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To me this is just one more pillar underlying my assumption that self driving cars that can be left alone on same roads as humans is a pipe dream.

Waymo might have taxis that work in nice daytime streets (but with remote “drone operators”). But dollars to doughnuts someone will try something like this on a waymo taxi the minute it hits reddit front page.

The business model of self driving cars does not include building seperated roadways and junctions. I suspect long distance passenger and light loads are viable (most highways can be expanded to have one or more robo-lanes) but cities are most likely to have drone operators keeping things going and autonomous systems for handling loss of connection etc. the business models are there - they just don’t look like KITT - sadly


Waymo works just fine in poor weather and at night, and it does not rely on end-to-end VLMs that would be vulnerable to this attack.

They have coexisted with humans just fine over the past couple years.


> But dollars to doughnuts someone will try something like this on a waymo taxi the minute it hits reddit front page.

and once this video gets posted to reddit, an hour later every waymo in the world will be in a ditch


Alternatively, it happens once, Waymo fixes it, and it's fixed everywhere.

How does Waymo fix it? They have to be responsive to some signs (official, legitimate ones such as "Lane closed ahead, merge right") so there will always be some injection pathway.

They've mapped the roads and they don't need to drive into a ditch just because there's a new sign. It probably wouldn't be all that hard to come up with criteria for saying "this new sign is suspicious" and flag it for human review. Also, Waymo cars drive pretty conservatively, and can decide to be even more cautious when something's confusing.

Someone could probably do a DOS attack on the human monitors, though, sort of like what happened with that power outage in San Francisco.


Given Waymo's don't actually connect LLMs to wheels, they are pretty safe.

Even if you fool the sign-recognizing LLM with prompt injection, it'll be an equivalent of wrong road sign. And Waymo is not going to drive into the wall even if someone places a "detour" sign pointing there.


To me the issue is not security agencies use Pegasus, but foreign security agents physically assault British citizen in London, MI6 does bugger all.

I’m not sure what I want from our security services, but security sounds good.

Also I wonder if there is a background level of foreign agent activity they accept and how is that related to the police’s paradox of using confidential informants


> if there is a background level of foreign agent activity they accept

Yup, there's constantly a number of known spies in pretty much all countries. If all were ejected, the other country would do the same to their spies and monitoring compliance with projects would become harder - so it seems in everyone's interest to not be too strict. See for example https://johnsontr.github.io/assets/files/spies_current.pdf

Also there's the idea of "the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" which generalises to lots of things - including this one.


It is London - hardly surprising.

Nothing will improve as long as Khan is Mayor, and may not even if he is replaced.

Anyway, MI6 (SIS) is the overseas spies, MI5 is the domestic spy agency.


Yes, it totally makes sense to blame Khan for what foreign intelligence services are doing in London. This is completely reasonable.

Someone being beaten up on the streets is domestic policing issue.

That the perpetrators may turn out to be foreign agents is neither here nor there, only if they were diplomatic staff would it not be a domestic policing issue. However the UK police have largely withdrawn from certain areas, and this would simply be another symptom.

High Court action suggests there was a civil case pursuing the perpetrators (or their principals), rather than a criminal case. With a properly functioning police system, that should not be necessary.

Kahn is the PCC for London, he sets their priorities.


Doesn’t matter if it’s people being poisoned with polonium or getting beaten up, preventing the activities of foreign intelligence services is generally not the job of the PCC.

It is the job of the British intelligence services to blow someone up in Riyadh to deter these activities.


London just had the lowest annual murders for 11 years.

>Homicide rate now 1.1 per 100,000 people, lower than any other UK city and major global cities including New York (2.8), Berlin (3.2) and Toronto (1.6)

I guess you'll praise Khan, as PCC, for that?


Say you were the Mayor of London, and being a great mayor you have your priorities 100% correct.

Can you guarantee that something like this will never happen on your watch?


Not within a mayor’s control

It’s almost as if the world is wide and we are siloed.

For example “High School Musical” Made a billion dollars withoute even knowing such a thing existed.

Edit This is the first I heard of this as well, but it bothers me. Along with the Salisbury poisonings I would be interested in how any criminal activities foreign agents are suspected of doing in the UK (Russia presumably heading the list)



>>> The image is not stored at any point.

The very first computers (Manchester baby) used CRTs as memory - the ones and zeros were bright spots on a “mesh” and the electric charge on the mesh was read and resent back to the crt to keep the ram fresh (a sorta self refreshing ram)


Yes, but those were not the standard kind of CRTs that are used in TV sets and monitors.

The CRTs with memory for early computers were actually derived from the special CRTs used in video cameras. There the image formed by the projected light was converted in a distribution of charge stored on an electrode, which was then sensed by scanning with an electron beam.

Using CRTs as memory has been proposed by von Neumann and in his proposal he used the appropriate name for that kind of CRT: "iconoscope".


Why didn't that catch on pre-transistor? Feels like you'd get higher density than valves and relays.

DRAM memories made with special CRTs with memory have been used for a few years, until 1954. For instance the first generation of commercial electronic computers made by IBM (scientific IBM 701 and business-oriented IBM 702) have used such CRTs.

Then the CRT memories have become obsolete almost instantaneously, due to the development of magnetic core memories, which did not require periodic refreshing and which were significantly faster. The fact that they were also non-volatile was convenient at that early time, though not essential.

Today, due to security concerns, you would actually not want for your main memory to be non-volatile, unless you also always encrypt it completely, which creates problems of secret key management.

So CRT memories have become obsolete several years before the replacement of vacuum tubes in computers with transistors, which happened around 1959/1960.

Besides CRT memories and delay line memories, another kind of early computer memory that has quickly become obsolete was the memory with magnetic drums.

In the cheapest early computers (like IBM 650), the main memory was not a RAM (i.e. neither a CRT nor with magnetic cores), but a magnetic drum memory (i.e. with sequential periodic access to data).


There is a tendril vibrating on the spiders web in society - this and the equally horrific case in France just suggests that rape and sexual abuse are far deeper than perhaps most of us ever assumed


I also have long thought this. Probably not for military service but some form of community service,


And that’s probably the OpenAI killer. If any of my work product from now to 2030 could legitimately be entangled in any of the millions of coming copyright claims, I am in a world of hurt.

This fast run to use LLMs in everything can be undone by one court decision - and the sensible thing is to isolate as much as you can.

Really interesting insight


Also I don't think it will be easy to defend a copyright on AI-generated images, especially if your IP is 'lot of humanoid soldiers in power armor' and not specific characters.


> not specific characters.

That's funny because they have been releasing a ton of named hero characters lately.

A (I'm unsure how large) portion of the community hates this style of game design and call it "Herohammer"

I play the space bugs because I like huge swarms of things, so thematically I agree with them.


> If any of my work product from now to 2030 could legitimately be entangled in any of the millions of coming copyright claims, I am in a world of hurt.

right... there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens, and where are the "millions of coming copyright claims" now?

i don't think what you are talking about has anything to do with killing openai, there's no one court decision that has to do with any of this stuff.


> there has been ample code and visual art around to copy for decades, and people have, and they get away with it, and nothing bad happens

Some genres of music make heavy use of 'samples' - tiny snippets of other recordings, often sub-5-seconds. Always a tiny fraction of the original piece, always chopped up, distorted and rearranged.

And yet sampling isn't fair use - the artists have to license every single sample individually. People who release successful records with unlicensed samples can get sued, and end up having to pay out for the samples that contributed to their successful record.

On the other hand, if an artist likes a drum break but instead of sampling it they pay another drummer to re-create it as closely as possible - that's 100% legal, no more copyright issue.

Hypothetically, one could imagine a world where the same logic applies to generative AI - that art generated by an AI trained on Studio Ghibli art is a derivative work the same way a song with unlicensed drum samples is.

I think it's extremely unlikely the US will go in that direction, simply because the likes of nvidia have so much money. But I can see why a cautious organisation might want to wait and see.


OpenAI indemnifies customers against copyright claims: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=671fdd7f-3cef...


Indemnification only means something if the indemnifying party exists and is solvent. If copyright claims on training data got traction, it would be neither, so it doesn't matter if they provide this or not. They probably won't exist as a solvent entity in a couple years anyway, so even the question of whether the indemnification means anything will go away.


Hire good people and trust them, they will build the best they can for the users they can talk to

If you don’t know what good people look like you can’t win.


The biggest thing is trust, in just about any relationship. The truth is, I think, most people are very well meaning and highly ambitious. It's disillusionment and distrust that creates the rift.

People want to work hard and they want to do good - but they're scared. They're scared that working hard will only be to their detriment and, well, can you blame them? When managers create an almost adversarial relationship, it can feel like doing your best is setting yourself up for failure.


And pay them well. If you want people to build you a thing that prints money, you better give them a sizeable cut. Otherwise enjoy "market rate" performance.


This leads to a fairly obvious conjecture :

That since for 100,000 years humans were roaming the landscape gathering or hunting, and for 10,000 years engaged in heavy agricultural work, is the modern day rise in depression not just correlated but caused by the modern day reduction in daily heavy exercise?

It’s such an obvious idea I am wondering if folks know of any research / studies on it?


Don't underestimate the meaning and relationships people had in those times, hunting together to feed your family, farming with your community and interacting with animals etc.

I think physical activity, even just going on walks makes one feel change is possible. If something sucks and I sit home all day on YouTube, then it continues to suck. If I can change my environment, do things outside, see new people and find myself if different situations, then the thing that sucks starts feeling like maybe it also could change.

For example I doubt exercising in a basement just by yourself on 1 machine is likely to materially help with depression. At least not as much as going out doing a variety of things, or playing a game of basketball at the local gym/community center.


Yeah. I think the communitarian point is valid, and valuable. Also, even if you only do that 1 machine thing in the basement, you can regard it as an achievement that's worth something. At least I did that thing. It makes me feel kinda ok too, or just better.


>is the modern day rise in depression

I think it was quite hard to get an appointment for a depression diagnosis 100,000 years ago.


I am interested in what is working in Vienna when “housing problem” is what almost every city in “the West” has or thinks it has.

To me it seems to be a combination of

- wealth inequality (eg 20/30 trillion dollars was printed and furloughed out in Covid, which funnels its way up to the holders of the most assets, seeing asset price inflation but no attempt to tax back the money printed). Repeat on different scales for unfair tax systems and poor infrastructure and and and

- urban planning (we think the ideal city is dense using seven storey or so apartment buildings and fairly aggressive anti-car (ie far less parking than seems possible) with better public transport and lots of pedestrian access. This describes almost no cities

- mortgages and other pro house incentives. You want house price inflation for decade after decade, just allow people to borrow a greater ratio against their salary — and allow married women into the workplace. Suddenly turning a mortgage limit of 2.5 x a man’s salary into 5x a dual couples salary. People bid up prices, forcing more couples to have two salaries to compete. And companies don’t have to increase salary to compensate … people combine salaries and go deeper into debt. Hell if you only had one policy weapon, forcing 2.5 borrowing against one highest paid persons salary is not a bad one. You won’t get re-elected however.


I don’t follow it but your last suggestion (use single income not household) was new to me and interesting in as much as it seems like an obvious extension of “The Two-Income Trap” thinking.

To some extent seems like it would also provide a margin of safety given homogeneity effects eg https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-pa...


1/3 of the housing stock in Vienna is social housing which belongs to and is managed by the city.

They offer low rents and therefore a large part of tenants dont compete on the private market, therefore pulling overall rents lower.


ChatGPT with no deeper diving thinks you are further off “”” Social/public rental makes up about 43% of the city’s housing stock; around half of that is city-owned public housing. The rest includes limited-profit housing associations and private housing.

“”” This compares with London around 20%, paris 24% and NYC 9%

So yeah that makes a huge difference…


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