It seems Sam Altman has the same suspicion, based upon his response:
> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.
> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.
For context his blog post seems to be a response to this deep-dive New Yorker article:
"Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?"
Wouldn't it be more correct to call the article "critical" and not "incendiary"? I looked it over and I don't remember seeing any calls to violence. Altman needs to remember that he holds an incredible amount of power in this moment. He and other current AI tech leaders are effectively sitting on the equivalent of a technological nuclear bomb. Anyone in their right mind would find that threatening.
Right, but the picture those statements painted collectively was not flattering. And that was certainly intended by the authors. Thus, critical, but not at all "incendiary."
Update: To clarify, my personal stance is that the critical tone was both intended by the authors and, in my opinion, appropriate given how much power Mr. Altman holds. If he has a history of behaving inconsistently, that deserves daylight.
Are you arguing that because the authors knew the pattern they were documenting was unflattering, the piece is somehow compromised? That they clearly had an agenda? That's called reporting. They called a hundred-plus named sources and the picture those sources independently painted was damning. Altman has a history of telling repeated, easily-checked lies, followed by fresh lies when caught in the first ones.
Are you suggesting that they should have "both sides"-ed by reporting company PR and Sam-friendly sources and giving them equal weight? Sometimes the facts point in one direction.
> Are you arguing that because the authors knew the pattern they were documenting was unflattering, the piece is somehow compromised?
Uh, no? Lol, I'm on your side, bud. Put away the pitchfork. I thought it was a really good and fair article. I am not the adversary you're looking for.
> my personal stance is that the critical tone was both intended by the authors
You may think we are on the same side. You don't understand what side I'm on. "Lol".
Your "personal stance" is that you can get inside the heads of the reporters? Obviously not. So you're going by the idea that an article that leads to critical conclusions is inherently slanted. This is an insidious and damaging idea. It has led to the belief by journalists and editors that they need to twist themselves into pretzels to present "both sides", which is easily exploited by people of bad faith to launder outright lies. There's a direct line between this and authoritarianism. I'm quite serious about this. The fact that you agree with the authors in this case is completely orthogonal.
Every article is inherently biased due to the fact that there are inclusions and omissions. This is just a fact.
You're injecting your own personal view into GP's statement by adding a lot of weight into the distinction between the words "critical" and "incendiary" and "neutral", when GP made a very neutral and not as charged statement.
I love reading stuff like “Critical, slanted, and compromised mean the same thing. They are interchangeable words.”
Given that, it looks like your position on davesque’s posts is slanted. Your take is critical of those posts, which means your assessment is compromised, and as such should not be taken as valid.
And I love seeing sentiments attributed to me, in quotes even, that I didn't state or imply, and certainly don't believe. "Critical" by itself is not a synonym for "slanted". However the post I was commenting on was:
> Right, but the picture those statements painted collectively was not flattering. And that was certainly intended by the authors. Thus, critical, but not at all "incendiary."
The key there is "certainly intended by the authors". The full sentiment here IS equivalent to "slanted".
Ronan Farrow, one of the journalists who worked on this article, talked to Katie Couric on her YouTube channel about this. They worked on this across ~18 months. I thought this interview was illuminating.
Yeah, it's one thing to write an incendiary article, it's a very different thing to write an objective article about someone who will say anything to get what they want.
He has to be talking about the New Yorker article, which wasn't incendiary at all. If anything, it seemed fully neutral to me, reporting what they could justify as facts but going out of their way to not specifically paint him or anyone else in a negative light beyond a listing of events that they presumably have solid sourcing on (if not, sue them; if so, stfu).
If a neutral look at your actions seems incendiary to you, maybe you need to rethink your own life and actions.
It should go without saying I don't think people should be attempting to light other people's houses on fire regardless of how distasteful they find those people.
There was a thread about this the other day [1]. It's the same issue as "count the r's in strawberry." Tokenization makes it hard to count characters. If you put that string into OpenAI's tokenizer, [2] this is how they are grouped:
Token 1: ((((
Token 2: ()))
Token 3: )))
Which of course isn't at all how our minds would group them together in order to keep track of them.
This is mostly because people wrongly assume that LLMs can count things. Just because it looks like it can, doesn't mean it is.
Try to get your favourite LLM to read the time from a clock face. It'll fail ridiculously most of the time, and come up with all kinds of wonky reasons for the failures.
It can code things that it's seen the logic for before. That's not the same as counting. That's outputing what it's previously seen as proper code (and even then it often fails. Probably 'cos there's a lot of crap code out there)
But for lisp, a more complex solution is needed. It's easy for a human lisp programmer to keep track of which closing parentheses corresponds to which opening parentheses because the editor highlights parentheses pairs as they are typed. How can we give an LLM that kind of feedback as it generates code?
Try asking an LLM a question like "H o w T o P r o g r a m I n R u s t ?" - each letter, separated by spaces, will be its own token, and the model will understand just fine. The issue is that computational cost scales quadratically with the number of tokens, so processing "h e l l o" is much more expensive than "hello". "hello" has meaning, "h" has no meaning by itself. The model has to waste a lot of computation forming words from the letters.
Our brains also process text entire words at a time, not letter-by-letter. The difference is that our brains are much more flexible than a tokenizer, and we can easily switch to letter-by-letter reading when needed, such as when we encounter an unfamiliar word.
The graphic that shows that a hijacker can route traffic to their malicious website is a little misleading. Since the SSL certificate would be invalid, browsers would block the connection and show a warning.
I guess the attack could still be used for denial of service.
Wow I'm surprised, you're right, and it has happened before:
> the attacker issued and registered a free temporary 3-month certificate for the developers[.]kakao.com domain through SSL certificate issuer called ZeroSSL. Because the routing policy was already manipulated by the BGP Hijacking, the attacker was able to register the certificate.
It sounds like that one may have been the result of a "lawful intercept", so perhaps not necessarily BGP hijacking. If you have legitimate control of the ASN/network, it's not a hijack.
Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.
The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.
This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.
Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.
I can't believe X would take back the account of such an active and valued member of the community who is clearly not squatting on the name or anything.
Squatting is something you do to someone else's property. It implies that there is someone else out there with a more legitimate claim to the @hac handle, which there isn't. It's not as if we're talking about @google or something.
If I stole your house and sold it because I didn't think you were using it properly, that would clearly be illegitimate. I don't see why the rules change when we talk about someone's twitter handle. Nobody needs @hac. X merely wants it and has the power to take it.
But you don't own it. X does. It's their service, they are free to apportion handles as they see fit. It is nothing like a house where you have an actual ownership claim through the deed.
It's less like having the house taken away, and more like having your house's street address reassigned to someone else's house. Sure, no one's taken your land. Your deed gives you ownership of parcel #530453080, not of the identifier "123 Vine Street", so nothing you legally own has been taken from you.
But it's your identity. It's the way you've been putting yourself into the world and telling people they can reach you there. It used to be that if someone sent a message to that address, or tried to navigate to that address, they would reach you; but now, they'll be taken to somewhere else, and they perhaps won't even realize what's happened.
And for the ownership issue, sheesh. Yes X, in a literal sense, owns all the usernames. We're talking about whether it's morally right for them to do, not about whether it's illegal. If they had held back these short "valuable" usernames from the beginning, no one would care; it's the act of taking away someone's established identity that is problematic.
This "ownership" or rather "identification" is a significant part of the service though.
It wouldn't have been so successful if everybody be called "Anonymous" meaning that they wouldn't be able to make money with it.
They've started to take this away now. Today it's some account with obviously few words. Tomorrow it might be one with wrong words. What you counted as value is nothing. It might be lost tomorrow, so why bother?
God, how I hate all those "well ackchyually" idiots who think TOS are the only contract there ever was ignoring social norms that were there for literally decades.
Internet monolithic social services are run by private companies with TOS that no one reads and change, services that barely anyone pays for (except through their data).
We should definitely normalize this so that people see what the internet actually is for the vast majority of people.
> but there's something of a grand social contract that keeps the concept of accounts on websites working
no there's not. this is complete and utter fiction. the things that keep it working are ads and normal users putting their eye in front of them, and the tos to make any silly claims of "social contracts" legally and absolutely moot.
It’s playing stupid to pretend that the theft of a hardly used handle has anything to do with an actual user account. I’m sure if @hac had a presence online, their handle wouldn’t have been sold from under them.
Since when do you "own" social media handles? Maybe you should, but that's not reflected in the laws of our countries or the policies of these platforms. They own your presence, your content, and your reach. This is our "solution" to self-publishing. Do you want change? Advocate for it.
Of course, if you advocate for a system with no equivalent to eminent domain you'll quickly discover why the rule exists.
People have accounts and never post. Since X makes it mandatory to be signed in to read anything on the site meaningfully, there would be millions of such accounts with limited post history. And that doesn’t even include the fact that people sometimes go away from a platform for months for a variety of reasons.
Trust your own style, even if you aren't a native English speaker. Here's an example where a non-native speaker used an LLM to polish his post. The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.
For dyslexia, use a spell-checker. For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s. But don't let a style-checker or an LLM rob you of your own voice.
> The general consensus was that his own writing was preferable to the LLM's edited version.
I don't believe a single one of those people.
> For grammar, use a basic grammar checker, like the kind of grammar checker that has come with MS word since the 1990s.
Those are notorious for false-positives, false-negatives, and generally nonsensical advice. Not that the LLM-based alternatives are much better (looking at you, Grammarly), but still.
> 2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to.
I'm surprised they missed the most important step, which is blocking the advertisers from collecting your data in the first place. This is easily done in the browser with uBlock Origin and system-wide with DNS filtering.
> There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me.
https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921
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