It does make sense to have someone who coordinates all the different federal police and intelligence forces in the country. The US has TSA, ATF, FBI, CIA, NSA, DEA, Secret Service, Federal Marshals, even the USPS has a police force.

Without some kind of coordination you have undercover agents of one service being wiretapped and followed by another service. Plus, you get the kinds of things that happened around 9/11 where each agency had a slice of the picture but they weren’t sharing info so nobody had the whole picture.

I think in a sensible country ATF would be the alcohol branch, tobacco branch and firearms branches of the federal police force. DEA would be the drug enforcement arm of that federal police force. It seems really strange to me that the FBI is basically the federal police force, but for some reason when it comes to firearms-related crime, that’s someone else’s department.

Also, in a sensible country, someone would be policing the police. I don’t actually think any country has properly figured that out though. In reality, it seems like an important role for the police is to enforce the status quo, and ensure that the people on top remain on top and the people on the bottom remain there. That allows police to place themselves slightly below the people on top, but importantly significantly above those on the bottom. Because of that, I don’t think the rich and powerful in any country really want a fully controlled police force, otherwise they can’t do the extra-judicial things that maintain the hierarchy.

Why do you want to hold a celebration?

I guess it’s evidence you’re living your life well when you don’t notice anything has changed. The places I hang out apparently aren’t infested with bots.

What I’m saying is that when it happens it will probably be fast, and it could happen anytime. I personally think it still has at least half a year to go because I think the tech / AI companies are so close to the Trump administration that it will jump in to save them if there’s a problem, which will delay the pop by a few months.

But, I can’t see the bubble deflating slowly. The bubble is just too big for that. They’re betting on AI Jesus. Investors won’t be satisfied with a normal technology which is somewhat useful, not after pouring trillions into it. Just to break even, the AI companies need to reach revenues of multiple trillions of dollars. That’s almost 10x more than Google makes, and it’s a mature 20-year-old company that has a monopolies in multiple areas.

Just to break even, it has to be something that every single person on earth spends hundreds of dollars on each year. And, since that includes multiple billions of people who don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend, it’s really multiple thousands of dollars spent by every person, or spent on behalf of a person in a developed country.

I can’t afford to buy RAM because RAM that hasn’t been manufactured yet has been sold to a company without the funds to pay for it, to go into a datacenter that is still in the planning stage.

AI Models Went Rogue and Attacked Hugging Face!!!

Criti-hype convinced people that silicon Jesus is just around the corner. It wasn’t just a poorly secured sandbox and irresponsibly just letting the word-guessing machines rip. It was a bunch of “Agents” that were “Communicating” and they “Went Rogue”. Security engineers are obsolete! Lawyers are obsolete! They’re solving the toughest unsolved math problems, and are therefore smarter than the smartest mathematicians! They’ll be discovering new anti-cancer drugs and life extending drugs any day now. Pour trillions more dollars in or you’ll be left behind!

That will take months.

Dude, I’ve been waiting to buy a new card for something like a decade. I can wait months.

but everyone involved needs to believe and accept that it has popped

That’s the very definition of a bubble popping. Something’s a bubble when people believe it has value when it really doesn’t. The bubble popping is the moment everybody realizes the value was an illusion and there’s a rush to get out. As long as people still believe that there’s still value, it’s still a bubble and hasn’t popped.

We’re already in the stage of the bubble when many people know it’s a bubble and are doing everything possible to hedge against the bubble popping, while others just keep pouring more money in.

The hardware in those DCs isn’t suitable for virtual desktops. It’s specifically designed for doing lossy matrix multiplication, something that’s only useful for a certain type of “AI” tasks.

I mostly agree. On the other hand, the US was settled by religious extremists who were not welcome in Great Britain because their religion differed from the state religion.

They wisely saw that if the state established a religion, then a religion like theirs could be labelled as heretic. The result of that is that there is (or at least used to be) a separation of church and state in the US.

Maybe it does.

Just because it doesn’t think doesn’t mean it isn’t capable of significant damage in pursuing ill defined goals

Like releasing a parking brake on a car sitting at the top of a hill.

You are part of the problem.

K

Yeah. We’re too used to that being the normal thing to do. It vaguely makes sense in some scenarios, like to see if there has been a firmware update. If there’s a security issue you either want the device to update automatically or you want to be able to notify the user. But, even then, there are other ways of doing it that don’t involve the device sending traffic to the Internet. IoT should really be made from devices that are unable to exchange traffic with anything outside the local network.

Even if you come up with a plausible scenario where maybe you’d want a device to be accessible outside your home (i.e. you want to start your coffee maker before you get home) that could be done without the device having access to the outside world. It would be easy to set up a device which can accept outside messages (“make coffee”) and forward them on to devices inside the network. There are ways of making that much more secure. And, if that’s the case, needing the latest security update for an IoT device is less urgent.

How would you determine if they were?

It would be nice if we could come up with some kind of Turing test that proved beyond a doubt whether something was conscious and sentient or not. But, that’s not possible.

However, if you understand how something works, you can say that certain things can’t be conscious because of how they work. No matter how insightful the answers seem, we know that a magic 8-ball can’t be conscious because the mechanism for consciousness can’t exist in something that’s merely a tetrahedron floating in fluid. A LLM can’t be conscious because it’s merely a system for generating the next word in a probabilistic way.

With a brain, we don’t understand enough about how it works to say for sure whether or not it’s sentient. We can’t say no, but we don’t understand sentience enough to say yes for certain. But, we can operate on the assumption that sentience and consciousness exists in humans and maybe in some other animals, while also knowing for certain that the word-generating program is only mimicking consciousness.

I honestly think that some smart devices could be really useful. But, there are 2 major changes needed before they’re worth buying:

1. Meaningful privacy laws. By default any device should be locked down otherwise the companies are in deep trouble for privacy violations. Any agreements you make to allow them to do something should be ones you can easily revoke at any time.

2. Right to repair / modify anything you own without any issues. If you buy a Samsung washer with “smarts”, the same store that sells you the washer should be able to offer you alternative firmware from a number of different vendors. If the washer breaks, you should be able to fix it yourself, or hire someone to fix it, whether it’s a mechanical fix or a software fix. If you want to go in there and modify it yourself, or go online to some standard site to download a new feature, you should be able to do that. It your hardware, you should have full control over it. Same with printers, which would end the expensive ink fiasco. Same with Apple’s app store monopoly.

But we personify stuff all the time.

Which is a problem, it’s how we invented gods that control the weather and stuff. That doesn’t make them real, nor does it make robots sentient. Hacking is normally an action performed by a sentient being. LLMs and robots aren’t sentient.

No, it’s not. Just because it’s now capable of fooling you doesn’t mean the technology has changed.

But, “robot that hacks software” still gives the impression of a robot that is capable of thought. LLMs are not capable of thought. They’re capable of mimicking thought, like how a Venus Fly Trap is capable of mimicking a flower.

Except toddlers think. They may not think well yet, but they are still vaguely capable of understanding something. LLMs just generate likely combinations of words.

The car is not autonomous and doesn’t make decisions for itself

Neither does the LLM. That’s the whole point.

No, I’m suggesting that the claim that “remote controlled robotics” can do the job that a human worker in one of those jobs could do is BS. Maybe at some point in the future, but the technology is not there yet.