Yaztromo

I’m willing to bet you could convince a subset of those people that such an LLM is in fact the second coming of Christ. So not just some tool “approved” by God, but that the LLM is the God itself.

Then (to the “true believers” minds) whatever it says will be unquestionable. And then whomever is pulling the strings behind the scenes can commit whatever atrocities they desire.

I’m familiar with TempleOS — but it really doesn’t have any applicability here. It’s just something written by a guy with some mental illness who thought God was telling him what he wanted in an Operating System. But even for the faithful it’s just a tool — like how a temple itself may be an important holy place, but isn’t itself worshipped by the people who use it. Nobody considers a church to actually be their God.

That’s vastly different from an LLM that purports to be itself divine. We can setup an LLM that actually claims to be the second coming of Jesus, and there will be people will do whatever it tells them to because of belief. If you suck in enough people for enough years slowly enough to build up a cult following, and abuse them just enough to keep them in line, you’ll be able to tell them to do all sorts of truly atrocious things — and some subset will in fact go through with them.

And yes, people can do that already (see Jim Jones, David Koresh, or any other cult leader that convinced all their followers to kill themselves and their families) — but an LLM could have a vastly larger reach around the globe. We may not need for the LLM itself to become Skynet — one or two bad actors behind the scenes of a “divine” LLM might be enough to bring down humanity all by itself.

Mark my words — but we’re going to see a time (in our lifetimes) where a group of people is going to worship an AI as “divine”. And you won’t be able to convince them otherwise. An AI-centric cult is all but inevitable at this point. And it will be self-reinforcing.

I have way too much self-respect to ever show my face on FOX 🤣.

I was on one of those “especially rebellious mod-teams”. We were even interviewed by Ars Technica about it all at the time.

On advice of a majority of our users, we took our sub offline and kept it that way until Reddit booted us as mods. Honestly, this was the outcome I was expecting — hell, I was pretty open about goading them into it. What was the alternative — to cave to the platform that was abusing us so I could keep working for them for free?

That’s the part I didn’t understand about my fellow mods from other subs. Many of them caved pretty quickly. Their identities seemed to be so tied up in being a Reddit mod that they couldn’t let it go, even though the relationship was obviously very unequal. Too many other people stood up after witnessing the mod abuse to take over from those who got the boot, just asking for the Reddit boot to be applied to their necks instead.

Well, I wish all the mods the kind of treatment they forgave/ignored the last time around.

GitLab Enterprise somewhat recently added support for Amazon Q (based on claude) through an interface they call “GitLab Duo”. I needed to look up something in the GitLab docs, but thought I’d ask Duo/Q instead (the UI has this big button in the top left of every screen to bring up Duo to chat with Q):

(Paraphrasing…)

ME: How do I do X with Amazon Q in GitLab? Q: Open the Amazon Q menu in the GitLab UI and select the appropriate option.

ME: [:looks for the non-existant menu:] ME: Where in the UI do I find this menu?

Q: My last response was incorrect. There is no Amazon Q button in GitLab. In fact, there is no integration between GitLab and Amazon Q at all.

ME: [:facepalm:]

This is why most apps that do use such services use more than one. Lots of modern sites have buttons for “Login with Google”, “Login with Facebook”, “Login with Apple”. None of them want to lose access to the user data and analytics they get from these services — so I doubt one is going to jump into cutting you off or requiring payment while the others are still free.

It would take all of these services to (illegally) coordinate to suddenly start charging — and of all of them I don’t see that being in the interest at all for Apple. Apple’s login service uses Touch and Face ID on their devices, and is part of the selling point for those devices (extremely easy logins with no password). They’re not making their money off Single Sign-On (SSO) login services — they make their money off selling devices, and they make the case for selling these devices in large part by selling “simplicity”.

So if you’re worried today about a login service yanking the rug out from under you, you just implement many/all of them. It’s not significantly more work — all of them are based off OAuth — so long as your website or app can authenticate via OAuth you just need to use the APIs each company provides to implement the authentication, and you’re done.

Nothing them stops you as you get bigger form implementing your own login/authentication service — and if you ever get big enough, you too can offer it as a service for other websites.

And that’s just fine. Considering how many people do login with those services, I doubt any that use the SSO services will particularly miss you and the small subset of users who don’t want to let a third-party service confirm your login.

That’s not meant as snark — every app and website out there has some subset of users who will decry “I won’t use that because it does X”. And that’s fine. It’s a personal decision. But it likely won’t significantly affect development decisions, as it’s going to happen with some group for some reason anyway.

It is not good for small commercial entities that will be required to enact a ID verification system because it will increase the cost of entry to the market.

As someone who works in this space, I doubt it’s going to be an issue for smaller entities. We already have SSO for basic login identity from a variety of providers (Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple) — smaller sites already love to use these as it provides easy access to existing users, and saves a ton of coding for having to handle login information, password management, etc.

These same entities can handle the age verification. Now I can see arguments as to why centralizing logins and age verification like this could be a problem for users, but if I decided to start my own social media app tomorrow I’d likely rely on the big platforms to handle all of this (as we already see everywhere — heck, app for ordering pizza support Facebook, Google, and Apple logins), and save myself the cost and hassle of implementing this myself (never mind the potential embarrassment and liability should someone hack my site). Then it’s on those platforms to worry about age verification.

All of these services are currently free, and save you from a ton of coding around user accounts and authentication, so using them is usually cheaper then having to DIY it.

Short answer — the internal “switch” is held in the on position by a magnet. Magnets become much less effective when they get hot, and while there is still water in the cooker the maximum temperature will be 100C. Once all the water boils off the temperature quickly rises — but the magnets stop being able to attract the switch when they hit around 102 - 103C or so and release the switch, turning the machine off.

So all has is a switch connected to a magnet next to the bottom of the pot. That’s it. Physics does the rest.

We have enough production in some areas — but not in others. Some goods are currently overly expensive because the inputs are expensive — mostly because we’re not producing enough. In many cases that’s due to insufficient competition. And there are some significant entrenched interests trying to keep things that way (lower production == lower competition == higher prices).

And FWIW, the US’s current “tariff everything and everybody” approach is going to make this much, much, much worse.

I am certainly not the friend of billionaires. I’m perfectly fine with a wealth tax to fund public works and services. All I’m against is overly simplistic solutions which just exacerbate existing problems.