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except.. this is San Francisco here .. totally different
OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
361–370 of 499 posts
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#362There are some pretty callous comments on this thread. This is really sad. Suchir was just 26, and graduated from Berkeley 3 years ago. Here’s his personal site: https://suchir.net/ . I think he was pretty brave for standing up against what is generally perceived as an injustice being done by one of the biggest companies in the world, just a few years out of college. I’m not sure how many people in his position would…
If I die in the midst of whistleblowing, I hereby give permission for everyone to not ignore that fact.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#363Metapost - Reading the (civilized!) comments on HN vs those on Reddit is such a contrast. I'm a bit worried that while regulators are focusing on X/Facebook/Instagram/etc. from a moderation perspective, not one regulator seems to be looking at the increasingly extreme and unmoderated rhetoric on Reddit. People are straight up braying for murder in the comments there. I'm worried that one of the most visited sites in…
> I'm worried that one of the most visited sites in the US is actively radicalizing a good chunk of the population.
Thank goodness they're an American site, where the precedent for persecuting websites for active radicalization is practically nonexistent.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm a whistleblower in an active case and I end up dead before testifying, I absolutely DO want the general public to speculate about my cause of death.
TBH, I'm kind of paranoid about CIA and FBI. Last time I travelled to the US on holiday, I was worried somebody would attempt to neutralize me because of my involvement in crypto. I don't think I have delusions of grandeur, I worry that the cost of exterminating people algorithmically could become so low that they could decide to start taking out small fries in batches. A lot of narratives which would have sounded in…
> I worry that the cost of exterminating people algorithmically could become so low that they could decide to start taking out small fries in batches.
My guess is that the cost of taking out a small fry today is already extremely low, and a desperate low-life could be hired for less than $1000 to kill a random person that doesn't have a security detail.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there something like this which is still maintained and isn't needlessly tied to crypto?
> Needlessly tied to crypto Let’s unpack that. By “crypto” you probably mean cryptocurrency, but let’s not forget it’s the same crypto as in cryptography. You absolutely want cryptography involved in something like this for obvious reasons. You’ve probably also heard the term blockchain and immediately think of speculative currency futures. So throw that to the wind for a second and imagine how useful a distributed l…
there's literally no way to implement this on ethereum, smart contracts can't store secrets, all of their state is public.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#366http://suchir.net/fair_use.html When does generative AI qualify for fair use? by Suchir Balaji
I just realized I stumbled on some of this guys writings when I was researching AI and copyright cases. I submitted this one to HN awhile back.
He seemed very insightful for someone that isn't a lawyer.
RIP.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not anything like rehosting though. Assume I read a bunch of web articles, synthesize that knowledge and then answer a bunch of question on the web. I am performing some form of information retrieval. Do I need to pay the folks who wrote those articles even though they provided it for free on the web? It seems like the only difference between me and ChatGPT is the scale at which ChatGPT operates. ChatGPT can mem…
I love this argument. "Seems like only difference between me and ChatGPT is absolutely everything". You can't be flippant about scale not being a factor here. It absolutely is a factor. Pretending that ChatGPT is like a person synthesizing knowledge is an absurd legal argument, it is absolutely nothing like a person, its a machine at the end of the day. Scale absolutely matters in debates like this.
Why?
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even thoughtful people can be wrong, make mistakes, or have lapses in judgement. Nobody is perfect, we all have flaws. Edit: Heck, even by definition, "thoughtful" doesn't mean "accurate". You can put a lot of thought and consideration into something and still end up with a different viewpoint than your neighbor. That's okay, that's life. Edit 2: "Didn't get his way"? He was part of an ongoing trial that hadn't concl…
The word "thoughtful" can carry different meanings. It can have a literal meaning (as in "deliberate") which you resonate with, and a different meaning (as in "solicitous" toward AI) that I resonate with. Neither meaning is wrong. Reference: merriam-webster thesaurus
>Reference: merriam-Webster thesaurus
Oof, are you using a thesaurus to determine the definition of a word? That's what a dictionary is for; a thesaurus is a list of words that have similar or opposite meanings. But within that, there are varying degrees of how similar/different words can be.
In point of fact, Merriam-Webster doesn't mark "solicitous" as having the strongest degree of similarity to the word, which means we can't easily conflate the two because they're not quite the same thing. Further, for the "solicitous" word you cherry-picked, it says that thoughtful means "given to or made with heedful anticipation of the needs and happiness of others".
That means that for the sake of the conversation with regard to the decedent, the word "thoughtful" as used by GP is still very vague. He thought about other people, simple as that.
For the sake of clarity, this is what "thoughtful" means: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thoughtful
This is what "solicitous" means: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solicitous
And these are words that are related to "thoughtful" to widely varying degrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/thoughtful
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can a smart contract “keep a secret” in a trustless way? Isn’t effectively all the trust still in the party releasing it at the right time, or not releasing it otherwise? If so, is the blockchain aspect anything other than decentralization theater? I guess one thing you can do with a blockchain is keeping that trusted party honest and accountable for not releasing at the desired date and in the absence of a liven…
A smart contract can still help. Use Shamir's secret sharing to split the decryption key. Each friend gets a key fragment, plus the address of the smart contract that combines them. Now none of your friends have to know each other. No friend can peek on their own, they can't conspire with each other, and if one of them gets compromised, it doesn't put the others at risk. It's basically the same idea as "social recove…
Ah, putting the key under shared control of (hopefully independent) entities does sound like a useful extension.
But still, while this solves the problem of availability (the shardholders could get their stake slashed if they don't publish their secrets after the failsafe condition is reached, because not publishing something on-chain is publicly observeable), does it help that much with secrecy, i.e. not leaking the secret unintentionally and possibly non-publicly?
I guess you could bet on the shardholders not having an easy way to coordinate collusion with somebody willing to pay for it, maybe by increasing the danger of defection (e.g. by allowing everyone that obtains a secret without the condition being met to claim the shardholder's stake?), but the game theory seems more complicated there.
Re: OpenAI whistleblower found dead in San Francisco apartment
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can a smart contract “keep a secret” in a trustless way? Isn’t effectively all the trust still in the party releasing it at the right time, or not releasing it otherwise? If so, is the blockchain aspect anything other than decentralization theater? I guess one thing you can do with a blockchain is keeping that trusted party honest and accountable for not releasing at the desired date and in the absence of a liven…
You can create a timelock smart contract requiring a future state of the blockchain to have been reached. Once that time has been reached, you can freely execute the function on the contract to retrieve the information. Tested it years ago, to lock up 1 ETH in essentially a CD for a year. The trust is held in your own code implementation of the contract and that ETH will continue to exist and not be hard-forked or Sh…
That's not how it works: You can fundamentally not store secrets in smart contracts, you do need off-chain agents for that. (How would a smart contract prevent me from reading anything published on a blockchain?)
> Tested it years ago, to lock up 1 ETH in essentially a CD for a year.
That's not locking up a secret, that's locking up value.
But it seems like there might be a game theoretic way to ensure that, as your sibling commenter has outlined.