You're fooling yourself if you think your opinions, particularly on matters outside of your direct experience, can exist independent of well funded influence campaigns.
Cute trick but it's not exactly a secret, e.g. deepseek recently published their own inference engine -- and it only has kernels for SM100 (blackwell) and Huawei Ascend 950, and all its published performance results using blackwell.
No one found it remarkable a couple weeks ago, ... but now the fact that DS is using blackwell is apparently some super secret requiring clever RNG init stats???
Another dimension to consider might just be displays which are easily opened and the wireless hardware removed.
Unfortunately a lot of large displays really aren't safe to open -- you're likely to break the screen doing it. But I have seen some results on LG tvs that have the wireless hardware on a separate removable board that the TV runs fine without.
If the alternative is a commercial signboard display or a reference monitor though one might be better off buying N consumer TVs and accidentally destroying a couple. ... and the question of giving money to companies bundling spyware might be better addressed by spending the price difference funding efforts to stop the practice via other means (e.g. outlawing it... to the extent that its not already unlawful, lobbying state AGs to take action to the extent that it is...).
Considering how unobtainium GPUs have become nvidia could get a PR win by publishing unlocks for all their outdated hardware. ... people are figuring it out anyways, might as well embrace it.
Unlocks and VRam upgrades, like VRam sim slots, and a VRom slot that ran Linux, had its own GUI for reconfiguration. Like old 68k macs that have a selectable os in the boot roms.
Not having a metric set out in advance may, in fact, be more rigging resistant! unfortunately.
But the real deal is that none of it matters because the program itself is the goat sacrifice. It's not there to work, it's there to signal the proponents values and ingratiate themselves with the goat suppliers. It's actually better for theses purposes if it DOESNT work, because then you can perpetually campaign on solving the same problem and conserve the considerable effort that went into convincing people that the problem exists and needs solving.
Which it did by doing an inefficient version of the aforementioned 1940s algorithm.
Essentially modern LLMs are able to do normal AI engineering tasks, like running optimization algorithms over weights. The media has been inaccurately describing this as if the AI had some special insight into the weights, when it reality it just performed the tasks a human engineer might do.
Right, humans don't need some special insight into weights either, since it's just a bunch of numbers that you can analyze like any other table with numbers. However, if you dump them on someone like in this prompt: https://github.com/RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs/blob/main/exp1... they might complain about the formatting or ask whether they can use Excel instead of doing calculations by hand. (The experiment with Qwen3.5-0.8B didn't use the "dump weights into the context as numbers" approach.)
Anthropic's "Pace the frontier" is a facially unlawful conspiracy to restrict markets. Imposing these restrictions in their product offerings is an overt act that they're taking to facilitate their unlawful market rigging conspiracy. (since their agreement with their conspirators won't have a full impact if upstarts or direct consumers can just take existing SOTA and use it to produce a competing product, routing around their oligopoly).
There is no legitimate purpose to restrict the ability to optimize accelerator kernels except to inhibit competition in this space-- it is the most benign and harmless act imaginable. There is at least some debate to be had about things like computer-security capabilities, but nothing is being damaged by AI inference being made 10% faster except the ability of market leaders to extract rents.
The tracking is normalized, and they're going to grow up to be adults that both tolerate and impose oppressive surveillance that we couldn't even imagine today.
I don't have any data to back it up, but my impression it is mostly young people that are aware and opposed to Flock et al.
I think people can understand the nuance and tradeoffs between your parents knowing your locations, Big Tech tracking you to profit off your data, and companies who's raison d'etre is to sell your data to law enforcement.
Surveillance is already normalized and mostly unavoidable, but I believe tolerance for abuse of the data is higher than you think.
I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.
They are opposed to Flock, while at the same time they are constantly reporting their location to each other and monitoring where everyone they know is. Which is logically consistent: they're not ok with tracking being done to them, but they're ok with doing the tracking and opting in to being tracked.
Of course, with pervasive tracking being normalized, and the apps doing this being subject to law enforcement and the government, it kind of ends up as the same thing.
(Whether parents have access to this voluntary tracking, I don't know. My kid uses it with his friends, but I've never wanted to track him. Seems creepy and distrusting. Sure, he lies to me about some things, but I have a pretty good idea of what is and isn't a lie. Feel free to disbelieve me.)
I don't think it i s the same thing. I don't like pervasive tracking either, but it is very different from for police to subpoena google to get my data, than it is for flock to directly give law enforcement my location.
I use Find My friends on my iphone, I trust them enough they can know my location and I trust Apple enough to carry that data (I realize this is implying "nothing to hide", but I also consent to giving Apple my location). I get that it seem creepy, but its also a cool new technology if you can get over how creepy it seems. Not trying to sell you one, but give you another perspective.
I'm not a parent, but when I was teen my parents monitored me as much as they could. Personally, I think location tracking is less of an issue than parental surveillance of internet browsing. I do think if parents are going to track their kid's location, they should let their kid track the parents, too.
> I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.
Right it's not even a question of new data-- a mountain of historical privacy leaks were benign because it was a needle in a haystack. In the future everyone will be electronically stalked by a fleet of AI private detectives. To limit the damage we must substantially restrict the collection and retention of personal information.
They wouldn't even need to stalk us. I imagine they are training individualized models based on our individualized data, then use those models to A/B test the potential for advertisements or other propaganda, but they are probably already doing that. I wish my brain was big enough to know what they could be up to.
I think the issue isn't the collection, or retention (although there should still be data retention laws to protect against the liability of holding that data), but the ways the data is shared or used by third-parties. If businesses were no longer able to be shared or sold to 3rd parties, or be used for advertisements, the remainder of issues are largely ideological.
I mean, it's pretty clear it's not going anywhere or getting any less oppressive. At a certain point, attempting to subvert these makes you stick out even more.
Sure, but "taking up time unnecessarily" is only what bureaucracy does from a particular outside perspective.
If you actually look at bureaucracy, what you'll see is that, on the whole, it keeps many abuses and neglects in check, though there are some who manage to abuse it to cause trouble as well.
You can't just say "this is what I perceive this system as doing" and then throw POSIWID at anyone who disagrees with you.
The premise of "the purpose of a system is what it does" is that if it did something the people in control of the system didn't want then they would change it, from which the implication is that they like what it does and want it to keep doing that, i.e. that's the system's purpose.
There are real instances of that happening, e.g. the purpose of zoning rules is to constrain the housing supply. It isn't an unintended consequence, there are people in actual reality who lobby for things like density restrictions under disingenuous pretenses because "we want to charge higher rents to tenants" or "we want housing prices to go up forever even if it means young people get priced out of home ownership" are not sympathetic motives.
The problem is naturally that the quip is false whenever the reason the system fails is incompetence, lack of resources/information, etc. rather than ulterior motives. Which is also why it's a meme, because it's essentially the inverse of Hanlon's razor and therefore becomes the thing people reach for when they want to insinuate malice rather than stupidity.
The problem with both is, of course, that it isn't always malice but it also isn't never malice.
The example from the thread is basically perfect, because bureaucracy is both at the same time. Some of the rules were put there by honest people with honest goals, but not all of them. Meanwhile this (see "General Interference with Organizations and Production"):
"The purpose of a system is what it does" is, in my view, a statement about accountability. It's an answer to "it causes this or that harm? Well, that's not the purpose of the system". We should reject those arguments: The purposes is what it does.
It takes a particular kind of rationalist-cult-addled weaponized autism to strawman this basic and important position. (not referring to you, of course :))
It might well be literally false in any specific case-- systems often have unintended and unexpected consequences and in large systems the unintended effects are often more significant than the primary effects. But it is never acceptable to dismiss those on the basis that they're unintended. We are no less responsible for the systems we create, control, and (often) impose upon others because of some argument about their "purpose"-- and sure, sometimes the effect truly is intended and someone is just lying about it but we don't need to go down that rathole. If a system's 'purpose' was somehow different than what it does we must adapt it or abolish it, or otherwise we must admit that we accept what it does, that we expect and intend what it does to continue, and that we who are responsible for it are responsible for all its consequences-- what it does is its purpose either by actual intent or because we failed to eliminate the system.
If the standard of care of treatment for cancer treatment results in 30% mortality, and a facility achieves that-- then we can say that it's purpose is to provide that standard of care. The purposes is what it does doesn't imply that such the facility it trying to kill people. It's purposes is to provide a service which includes in its effect a level of mortality, and its existence is desirable in spite of the death because we believe the alternative is worse, because e.g. we believe without it the mortality in those patients would be 50% instead. The statement is a rejection of often self-serving claims about motivations as excuses.
This is particularly acute for regulatory regimes (or the procedural artifacts of them)-- as they're imposed on people against their will and "just don't do that" is always an alternative. To continue existing any such scheme must justify its existence on the basis of "what it does" vs where we'd be without it-- not on some lofty argument about the intentions behind it.
This is actually a good point. The purpose of the New York bus system isn't to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide, but its purpose also isn't just to transport New Yorkers.
Its purpose is to transport New Yorkers by emitting four billion pounds of carbon dioxide. They're choosing to do it that way instead of doing something else, and instead of doing nothing.
And then it's kind of hyperbolic rhetoric to claim the purpose is only the bad thing the system does, but it is actually doing the bad thing, so then if you want to claim that its purpose isn't to do that, maybe get it to stop doing that.
It's also likely that "keep the bosses rich" is the purpose of most currently existing institutions that make money.
I actually don't think anyone involved gives a shit about the carbon dioxide. Even oil barons don't - they care about selling oil, and if an emissionless way to burn oil were discovered, they wouldn't mind. "... using oil" may be part of the purpose.
Come on, obviously context matters and reducing apples and oranges to the same thing with such generalization is nonsense
Grammatically correct but so are many Superman comics and I have yet to see a real Superman; educated language use is not evidence the writer made a meaningful point
The behavior of many a ghoul in Washington should make it clear a lot of the bureaucratic fuckery is just to insulate certain people from accountability
And we can neatly set aside that in healthcare it's different and much (if not all) is important safety protocol
Oh look more rhetoric the grammatical rules for which only make sense within themselves in some reductive recursive way until the point is achieved and the syntax structure ends
I can do that too. What obligation to accept this has any meaningful relationship to my existence?
I agree with Lecun there is no intelligence embedded implicitly to language syntax; but he's wrong about code because it does capture an observable physical state relative to a machine.
Context matters.
The same has yet to be said of human semantics as awareness of them is never uniformly distributed.
That's why small models uniquely tuned to local context and ability will eventually succeed as everyone will just run their own little inference loop on their device telemetry and IO
And then with our local hospitals compute infra perhaps we can synthesize designer personalized drugs rather than continue with over-centralized planning
Maxwell's equations didn't work until he quit trying to account for entirely simulated abstraction levers and pulleys because that's how physical reality works. We don't have to simulate all states of biology just hot fix over time.
For a long time AI was presumed to never be workable until "why do reality/physics/big bangs/black holes exist?" was resolved. Hm.
But language is leaky abstraction and never meant to be fully representative of reality. Just some lightweight cognitive triggers to light up neural happy paths that invoke memory of sensory input; education.
It's what language is for and what it does.
This is just a restatement that life is about chasing utility. I agree. But utilitarian systems designed for a purpose do 100% exist.
The guy is just huffing copium because he missed the point, it seems. It seems his process is to pick a system, pick one thing it does, observe that doesn't seem to be the main purpose and then declare the principle dead.
Let's focus on one of the examples he gives:
> [POSIWID implies that] The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide [and this is obviously absurd]
But that's not what the bus system does, is it? That's only one thing it does and it's the least purposeful thing it does, as if you chose that one on purpose.
I'd sooner think the purpose of the NYC bus system is to move money from government coffers to oil barons, or to placate left-wing protestors, or to satisfy a sustainability checklist item, or to increase the employment rate in NYC than to think the CO2 is the point.
You're fooling yourself if you think your opinions, particularly on matters outside of your direct experience, can exist independent of well funded influence campaigns.
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