We can only hope that this happens more often and more broadly in order to shape public (and public officials') awareness of the sloppiness before there is broad investment into AI tooling to assist police in evaluating incoming submissions.

In that sense, Anthropic did society a great service by doing this.

We're already screwed there. Every police department in the country is heavily invested in AI tool at every level.

I'm curious why this comment was voted down.

Is it because people don't agree that one can just take such things for free? Well, I also don't, but this was obviously a sarcastic comment, so down voting for that reason makes no sense since you agree with its sentiment.

Or is it because of the style? Are we really so sensitive now that anything not said explicitly but in some indirect way is bad? It's not like the comment was insulting anybody. Should it explicitly have said "They don't renumerate anybody because they clearly get away with it"? Would that really have been better?

Or do the down voters not agree with the sentiment but consider the behavior ok?

Or something else I'm overlooking?

Most likely because sarcasm isn’t really encouraged here.

On that note, there’s another rule about not commenting on comment votes as well:

>>> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

FWIW I agree with you, but the rules do seem mostly effective in general.

Anyways, welcome to HN!

> Most likely because sarcasm isn’t really encouraged here.

Sarcasm probably accounts for half of the comments on this site.

I'd have asked the speaker if he scanned his actual hotel room at the conference.

I'm actually quite certain that he did. Imagine the scoop, opening your conference presentation with what you found upstairs the evening before!

Non-branching memory accesses?

> The speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.

With a bit of practice it's actually quite easy to understand the accent of Chinese speakers as they have some typical patterns and speak slowly.

I must say, I loved listening to him because this was genuine human work. Human made slides (with lots of ugliness coming with PowerPoint), human typos, human grammar mistakes, all of it. It may be flawed in some ways but this fully removed any doubts that a slop machine came even near it. So refreshing in this day and age!

Now please show me the consequences from the Hugging Face incident. The company or the engineers individually apparently have nothing to be worried about.

They’re not software engineers, they’re software farmers. Very different kind of job

IMO social engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.

IMO reverse engineering is not engineering because it has nothing to with the physical sciences.

That's not how language works.

But not necessarily in a good way. This introduces a bias into the users prompt which is not there without the suggestion. So, arguably, this feature makes the users inputs less useful for training because they are partially impacted by model output.

This is similar to blog articles since 2023 or so onwards being less useful for model training since more and more of them are based on LLM output to varying degrees.

Good point, if we thought the ensloppification was bad now, imagine how bad it will be when the AI is slop prompting itself.

Go a step further and randomize it. Different page at every request.

But then people will rely on the randomness to pick their quicksort pivots or something like that.

Maybe, but in any case far fewer than will rely on a fixed page. I think very clearly it'd be a net-pain lowering move for example.com to randomize the results a bit, if they felt like it.

~~I feel like that would probably meaningfully increase the amount of compute necessary to serve the website. As it were it’s likely static html, but any randomness would have to rely on a server side operation for each request and couldn’t be cached.~~

I went and checked and in fact it is already serving a script s.js so I guess you’re right!

There's an xkcd (1172) for that.

In Blighty, the counters (paid volunteers from the local council working voluntery overtime) are supervised and audited. Not to mention representitives from the local political parties will be present as well as the local press to oversee the proceedings. Typically the returing officer will also allow anybody else to be present and observe the proceedings, space and practicalities permitting.

The process is quite fair and rigorous.

Certainly it´s possible to rig in person voting - but if you do, people will know that you did. And that also matters.

This would need at least a majority of die-hards present in a (near) majority of polling locations. At this point, the party can probably win the election without fraud.

For the counting process you have "auditors" from all the different parties. We have that system in Argentina and it works pretty well in terms of electoral transparency. People's choices are another thing.

This seems both the least likely and easiest threat to remediate. Also the threat doesn’t scale.

These volunteers will have a far easier time scaling their conspiracy if voting machines are involved. There are fewer points of failure to corrupt and it is easier to produce a plausible sketchy result where their guy wins by 100 votes.