I grew up running and calling dialup BBSs, learning to program in the MS DOS shell world with QBasic and Turbo Pascal "IDE"s, dialing up and later telnetting into a Lynx browser (early on when I couldn't afford a PPP link with lawn mowing money).. the "terminal" and thereby TUI applications (they weren't called that at the time as far as I know, but that's definitely what they were) are home, for at least me. I just wish more TUIs had single keystroke hotkeys (indicated by the hotkey's letter in the menu item title being a different color or intensity) like the old BBS and other menus. I could login and download a QWK packet quicker than the time it took for the modem to finish the DTMF tones. I'm excited about how many new things allow me to stay in the interface my brain formed around. YMMV
I don't actually know what you're referring to, but from context I can guess that you're referring to something like the Juno dialup "at&t" links they used to actually send the emails. The PPP L/P were stored in the .ini files and they were great free PPP links while they lasted.
I immediately thought of the painter analogy (from the books which are astonishingly good) of "painting" 3D objects into 2D objects from the stories, and wondered if the author was exploring the reverse of this "perfect painting" that is still "functional". I'm definitely a lay person, I know enough physics to use a lever to lift heavy things.
I can't properly read the tank/car comment, the comparison is bizarre to me. But I think this misses the point a bit. The reality of these new risks is literally being learned in front of us in real time, and in my opinion, anyone who claims to understand these risks is speculating at best, and actively manipulating the situation for whatever reasons.
While I am a (mostly) capitalist and generally disagree with nationalization (including, for the time being, this situation), I also don't think we can say that "centralized power never works". Maybe we scope that a bit. I know plenty of business owners who centralize power in their businesses and they are effective, ethical and it works perfectly fine. In theory, in the US, nationalizing some unit of the economy _decentralizes_ power; the US is, after all, a representative democracy. Trustworthiness of the electorate is a different problem. But I don't think we can generalize much about centralization beyond sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There is a difference between centralizing all power in a given administrative unit, and centralizing certain powers, but that's more analogous to non-democratic units.
It seems that simple, I agree, but digging in we're winding up in a bit of a "responsible party" black hole, at least it seems from my non-legal engineer perspective. If I ask an AI to find me articles on some arbitrary things and it hacks the Gibson to do it; and I am not a computer expert, it will be a struggle a bit to honestly put the blame on me. It's always been that way I think.. in what reasonable world can a non-lawyer agree to 100+ pages of a ToS and actually understand it? No world. But that's the point I think. What if I modify every TOS in HTML before I submit it and then agree by checking the box under my "redlined" version of the contract? I think this stuff is going to become exponentially murkier as time goes on.
Completely agree that the world is full of absolute nonsense, but legally determining responsible parties appears to be relatively straightforward (but does involve a judge or jury)
Yes, agreed. Except "involve a judge or jury" is where the wildcard comes in. I believe there will be reasons to doubt culpability as we move further into the nonsense. Justified or not. My point is really just that we're in some weird territory, so I guess I'm going to make popcorn and watch. Some deeper legal questions lurk in this mess, and I don't think the obvious answers will always necessarily be right.
I've been yelling at the top of my lungs since I was a kid and the clipper chip was floated. I even had a commentary published in FidoNews about it, though I was like 15 and it was fairly incoherent. I don't know that anyone really is listening to me, but I'm with you. I tell myself that every time I spend 5 minutes haranguing to someone about the dangers of "trusted computing" (for lack of a better term) I haven't yet harangued to might buy us all one more voice in this obnoxious ceaseless war.
Right, but how does that sentiment get encoded in such a way that AI models can exhibit such things as "morals" or "ethics" in alignment? Murder is a bit of an extreme case. For example, countless people break traffic laws all of the time, so neither their internal "ethics" nor the law prove to be a reliable control. I can't get on the highway without driving the speed limit and being passed by almost everyone else on the road; and that behavior is arbitrarily more dangerous than following the speed limit and statistically more likely cause someone to be killed than following posted speed limits. I guess my point is that this is a very complex topic and I'm not smart enough to have any answers.
I agree with this assessment. My consulting business partner and I are in the process of moving a bunch of applications from an old deployment managed with Ansible on EC2 over to an ECS deployment. We're doing this app by app, and it's taking a while. The last two apps we both moved we were able to point the model at the appropriate repository and aws account and it was able to execute the entire move on both of these _in one shot_ with various CLI tools. That's not a parlor trick.
