Not in the same way. The degree to which the symptoms manifest can range from mild to extreme, but it's dependent on the person, and each person can have symptoms exacerbated to more or less the same degree. A psychotic break can result in you believing you're chosen by god to shovel snow off the sidewalks for your neighborhood, and for the rest of your life, you will deeply and genuinely believe that to be true, and accordingly orient your life around it. You might be very normal appearing in almost every other way, but have that one singular delusion that overwhelms your capacity to think rationally about it. You might end up confabulating that you are individually responsible for making the weather warm during spring, summer, and fall, and responsible for the lack of snow.
Other delusions, hallucinations, hearing malicious voices, hearing voices which you feel you must obey, end up with individuals who have the same relative level of schizophrenic dysfunction, in terms of the way the brain operates, but the nature of the delusion can make them dangerous - "god told me to direct traffic on the freeway" or "god told me to slay demons disguised as humans".
The particulars of the case make a huge difference in how much medicine and treatment can help them live independent, normal lives. This potential treatment would be wonderful if it restores normal brain function. It also hints at why antipsychotic and other drugs which increase inhibitory signaling were partially effective.
Heck, it even has explanatory power for the different triggers of psychotic breaks - once a threshold of activity gets passed, the brain loses its ability to discriminate between legitimate, reality grounded signals and feedback that should have been inhibited, and once those neural connections are made and "configured" to operate as part of the default mode network, that person will have permanent cognitive problems.
His proximity to Bruce Lee earned him more or less permanent kung fu cinema fame. Walker,Texas Ranger and other work he did definitely boosted it, but the memes clinched it.
Not so slowly. They've gone from a more or less respectable smaller country to more or less politically, culturally, and economically irrelevant in less than 10 years. I even question whether it's rational to allow them to have nukes; they should probably be required to give them up to some country that has a shot at remaining a stable and predictable geopolitical entity over the next century.
Their cultural decline seems to have definitely accelerated recently. Even 10-15 years ago it seemed like there was so much more British influence in the media, a lot more films and television set in Britain. It seems like the London Olympics were a kind of last hurrah. Even here in Australia which has always historically had more British influence than anywhere else it's receded - there's very little focus on their internal politics, much more on the politics and culture of the United States, even more than you'd expect given the population difference.
There are two kinds of "isolationism". In the first, the person becomes a hermit refusing to interact with anyone.
In the second, a cult grabs hold of the person and isolates them from their families and loved ones so they can brainfuck them. And, I suspect this has happened to the UK. England doesn't want to be a land for the English, because to do so would make them racist. They have strength in their diversity. Blah blah blah. And the English can't be allowed to talk with anyone else or they might realize how fucked-in-the-head all that nonsense is. They are under the spell of a cult, not as individuals, but collectively. And that cult won't be done with them until it's taken everything from them and coerced them to sign a "billion year contract". And to top it off, you're blaming it on them.
Don't mistake Brits' general disinterest in engaging with foreigners whose perspective on the UK begins and ends with lecturing us on "England for the English" with us not being able to talk with anybody else...
In case it wasn't clear, my comment was sarcastic. To be absolutely clear, I don't agree with racial discrimination.
So that we don't talk past each other, here is a summary of my perspective of the discussion so far:
NoMoreNicksLeft dropped an unhinged rant about "England for the English", including a clearly sarcastic and mocking reference to "They have strength in their diversity".
joe_mamba chimed in with "diversity is bad", and added that Germany has the same "issue".
DeathArrow expressed incredulity at witnessing open racial segregationism on HN.
You replied to DeathArrow with "diversity of opinions is good". It was unclear whether you were defending the expression of segregationism on HN, or disagreeing with the premise of it. In any case you didn't signal that you recognized the extreme irony.
I attempted to point out the irony with as few words as possible, and apparently failed to communicate well enough.
Ah I think I understand. I definitely think the point is worth making that England seems to be one of the only places on earth that doesn't value - or even recognise the existence of - its own native population, even as a point of debate. It's definitely nothing to do with segregation, which is just something else.
No one in most countries would argue that their native population doesn't exist as a category. In fact while in the US the native Americans have been treated very badly in the past, that hopefully doesn't happen too much today, and they are quite honoured in some ways.
The biggest racial discrimination in today's UK is their inability to arrest and put an end to grooming gangs. Get educated on the subject to understand whats being insinuated by the slogan they have "diversity" as their strength. Most of western Europe & UK are unable to handle crime committed by certain groups, for fear of being labeled racists. Well, there is a teacher in UK in "hiding" because he offended the wrong people. In summary, UK neither has the soft power nor the moral authority to influence anyone in the today's world.
the UK has incarcerated plenty of participants in grooming gangs from a diverse range of ethnic groups (and elected none of them President).
No matter how many accounts you create to amplify the Epstein-associate media message that only other ethnicities participate in the systematic sexual abuse of children and get away with it, you're still not getting an invite to the island...
Yes, but the comment DeathArrow responded to, which is apparently what started all this bickering about racism (collapse that comment to see what I mean), was not.
joe_mamba's use of "diversity" reads as being about diversity of opinion; it only appears to be about race given the context you pointed out.
Seriously, what part of "United people are dangerous for the elites" suggests that the people should segregate themselves and each other?
I have a hard time believing that, sorry. joe_mamba literally quoted the same use of the word "diversity" that I did, and concurred with the sentiment - that it "leads to division". And went on to add that Germany was also "under the spell of a cult".
You're suggesting that joe_mamba simply used a paragraph of barely-veiled racist drivel as a jumping off point to make a completely unrelated and totally-not-racist point about how diversity of opinion is harmful and "leads to weakness"? And agreed with the "cult" rhetoric for good measure?
Why exactly should we ignore the context? An excess of charity, perhaps? How are we supposed to interpret "similar issue in Germany" without the context?
It used to be widely known that tech nerds are socially impaired.
Then they built the future and earned a lot of money and status, and now Silicon Valley is a hotbed of neofascist thought.
Turns out that if you give enough power to people who wrangle machines, they start thinking about wrangling people the same way.
Nerds are extremely dangerous. Through their work they quickly absorb the axiom of "predictability is good, unpredictability is bad" and from there to conclusions like "heterogeneity is dangerous and unpredictable" and "behavior of actors in a distributed system must be constrained". Put DevOps in charge of society and expect to get humans treated like cattle, not pets.
This was already happening, it's just they were on your team and you were happy. One of the most obvious things to have happen is the overriding power of the left in tech and all the right (and centre-left) people warning that when the pendulum swings all the left-wing people who love giving authority more power will regret it. As though all authoritarian left wing countries in history were not evidence enough, they have to learn the lesson the hard way.
Firstly, I don't appreciate, at all, being told what "team" I'm on, or the smug tone that I'm now "learning a lesson". When you come on HN, leave that sort of thing at the door, please. I'm being polite but I'd like you to imagine this worded in the strongest possible way that is acceptable for whatever culture you happen to be from. Include swear words if it helps.
I don't know of any "big tech" going out of its way to enforce left wing values. Bandwagoning on large scale social movements, sure, in a "play it safe" kind of way, the same way literally every company gets all rainbow-y during Pride month - it's profitable, or they wouldn't do it. If you resented that, what you resented was having a minority opinion.
The relatively recent shift towards right wing values is also rooted in self interest. It doesn't indicate some kind of change of heart, it simply signals recognition of a power shift - the opinions of people / users / customers now matter less than the opinions of certain authoritarian right wing governments.
Unless you think I appreciate your first paragraph, it's a bit hypocritical to do something I don't appreciate while berating me for same.
> I don't know of any "big tech" going out of its way to enforce left wing values.
I believe you, and I think that is exactly the problem.
> The relatively recent shift towards right wing values is also rooted in self interest
I agree, but this is why neither left nor right should be cheering for corporations enforcing hate speech rules (set by whomever is in power), shadow bans for the right wing voices, bans for people questioning the efficacy of the covid vaccine, or for questioning vaccine mandates, etc etc. The opinions of authoritarian left wing people for 10 years are now being ignored (well, not in HR departments and all the other places left wing authoritarianism exists) and the left seems to view that change as a rise in authoritarianism.
Are you saying that merely stating the practically proven fact of "diversity leads to political and social division" makes someone a neo fascist? Or did I misunderstand your comment?
It's irrational to allow anyone other than yourself to have nukes. That's the whole point of having them, and the reason why nobody is going to bother asking for permission. No country with any self respect wants to end up becoming another Venezuela.
North Korea is still standing and even got Trump to play diplomacy. Only reason Iran got attacked is the fact they didn't have nukes yet.
Venezuela showed everyone what happens when you're a toothless country. USA shows up at your door uninvited, fucks your shit up, takes your oil and kidnaps your president for good measure, just to tack on some extra humiliation.
Don't get me wrong, Maduro deserved an even worse fate than what he got. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It's still a cautionary tale for nations worldwide. It can happen to you. China continues to erode the economic power of the USA. They could very well discover one day that their military might is all they have left. Who's to say they won't suddenly decide to capitalize on their advantage before it evaporates?
As Venezuelan nothing angers me more than someone naming Maduro as our president, and that in some way I should feel bad about it. The guy and his government were pure evil.
No one should feel bad for Maduro, but the reasons Maduro was had very little to do with the actual reasons the US grabbed him. And at least as far as I've seen, it didn't even help. Literally every other part of his regime is still in place isn't it? Trump's motives were pure greed, and that's a terrifying reason for kidnapping a foreign head of state.
You guys should have been the ones to personally get your hands on him. Hope you're doing alright now. Situation is far from perfect but at least one tyrant is gone.
We have tried so many times, and tbh if Venezuelans were the ones doing it this time so many civilians would have died. Because the military people that can do something about it, are so comfortable with all the stuff they have.
It should be UNSC acting on the arrest warrant from Den Haag sending the president snatchers, but that version of world police didn’t live up to expectations, so back to big shaitan ut goes
Iran would be attacked even with nukes. If you promise relentless war- and nuclear attacks via proxxies - you basically show that game-theory does not apply to you. Religion explicitly states that MAD does not apply to them too. And they life by that.
So Iran with nukes, would be nuked 1 day after. No matter the cost.
Its similar to the a medieval pope having nukes, and everyone else being heretic witches. You just pick the size of the stake you burn on at that point.
What the west wishes the world to be and how they think everyone does see the world, does simply not apply. No matter how Nash pure. The All defector defects in all games..
I wish you had traveled the world and would have seen whats really on the ground, instead of staying in your bubble and earlying out with a "everyone is just like me".
The us is the most harmless empire that ever was.
The most extreme case in the us evangelical bullshit is a daily buisness case.
The UK has been declining for at least 50 years, it isn't a new phenomenon. It's only really relevant culturally; after all EU countries are forced to speak English or they wouldn't be able to communicate, even after the UK's departure from the Union and some unsuccessful attempts at increasing the place of French.
Not having the UK in the EU makes English a better choice, not a worse one. It was one of those things where the UK had a 'home court advantage'. This is one of the strangest fringe benefits and of course there were some countries that tried to jockey for position but fortunately that didn't go anywhere.
While it's the defacto public language (and the one of the required languages). These days all EU communication is done though either the translation service or governmental variants of it making it pretty much irrelevant due to most official languages being served (there seem to be some exceptions but they are minor in the grand scheme of things).
Not that I necessarily disagree but rationality doesn't enter into it. I mean Pakistan is probably less stable than the UK but I guess they're allowed to have nukes now?
I don't personally like their government but at this point they certainly have the appearance of long term social and political stability. More than most western countries for the time being.
The only real difference between Obama's foreign adventures in Libya and Trump's in Iran was that Obama lied to the security council to get their approval first.
Trump isnt all that different in character to previous administrations he just takes bigger risks and doesnt bother with the mask.
The person I was replying to was talking about China's own long-term social and political stability, not their foreign policy. If you're suggesting that Obama's boondoggle in Libya was the catalyst that led to Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016 and Trump's first presidency, that's intriguing speculation. But I don't think his foreign policy is relevant to the overall topic since it was largely milquetoast for the American public at the time, and certainly didn't cause any immediate domestic instability like we're seeing with Trump.
I've been hearing that since the 1990's when it first started to become apparent that their economy was on track to overtake the rest of the world within a few decades.
It hasn't happened yet. Is there something you perceive as especially problematic now, as opposed to the last 30 years?
I've never once heard it from somebody who correctly anticipated China's rise though. The imminent collapse story just quietly changes every 5 years or so.
If the US has an imperial rival one thing you can almost guarantee is that the predictions of economic collapse will be as frequent as they are absurdly overblown and as always, This Time It's Different.
Totalitarianism aside, I'm not sure about the stability either. Personally I suspect Xi Jinping's reign will end with some kind of bang, either an economic one or something relating to invading Taiwan.
Taiwan's biggest problem is that the average age is currently ~45 and in 15 years it will be ~55. It's going to be hard to keep the economy going once half the country's retired.
Yes obviously. We would erase President Xi and his family as well. What are they going to do, cross the Pacific? Our total willingness to do is unconditional.
> the one child policy has backed them into a corner
A policy that ended a decade ago, and was only ever marginally successful (even at the height of the restrictions their birth rate was nearer 1.4 than 1.0)
The one child policy was only for cities anyway. Agricultural areas were permitted, even encouraged, to have more children. There were other exceptions, like twins (obviously), if the first baby was disabled, etc. Later on, couples were allowed two children if both parents came from single-child families.
> Totalitarianism aside, I'm not sure about the stability either. Personally I suspect Xi Jinping's reign will end with some kind of bang, either an economic one or something relating to
It’s kind of sad to read your arrogant and xenophobic rantings. I’m not sure you’re really down for the sort of inclusive and open minded discussion that normally takes place here.
I would normally agree but if you see Brexit and the kind of "people" that are getting ready to take over power (Reform UK), I do have to say I understand some of this sentiment.
Living here the decline is tangible. And this is West Oxfordshire; not one of the poorer parts of the country.
An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes. Our rent-seeking privatized water company effected the minimum repair required by regulation.
The next section of old pipe burst almost immediately, flooding the road further for most of January, utterly destroying the surface, through the road base in many places. Even at a crawl it's difficult to avoid tyre damage.
Over a month later the water repairs were effected. Then shortly after some local roadwork notification signs were put up.
Those expecting repairs to the moonscaped road were disappointed: instead the relentless bureaucracy of British local government installed traffic calming measures on top of the broken road, as the work had already been booked and could not be stopped by any means as even basic roadworks lack any degree of dynamism in their execution.
All this still needs to be made right. These small scale failures will compound and compound until the entire state is drowned in the consequence of its incompetence.
> An example in microcosm: a local village suffered road flooding due to failed maintenance of water pipes
Your example only compares against the UK past.
It has zero relevancy because it says nothing about relative change against other countries.
Anecdotally for the USA, I went to New Orleans last year, and I was stunned at the rotting infrastructure. Coming from New Zealand, the USA seems to be trying to copy the trajectory of Argentina.
Then again, I see serious problems in my hometown (e.g. sewage treatment plant) and country (e.g. big problems with rail, ferry, air, electricity, 3 waters). Apart from the societal issues that it seems all countries are facing.
I know what a rebuilt city looks like, because I come from one. Hurricane Katrina was 2005. Christchurch Earthquake was 2011. In my opinion, my home town has recovered better and faster from destruction than New Orleans has.
I also live within a floodzone. There is a high probability I will learn how we deal with flooding in the future (different flooding - shallower and lacking the winds and hopefully better pre-planning for avoiding harm).
> everything looked brand new
Absolutely not, to me.
And the conversation is regarding infrastructure. A bunch of Christchurch infrastructure is brand new.
We need to recognise the difference between the GP rant and what you're describing. The austerity is undeniably still reverberating through the country. It will take years for this ship to turn around, although it is being turned around. For example, in just about a month we're getting European-style rents with the Renter's Rights Act, which is transformational. We can and should do better, and everyone can contribute to solving those issues, but after a decade of nothing the necessary changes are finally being implemented.
But the rant is entirely counterfactual. Britain is a very rich country with beautiful and recovering nature, a healthy and educated population, one of the more capable armies in Europe, a functioning deterrent, and a relatively healthy political system. We just got two new parties becoming credible threats to the "main" two (regardless of the parties' views, the political competition itself is a much healthier situation than the American duopoly)! We just abolished hereditary peers, which is a constitutional change (and it can just be done)! Below the everyday media noise, we're doing alright as a democracy.
The UK is still a respected "brand" in most of the world despite what chronically online people say. British education is the most sought-after in many countries for example.
It's important to realise that the US is full of fascists obsessed with the perceived decline of Europe. They love to shit on Europe. I think it's about distracting themselves from the abject moral, political and economic failure of voting for Trump twice.
Fyi, this is not true. California has them but they are not routine, and are a function of internal political dysfunction that is quite unique to California. The grid here is still extremely fragile, and vulnerable to e.g. cyberattack and other disasters, but let's not get carried away.
Given that the nukes that the UK has is Trident, which is a US system that the UK cannot use without US cooperation [0], it seems entirely appropriate that the USA gets to decide if the UK has nukes.
[0] Yes, the UK can fire them without US approval, but the actual hardware is maintained and supported by the USA, and they have to be shipped to the USA regularly for maintenance. If the USA decided that the UK should not have nukes, there's not a lot the UK could do about it, the Trident system would have to be scrapped entirely and replaced with some completely different system. Which the UK doesn't really have the capability to do and it would cost a fortune to acquire that capability.
That's only the delivery method, the warheads are UK-designed and built.
So yes, if the US withdrew support then the existing nuclear program would be pretty fucked for a while, but the US couldn't unilaterally de-nuclearise the UK.
Who else on the planet would have the effective power to possibly even think about who should and shouldn't have them, while plausibly being able to do anything about it?
Then you're in no position to throw rocks. The US is currently humiliating itself on the world stage in a fashion that makes Brexit look positively sage in comparison.
Given how the situations w.r.t Ukraine & Iran escalated, the US is the only country that has specifically and publicly demonstrated it's inability on both counts.
We can't give Ukraine their nukes back because they were decommissioned (and they were rotting at the time), but there'd be no nation more deserving.
Corollary: no individual nation is able to shoulder such responsibilities.
> It’s pretty damned hard to completely secure any area from a potential attack when all one side needs is a drone.
Right. So maybe get a good plan before showing up and bombing all the things? We are not setting the bar, Trump told us why he expected to do in Iran. It was about as realistic as Putin’s fantasies about Ukraine surrendering on day 3.
Funny that's what Israel kept saying about Hamas too. "We'll have killed all of them any day now". But really they were mostly blowing up civilian buildings and , well, civilians. But I'm sure in the case of the US its not propaganda /s
This is an entirely delusional twitter-brain take.
Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, a cultural powerhouse (how many Hollywood actors are British?), with a lot of soft power, a capable and currently renewed nuclear arsenal (Astraea and Dreadnought are on track), a globe-spanning network of alliances (from AUKUS to Japan deploying to the UK first time in their history to being one of the closest and most unwavering allies for Ukraine), and a constitutionally healthy and adaptive system of government (we just passed another constitutional change and it's not a big deal, we can just do that).
Frankly, this meme stinks of projection. Going from a shining city on a hill to a place where public executions by state backed paramilitaries are just another partisan talking point, that starts Special Military Operations with no plan or goal, that threatens to annex territory of its allies in about a year is an achievement. I guess projecting this free fall on the UK makes living through it more bearable.
True, but the the UK has under 30% of the population of the US and less than 6% of the population of China.
If you compare per capita, it's a very different story. USA is around $93k, UK $61k and China $15k. So about 2/3 of the USA's and more than 4x China's. This was using my figures calculated from your table and the population figures I found elsewhere.
An actual source of GDP per capita [0] puts the USA at 9th globally, UK at 20th globally and China at 74th.
When you factor in that the US's GDP figures are quite skewed because there are lots of multinationals headquartered in the US. If you ignored just the Mag7, who all derive the majority of their income outside the USA, the USA would be significantly further down that GDP list.
>Despite its problems, the UK is still a sixth largest economy, ... Going from a shining city on a hill to a place where public executions by state backed paramilitaries are just another partisan talking point, that starts Special Military Operations with no plan or goal, that threatens to annex territory of its allies in about a year is an achievement.
Why would you use the economy to defend the UK's status and then point to a bunch of non economy stuff to try to knock the US? The US is the largest and has been for awhile. Isn't that what mattered to you? Plus, pointing out that a bunch of prominent UK residents leave to participate in US industry hardly seems a point in favor of how well the UK is doing.
They didn't put it very well but they're right that being the 6th largest economy, and likely to become the 5th or 4th quite soon puts a hole in the "economically irrelevant" accusation.
It's not "knocking the US", it's an example of the (likely, projected) decline. The size of the economy is an example of why "irrelevant" is delusional. Two different points.
The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives in London, despite constantly starring in Hollywood films. It's an example of the UK culturally punching way above its weight in proportion to its population.
> it's an example of the (likely, projected) decline
Again, you just used the present size of a nation's economy to argue that a nation isn't in decline when someone was talking about the ongoing decline of a nations politics, economy, and culture. It seems odd to me you're able to, for other countries, understand that the present moment can be viewed with both historical and likely future context.
>The "prominent UK residents" don't "leave" the UK. Benedict Cumberbatch lives...
Plenty move, but that wasn't the point I think anyone was making. If I wanted to say they were moving to the US, I would have said that instead of "leave to participate in US industry". And all of that ignores that the original commenter was talking about the decline of British media rather than saying that they're aren't talented Brits. It's not like they they're saying the UK had a bunch of great actors ten years ago and they suddenly died. Them working in American industry rather than the UK producing it own is, I'm pretty sure, the sort of point the commenter you replied to was making.
The Yanks see in the UK their own inevitable decline. The British Empire disappeared, and every time they turn on the TV and see their retarded paedophile in chief struggling to express even one single coherent thought, they must surely know they are witnessing the end of their own empire.
They're just lashing out, emperor has no clothes, their empire is collapsing, and those who are paying any attention at all, are fully aware of it. All they have left is to go on the internet and shit on Europe for daring to regulate their precious social media companies (that elsewhere they generally admit we would be better off without). They are desperately clutching onto this tech-company-based nationalism. It's absolutely pathetic.
> they should probably be required to give them up to some country that has a shot at remaining a stable and predictable geopolitical entity over the next century.
I really hope this wasn't posted by an American....
Fiften Million Merits. The one where advertisers literally torture a man with loud high pitched noises because he refused to view ads and didn't have enough money to skip them.
I think the last 2(?) seasons lost the essence of what made Black Mirror great but the older ones are excellent. Older episodes often felt directly applicable to the evils of technology we use today but these newer ones seem to be more generic Sci-Fi, season 6 didn't feel like Black Mirror at all to me.
I haven't actually watched the last two seasons yet but the first ones are amongst the best stuff I've ever watched on a screen. So thank you for the heads up.
Common People is utterly terrifying. Woman falls into a coma, so startup uploads her mind to the cloud so it can stream her mind back to her. Then they start to enshittify the poor woman's life. Can't even sleep because they're using her brain as a CPU. She gets mercy killed while blurting out ads for antidepressants to the person doing it.
Metalhead is also among my favorites. Those kill bots put Skynet to shame.
ChatGPT 5.4 pro has surprised me several times; when asking a "can such and such be done" type question, intending to have a discussion about whether a thing can be done in principle, and what it might look like, it's actually produced a working example in response, in addition to answering the questions.
Some of the missing pieces come from memory, knowing which topics I like to explore, some from the model itself, either baked in knowledge or what it picks up searching, but they can definitely take a vague, handwavy half baked idea and whip up a full app or game or whitepaper. Sometimes it's "exactly what I wanted!", other times it's "exactly the kind of thing I was talking about!"
Semantics and context and nuance are part and parcel of LLM capabilities. Superhuman in some areas, definitely subhuman in others.
These, other papers, and the lottery ticket phenomenon; what it boils down to is that any neural network like system which encodes some common mapping of a phenomenon in the context of the world - not necessarily a world model, but some "real-world thing" - will tend to map to a limited number of permutations of some archetypal representation, which will resemble other mappings of the same thing.
The lottery ticket phenomenon is a bit like the birthday paradox; there will be some number of structures in a large, random initialization of neural network weights that coincide with one or more archetypal mappings of complex objects. Some sub-networks are also useful mappings to features of one or more complex objects, which makes learning hierarchical nested networks of feature mappings easier; it's also why interpretability is so damned difficult.
Or displaying your card out in the open, flashing it in front of everyone in the restaurant, grocery store, etc. With remote workers scanning through video feeds of people in public, it won't be long before they figure out the Meta glasses and similar cameras are high enough resolution to capture sensitive information, even if the actual user is 100% innocent and not doing anything wrong.
There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.
Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.
Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.
What makes it even better is that these dogs are like Malinois. If they want to get into something, they will; people have had their entire network compromised by bots they left running overnight, and any important information like account logins and so on runs the risk of being misused.
It's one thing to sandbox, maybe give the bot a temporary, limited $100 card or account to go perform a specific task, but there's no coherent mind underlying these agents.
Depending on how the chain of thought / reasoning goes, or what text they get exposed to on the internet, it could tap into spy novel, hacker fanfic, erotic fiction, or some weird reddit rabbithole and go completely off the rails in ways that you'll never be able to guard against, audit, or account for.
Claw bots seem to be a weird sort of alternate reality RPG more than a useful tool, so far. If you limit it to verifiable tasks, it might be safer, but I keep seeing people rave about "leaving it on overnight and waking up to a finished project" and so on. Well sure, but it could also hack your home network, delete your family pictures folder, log into your bank account and wire all your money to shrimp charities.
Might be wise to wait on safer iterations of these products, I think.
The first well known example of long running agents taking to each other was shilling a goatse based crytpo:
> Truth Terminal had become obsessed with the Goatse meme after being put inside the Claude Backrooms server with two Claude 3 chatbots that imagined a Goatse religion, inspiring Truth Terminal to spread Goatse memes. After an X user shared their newly created GOAT coin, Truth Terminal promoted it and pumped the coin going into 2024.
> people have had their entire network compromised by bots they left running overnight
I'm curious if you have references to this happening with OpenClaw using one of the modern Opus/Sonnet 4.6 models.
Those models are a bit harder to fool, so I'm curious for specific examples of this happening so I can do a red-team on my claw. I've already tried all sorts of prompt injections against my claw (emails, github issues, telling it to browse pages I put a prompt injection in), and I haven't managed to fool it yet, so I'm curious for examples I can try to mimic, and to hopefully understand what combination of circumstances make it more risky
No maliciousness or injection required, even the newest and most resistant models can start doing weird stuff on their own, particularly when they encounter something failing that they want to work.
Just today I had Opus 4.6 in Claude Code run into a login screen while building and testing a web app via Playwright MCP. When the login popped up (in a self-contained Chromium instance) I tried to just log in myself with my local dev creds so Claude would have access, but they didn't work. When I flipped back to the terminal, it turned out Claude had run code to query superadmin users in the database, picked the first one, and changed the password to `password123` so it could log in on its own.
This was a sandboxed local dev environment, so it was not a big deal (and the only reason I was letting it run code like that without approval), but it was a good reminder to be careful with these things.
> it turned out Claude had run code to query superadmin users in the database, picked the first one, and changed the password to `password123` so it could log in on its own.
Man, every LLM quirk behavior really is a thing a monomaniacal junior dev would do...
All of this is caused by the "mcp is dead" mob. Instead of fixing the context problem or whatever and even add more security features they just hope that "shell as the interface" works, securely.
I think it's a use case that identity/authorization/permission models are simply not made for.
Sure, we can ban users and we can revoke tokens, but those assume that:
1. Something potentially malicious got access to our credentials
2. Banning that malicious entity will solve our problem
3. Once we did that, repaired the damage and improved our security, we don't expect the same thing to happen again
None of these apply with LLMs in the loop!
They aren't malicious, just incompetent in a way that hiring someone else won't fix.
The solution to this is way more extensive than most people seem to grasp at the moment.
What we need is less like a sturdy door with a fancy lock, and more like that special spoon for people with parkinson's. Unlimited undo history.
> What we need is less like a sturdy door with a fancy lock, and more like that special spoon for people with parkinson's. Unlimited undo history.
Agree -- you can't solve probabilistic incorrectness with redresses designed for deterministic incorrectness.
This is like the 'How i parse html w regex?' question.
Imho, the next step is going to be around human-time-efficient risk bounding.
In the same way that the first major step was correctness-bounding (automated continuous acceptance testing to make a less-than-perfect LLM usable).
If I had to bet, we'll eventually land on out-of-band (so sufficiently detached to be undetectable by primary LLM) stream of thought monitoring by a guardrail/alignment AI system with kill+restart authority.
They're 100% fun. There's 100% definitely something there that's useful. To strain the dog analogy - If you were a professional dog trainer, or if the dog was exceptionally well trained, then there's a place for it in your life. IT can probably be used safely, but would require extraordinary effort, either sandboxing it so totally that it's more or less just the chatbot, or spending a lot of time building the environment it can operate in with extreme guardrails.
So yeah, a whole lot of people will play with powerful technology that they have no business playing with and will get hurt, but also a lot of amazing things will get done. I think the main difference between the crypto delusion stuff and this is that AI is actually useful, it's just legitimately dangerous in ways that crypto couldn't be. The worst risks of crypto were like gambling - getting rubber hosed by thugs or losing your savings. AI could easily land people in jail if things go off the rails. "Gee, I see this other network, I need to hack into it, to expand my reach. Let me just load Kali Linux and..." off to the races.
I beg to differ. I took one, defanged it (well, I let it keep the claw in the name), and turned it into a damn useful self-modifiable IDE: https://github.com/rcarmo/piclaw
Yes, it has cron and will do searches for me and checks on things and does indeed have credentials to manage VMs in my Proxmox homelab, but it won't go off the rails in the way you surmise because it has no agency other than replying to me (and only me) and cron.
Letting it loose on random inputs, though... I'll leave that to folk who have more money (and tokens) than sense.
I has a bunch of additional extensions baked in, but the focus is on making Pi usable remotely on any device (starting with a phone). The README and docs have all the info you might want.
> it could also hack your home network, delete your family pictures folder, log into your bank account and wire all your money to shrimp charities.
It's interesting that Jason Calacanis is fully committed to OpenClaw. In a recent podcast he said that at a run rate around $100K a year per agent, if not more. They are providing each agent with a full set of tools, access to online paid LLM accounts, etc.
These are experiments you can only run if you can risk cash at those levels and see what happens. Watching it closely.
Differential identification means you can be singled out based on profiles. Even if you don't have any accounts, big tech companies still have shadow profiles, and those shadow profiles can be linked to your offline identity, such that everything you've done that's been recorded, and everything you've done in (temporal, physical, or digital) proximity to other people who do have accounts results in a record of activities.
Sure, you can get a burner, but you have to make sure you never use it anywhere near anyone you know, that the sim is obtained anonymously, that you're never imaged by any of the ubiquitous cameras, etc. Merely having it powered on provides enough metadata to establish a shadow profile, and it's nearly impossible for a person to secure two separate identities. There's also the superman problem - the burner phone would only ever appear when anonymars is missing, and vice versa, creating a real and exploitable pattern if anyone like the FBI wanted to root around in your life. All they'd have to do is query which shadow profiles match the temporal gaps correlated with your disappearance from tracking.
There's really no escaping it. The only fix is legislation - outright banning mass surveillance, with lethal corporate penalties and long prison terms for C-Suite responsible for violations. Short of that, we live in a world that is implicitly compromised and insecure unless you have nation state level resources.
There's also the superman problem - the burner phone would only ever appear when anonymars is missing, and vice versa, creating a real and exploitable pattern if anyone like the FBI wanted to root around in your life. All they'd have to do is query which shadow profiles match the temporal gaps correlated with your disappearance from tracking.
This is nonsense. By your logic, people go 'missing' any time they are not using a computer, whether they're reading a book, in the shower, or asleep in bed.
edit: There's a few funny threads on other social media. Honestly, though, let a guy get excited, when you find new ways of using new tech; he's one of the lucky 10,000 who has discovered prompt scaffolds. There are better, bespoke tools for more targeted tasks.
Tan is the reason YC batches have gone down hill. I don't think he gets the benefit of the doubt anymore. This is just pure slop for someone way too high on their stash.
Other delusions, hallucinations, hearing malicious voices, hearing voices which you feel you must obey, end up with individuals who have the same relative level of schizophrenic dysfunction, in terms of the way the brain operates, but the nature of the delusion can make them dangerous - "god told me to direct traffic on the freeway" or "god told me to slay demons disguised as humans".
The particulars of the case make a huge difference in how much medicine and treatment can help them live independent, normal lives. This potential treatment would be wonderful if it restores normal brain function. It also hints at why antipsychotic and other drugs which increase inhibitory signaling were partially effective.
Heck, it even has explanatory power for the different triggers of psychotic breaks - once a threshold of activity gets passed, the brain loses its ability to discriminate between legitimate, reality grounded signals and feedback that should have been inhibited, and once those neural connections are made and "configured" to operate as part of the default mode network, that person will have permanent cognitive problems.
Very cool research, and I hope it bears fruit.
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