Just like with John Kiriakou, the only man ever convicted in connection with the torture program? He went to prison for two years despite only ever leaking information about illegal programs, lost his wife, lost all his money; is that the mercy you expected Snowden to submit to?
Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC describing waterboarding on December 10, 2007, in order to defend the practice. The government did not charge him with any crimes at the time. Three years prior, Newsweek had reported on a secret memo from Yoo justifying the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah. None of the people who leaked that memo were charged with crimes. Three months prior to Kiriakou's interview, "current and former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials" said that three prisoners had been waterboarded, including Zubaydah. None of them were charged with crimes.
Four years after Kiriakou's interview, he was charged with giving the names of CIA agents to two journalists, a crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment, not for describing waterboarding, which if he had leaked would have been covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act.
He said "as Americans, we're better than that", does that sound like defending? That he was conflicted about it isn't too surprising, he was ratting out his colleagues and the institution he had worked for through the entire of his professional life.
To the rest, you've fallen for their trick. Three CIA threw the book at him, and indeed tried to convict him for his leaks: "The five-count indictment against Kiriakou charged him with violations of both the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (for allegedly revealing the identity of a covert agent) and the Espionage Act (for allegedly revealing national defense information to unauthorized individuals such as journalists). He was also charged with making false statements to the CIA about a book that he was seeking to publish."
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act is just the charge that stuck. When you're revealing government secrets, it's very, very hard not to accidentally cross the line, especially when you consider that the whole justice system is arranged in their favor, not yours.
The result is that lots of people say they support whistleblowers, but anytime someone actually whistleblows they back the government line and say "they went too far". Why is the onus on whistleblowers, acting in secret and with fear of retribution at every step, to perfectly separate the illegal actions from the legal, and punish only the former? Why is the onus not on our government, the elected representatives who ought to serve us and obey the law, to not commit crimes against humanity in the first place?
If you demand perfection from whistleblowers but accept faults in your government, don't be surprised if you don't get many whistleblowers.
Have you not been watching what's been happening? What do you think the open letter in July was about? And the recent (staged) call from the President?
As far as I can tell Nvidia takes a longer-term view on the diffusion and proliferation of hardware and intelligence, and sees the labs' attempts to impose a regulatory structure to save their business models in the short term as contradicting that longer-term view.
This is a weak argument. Almost everyone who's talking about catastrophic risk is also worried about mundane risks. Arguing "well how could they kill everyone?" serves nobody but Altman and Amodei.
Absurd fantasies like solving a Millennium Prize Problem? How is this not prima facie absurd? And if that's come to pass, why should we believe your bar for anything else?
Yes absurd fantasies like it did that without human help and guidance. OpenAI found out there was a solution and humans attempted to brute force generating all possible solutions while threatening the mathematicians involved (generous interpretation), or stole some ideas and took shortcuts to know where to look and brute forced it so they could claim credit.
Neither looks good for OpenAI or those who support them.
And yet they solved it. You don't think mathematicians have been trying to brute force a counterexample for decades now? Only with AI did it actually work. Even the researchers that got scooped were using AI to drive the work -- not a dig at them, they were certainly wronged here, but just to point out that AI was essential in this.
Yes there was human involvement. But that does ~nothing to change the fact that this is an incredible leap forward, and one that should be viewed with deep concern.
Of course they don't, but if you choose to use a work of fiction as an illustration, it comes as a coherent package (assuming the author did a good job at worldbuilding) - you can't just take the bits you like and ignore the bits you don't and still have something coherent.
Interesting! I admit the AI-written text is rough to read, it could have used a pass or two from an actual human. E.g. "Publishing it unresolved rather than tuning until it matches." -- thanks for not lying, I guess?
Fun:
> In my first run, Belady — an offline oracle — lost to LRU. That's not a result, that's a broken harness, and it's worth publishing because I expect it to be common.
> The cause: inserting a long chain into a near-full cache lets a policy evict the very prefix it is currently building. LRU is accidentally immune because just-inserted blocks have the newest timestamp.
Not 100% surprised that this wasn't picked up as a security issue; denial-of-service is bad, but ultimately doesn't give you a direct path to stealing secrets / hijacking identity / etc.
It is pretty egregious though, I hope they fix this. I expect there'll be a Radar tracking this now that it's made it to the HN front page.
The usual read on cybersecurity determines how bad an issue is using (something akin to) impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Being able to freeze a computer from the browser is a plain availability risk. It's not exactly a high-priority risk, but still something that should be considered a risk in my opinion.
With operating systems like macOS+Safari reopening a page after reboot, a malware domain can claim to take your computer hostage by te-freezing the PC every time the user moves away from the page until money is paid. People already fall for "we have hacked your computer pay X bitcoin to get it back", this just adds to that.
According to the comments here, this has been a thing for ages, so I kind of doubt that they'll fix it this time. But fingers crossed!
If you don't need to 'understand' to do this, then maybe what you call 'understanding' is less important than you think. When people in the real world reach for a tool, what they care about is whether or not it'll produce results, not whether or not it has the capacity for interior phenomenological experience.
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