to provide the base information to extrapolate, the results will not change even if the sentence structure is never the same.
Debian has an extensive toolchain to check things. Having a set of deterministic tools which feed LLM with data can be beneficial, though.
Again, I'm not defending the LLM here, just want to show how hard the problem is to begin with.
That's just semantics around the word "performance".
We're messaging each other right now inside a heavily sandboxed virtual environment that interprets XML-like markup and runs a text-based JITted scripting language from the 90s. It doesn't really matter that it's extremely inefficient, since it's still effectively instant.
Actually not. Watt per task is a metric bothers more than LLM operators and users. We care about it a lot, and working a lot to measure and improve it, and we're not doing it in context of AI or LLMs.
Effectively instant means nothing, since everything is fast for small n. I love to give this example from a codebase I have worked on during my Ph.D. The problem which took half an hour under Matlab was done in ~40 seconds with mine, however, a thousand-step version of the same problem would take 11 hours. Saving a single second from that 40 second loop would shave my work by ~20 minutes, and this will compound for bigger problems still.
Just because we see the results instantly, doesn't mean it's fast or efficient by any means. It means we might forego optimizing it for sufficiently small n, if we don't care about that part of the code. That's all.
> The watts per task is abysmal compared to a desk calculator.
It depends on the calculator and task at hand. Consider graphing, integration or any programmable needs, and they might converge. ALU of a processor is pretty efficient at what it does.
> The app is less efficient only in an abstract, impractical way.
Again, depends, as I said above. You tend to brush efficiency away because you only mentally measure time to completion, only, which is understandable.
The problem is that they are 'everything boxes'. They're the first application that can actually lay claim to being a universal computing aid. What then happens is that people will start using their newfound hammer and before you know it everything becomes a nail, even if for a particular problem there is a better solution you can't beat 'nothing to invest, nothing to learn, get an answer in 10 seconds flat' from a convenience perspective. If I look at the things people use LLMs for I wonder why they take such an unsuitable tool, and then I marvel at the fact that they actually get more-or-less to where they would have gotten with the proper tools, and most likely in less time.
Slide rules displaced tables, calculators displaced slide rules and calculators themselves were displaced for the most part (they are still in use, in education but not nearly as much as they used to be outside of that) by the PC.
LLMs do that sort of thing for just about every information processing aid.
LLMs should be for general/high level work. For example, an LLM with the right harness could fetch and use that CNN, or train it's own CNN or other model to use for this task.
The harness in my experience makes a huge different too. Out of curiosity I tried having Gemini chat (with Argon) try to solve a level of this new puzzle game I'm linking (Order of the Sinking Star). It just got in an infinite loop and crashed. Then I try Antigravity with Flash 3.8 and it solved it easily. I saw the harness looked at other sokoban puzzles, coded some stuff, tried to replicate the level, etc. All things that a pure Gemini Chat doesn't really do.
LLMs are great for the high level harness, but if you want to count letters for example, it will still rely on "tools" like a piece of code to do it more reliably. Similarly in the above example, you wouldn't have the LLM directly try to analyze the images, but instead fetch and use the best tool for the job. But that can only be as good as the harness/tools it has access to.
There are some ways to counter that, from what I see:
1. You can use a RSS reader, if you fancy.
2. Firefox's reading mode can render that site nicely, with your appearance choices.
3. You can "patch" the site with an extension.
4. Best yet, you can reach out to owner of the site. There are some links on the site.
Maybe the creator likes their site the way it is. Does reaching to a point which someone likes make them less ambitious, or do people have to push a couple of megabytes of CSS, JS and all that jazz to be ambitious?
Maybe, as the creator of your own experience, you should be more ambitious to fit what you see into your tastes as well. This goes both ways.
It's not AI fanfic. It seems well written, and can be considered a novella. Flies close to what I have read in the past. I'll give it proper time to read it.
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