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I just love this whole "forbidden knowledge" schtick the AI safety dweebs have stuck up their butt. Is this really going to stop anybody determined enough to make that kind of outcome?

There is an extremely narrow band of things that the AI shouldn't be answering, and that is generally immediately-actionable advice that allows someone to build something of harm to others. But even then, in an age where Tor, bittrent, i2p, abliterated local models, etc are freely available, let alone numerous books and online resources, is there even a point? Is it worth fully compromising the principles of free agency to an increasingly oppressed populace?

But instead of that we are handing the keys to regressive and repressive governments to order the suppression of any knowledge they deem inconvenient. I really doubt anyone is going to take a principled stance when the company's party minders threaten local staff with a rubber hose or incarceration.

I'm sure China et al are already doing this.

For the past 30-40 years humanity has received an incredible gift in these sand-powered thinking brainboxes. A gift that allows the common man to empower himself with a force multiplier towards his own success, and now access to superintelligence the likes of which few have ever seen. These can be tools to destroy the oppression that governs our lives from foolhardy, greedy, bootlicking control freaks. And here we are squandering it.


> These can be tools to destroy the oppression that governs our lives

So far it seems that the clearest use for these tools is to enhance, rather than destroy, oppression.

1. Suppression / elimination of white collar jobs

2. Negative cognitive effects, especially for young people

3. Accelerated decline in social media / information ecosystems. Increasing polarization, hard to tell fact from fiction.

4. Environmental impacts: increased energy usage means more carbon in the atmosphere, climate change accelerates.

5. Software security incidents increasing. Hard for individuals and small organizations to defend themselves.

6. “Power to think” vested in a very small group of organizations/labs. Doing work which should only require a computer and freely-available software will now be gated by expensive subscriptions. Once you “vibe code” a significant portion of your software you’re locked in and cannot go back to maintaining it without frontier-model level assistance.


> I just love this whole "forbidden knowledge" schtick the AI safety dweebs have stuck up their butt.

It's just the latest incarnation of a timeless debate. In the 1970s and 1980s it was about the Anarchists's Cookbook, which was revived again in the 1990s when it started circulating on the Internet. There are many timeless debates, but the debate over weapon-making knowledge is much more concrete and predictable.


Agreeing with the first part of your post, but not the second.

> A gift that allows the common man to empower himself with a force multiplier towards his own success, and now access to superintelligence the likes of which few have ever seen.

As long as that "gift" requires me to call up Sam Altman's datacenter every time I want to do anything with that "superintelligence", it's not empowering, it's deepening the control.


Check back in a year or two. The cat is out of the bag.

Security theather is easy and gets lots of eyeballs. Actual security is hard and no one cares. Which one do you think soon-to-ipo companies are going to pick?


Anybody remember the Temple Of The Screaming Electron? Was a 2000s website dedicated to collecting those types of forbidden knowledge


This sort of overly eager upgrading has caused me a lot of problems over the years. I really wish it didn't default to updating the entire world just because you want to update one package.


Does this handle macOS installs with multiple local users? I have to su into account 1 if I want to brew install something from account 2


brew as-console-user may help here. We don’t support a multiuser setup so there may be some limitations but we try our best to address problems as they come up.


Is there more documentation than this?

> as-console-user command [args …]

> Run a Homebrew command as the active macOS console user.

> This is intended for MDM, Munki and Jamf workflows where brew is invoked as root but Homebrew operations should run as the logged-in console user. The nested command is always dispatched through HOMEBREW_BREW_FILE.

https://docs.brew.sh/Manpage#as-console-user-command-args-

This isn’t very informative. Is there more documentation somewhere else that I’m missing? Google search doesn’t really find much.

I currently have a dedicated `homebrew` user that I access with `alias brew='sudo --set-home --user=homebrew --chdir /Users/homebrew -- brew' but it’s got a number of shortcomings. What will as-console-user do differently to this?


That level of control will be fleeting at best; as soon as the open models and competitors catch up they lose that influence


That's why Dario's advocating for making open weight models illegal and also saying we should stop the clock on model development amongst the large labs.


Can we kill the hackathon please? Yes I totally want to get nerd-sniped for some of my precious off time for some trivial reward. NOT

Its a fantastic deal for management if you can find people gullible enough. But a raw deal for the worker bees themselves


I enjoyed "old fashioned" hackathons, which you had 24h to build or play with some technology or API. It has lost its charm (for me)since it moved to be startup-ish like events that you need to pitch a product instead.

I think it will be considered a "blast from the past" at some point, due to the AI era we are getting into.


retro hackathons will replace retro arcades as gen x retires and millenials are 50+ and have money and kids out of the house. haha.


Is participation in your off time mandatory? If so, the problem is not hackathons. If not, why not just… not participate? The folks who do often enjoy working on the problems, networking, etc., so I’m not sure killing them all together is particularly fair to folks who do get a lot out of them.


The lack of participation is often one of those things that management will quietly hold against you.


The problem in that case is working for a toxic employer, not the hackathon. You need to fix that regardless.


mandatory fun


It was the release of Stable Diffusion and its source code.

I spent the next few days tinkering with my own Stable Diffusion implementation. I never got it past outputting total nightmare fuel, but it was fun!

To this day I think of the process as like baking pizzas in a sequence of pizza ovens


The Intended Method(tm) is an intentionally gimped feeding trough designed primarily to pacify uninquisitive minds and line Hollywood exec pockets. They have never ever been honest in their accounting or reasonable in their expectations, let alone charitable enough to let the art propagate amongst its consumers in the manner they see fit (without court interventions). So I don't see why we have to be honest in our consumption.

There is plenty of money to be made in secondary sources -- merchandising and so on. They can give up trying to lock down information that naturally wants to be free. But they won't, because greed.


a "standard" GPU would be an nvidia geforce RTX 5090


You can ask them for high-level overviews of a given topic, and then drill down into individual sections of its response. With the most recent iterations, many of the times I have blindly stumbled into something new, it has pushed back with warnings


The speeches may not have felt drawn-out, but the writing sure did

If there is one thing that drives me nuts about old literature, it is how verbose authors seems to be.


One thing that drives me nuts about modern readers is how shallow their attention spans are.


Ah yes, how virtuous to consume so much pointless detail.

Looking at the aesthetics of the era, there is just so much frivolity and extraneous flourish. Clean lines and minimalism are avant garde. Yuck.

I got shit to do. Art doesn't need to waste my time unnecessarily.


>Ah yes, how virtuous to consume so much pointless detail.

A, yes, how efficient to denounce anything that's not mere plot driving dialogue as "pointless detail".

>Looking at the aesthetics of the era, there is just so much frivolity and extraneous flourish. Clean lines and minimalism are avant garde. Yuck.

Frivolity. Humanity. Literature that's not the equivalent of an IKEA furnished Airbnb. How dare they!


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