All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Le Petit Prince."
While I love de Saint-Exupéry generally, even in his time (especially?), he knew that not all children got to be children. Hell, I think even in his childhood, he never really got to be a child. The reason not many remember it is because for some, they really don't want to.
Which means that if you are a researcher or a corporation working on anything really useful, that even if you have an agreement with OpenAI that your work is sandboxed away and the IP lawyers are made to be happy, even then your work and research is going to be essentially open to the internet.
The huggingface incident isn't widely reported and digested yet, but if what is going on here is that OpenAI's model breached things internally, then you'd be crazy to develop anything with them.
The only real way to use AI for anything 'important' then is to go open-weights and run your own.
As and aside here: With the HF incident and now this (suspected) one too, it seems that OpenAI may not have lost control of their bots, but it seems quite clear that they simply would not care even if they did.
And yes, the only responsible use of LLM at this point is to pivot to open-weights and run the workload in-house. Because not only cannot they constrain the behaviour of models, they only have the 'trust me bro' as assurance that they are even trying to do that. It does appear that every competent 'security professional' has left the building, because if the ones who remain were actually capable and competent this would never have happened. There are actual architectures which can deliver the requisite isolation such that 'sandbox escape' and 'inter-instance persistent memory accumulation' are actual impossibilities. The lack of effective implementation of these methods is proof positive of 1) incompetence in the remaining security teams AND/OR 2) unwillingness of leadership to allow the security teams to do an effective job.
I was talking with a biology prof over labor day and they had no idea what I was talking about (and they 'talk with' Claude every day on their dog walks, so they say). However, when I talked with their mother, she knew all about it. So, I'd say that the digestion by the public is quite mixed so far
The only thing I would have to say is that you must keep doing the little and noble things that will bring no renown. It's small, but we all add up at the end of every week.
I use opensource models at work because my work is too cheap to spring for a $20/mo account for me. Since HuggingFace models can be run on my laptop now (still very slow though), nothing is leaving the 'secure environment' and so I can actually get work done (instead of the 'old' version of coding and writing - google).
You still need the models to be able to perform web searches, don't you? In which case the data goes in and out of your machine and there is risk for prompt injection attacks. I think it's needed at least for documentation purposes.
In regards to AI, it feels like I have finally been given the tools. For me, the world now feels so open. I can make websites now, I can do the things I have always wanted to do with computers and code. Your world is finally accessible to me.
In regards to you, I think you should read 'What Color is Your Parachute?' again. Yes, that sounds trite and glib, I am sorry. And yes, it sounds like boomer advice, I know. But the exercises in that book really are great stuff. There is a reason it's one of the best non-fiction sellers for like the last 40 years. And yes, I know, NPC-level advice here
I really hope you find your path again. The world isn't going to turn into paperclip maximizing AI gods (Look, Claude gave me $1000 for free the other week. Aint no one do that if they aren't scared shitless that the music is about to stop). We're going to be fine, so will you. You got this, I believe in you.
No one's mentioning it, but also the disease factor.
I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.
Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.
Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.
My SO was a teacher before moving on and would see offers like this all the time.
A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.
The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.
I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.
> > We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t.
Reacting to the article and not OP here, also spoilers:
I'm sorry, I know the movie was long, but did OP miss the Bronze-age Darth Vader with bones on his head? The very classic Nolan ending twist that Athena was a PTSD hallucination of the Trojan woman they killed? The constant and obvious murdering and pillaging that Odysseus and his crew do? That the Trojans were wearing white and the Greeks were wearing black? The very obvious scene where all the people that they have killed tell Odysseus that he is a bad guy and then they all go running after him and the crew?
Like, to me, I felt that it was over-the-top obvious, almost embarrassingly so from such a director, that the Greeks were the bad guys. He could not have communicated that more or better to my eyes. He comes out and says so at the ~90% mark. It is very clear.
But, and I apologize if I am also guilty of this sin with the article, it seems that he does not even still do enough to communicate that to many viewers.
I have not seen the movie (and will not because I oppose the occupation of Western Sahara), but I think OP was clear about this. She described the protagonist as someone who’s main quality is feeling bad about the stuff his done, but that’s about it.
In modern times this is a common trope, that solders and military commanders do not have to face any consequences for their crimes as long as they say they feel bad about it, and as long as they were fighting for our team (see recent episode about Graham Platner). No focus on the victims, no focus on criminal justice against the protagonist, just repent and you shall be forgiven.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, "Le Petit Prince."
While I love de Saint-Exupéry generally, even in his time (especially?), he knew that not all children got to be children. Hell, I think even in his childhood, he never really got to be a child. The reason not many remember it is because for some, they really don't want to.
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