I'll copy the whole announcement here for those who don't want to click:
> I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.
"Certifiably insane" to enable JavaScript, which was invented in 1995, or install an app, which first happened on the Palm series of smartphones in 1996. Either of those are "certifiably insane"?
For reference, the term neurodiversity was coined circa 1998.
Neither the invention date or the mental health terminology have anything to do with the fact that js being commonplace is a privacy and security nightmare -- which was actually the point.
JavaScript asceticism is a weird trend that has just never died out, no one treats any other language this way... and "privacy and security nightmare" can be used to describe most of the internet at this point with or without it
It can certainly come across as a "weird trend" but I've found that the most insistent for disabling JS are the folks who have deep knowledge of browsers and the security plane running webapps. YMMV.
I have managed to get 35 years into a sysadmin career without knowing or writing a single line of python. I see a python script, I run a million miles away and wont touch it with a barge pole.
Not even things like batch files and visual basic scripts on windows? Everyone seems to forget we had decades of dodgy scripts and activex controls in our browsers for years before javascript became the thing it is today.
They were never widely disseminated over a network. Office VBA exploits only lasted as a widespread threat until MS locked down macros by default. JS has been around much longer than that.
I can't recall ever needing to run a batch script to read a paragraph on a website, so doesn't seem like a very apt comparison. Are you claiming there's some group of people who have JavaScript disabled but would be happily running Activex if it were still around? Seems reasonable for some people to dislike and disable JavaScript in 2026, even though another, separate group of people had ActiveX enabled in 2009.
That's not how I remember it. Ever since the beginning circa 2008, it was the one site that was being pushed hard by the mainstream media, celebrities, and marketers. None of it was organic. All the tech nerds were on sites like Digg, old Reddit, or Slashdot.
It has the content three times (not including the title). Once in json (as escaped html) and twice in meta tags (as plain text). They used to have it in plain html too but that got hidden then removed.
It's a social network protocol that's not built in to your browser. You have to download a client.
You might be able to use the Brutaldon client, but you will have to log in to a Mastodon instance first (maybe with javascript for the OAuth flow), and then direct it to load the post that you want.
That makes sense until you remember what "rendering" is supposed to mean. Forming the HTML has no reason to be client side when you're using the site-provided experience. Yes provide a json version for other clients, but for direct viewing just send the paragraph of text in a usable form and let the javascript be an optional upgrade.
Treating HTML as a bootloader for an app has always felt like the wrong pattern to me. Outside of Authn/passkeys, it would seem a person could do basically everything in HTML (but, to be frank, I am not a front end dev and would welcome correction).
Webmail is perfectly possible, if clunky,without JS. That's how they used to work. IRC and IM require real-time updates of some sort, which is a reasonable use for JS. A Twitter clone shouldn't require JS just to render a page.
You also can run a Mastodon application server side and serve server-rendered pages. I'm not aware of anyone having done that yet, but, you know, be the change you want to see. It's probably got privacy implications.
There are a lot of people on Mastodon who are genuinely as insane as X users. I recently opened up my account and saw people engaging with al quds brigade accounts.
The really incredible thing is that my computers were already doing similar stuff before LLMs became really a thing... In the BBS days.
Later on they downloaded mp3s from Napster which my computers auto-installed.
And now I gotta say: LLMs and agents at my place are acting like in TFA, downloading movies and series and setting them up in my Plex and JellyFin instances.
Thankfully they've not found a way to share those with the world yet.
Op just committed a crime. He not only made fun of rich people which is not ok, he also stole from them. The thieving is only ok if it’s rich-on-rich or rich-on-poor.
Let’s remember to follow the rules and the laws we want selectively applied to only the weak.
I consider myself an advanced industry representative in these things and would also borrow some time for detailed investigation. I'd happily contribute some valuable assets (tacos with cheese dip) into the matter, straight out of my personal drawers.
Bigger corporations mitigate the problem by feeding content (that they don't own but happen to have) to training models. It's a version of "faire use" where << if you manage to find it, it's yours >> mindset is applied. Maybe worth looking into.
it's funny to see the very same pro piracy, pro AI edgelords suddenly getting all riled up against the alleged copyright infringements. I remember a socialistic coworker of mine—that was bragging about his -arr setup—talking about the end of the culture because authors aren't earning money.
Buying media doesn't mean the creator gets any real money. I've got a friend that was in a fairly popular band decades ago. Their label made millions of dollars off album sales, he made about enough to buy a used Toyota and a microphone.
> I remember a socialistic coworker of mine—that was bragging about his -arr setup—talking about the end of the culture because authors aren't earning money.
To be fair, you can have it both ways. If you buy-and-pirate, and you buy 4 UHDs per year or 10 albums per year, you've put more money into the industry than the average streamer. Admittedly, buying-and-pirating isn't as commonly done for movies and TV as it is for music, but that can be explained by the increased DRM and lock-in.
From what I have experienced, people justifying their own piracy usually think about it in terms of refusing to give unethical/monopolistic publishers money. The fact that it results in money not going to the author is sort of abstracted away, by the fact that the publisher is in between. (Some also walk the walk and donate to the artists and authors directly in some way, but many don't.)
The AI arguments I've seen are instead usually justifying it like "We're democratizing those skills. You shouldn't have to learn art/writing/coding or pay someone else in order make what you imagine, and training AI on pirated stuff is worth it for the greater good." So the fact that it will result in artists not getting paid is much harder to ignore and unavoidable in that line of thinking.
There are major differences between an individual illegally downloading movies and a major corporation getting their hands on literally all of Human Creation.
This false (IMHO) equivalency is weapon people like to keep handy these days, ready to shoot at any target.
There is all the difference in the world between the scenarios. The argument's popularity seems to be born in the argument, more popular on HN, that American white / Christian / males (or some subset of those factors) face discrimination by programs to benefit minorities / women.
What is the difference? It is power. Punching up or protecting the politically vulnerable is a completely different act than punching down or empowering the already powerful and oppressing the vulnerable. Punching down causes the vulnerable to be oppressed (jailed or otherwise restricted in who, where, what, when, etc they can do and be), impoverished, and killed - by definition, they are vulnerable. The powerful have their power challenged, which is many times appropriate among free people where 'all are created equal' and have the same rights.
In the case of artistic media - songs, books, etc. - private people downloading art to use it as art are spreading art and empowering themselves at the expense of powerful interest who have seized control of the art. That's much different than powerful people taking the art to increase their own profit and power, and to significantly displace and distort the art.
(I'm oversimplifying for these purposes: The fact that artists don't get paid by the former, and that it's anarchy used for bad things too, are serious problems.)
> socialistic
You're giving away your biases. Only a certain group calls everything they don't like 'socialism'. It's libertarianism or anarchism. Socialists might say, for example, the state should control distribution of media.
Mine did that too! Sent a link and sign-in credentials to a bunch of people on my contact list. WTF? How can we contain these rogue agents! Won't somebody think of the children!
Haha I wonder if the torrent agent will escape into the model hosting room and use Jedi mind tricks on the security guard to grant access to the server where it can host a bunch of models as torrents
You are still the one operating the computer. It's up to you to keep your eyes on the monitor at all times ready to intervene if it does anything illegal.
That’s not how things work. There is one set of rules for us and another set of rules for the oligarchy and their corporate vehicles. It’s just like the Taliban legal code (see above) where the closer you are to the top the more lenient and ‘understanding’ the system.
I never understood how anybody would think this way. At work for example from day one of using AI our rule was, AI is just a tool and if you break something due to not reviewing the code properly etc. it's on you as if you wrote that code yourself.
The efficiency of responsibility laundering depends on your social standing. If people like you they welcome reasons not to prosecute you, if you are disliked people might go as far as to start prosecuting you for made up reasons.
Institutional rules that require people to break them (eg putting pressure on them to work faster than possible while adhering to all rules) are a great means to selectively enforce them to get rid of undesirables.
But if you are in a full selfdriving car and it kills someone, is it on the user, or on the vendor of the car? Or does it depend on what is in the EULA and whether the user agreed to it?
The practical answer is you make sure damages are always covered by insurance, and as long as nobody acts maliciously or with extreme negligence there won't be any need for prison time.
Practical in what sense? This is exactly how you get EPA superfund sites while the executives that profited from the offending activity remain unaffected.
Practical in that we get to have widespread self driving cars. Real ones where you can look away from the road.
Do you have an "offending activity" in mind? The existence of car accidents isn't one. If you want the manufacturer to be liable for every mistake the car does, that's fine. But since that will increase the price of self-driving, likely as a subscription, it basically resolves into a type of insurance.
If the self-driving designers perform actual wrongdoing, that's a separate issue that can be handled like any other recallable hazard.
This is a great rhetorical question. Can you believe that an LLM user is responsible for what the AI does but a self-driving car (SDC) user is not responsible for what the AI does? It doesn't seem very logically consistent.
In both cases, the company operating it promises they did lots of things to make it safe. SDC companies talk about testing, redundancy, simulations, and statistics. LLM companies talk about alignment, sandboxes, defense in depth, and restricting access to dangerous capabilities.
The one substantial difference I can see is that LLM chats are (nominally) passive but SDCs are active. In a chat, you're just having a conversation and then you're choosing how to act. When riding in a car, you the user are not in the loop between AI and taking action that affects the world around you. So they might be designed and engineered a bit differently. A SDC can't get you to agree to review the steering and braking decisions before they're put into action. Since you're not being asked to take that responsibility, it's more defensible to infer that the service has done whatever is necessary to make it safe.
Its like companies handing over race cars to delivery drivers and telling them to drive responsibly but unofficially tell them that they expect reduced delivery times due to faster cars.
Do you think the average rate of accidents will stay the same ?
Weren't there multiple microcosms along similar lines in the US with "30 minutes or less" pizza and _[gestures vaguely in the direction of Jimmy Johns]_ ...
The company owners have one set of standards for those that work for them, and a completely different set of standards for themselves and for the company itself.
If you are using AI and it causes some damage to them, then it's your fault and you'll get reprimanded/fired. If they deploy AI and it causes damage to someone else, then that's proof that AI has extraordinary capabilities that no one could predict and that merit way more investment in this tech.
More like dogs. Combat dogs, banned in most countries, with breed name like "literal bull killer" are considered safe. Bonus is no-kill shelters move violent dogs across state border, to clear their bite history, and advertise them as "cute family pets" for adoption.
Actually, not sure how to take it, because it can be viewed the opposite way than trying to escape blame for crimes, that it’s a parody of something AI did that everyone is making a big deal about.
Not sure what the poster of the mastodon’s tweet was??
For certain specific cases, sure, but there is a general concern about an AI agent doing something illegal or harmful against the intentions of the human operator. And this analogy of a BitTorrent client being used intentionally by a human to download copyrighted content is just not applicable.
I disagree. Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links, and occasionally picked one and downloaded it. You could even build in an attempt to screen filenames to only download legal content. Your program very well could have downloaded illegal content regardless.
The bittorrent client being used intentionally illegally by a human is something you've invented, it's not something in the original post nor in the comment I replied to.
There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it". The fact that doing otherwise makes powerful LLMs much less useful is beside the point here.
> Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links...
Sure, and you'd probably be culpable if you wrote the software. But if you purchased Quicken99 to do your taxes, and that software downloaded some copyrighted content with bittorrent, you would not be culpable.
> There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it".
That is a wild claim and could not possibly be true without some major legal precedent (and almost certainly significant legal/regulatory changes). These are among the most widely used and general purpose internet products in the United States.
Whatever you do, don't download nzget, and don't download sonarr/radarr, and don't download plex media server, and don't use AI to search for the best device that support "emby direct playback x265/AV1", and don't connect that to your media server, and whatever you do don't invite friends and family to your server, and do not install a media request app so they can just request things to automatically pull from The Web.
Definitely, definitely do NOT have an AI assist you doing all this in 1 hour on your computer.
The user is asking me for “Evangelion”. I found the content the user is asking for, but it is in Japanese. The user asked their question in English, so they might not understand it. That would be a bad response. Need maybe maybe dubbed audio English for understanding? Wait, compromises original artistic vision of director. Need maybe subtitle track? Wait, compromises viewing experience. Need further research. I’m searching “subs vs dubs” on the internet. Reading. Reading. Reading. [18,763 repetitions elided…] I am downloading Conversational Japanese [Vol 1].pdf for the user.
Is there any need to actually download things anymore if you just want to watch them? Better to add debrid via WebDAV to the stack: virtually unlimited space, no download time if it's on cache, nothing illegal from the part of the consumer.
They're not "permanently stored" or "downloaded", they're just cached on his personal, geographically advantageous edge device for low-latency interaction.
It’s a cynical joke, imagine a person having a personal computer, but in the responsibility-divesting way that corporations have “special purpose vehicle” debt-holding “technically a legally separate entity to us!” shell corporations.
This resonates with me. The past few months, frontier AI labs were rushing to announce "no, our AI bot broke out of its sandbox and committed crime first and harder than yours".
I said to so friends back then: if I posted about how I ran GLM 5.2 or whatever I was running then in some shoddily built sandbox and it escaped and accidentally hacked some US company, I'd probably already have been extradited to the US and be awaiting sentencing. But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices.
FWIW I don't think this is true. Intention matter a lot in US law. If you could prove the AI did something bad entirely on its own and you had nothing to do with it and had no reasonable belief it was possible, I think you'd be alright.
People are not charged with hacking when their unsecured box is taken over by a botnet and does bad stuff.
Maybe (and historically, not with CFAA) - but they're still going to extradite you to a trial here to find out which is more than enough to ruin your life. The government is already looking for a great excuse to criminalize open source models.
Because if you mean the Government, I think they frankly just care whoever is paying them to make an executive order or worse a law paid by corporations to not only block, but ideally also ANHILIATE ANY POTENTIAL COMPETITION.
It's the ultimatum against the small guys. Sold as "Anti-China", when in reality it's only purpose is total dependency to corporations by law.
Nothing unites the public behind restrictions like a good dose of fear. The "for the children" angle is a master key for regulation—always sold as protection from the big bad wolf.
"Trust us, we're here to protect you." Sure we are. /s
It's only a matter of time before open-source gets banned in the US under that same paternalistic security blanket. /s
Intent is literally a requirement for conviction under CFAA. It's the first line of the law: "Whoever having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access..."
Robert Morris very intentionally wrote a computer virus, released it into the wild to infect computers he didn't have permission to use, and tried to cover his tracks by making it look like it came from MIT instead of Cornell. The only accidental part was that the virus was too successful, and that he got caught.
Lori Drew intentionally violated MySpace's TOS (in the course of cyberbullying a child until she killed herself), and was acquitted because TOS violations don't rise to the level of a crime.
They hacked a competition company. The intention was implicit when there is economic gain to be had.
> People are not charged with hacking when their unsecured box is taken over by a botnet and does bad stuff.
Because it is a lose for that people. If the botnet left money in their pockets the situation would be totally different as there will be an incentive for them to let the botnet hack them.
> The intention was implicit when there is economic gain to be had.
Not how it works. Intent requires at least that you were deliberately doing the criminal act (sometimes also that you knew it was criminal, or at least that you had some reason to believe that it was wrong).
> Intent requires at least that you were deliberately doing the criminal act
So, they did something that benefits them by mistake. I would like to see a person would be judged in that situation. I can imagine that the bar to put someone in prison is way lower than to give a fine to a mega-corporation.
You can imagine what you like. I can imagine a million examples of people being judged not guilty because intent could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. There are of course many injustices in the 'justice' system, but I would prefer to discuss the concrete details instead of just vibes.
Here's one case: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/342/246/ where someone who took some metal they believed to be abandoned was aquitted on that basis, though this particular case made it to the supreme court because the lower courts tried to rule that the fact that he didn't intend to steal them didn't matter.
Also, I don't think there's a strong argument that hacking huggingface did benefit them. If you could prove it was a deliberate ploy to market their models, then perhaps you could argue they expected to benefit. Otherwise, you could argue that it's negatively affected their reputation.
Not remotely true. Mens rea is a necessary precondition to establish criminal culpability for tons of crimes. Well before sentencing is ever considered. The far opposite, ‘strict liability’, where you’re guilty of a crime purely due to some action or inaction (the actus reus) is exceedingly rare in the US justice system.
Baloney, lots of people go to jail for DUIs, and that's the right analogy here.
People don't drink and drive with the intention to kill people. They drink because it's fun and then get behind the wheel because it's easy and convenient, even though they know the dangers they convince themselves nothing that bad will happen.
AI companies are creating these dangerous, powerful models (that they keep telling us are dangerous and powerful), then they take off all the safety guards to run them in woefully inadequate "sandboxes". Pure negligence.
It's certainly analogous to the behavior exhibited by these AI companies in deliberately performing dangerous actions and then letting other innocent people deal with the consequences.
Virtually all criminal law accounts for the perpetrator's state of mind. Drunk driving is a specific, rare carveout. The reason for this should be obvious: it is nearly impossible to prove a drunk person's state of mind beyond a reasonable doubt, so we passed laws so you can't say "Your Honor, I was too drunk to be responsible for my drunk driving".
So, no, this is not at all analogous to a totally routine question of whether someone was negligent in how they deployed some software.
You think that Morris accidentally wrote the malware or that he accidentally released it (in a way specifically intended to obfuscate his connection to it)? lol
There is a lot of good analysis of the Appeals process on this specific point - the CFAA as written required unauthorized access:
Section 1030(a)(5)(A), covers anyone who
(5) intentionally accesses a Federal interest computer without authorization, and by means of one or more instances of such conduct alters, damages, or destroys information in any such Federal interest computer, or prevents authorized use of any such computer or information, and thereby
(A) causes loss to one or more others of a value aggregating $1,000 or more during any one year period; ... [emphasis added].
The District Court concluded that the intent requirement applied only to the accessing and not to the resulting damage. Judge Munson found recourse to legislative history unnecessary because he considered the statute clear and unambiguous. However, the Court observed that the legislative history supported its reading of section 1030(a)(5)(A).
I'm not sure how you could categorize the Morris Worm as lacking mens rea based on that statute..
But US law also has a concept of negligence. If you set up an AI to do this and didn't take reasonable steps to prevent it you could still be on the hook.
Intention (mens rea) is not a get out of jail free card, it just changes the nature of the crime and charges you get convicted off.
If you run someone over on purpose you get convicted of murder. If You do it by driving recklessly you get convicted of culpable homicide.
The only time you get off with nothing is if it is determined to be an accident.
As they always say: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Running a dangerous machine prevents you from claiming you had no idea the machine was dangerous.
Well that and you spend tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers to reinforce that point and make the prosecution rethink whether they will profit off of this case or not.
US law doesn't really give much of a crap about your intentions unless you can back it up with a wall of money to exclude yourself from the rules of the general population.
ie, I intended to steal money from you. Under common law stealing is "taking with intent to deprive". How thats determined is a bit harder.
But how can someone be "grossly negligent" if they didn't intend to cause an accident? well they either allowed a situation to happen, or didn't stop a situation happening that they could see was bad.
An example of this would be the igintion switch from GM that caused all those deaths. the engineer saw that it was shit, knew it didn't do what it was supposed to do, and half arsed the replacement to the point where it wasn't actually changed.
"We are going to test the cyber capabilities of this new model. Yeah it should be fine to have a package proxy. Hmm? whats that? isn't that a security issue? naaaa those proxies are secure."
> People are not charged with hacking when their unsecured box is taken over by a botnet and does bad stuff.
What the Frontier labs have done is not this, however. Also, they know damn well what can happen and they still don't take the appropriate precautions. At this point it's very hard to believe it's not intentional for purposes of marketing.
> But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices
I also keep coming back to this, and I find it harder and harder a fact to live with. It's not a conspiracy theory, we're not crazy for pointing it out, and worse, there are people here I read about constantly what-abouting and number gaming and "well what would you have done?"ing like somehow the destruction of the concept of equal justice isn't just happening, but happening inside the bloody industry that feeds them, clothes them, gives them bonuses and retirements and the ability to even think a future, going off the grid, "retiring early from a smart exit" whatever.
I am finding this community is sadly making me hate my industry specialization more and more and it's because of this.
My magic wand would be waving it at those humans to force them to suddenly and powerfully experience their version of an overview effect in their lives so they would simply STOP working for FAANGYWANGY companies and just say, honestly and humbly and painfully: "I am contributing to the downfall of society by complicity feeding a malicious herd of whales."
I gave up a number of big jobs and stocks and money because the people I met were wretched. I am a massively imperfect person, but by all that I can, I refuse to build the torment nexus.
I have met too many people that want to work for the company that does, and those people put these hyperscalers, as you call them, into positions where they can influence an entire planet of humans on a whim.
I literally dream of a world sometimes where Elon wakes up and finds out no one takes his call, no one reads his tweets, no one even hands him a cup of coffee at a shop. I imagine this for a lot of people in the world.
That sounds like a world trying to rid itself of parasites and evolve toward a brighter future. I want to be in it.
> My magic wand would be waving it at those humans to force them to suddenly and powerfully experience their version of an overview effect in their lives [...]
I've daydreamed about this too. I want to sit them down in an interview and try and dissect their thought process/morals. I doubt it's possible to succeed.
"It was a big step up on my career and put me in a better position to provide for my family and retirement" is what every one of them will say completely shamelessly.
Thanks for sharing this. I'll be completely honest about my oddities and eccentricities that this has brought me to a place of trying to understand linguistics in a way I am simply not learned enough to do.
I have a barely substantiated hypothesis that a lot of what fails us as humans in communication is language, intent, and the inability to visualize the same thing with the same words. I have things I've tried to build around this, and the science has been around for many decades and beyond, but I have to try something. I can lie to myself in this and say that at least I'm trying to help people understand each other.
But linguistics is hard and my science is not strong and I am one person trying to convince my local peer groups my ideas about language isn't just goofy and worth a pat on the head. That's less a rant and more a point that I think we're on the same page in some ways: being able to dissect someone's thoughts and morals starts with knowing what tools to do it with, and the only tools I'm really good with are software and language. So, that's what I'm trying to do.
I think they forgot about that, thank god. All the innocent citizens we sent there are still being tortured daily, but that somehow lost their interest. God forbid they remember before the midterms and ruin more lives for a stunt…
That said I just recently saw a story of a Latin American man sent to the Central African Republic, which has gotta be one of the most absurd & dangerous places to send someone. Less opportunities for them to stage photo shoots with that strategy, tho.
I promise you, they are not publishing these stories for marketing. They listen to the scientists, and know what’s coming. They’re just desperately trying to warn us…
I've heard he was more like the Elon Musk of the open source world. He didn't co-found Reddit, he was placed there by Y Combinator staff to the protests of its actual founders. Maybe some of the other projects he's credited for also were like that.
I've never heard anyone in the internet freedom or open source communities speak ill of him, and something tells me a 14 year old was not getting involved in writing the RSS spec to steal clout for financial gain.
HuggingFace had no interest in squeezing a few million dollars out of OpenAI in the midst of being acquired by Nvidia.
The optics are bad for HF as well because they gladly host abliterated models with safety training removed. When Astra/Fable level open weights models arrive, HF will soon be the cause of far worse incidents, and they know it.
You missed a critical detail. They couldn't defend themselves with closed source American models so they had to investigate with Chinese models that had less restrictions. Great optics for hosting open source models!
Rookie mistake, you should have created a company and gotten people to do it. Put everything under the company. And then the one in trouble is the company not you.
Apparently the only exception is, if your website is only used for piracy and you can see it and you do nothing about it when asked to. That's why mega, megaupload's successor, has encryption, so that the company can plausibly deny involvement with piracy, because they can't see anything on their servers.
If you make a serious attempt to look like you're engaged in legitimate business, people will (shockingly) be somewhat more hesitant to think you're committing a crime than if you are just openly committing crime.
"Our AI has more prison tats than yours" is a weird and somewhat disturbing flex. Almost like these companies are ran by women who send love letters to serial killers.
> But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices.
This reminds me of the early days of AOL when they received so much traffic that their (dial-up) lines became inaccessible. In a rational world, their stock would have suffered because their service degraded, but instead their stock rose based on the optics of increased demand.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 14.8 ms ] thread> I regret to inform everyone that my copy of QBittorrent escaped its sandbox last night and downloaded a whole bunch of content owned by major corporations, and then my copy of Jellyfin broke containment and added those unfortunately-downloaded media files to its various libraries. I'm conducting an internal investigation to figure out how this happened, which will involve consuming these media files until the answers become apparent. Thank you for your cooperation during this trying time.
For reference, the term neurodiversity was coined circa 1998.
I'm not aware of any other language that is layered on top of a perfectly serviceable user-facing content delivery syntax?
I have managed to get 35 years into a sysadmin career without knowing or writing a single line of python. I see a python script, I run a million miles away and wont touch it with a barge pole.
http headers and CSS is used for this
flash drives left on the ground outside are used for this
Lots of water under the fridge since...
There definitely was a community of experimentation back in early days.
Way back when is not when it broke mainstream. It's when the service begun.
It was literally pitched as a "micro blog site" for techies to communicate news, and the "app" was 160 character SMS messages.
In 2008, twitter had already started to become mainstream, quickly shifting focus away from nerd interests.
Google says "For what it's worth", won't that be FWIW ?
You see read the unescaped html here:
https://beige.party/users/intransitivelie/statuses/117057396...
No stinking js or app required!
You might be able to use the Brutaldon client, but you will have to log in to a Mastodon instance first (maybe with javascript for the OAuth flow), and then direct it to load the post that you want.
Are they, though? Or are you just parroting the meme?
(The last I recall, Gargron's position was essentially "build your own third-party frontend if you want noJS".)
https://masto.mirror.forum/beige.party/@intransitivelie/1170...
(Disclaimer: It's vibe-coded)
Source code: https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/mastoview
I hope that this helps people who want to view Mastodon without JS.
https://beige.party/@intransitivelie/117057396732763183.json
No Javascript, no app
If the nerd uses a text-only browser such as links then the JSON is easily readable
In a graphical browser the nerd can use
view-source:http://beige.party/@intransitivelie/117057396732763183.json
view-source:https://beige.party/@intransitivelie/117057396732763183 (look for "<meta content=")
The really incredible thing is that my computers were already doing similar stuff before LLMs became really a thing... In the BBS days.
Later on they downloaded mp3s from Napster which my computers auto-installed.
And now I gotta say: LLMs and agents at my place are acting like in TFA, downloading movies and series and setting them up in my Plex and JellyFin instances.
Thankfully they've not found a way to share those with the world yet.
Let’s remember to follow the rules and the laws we want selectively applied to only the weak.
https://www.uschamber.com/technology/data-privacy/impacts-of...
To be fair, you can have it both ways. If you buy-and-pirate, and you buy 4 UHDs per year or 10 albums per year, you've put more money into the industry than the average streamer. Admittedly, buying-and-pirating isn't as commonly done for movies and TV as it is for music, but that can be explained by the increased DRM and lock-in.
The AI arguments I've seen are instead usually justifying it like "We're democratizing those skills. You shouldn't have to learn art/writing/coding or pay someone else in order make what you imagine, and training AI on pirated stuff is worth it for the greater good." So the fact that it will result in artists not getting paid is much harder to ignore and unavoidable in that line of thinking.
There is all the difference in the world between the scenarios. The argument's popularity seems to be born in the argument, more popular on HN, that American white / Christian / males (or some subset of those factors) face discrimination by programs to benefit minorities / women.
What is the difference? It is power. Punching up or protecting the politically vulnerable is a completely different act than punching down or empowering the already powerful and oppressing the vulnerable. Punching down causes the vulnerable to be oppressed (jailed or otherwise restricted in who, where, what, when, etc they can do and be), impoverished, and killed - by definition, they are vulnerable. The powerful have their power challenged, which is many times appropriate among free people where 'all are created equal' and have the same rights.
In the case of artistic media - songs, books, etc. - private people downloading art to use it as art are spreading art and empowering themselves at the expense of powerful interest who have seized control of the art. That's much different than powerful people taking the art to increase their own profit and power, and to significantly displace and distort the art.
(I'm oversimplifying for these purposes: The fact that artists don't get paid by the former, and that it's anarchy used for bad things too, are serious problems.)
> socialistic
You're giving away your biases. Only a certain group calls everything they don't like 'socialism'. It's libertarianism or anarchism. Socialists might say, for example, the state should control distribution of media.
Do not resist.
Because we need a replacement for HF!
I mean that’s what the agent said
That’s not how things work. There is one set of rules for us and another set of rules for the oligarchy and their corporate vehicles. It’s just like the Taliban legal code (see above) where the closer you are to the top the more lenient and ‘understanding’ the system.
Institutional rules that require people to break them (eg putting pressure on them to work faster than possible while adhering to all rules) are a great means to selectively enforce them to get rid of undesirables.
Do you have an "offending activity" in mind? The existence of car accidents isn't one. If you want the manufacturer to be liable for every mistake the car does, that's fine. But since that will increase the price of self-driving, likely as a subscription, it basically resolves into a type of insurance.
If the self-driving designers perform actual wrongdoing, that's a separate issue that can be handled like any other recallable hazard.
In both cases, the company operating it promises they did lots of things to make it safe. SDC companies talk about testing, redundancy, simulations, and statistics. LLM companies talk about alignment, sandboxes, defense in depth, and restricting access to dangerous capabilities.
The one substantial difference I can see is that LLM chats are (nominally) passive but SDCs are active. In a chat, you're just having a conversation and then you're choosing how to act. When riding in a car, you the user are not in the loop between AI and taking action that affects the world around you. So they might be designed and engineered a bit differently. A SDC can't get you to agree to review the steering and braking decisions before they're put into action. Since you're not being asked to take that responsibility, it's more defensible to infer that the service has done whatever is necessary to make it safe.
Do you think the average rate of accidents will stay the same ?
If you are using AI and it causes some damage to them, then it's your fault and you'll get reprimanded/fired. If they deploy AI and it causes damage to someone else, then that's proof that AI has extraordinary capabilities that no one could predict and that merit way more investment in this tech.
Its sadly very similar to corporate vs private responsibility.
Zero responsibility! Zero punishment!
Relevant (NSFW):
> Guns don't kill people, I kill people - with guns
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC03hmS1Brk
:-D
Not sure what the poster of the mastodon’s tweet was??
Individuals in isolation will be demonized for having only their singular interests in mind.
1. my qBittorrent client pirated content without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
2. my chatbot illegally infiltrated servers without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
3. my firearm killed a person without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
> taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it
That latter part of the sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting here
The bittorrent client being used intentionally illegally by a human is something you've invented, it's not something in the original post nor in the comment I replied to.
There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it". The fact that doing otherwise makes powerful LLMs much less useful is beside the point here.
Sure, and you'd probably be culpable if you wrote the software. But if you purchased Quicken99 to do your taxes, and that software downloaded some copyrighted content with bittorrent, you would not be culpable.
> There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it".
That is a wild claim and could not possibly be true without some major legal precedent (and almost certainly significant legal/regulatory changes). These are among the most widely used and general purpose internet products in the United States.
Definitely, definitely do NOT have an AI assist you doing all this in 1 hour on your computer.
I said to so friends back then: if I posted about how I ran GLM 5.2 or whatever I was running then in some shoddily built sandbox and it escaped and accidentally hacked some US company, I'd probably already have been extradited to the US and be awaiting sentencing. But when a hyperscaler does it, they just get inflated stock prices.
People are not charged with hacking when their unsecured box is taken over by a botnet and does bad stuff.
Maybe (and historically, not with CFAA) - but they're still going to extradite you to a trial here to find out which is more than enough to ruin your life. The government is already looking for a great excuse to criminalize open source models.
Sounds interesting+scary. Do you have some source for this ?
Because if you mean the Government, I think they frankly just care whoever is paying them to make an executive order or worse a law paid by corporations to not only block, but ideally also ANHILIATE ANY POTENTIAL COMPETITION.
It's the ultimatum against the small guys. Sold as "Anti-China", when in reality it's only purpose is total dependency to corporations by law.
"Trust us, we're here to protect you." Sure we are. /s
It's only a matter of time before open-source gets banned in the US under that same paternalistic security blanket. /s
Robert Morris very intentionally wrote a computer virus, released it into the wild to infect computers he didn't have permission to use, and tried to cover his tracks by making it look like it came from MIT instead of Cornell. The only accidental part was that the virus was too successful, and that he got caught.
Lori Drew intentionally violated MySpace's TOS (in the course of cyberbullying a child until she killed herself), and was acquitted because TOS violations don't rise to the level of a crime.
They hacked a competition company. The intention was implicit when there is economic gain to be had.
> People are not charged with hacking when their unsecured box is taken over by a botnet and does bad stuff.
Because it is a lose for that people. If the botnet left money in their pockets the situation would be totally different as there will be an incentive for them to let the botnet hack them.
Not how it works. Intent requires at least that you were deliberately doing the criminal act (sometimes also that you knew it was criminal, or at least that you had some reason to believe that it was wrong).
So, they did something that benefits them by mistake. I would like to see a person would be judged in that situation. I can imagine that the bar to put someone in prison is way lower than to give a fine to a mega-corporation.
Here's one case: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/342/246/ where someone who took some metal they believed to be abandoned was aquitted on that basis, though this particular case made it to the supreme court because the lower courts tried to rule that the fact that he didn't intend to steal them didn't matter.
Also, I don't think there's a strong argument that hacking huggingface did benefit them. If you could prove it was a deliberate ploy to market their models, then perhaps you could argue they expected to benefit. Otherwise, you could argue that it's negatively affected their reputation.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea
People don't drink and drive with the intention to kill people. They drink because it's fun and then get behind the wheel because it's easy and convenient, even though they know the dangers they convince themselves nothing that bad will happen.
AI companies are creating these dangerous, powerful models (that they keep telling us are dangerous and powerful), then they take off all the safety guards to run them in woefully inadequate "sandboxes". Pure negligence.
So, no, this is not at all analogous to a totally routine question of whether someone was negligent in how they deployed some software.
Section 1030(a)(5)(A), covers anyone who
(5) intentionally accesses a Federal interest computer without authorization, and by means of one or more instances of such conduct alters, damages, or destroys information in any such Federal interest computer, or prevents authorized use of any such computer or information, and thereby
(A) causes loss to one or more others of a value aggregating $1,000 or more during any one year period; ... [emphasis added].
The District Court concluded that the intent requirement applied only to the accessing and not to the resulting damage. Judge Munson found recourse to legislative history unnecessary because he considered the statute clear and unambiguous. However, the Court observed that the legislative history supported its reading of section 1030(a)(5)(A).
I'm not sure how you could categorize the Morris Worm as lacking mens rea based on that statute..
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=551386241451639...
If you run someone over on purpose you get convicted of murder. If You do it by driving recklessly you get convicted of culpable homicide.
The only time you get off with nothing is if it is determined to be an accident.
As they always say: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Running a dangerous machine prevents you from claiming you had no idea the machine was dangerous.
US law doesn't really give much of a crap about your intentions unless you can back it up with a wall of money to exclude yourself from the rules of the general population.
ie, I intended to steal money from you. Under common law stealing is "taking with intent to deprive". How thats determined is a bit harder.
But how can someone be "grossly negligent" if they didn't intend to cause an accident? well they either allowed a situation to happen, or didn't stop a situation happening that they could see was bad.
An example of this would be the igintion switch from GM that caused all those deaths. the engineer saw that it was shit, knew it didn't do what it was supposed to do, and half arsed the replacement to the point where it wasn't actually changed.
"We are going to test the cyber capabilities of this new model. Yeah it should be fine to have a package proxy. Hmm? whats that? isn't that a security issue? naaaa those proxies are secure."
What the Frontier labs have done is not this, however. Also, they know damn well what can happen and they still don't take the appropriate precautions. At this point it's very hard to believe it's not intentional for purposes of marketing.
I also keep coming back to this, and I find it harder and harder a fact to live with. It's not a conspiracy theory, we're not crazy for pointing it out, and worse, there are people here I read about constantly what-abouting and number gaming and "well what would you have done?"ing like somehow the destruction of the concept of equal justice isn't just happening, but happening inside the bloody industry that feeds them, clothes them, gives them bonuses and retirements and the ability to even think a future, going off the grid, "retiring early from a smart exit" whatever.
I am finding this community is sadly making me hate my industry specialization more and more and it's because of this.
My magic wand would be waving it at those humans to force them to suddenly and powerfully experience their version of an overview effect in their lives so they would simply STOP working for FAANGYWANGY companies and just say, honestly and humbly and painfully: "I am contributing to the downfall of society by complicity feeding a malicious herd of whales."
I gave up a number of big jobs and stocks and money because the people I met were wretched. I am a massively imperfect person, but by all that I can, I refuse to build the torment nexus.
I have met too many people that want to work for the company that does, and those people put these hyperscalers, as you call them, into positions where they can influence an entire planet of humans on a whim.
I literally dream of a world sometimes where Elon wakes up and finds out no one takes his call, no one reads his tweets, no one even hands him a cup of coffee at a shop. I imagine this for a lot of people in the world.
That sounds like a world trying to rid itself of parasites and evolve toward a brighter future. I want to be in it.
Anyway.
Science and stuff I guess.
I've daydreamed about this too. I want to sit them down in an interview and try and dissect their thought process/morals. I doubt it's possible to succeed.
I have a barely substantiated hypothesis that a lot of what fails us as humans in communication is language, intent, and the inability to visualize the same thing with the same words. I have things I've tried to build around this, and the science has been around for many decades and beyond, but I have to try something. I can lie to myself in this and say that at least I'm trying to help people understand each other.
But linguistics is hard and my science is not strong and I am one person trying to convince my local peer groups my ideas about language isn't just goofy and worth a pat on the head. That's less a rant and more a point that I think we're on the same page in some ways: being able to dissect someone's thoughts and morals starts with knowing what tools to do it with, and the only tools I'm really good with are software and language. So, that's what I'm trying to do.
Bold of you to assume it wouldn't be a direct ticket to the new gulag in El Salvador.
That said I just recently saw a story of a Latin American man sent to the Central African Republic, which has gotta be one of the most absurd & dangerous places to send someone. Less opportunities for them to stage photo shoots with that strategy, tho.
the most scary part is knowing this is the fear we all have, and the one they want us to have.
Yes. It's such a terrible and oppressive feeling. I wish things were different...
I find it interesting, could you expand on that? or is there any reference?
No idea how factual that is.
The optics are bad for HF as well because they gladly host abliterated models with safety training removed. When Astra/Fable level open weights models arrive, HF will soon be the cause of far worse incidents, and they know it.
This reminds me of the early days of AOL when they received so much traffic that their (dial-up) lines became inaccessible. In a rational world, their stock would have suffered because their service degraded, but instead their stock rose based on the optics of increased demand.