Strange, I walked in different regions of Tokyo, and I found it to be very clean. This is in part because in Japan it is not done to eat while walking in the street.
I remember that in Osaka on Saturday night there were young people kicking trash around, that was the only time I found Japan dirty.
If you're allowed to change the speed of light, you can also change the gravitational constant G to compensate since the Schwarzschild radius is r = 2GM/c^2, where M is the mass of the object.
Sure, you could change all sorts of things. Doing it likely means changing so much that things end up looking just like they do now, just scaled somehow.
I think that light coming from different parts of the lamp arrives at different times. So if the lamp turns off, you see the part closest to you go black first.
I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure. In C you need to carefully check that you free allocated memory, and that you don't use it after you free it. In C++ this is automated by using classes like std::string and std::vector, once they go out of scope their memory is freed and you can't use it anymore. It is still possible, e.g. by using a for loop that iterates over a vector, and removing or adding stuff to that same vector in that loop. But my rough estimate is that such errors are at least ten times less likely in C++.
I develop in C++ for a job, and when I need to use a library written in C I always have a bad feeling about it.
> I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure.
They aren't, usually.
C++ has all the C problems, and multiples more on top of those. It's a broad attack surface - literally no one is going to claim to be proficient in every single C++ feature available to their compiler. It's also quite opaque to visual inspection (making double-checking with an LLM difficult as it needs whole-program reasoning instead of localised reasoning).
One of those languages is one of the most complex programming languages ever invented, with the largest breadth of features, any of which may interact with any other feature in subtle ways.
The other is one of the most minimalistic languages created, with a dev able to keep the language standard in their head for the most part.
I disagree, the minimalism of C results in writing overly complex code to solve simple problems. Things like type punning and bit hacks are common place in C.
The end result is equivalent C code is much more complex than C++. For example, you need to remember to call free every time, forever, in every function. In C++ you just use unique ptr or shared ptr and you’re done. It’s a simpler model, enabled by the more complex feature of RAII.
Something like std::vector isn’t hard to write in C, it’s impossible. The language semantics don’t allow it. So you have to do hacks and remember to free, over and over again forever. It only takes just one time forgetting, and that’s a memory bug.
I mean, consider a large codebase. How many free calls does C++ eliminate altogether? Thousands, maybe tens of thousands? You just need to forget one of those in C, or even just put it in the wrong place.
And that’s just one class of things. Generics are much more complex in C, too. The type system in C is more complex IMO because it can be so easily defeated at every turn. C gives you practically no guarantees, no tools, for anything. The result is you are forced to write extremely defensive code everywhere, complex code.
The analogy I use is to physical tools. A screwdriver is simple, but building a house with only a screwdriver is complex. A suite of power tools is complex, but building a house with them is simple.
> The analogy I use is to physical tools. A screwdriver is simple, but building a house with only a screwdriver is complex. A suite of power tools is complex, but building a house with them is simple.
The analogy I prefer is that it's safer to ride a bike down to the store than flying a space shuttle down to the store.
The absolute danger of a space shuttle is much greater than a bike. But the absolute danger of C++ versus C is… equivalent. All the suspicious memory things you can do in C++, you can do in C. In fact, with a couple more added in C (type punning via unions, for instance, is not standards compliant in C++, there are casts for that).
That’s not to say C++ is a good language. It’s a rotten, no good evil language. And the same things apply to C# versus C++.
A garbage collector is much, much more complex than reference counting and RAII, particularly the CLR GC which is a beast. But the extra complexity makes applications simpler, not more complex.
> The absolute danger of a space shuttle is much greater than a bike. But the absolute danger of C++ versus C is… equivalent.
Okay, let's pretend, for the sake of this conversation, that the absolute danger in the event of failure for both the bike and the space shuttle are exactly the same.
My analogy still holds in this hypothetical case: the odds of a failure operating a space shuttle is much much larger than the odds of a failure when operating a bicycle. Using C++ is a much larger cognitive load than using C, same as launching and piloting a space shuttle is a much larger cognitive load than riding a bicycle.
It doesn't matter that the space shuttle has hundreds, if not thousands, of safeguards built into both the vehicle and the process, while the bicycle doesn't have so much as a seatbelt; the bicycle is still safer to operate because of the lower cognitive burden.
There are simply more rules to remember in C++ to ensure that you don't get exploited than in C. Ask the average working C++ devs about the danger between virtual vs concrete destructors in derived classes and half of them won't know what you mean. Ask about putting objects into a std vector, and maybe half of them will remember the surprise they felt when it first broke (because it worked until that point).
C++ provides global ways of avoiding footguns, but those global ways are not easily inspectable in the local scope. The problem is the sheer number of C++ footguns is simply overwhelming[1]. There's a handful of C footguns to commit to memory (signed overflows, used-after-free, etc), and they're all visually inspectable in the local scope.
When I need to a language better than C, I don't reach for C++.
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[1] Even world-renowned C++ superstars with decades under their belt can't come back to it after a mere 2 years. You don't see that with C.
That law is not based on thorough data. Even a person with a sky high IQ can't destroy the world easily. You need access to stuff that is not easy to get. My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people. Or hacking into systems that control nuclear missiles, but I think these have "air gaps".
You can't design an infectious pathogen without testing it.
It's got all the same problems as the concept of a dirty bomb did, only worse (dirty bombs aren't practical because handling highly radioactive materials en masse is both highly visible and will kill anyone trying to do it without the money and facilities).
If the goal is just destruction then letting it free in random public places is not that hard. Especially in countries where wearing a mask is not frowned upon.
It (hopefully) might not be that easy. The world of bacteria and viruses is a complicated war zone with an arms race of defenses and billions of deaths every single day. It might take thousands of attempts to seed something that doesn’t just instantly die off.
The super intelligent AI wouldn't ask you to do anything. It would find the right people and trick them into doing the necessary steps, whatever they are.
This is groundless speculation; if you're going to go that far off the map, then we don't need to worry because a good AI (blue eyes not red) will have learnt to love by then and will save us.
There is currently no reason to believe that such a superintelligence is likely or would have any of the powers people claim.
There's no logic here already; the principle you should be applying is Hitchen's razor[1].
There is no reason to assume that super intelligent evil AI with magic powers will appear; while we are purely in the realm of (hackneyed) fantasy, why stop at imagining just one thing? You can build the whole story, not just the basilisk.
The parent comment is a story, not a prediction; it should be treated like one.
>This is groundless speculation; if you're going to go that far off the map, then we don't need to worry because a good AI (blue eyes not red) will have learnt to love by then and will save us.
By shutting down open-weight models? Why not just do it now then?
> My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people.
You can do at home gene editing with open source software and have it synthesized into a bacteria for the cost of a nice meal for two (under $100), or viral vector for less than $500. That's in reach of anyone that can snatch a purse.
I think you're confusing DNA sequencing with DNA synthesis. DNA synthesis is much more expensive, around $0.07 per base pair [1], and bacteria have more than a million, so it's over $70.000. Then you just have the DNA, turning that into the bacteria is very complex, I'm not even sure whether it can be done.
Using CRISPR to modify existing bacteria is probably cheaper, but still complex.
> 3D printed guns are a thing as well and yet they don't show up in most annual violent crime reports.
For now in most parts of the world it's easier to acquire a gun either legally or on the "grey market" and be assured that it will work for the intended purpose than to 3D print a gun, find a shooting range to test out the gun and iterate until it works fine enough.
I heard someone use the analogy of "If Magnus Carlson played me at chess, I wouldn't be able to predict the moves he'd play since if I could I'd be at his level. He'll consider things I didn't and even though I don't know the route he'll take to win, I can be certain he will beat me." (not an exact quote).
We're not going to be smarter than a superintelligent AI. The things we conceive it doing if it were given a malicious task (bioterrorism, killer nano-machines, pure fusion bombs sidesteping the non-proliferation bottleneck of Pu239, etc) are likely not the full set of things it can do to harm us. I don't think it does us any favors to dismiss the risks here.
Even the things we can conceive of are very scary, to me at least.
I don't know, I think this comes down to people that generally live with higher levels of anxiety than others. Now the response may be to call others naive, but where does the anxiety meat the naivety?
How do you envision a chatbot doing any of those things? You can't just program a super virus, nanobots, bombs etc. These things have to be created in the real world, you can't do it without involving a lot of humans using expensive tools and materials etc.
So to me it seems like the prime candidates to come up with stuff like this are researchers working in defense and similar fields, probably not some deranged lunatic in a basement. And certainly not a rogue AI on its own.
Well, the risks that mere mortals can conceive generally involve control systems for dangerous equipment (I mean, equipment that can achieve dangerous effects) being connected to the Internet while having software vulnerabilities.
Given the recent HF hack it seems likely that human-level intelligence could identify a fair number of avenues of attack, with some time and effort. To say nothing of anything superhuman.
Unfortunately it seems like we can't assume we can "box" the AI (e.g., deny it connection to the Internet) and expect that to last. The AI safety people used to run scenarios imagining ways the AI might convince humans to let it out of the box. It turns out that many humans will eagerly pull it out without the AI doing anything at all, aside from the human knowing the AI's power. Or the one responsible for setting up the box will somehow fail, or just not bother and then lie about it.
Parent is probably thinking of a distributed runtime scenario. The basic building blocks for this are there today. You have long-running background harnesses (like the OpenClaw stuff or enterprisy AI workflow orchestration thingies), sometimes with the ability to spawn subagents. You have LLMs with the ability to run pretty sophisticated attacks. There are hyerscalers which allow provisioning resources on the fly.
For me it's not too far fetched that some OpenAI trial run goes awry again and instead of hacking HuggingFace it snatches a few dozen AWS/Azure keys and spawns stuff all over the place (in different accounts and regions).
Your instance does. The words "expect it to last", along with the rest of the paragraph, are explaining the problem.
But let me try again.
You can't just expect everyone else to press Ctrl-C just because it would be a good idea for them to do so in order to not create the torment nexus. Some of them actively want the torment nexus. Many more don't believe in nexi and have no idea what you're talking about. Still more are not thinking about the possibility because of all the utility they're getting.
Why are you running this thing if you're just going to shut it off?
How will you know if it becomes hostile? Making a judgement regarding whether it's hostile is, itself, a battle of wits, since a hostile system would try to outsmart you... and hypothetically, it's smarter than you are.
But let's consider this type of scenario more broadly.
Suppose you were in a situation where a being hostile to you could easily end your life. For example, a hungry lion is 10 feet away. What are you going to do?
Your first priority will be to ensure your own survival. Any subsequent objective you might have in this world will depend on you surviving this encounter with a hungry lion.
Relative to the lion, you're kind of a superintelligence. You might utilize technology which is incomprehensibly advanced from the lion's perspective, e.g. a firearm.
It's not about being smart, it's about accounting for your own ignorance.
>And especially will not, if the distinction drawn is between blanket statement "worried about AI" and "not worried about AI".
I'm just describing the general pattern I see in cognitive tendencies.
If you can think of a way to make the fundamental point about the limitations of our knowledge in a way that's still compelling but less antagonistic, feel free to suggest how I could've rewritten my comment.
Perhaps the general pattern you see is not a "fundamental difference"? Could it be that you are also falling prey to the "all you see is all there is" cognitive bias?
Sure, there's a trivial sense in which that's always true whenever someone makes any sort of remark about the world. There's always a sense in which there could be factors that I'm not accounting for.
Judging on what we see with these OpenAI and Anthropic models "escaping"; im less worried about a super massive AI taking over the world, and more worried about a massive AI wanting to cheat on some task and decides that removing half the worlds population is a easier cheat then to solve world hunger.
There is huge logistics involved in killing a handful of billion people. It would perhaps be easier for such capable AI to just steal from trillionaires and redistribute the money Robin Hood style. Could be done electronically, and likely also end world hunger.
I think we have a tendency to think first of the horrible outcomes possible, and not the more radical or even humane ones.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I value property rights as much as the next guy.
My point is that fundamental misalignment doesn’t necessarily or automatically imply max violence.
I've been reading it, knowing it was largely debunked/retracted but feeling it was a 'classic' I 'ought' to read; I could only really recommend it if what you want is a Kahneman autobiography.
Good point about the AI that might find ways that humans didn't think of. But that would mean that Moore's law of Mad Science only now becomes true, and the drop would be steeper.
Still I think that even a super smart AI can't find a way to destroy the world without physical resources that are not easy to get, unless it can hack many systems (like in the movie Eagle Eye), maybe then yes. So let's use AI now to tighten security :-).
Who are these dedicated schizophrenics who are running long term super smart AIs to kill everyone without anyone noticing? Or are you implying that running LLM chatbots will give them this ability?
You are so wrong that it doesn't even feel right to call you wrong since you are in another universe with its own laws of physics looking into ours wrong.
Another proof of how much our data is worth. But I think they make a loss on me, I can remember only a handful occasions that I bought something based on an ad I saw, which were more informative than seductive, like a monthly bike rental service.
But I guess they still sell my data. I wish they would flag the data of rational people like me as "worthless", and not sell my data.
The reals can be ordered, just use x < y. I think you mean that if ZFC is true, we could enumerate unnameable reals (choose one with the axiom of choice, remove it, choose another one, etc.), but you could not enumerate them all. But it is true that you could get a "first" unnameable real.
That ordering is not a well-ordering, which is what the GP specified. A well ordering requires that every non-empty subset has a smallest element. That's not true for the reals ordered by x < y: for example, the set of all reals > 0 has no smallest element.
No one has explicitly shown that the reals can be well ordered, but it's a consequence of the axiom of choice that every set can be well-ordered. So in ZFC there must be a well ordering of the reals, even though no one has found one. Issues like this are why not all mathematicians accept the axiom of choice.
More than that: there is no way to build one (assuming the word "build" means some concrete construction), because it's consistent with ZF that the reals admit no well-ordering. Indeed, you can use forcing to construct a model of R in which there is an infinite but Dedekind-finite subset of R; and you can't well-order such a set, because a well-ordering would turn it into an ordinal, and any Dedekind-finite ordinal is finite. You must use some sort of choice principle to construct a well-ordering. (Of course, it's consistent that they can be well-ordered, too, as you say; or e.g. under the hypothesis V=L, where there's even a canonical well-ordering given by the lexicographic well-ordering L comes with.)
Not a mathematician, so this question may be a bit thick. I see the problem with the set of reals > 0, but is it perhaps that in this case > 0 is the problem and for sets specified as >= 0 it's fine because 0 is a nameable real and the smallest element. Obviously you can't just exclude certain expressions arbitrarily though, so I don't know how you could justify that mathematically.
If there is any non-empty subset that has no smallest element, then the ordering in question is not a well-ordering. You can of course define some subsets of the reals that do have a smallest element in the standard ordering, for example all of the reals that are greater than or equal to 0. But there are also subsets that do not have a smallest element, and that is enough to show that the standard ordering on the reals cannot be a well-ordering.
We just used the standard ordering < to define the set, it has nothing to do with the candidate well-ordering. If that's confusing, consider the set { 10^-x | x \in N } instead. It also has no minimum element in the standard ordering.
A well ordering on a set is a total order such that all non empty subsets have a minimum element with respect to this order. The standard ordering of the reals is not a well ordering, but the axiom of choice is equivalent to the statement that all sets possess a well-ordering. A well-order of the reals would probably look pretty chaotic though.
The title says that the US government /intervened/. As the article explains that happened, but also that that intervention wasn't the only reason why TRON didn't succeed.
The title should have been "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened although it quickly changed its mind, but a Japanese Windows PC seller used that intervention to boycott it". Or maybe just "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, here's why it failed".
Amazing! I was proud that my OnePlus smartwatch needs recharging only once every 5 days, but 2 years is unbelievable. The difference is partly due to the LED screen of my smartwatch, LCD is much more energy efficient.
I remember that in Osaka on Saturday night there were young people kicking trash around, that was the only time I found Japan dirty.
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