It’s not very soon, it’s already the case that if one wants to enable the latest models in the OpenAI api you have to submit your details to their “identity provider”.
Which is why it’s important to be able to run models locally. Which also might explain the strategy behind buying all of the memory that is or will exist for at least a year out. Maybe we’ll eventually see AI safety be used to prevent people from running local models.
+1 for local models. It also teaches users about how much energy they are using. One's perspective on 24/7 chatbots and agentic operating systems changes when you feel the heat coming from a rack of gpus.
(Spring is nearly here and my excuse about my rig also heating my house is about to end. Soon I will be paying extra to run my a/c as my rig pumps out a steady 1000w under load.)
You mean having to sign into your Microsoft account to get your bootloader co-signed before your legally mandated TPU 3.1 allows you to install a govenment blessed and sufficiently telemetrized signed OS to "your" computer if you are on the whitelist of not-yet-misinformation-spreaders?
Given the recent mexican telecom hacks were allegedly done with significant help from openai/anthropic's chatbots, it seems at least somewhat prudent to require some sort of identity verification for API access? I'm struggling to see how this isn't the tech community's version of "no background checks for gun purchases" or "no KYC for bank accounts".
Alright, so does that mean we don't need KYC for gun purchases or bank accounts either?
Of course you're probably going to say something about how guns and bank accounts are crucial components to crime, in which case the same holds for AI in the mexican telecoms hack.
> Alright, so does that mean we don't need KYC for ... bank accounts either?
That sounds reasonable. A bank can just be an institution that holds money for people; they don't need to be all over their customer's business. It is like a telecom not being responsible for what their customers say. In a simple sense banks don't need KYC.
>> A bank can just be an institution that holds money for people
Nope. That is a storage locker. A bank uses the money it holds for other purposes such as loans or its own investments, possibly returning interest to the depositor. But, most importantly, a bank disperses money. it therefore needs to know who deposits what so that it doesn't eventually release funds to the wrong person. And then there are the lengthy procedures for handing out money without customer permission. People die. Governments garnish wages. Courts order payments to for child support. If you hold money you have to be prepared for this stuff. So you need to be absolutely confident in the identity of everyone you deal with.
Want a simple bank? A bank that doesn't ask for ID? Keep your cash under your mattress. Or put it all in a crypto wallet.
I don't think this makes sense. You seem to be saying that a bank has to do all these things to control criminals while simultaneously arguing that there are simple methods criminals could use to bypass the banks (ie, deal in cash and keep it under the mattress or use crypto).
Given that the criminals aren't going to be using the banks it would make sense for the banks to not have mandatory administrative overhead that is easy to avoid.
> Nope. That is a storage locker.
Again, sounds good to me. Let people have a storage locker with a plastic debit card attached. If people had the option of a bank that was a little bit more responsible and didn't roll the dice of total collapse every financial crisis there'd be many that would go for that. Prepper types for example. The discourse glosses over how crazy it is that full-reserve or near-full-reserve banks are soft-banned.
Just yesterday I thought about the right middle ground for KYC when buying guns.
The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique).
The issue with no controls is that even anti-social and mentally ill people can get them.
I wonder if the right middle ground could be:
- Sellers have to do their due diligence - require ID, proof of psychological examination, whatever else is deemed the right balance.
- Not doing due diligence means they get punishment equal to that for any offense committed with that gun.
- They might be required to mark/stamp the gun so that it can be traced back to them or have witnesses for the transfer.
The arguments for background checks generally have to be split into two separate classes of people.
The first is the mentally ill. Intuitively it seems desirable to say that someone undergoing treatment for e.g. depression shouldn't buy a gun. The problem here is the massive perverse incentive. If you're pretty depressed but you're not inclined to forfeit your ability to buy firearms, you now have a significant incentive to avoid seeking treatment. At which point you can still buy a gun but now your mental illness is going untreated, which is very worse than where we started.
The second is career criminals, i.e. people who have already been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. The problem here is that career criminals... don't follow laws. If they want a gun they steal one or recruit someone without a criminal record into their gang etc., both of which are actually worse than just letting them buy one.
On top of that, when people get caught, prosecutors generally try to get them to testify against other criminals in exchange for a deal, who are then going to be pretty mad at them. Which gives them a much higher than average legitimate need to exercise their right to self-defense once they get back out. And then you get three independent bad outcomes: If they can't defend themselves they get killed for snitching, if they acquire a gun anyway so they don't then they could go back to prison even if they were otherwise trying to reform themselves, and if they think about this ahead of time or are advised of it by their lawyers then they'll be less likely to cooperate with prosecutors because the other two scenarios that are both bad for them only happen if they snitch.
Meanwhile the proposal was only ever expected to address a minority of the problem to begin with because plenty of the people who do bad things can pass the background check. And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?
> And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?
Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?
Because that's genuinely an interesting position. My proposal came from the view that if we need gun control, we should make sure it cannot be abused into a self reinforcing loop where a completely disarmed population is the end state (and possible end goal).
I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about. For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc. E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
> Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?
We can probably make an exception for people who are currently in prison.
> I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about.
This is a political question so all of the research is performed by partisans for one side or the other. On top of that, most of this stuff is inherently hard to measure, e.g.:
> For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc.
The government is going to try to avoid disclosing who snitches and the criminals are going to try to find out and retaliate. But if the criminals have a way of finding out (e.g. bribe the cops) then it will be illegal and no one will want to admit it's happening, and likewise if they successfully retaliate they'll want to do it a way that doesn't catch them a murder conviction.
So now someone few people are going to notice winds up dead. If they were an informant at some point in the past, those records are closely guarded for obvious reasons, so how is someone trying to collect statistics even supposed to know that? Likewise, if their death is made to look like an accident or the killer is never caught, how do you know how often it was actually an accident or an unrelated crime?
Which then leads into this:
> E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.
Part of the premise of having a weapon is as a deterrent, which gives you another measurement problem: If a lot of the snitches are keeping weapons even though they're not allowed to and that's successfully deterring anyone from trying to kill them, neither the snitches nor their hitmen are going to admit to either one because they're both breaking the law.
The lack of anybody having good numbers also feeds into the problem itself, because then the snitches have to guess whether it will help them and a lot of them are going to regard the risk of getting killed as a bigger threat than the risk of getting caught with a gun. Or worse, the hitmen will like their chances better when the law requires their target to be unarmed. And both of those happen stochastically as a result of the inherent uncertainty regardless of your own guess for how effective the victim having a weapon is at deterring retaliation.
Third, non career violent people. Domestic violence or other interpersonal viole ce should prevent you from having a gun. Regardless of whether you are career criminal
That isn't a third category, those are people who have been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. It's the same general category of not being able to solve people committing crimes by making already-illegal things even more illegal. And on top of that you get to add two new problems.
The first is the deterrent to reporting, both before and after a conviction. In the original case the victim now can't even report a domestic misdemeanor in the subculture where gun ownership is sacrosanct because either they themselves consider "permanently can't own a gun" too severe a penalty for the crime they were trying to report, or they know the perpetrator will and they're afraid of being booted out into the street or worse if they do it. And for someone who already has a conviction but still has a gun, now the other people in the household can't be calling the police for any reason because if the police find the gun the person keeping a roof over their head is going to prison for years. In general you want the penalties for things to be proportionate and making them disproportionate makes things worse instead of better.
The second is that the victim, or any future victims, are living in the same household as the perpetrator, and then how do you answer this question: Is the victim now prohibited from having a firearm? You're screwed either way, because if you say no you're denying the innocent victim's right to self-defense but if you say yes the perpetrator now has an excuse to have them in the house.
Then these things combine poorly because the overconfident drunk who wants a gun is willing to bet they can convince anyone it belongs to their sweetheart but the sweetheart is nowhere near as confident they can control what happens if they call the police.
> those are people who have been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one
FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.
> "permanently can't own a gun"
This points to other issues with the current system of punishments. OOH you have people claiming prison is meant for rehabilitation and released prisoners are to be considered fully rehabilitated, having paid their debt (which they argue is to society and not the victim) and not longer a threat to society. OTOH you have the reality that many people are repeat offenders and that also some people can genuinely change (or at least maintain the facade of internal change for the rest of their life).
Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.
---
FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household. People who commit it are often deeply and inherently anti-social without a way to treat them. Instead, as a society, we should be looking for ways to ease the process of their targets separating from them permanently. Case studies of what this kind of abuse looks like should be part of primary education, the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.
> FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.
But then what are you proposing to do? Tell people they lose a right based on vibes even though they've never been convicted of anything?
> Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.
Maybe we should reorient prisons into places that actually rehabilitate prisoners and then release the ones that are actually rehabilitated.
> FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household.
This is one of the things which is hard for the system to tell from the outside. There are legitimate predators with no record because they have the right friends. Then there are alcoholics who are violent drunks and therefore have a record, but haven't had a drink in ten years and then everything seems fine until they have a relapse. Or the exact same thing except that they stay clean and then everything actually is fine.
There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents. I find it hard to judge people who have only bad options and then pick one of them.
> the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.
The situation commonly happens to begin with because they're both poor and can only stay above water by sharing accommodations. If you want shelters then build shelters; we don't need things that would only work when the perpetrator has enough money to lawyer their way out of it anyway.
> then release the ones that are actually rehabilitated
Yep. The issue becomes what do to with those who are not or cannot be rehabilitated. But maybe it would be politically tenable, after all, some places have "three strike laws" which are essentially a heavy handed way to get a similar effect.
> they lose a right based on vibes
> hard for the system to tell from the outside
Same issue. The people close to the person know but are hard to prove to outsiders. BTW I wouldn't call it vibes. It's vibes if you've seen it the first time and haven't had any education about cluster B disorders. When you have seen a few people with them and know the names and patterns, you can have a fact based discussion about what drives the person to do what they do and what the probabilities of harmful acts are.
For example, if somebody has a documented pattern of bullying others, especially from childhood, it should reduce their rights unless they prove they have undergone successful treatment. It's common to give child offenders more leeway but I think it should be the opposite. Those who offend from childhood do so because they haven't yet learned to hide their nature and abusers are who they really are internally.
> There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents
Maybe the real problem here is housing. The second problem here is that violent (physically or emotionally) people get to keep their property instead of the target, especially when they clearly use the property as leverage against the target.
> enough money to lawyer their way out of it
Yes another systemic issue. We should do studies about the effects of layers on the outcome of cases. Maybe they happen but I haven't heard about any. We should redefine laws to close loopholes and make them as simple as possible so the need for lawyers is reduced as much as possible - I think the need for layers is a symptom/metric of the system not working. We could also cap the allowed spending on layers.
It already does. Here is the list of prohibited persons:
convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
who is a fugitive from justice;
who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);
who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;
who is an illegal alien;
who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;
who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;
who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner;
or
who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.
> interpersonal viole ce should prevent you from having a gun
Nitpick but violence is not wrong on its own. Self defense is also violence and should not prevent your from having a gun for next time. Defense of others or reasonable defense of property likewise.
Forcibly removing a person from power who has gained or maintained that power without consent of those he has power over is also violence and even most current states allow us to celebrate it (usually as long as we don't argue it should be repeated against the current government).
What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate.
Once a common technology that everyone has access to becomes powerful enough to alter the lives of others on command, do we as a society just need to do away with the concept of anonymity? We are all just too powerful in isolation, and too much of a threat to the collective, that we cannot reasonably expect not to have some governing body watching at all times?
Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?
>What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate.
Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here. Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.
>Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?
Fortunately 3d printed guns are bad enough that it's not really an issue, although the bigger threat is probably CNC machines. However that's probably will get a pass, because they're eye-wateringly expensive compared to black market guns that nobody would bother.
> Fortunately 3d printed guns are bad enough that it's not really an issue
It does actually seem like they are an issue - the technology has now been used in several high profile murders and police are reporting seizing them pretty regularly.
I don't think that justifies taking away the freedom to 3D print, but the truth is that if you're committing a crime there are a lot of advantages to a dirt-cheap untraceable nonferrous gun even if it only lasts a few shots.
> Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here.
Slippery slope is a fallacy, they said.
> Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.
Except that it isn't KYC at all, both because employees aren't customers (most people are the employees of one company but the customers of hundreds or more), and because the majority of people don't have that requirement imposed on them by the government. There are many jobs you can get without a background check.
You can buy 80% lowers, which require no serial numbers on them if you don't transfer or sell, and it is pretty trivial to complete the machining necessary to make it a 100% lower. It does not require a professional CNC machining shop.
Buy an 80%, machine it to finish it, and you now have a completely unregistered long rifle with no serial number, and it is completely legal.
Is api access really really so extreme that it's italics worthy? Technology should be available to us in other roles than just passive consumer using front ends that might not suit what we need, or work against us in some way. Already I am giving a credit card to openai to use the service, but in addition now I have to hand my government ID over to withpersona.com. who are they? who are their investors? will the leak my information accidentally/accidentally-on-purpose/on-purpose? Okay maybe Rick Song and Persona Identities are genuinely trustworthy, but what happens when someone wants an exit in the future and they merge with palantir and now when i generate a picture i have to worry about being added to a target list for some automated kamakazi drone kill-chain a-la black mirror.
Or if this becomes standard practice .. maybe its not Persona Inc. but i have to vet dozens of these companies and it becomes too hard.
Rather than guns, this is more like Identity verification for pipe purchases from the hardware store because one could use it got build a rocket.
Well for one, API access has nothing to do with it, you could to the same hacks through the chatbox, perhaps with a bit more time.
And the same logic about hacks also applies to access to a command line or Linux or a programming language or just a general-purpise computer.
"Given the recent [everything] hacks were [definitely] done with [Python scripts, a Linux distro and a computer with disabled secure boot], it seems [...]"
I hope you get my point.
As for your gun comparison, a gun is a very optional thing and the identification is just for purchase. It's not like a GPS tracker and shot counter is welded onto it at the time of purchase, nor do you need a gun to do the vast majority of everyday tasks.
As for bank KYC, well, I for one am actually not sold on the idea that having to send a blurry photo of my ID and smiling at my phone camera to open a Relovut account is in any way beneficial to society. Terrorism still gets financed, money still gets laundered, taxes still get evaded. But every swipe of my card can and will be used against me by banks, loan providers, advertisers, government agents and eventually also hackers.
This seems to be a core of the problem with trying to leave things to autonomous agents .. The response to Amazons agents deleting prod was to implement review stages
Seeming as this affect everyone .. Is there anything like and Open Collective .. grassroots consortium, to put together strong sensible zero-knowledge proof based policy examples that could be given to law-makers instead of this shadowy surveillance Trojan horse nonsense?
Nothing is inherently “wrong” with Windows. When practiced with informed consent, technical knowledge, and safety awareness, it is considered by many communities to be a legitimate form of intimate expression between a company and its employees.
Never owned an iPhone after 3GS because it became prohibitively expensive.
I have so many memories of cydia and there was this itools, some Chinese software that let me do more than iTunes.
Those were the days.
I was rocking an html lockdscreen which was pretty cool.
When I got hands on original iPhone back in 2008, I remember my PC having less ram, less storage as that was a handmedown. It was freaking cool to have more compute in hand than what my xp machine did.
Is this kind of Hyper-awareness of data you can't actually do anything about even a desirable thing, or just a pathway into a hole of hyper-alert stress and low Self-efficacy?
Censorship here is specifically moderation of discussion of political assassinations, and NSFW fetish art work? I think its good to have a space for people to do "shadow work", but also I'm terrified by the path that neo-facist idiology took from 4chan /pol -> gaming culture -> the white house.
This is one of those things that gets categorized one way or the other depending on whether you're respectably right-wing enough. People have been selling firing range targets with their political enemies on, and even in a couple of cases using them in campaigns, for a long time. And now political assassination is official US state policy!
> the path that neo-fascist ideology took from 4chan /pol -> gaming culture -> the white house
Yes, although I think that shows how difficult it is to moderate against ideology which can be smuggled in through "reasonable concerns".
Reminds me of when a terrible person I don't agree with gets deplatformed. Historically freedom of speech has been defended by those usually icky things and silencing them often just makes them more powerful.
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