I’m assuming they have much more control during training and at runtime than us with our prompts. They’ll bake in whatever the person with the checkbook says to.
if they want dynamic pricing like adwords then its going to be a little challenging. While I appreciate its probably viable and they employ very clever people there's nothing like doing two things that are basically diametrically opposed at the same time. The LLM wants to give you what _should_ be the answer, but the winner of the ad word wants something else. There's a conflict there that I'd imagine might be quite challenging to debug.
Generate an Answer, get the winning Ad from an API, let another AI rewrite the Answer in a easy that the Answer at least be not contradicting to the Ad.
I think someone should create a leaderboard that measures how much the AI is lying to us to sell more ads.
If AGI was around the corner, they wouldn’t have to resort to what some consider a scummy way to make money. They’d would become the most valuable company on the planet, winning the whole game. Ads show you they don’t know what else to do but they desperately need money.
There are costs to doing ads (e.g. it burns social/political capital that could be used to defuse scandals or slow down hostile legislation, it consumes some fraction of your employees’ work hours, it may discourage some new talent from joining).
Yes. Infinite low cost intelligence labor to replace those pesky humans!
Really reminds me of the economics of slavery. Best way for line to go up is the ultimate suppression and subjugation of labor!
Hypothetically can lead to society free to not waste their life on work, but pursue their passions. Most likely it’ll lead to plantation-style hungry-hungry-hippo ruling class taking the economy away from the rest of us
Sure the details were negotiated in 2019, but it isn't even in effect yet. It still needs to be approved by legislative bodies on both sides of the Atlantic. Which will probably happen sometime this year.
Interesting, looking at it from that side. How does it work with traditional real world ads, billboards for example. I'd expect them to have a similar challenge. Not whether the ad was put in front of people, but the high level impact of the whole campaign.
How would advertisers know whether OpenAI even applied the ad to the paid for number of people's conversations, I don't know.
This was posted in Show HN today [0]. Looks like queries just query ChatGPT themselves for whatever terms they want to track and then correlate revenue with that. But ChatGPT will probably do it like affiliate links, where there is a tracking parameter or cookie that identifies that it came from ChatGPT.
In restaurants it doesn’t make sense, because you usually have the table for 2 hours after which the staff will remind you it’s time to leave (in Germany).
> Also what's up with the people hiking (by themselves) with a bluetooth speaker. You're by yourself, in nature. If you want to listen to music wear headphones!!
Maybe they don't know of or don't have access to bone conducting earphones. Whatever they're listening to, that way they'd also still hear their environment.
>Maybe they don't know of or don't have access to...
Maybe they don't know of or don't have any access to any sense of boundaries, as if they skipped the infant stage of development where they should have learned that "mom" is another person with her own coequal set of needs. And anybody with the urge to push back on this notion, please cover the case where it might apply to you to.
If you can't listen to your music without polluting the noise landscape around you, then you don't get to listen to your music. The excuse you present is a selfish one.
Yea, with you on that one. Headphones are great at the house where I have a controlled environment. When I'm out and listening to things I'll typically only use one at a time because it's easy to miss very important, possibly deadly things.
They're obviously not the most affordable things around, but if you have an iPhone and spending ~US$250 on a pair of wireless earbuds won't unduly stress your budget, the transparency mode on AirPods Pro is great for this.
They are great.
But… I tried them on a plane. It may have been full sound cancelling rather than transparency, and it works, and goes silent but it’s a weird silence. It sort of feels heavy, or loud.
> In 2019, the Maduro government accused the United States of conducting a cyberattack on a hydropower plant that plunged much of the country into darkness for a week.
> The power failures caused sporadic outbursts of looting and unrest, bringing the government close to collapse.
Good point. It's easier to say you got hacked by nation state actors than to tell your boss you accidentally screwed up a major system with no way to recover. It's not like 99% of the management could tell the difference.
In the 2019 book "Sandworm", which discusses cyber warfare against infrastructure like this, but between Russia and Ukraine, the author begs the question in an interview with a US military/intelligence official,
"why doesn't the US go after these hackers and designate targeting civilian infrastructure as a crime?"
To which the response was essentially "The US would like to reserve those types of cyber attacks for their own uses"
These quotes are very loose, I read it last year, but essentially, the US didn't make a stink about older grid attacks in order to save face when the US does it.
Additionally, much of VZ's difficulty was due to the massive sanctions against the nation. Sanctions are effectively attacks on a nation's citizens to pressure the government. Disabling power infrastructure is absolutely in-line with the motives of sanctions and embargos.
I think perhaps nationalizing your oil companies, looting their assets for political reasons, and driving out the only people with the competencies to operate your only valuable industry might have a tiny bit to do with the state of the country.
I feel like Mother Goose had a cautionary tale about killing your golden goose that perhaps Venezuela’s leadership ought to read up on.
Is there a particular reason to take any state account of anything at all at face value? At some point you either have to accept to play the game or reject all news.
In this case, it fits squarely in with American foreign policy, especially their orientation towards Venezuelan chavismo.
It also fits squarely with corruption in Venezuela, specially regarding energy. Venezuela has been rationing electricity across the country since 2009 and has been involved in countless corruption scandals involving Odebrecht, PDVSA, Derwick Associates.
I understand the US's foreign policy is a global threat, but let's not let that be an excuse for the atrocities and corruption of tyrants in Venezuela and other places.
What is the scandal supposed to be in the first one? No water in the dam? Mismanagement? Nationalization itself?
The Derwick one seems pretty light too, at least the article here just mentions an accusation from a journalist. And even then, if we are using corruption/overbilling with regard to a government contractor as an "atrocity" now.. That's going to have wider repercussions than here.
And ok, Venezuela took bribes from another government contractor, along with many other countries. I wouldn't call that an atrocity, but if that's what it is I guess I will give you the benefit of the doubt about it.
I give you benefit of the doubt about everything really! I just don't know if you have packaged your case here well is all.
The scandal is that the energy crisis was declared in 2009, and 17 years later, after investing $100 billion of which up to $80 billion disappeared, there are still blackouts across the country. That's all in the first article. The Derwick one is not just one reporter either, there's local and international reporters involved including claims from Reporters Without Borders where reporters received "threats, pressures, bribe offers". That's also in the article.
As for the attrocities I meant the Maduro (and current) government in general. There are currently over 1000 political prisoners in the country, a mix of protesters, politicians, reporters, etc. A lot of them have been tortured and many have died in custody. Most of the sources from NGO are in Spanish but the Wikipedia is a good start, specially the section about the Maduro government [1]
If you check the news right now you'll see that only in the past month about 50 have been released. There's a huge effort in the country right now to get the hundreds of others out.
Ultimately, what I want to say is that while we can express disdain for the US government we can do the same for the Venezuelan one, even if they claim to be against each other. Maduro and his gang are not the victims here, they've oppressed the Venezuelan people for 27 years, let's not give them an easy out
Perhaps there's more at play here than pretending like Maduro is a uniquely bad guy but also so hilariously incompetent his corruption scheme blacked out the country.
Let's be clear here, there are many evil states in this world. But Maduro isn't exactly Mohammed bin Salman or Donald Rumsfeld.
>> But Maduro isn't exactly Mohammed bin Salman or Donald Rumsfeld.
Just showed you an article describing all the human right abuses, tortures and forced disappearances done under the Maduro regime and this is your take away? I can only assume you're not arguing in good faith.
Check the news right now, about the prisoner releases happening as we speak and the hundreds still to go. One died only last week in captivity. Guess we can tell their families at least Maduro is not bin Salaman. Such cruelty, man
Perhaps. This seems somewhat suicidal of a corruption scheme for the leader of a country. Surely there must be easier ways to personally profit than making an international embarrassment of the country—every other country on earth manages this sort of graft just fine.
Let's hope those chicken never come home to roost. NSA has a history of losing offensive cyber tools.
IIRC both Texas and California had widespread power outages in the last few years. I am not convinced that US power grid is much better defended than the one in the EU.
> Let's hope those chicken never come home to roost.
Bare minimum it gives chinese tech suppliers a great pitch to convince buyers to choose their products over US suppliers. Even if theirs are also full of backdoors, at least they have no history of taking advantage of them to kidnap heads of state far away.
Yes, you're missing that if you mess with the power grid the US will go and kinetically strike back (read: bomb your country) or attack you with its own cyber warfare capabilities, unlike the EU. That's why the EU is experiencing cyber attacks and cyber warfare with clear culpability from Russia, but is unable to do much about it besides give Ukraine more weapons. If Russia launched a cyber attack and shut down JFK the way it did Heathrow, the US would actually do something about it even with all the Trump is a Russian agent stuff aside.
Calm down, John Rambo. Even if USA could prove that it wasn't a false flag op, it won't "kinetically strike back" against China, Russia, India, or even small allies like North Korea.
USA is only willing to fight very asymmetrical wars.
Please don't cross into name-calling or personal attack and please don't be snarky in HN comments, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
Sure, of course it's not that simple. If China for example did a cyber attack it doesn't necessitate an immediate kinetic response or some sort of gargantuan nation-state level warfare to take place.
But if one of those countries shut down the US power grid we absolutely would respond and you're naive to think that the US would not respond out of some "fear" about only fighting very asymmetric wars.
Amongst some there seems to be this idea that because the US has taken military action in other countries over the years, more recent being more important, and because those countries "couldn't fight back" that the US is unable or unwilling to take further action against other nation states that theoretically could fight back (India could not, for example as a weak military power with nuclear weapons), but instead I'd caution you look at those action with respect to the ability of other countries to take action.
In other words, it feels good to throw in zingers like the US only beats up on weaker countries or something which, let's be frank would be every country or bloc except China, but you're missing the fact that those countries are not even able to project power to or willingness or ability to attack other countries.
I only remember that if one US state loses power the other states laugh about it because obviously it is because the current governor is a black female democrat. It'd be great progress to actually detect what caused it in a timely manner and then do a proper cyber attribution.
Generally I think you are using a lot of big words to compensate for the fact that the US ignored the Minsk agreement.
The russian government has been publicly joking about Trump, broadcasting nude pictures of the first lady and boasting about possessing the Epstein tapes. Before that was the hack of Hillary's mail server and fake news campaigns. No kinetic repercussions, even red carpet for putin's visit in Alaska.
Apart from all this a modern drone war would be a big problem for the US, and countries like Ukraine, russia and china are much better prepared for such a scenario.
> I only remember that if one US state loses power the other states laugh about it because obviously it is because the current governor is a black female democrat.
Yea that's obviously dumb, but the difference is you hear about America's problems, but not the problems in other countries. Russia has its oil facilities regularly bombed. China has institutionalized corruption down to the local level. It's not all peaches and rainbows in every country on earth.
> It'd be great progress to actually detect what caused it in a timely manner and then do a proper cyber attribution.
Who says we aren't?
> Generally I think you are using a lot of big words to compensate for the fact that the US ignored the Minsk agreement.
Can you elaborate? What's the broader point you want to get at here?
> The russian government has been publicly joking about Trump, broadcasting nude pictures of the first lady and boasting about possessing the Epstein tapes. Before that was the hack of Hillary's mail server and fake news campaigns. No kinetic repercussions, even red carpet for putin's visit in Alaska.
Yes, totally. The United States should have bombed Russia for publicly joking about Donald Trump. Give me a break. Why even post stuff like this?
> Apart from all this a modern drone war would be a big problem for the US, and countries like Ukraine, russia and china are much better prepared for such a scenario.
Who do you think is operating in Ukraine and advising the Ukrainians and learning from their drone warfare techniques and capabilities? Do you really not know how this stuff works? Are you not aware that the United States is actively testing weapons in Ukraine to prepare for drone warfare? Is that why you're saying stuff like the US should have a kinetic response against Russia for posting pictures and joking about Donald Trump?
> Can you elaborate? What's the broader point you want to get at here?
I mean that by ignoring Minsk agreement and being a bitch about weapons deliveries on top of that, the US incentivized every single country to pursue access to nuclear capabilities.
> The United States should have bombed Russia for publicly joking about Donald Trump. Give me a break. Why even post stuff like this?
They started with the public humiliation after they felt empowered because there was no credible US response to all the previous hacks that you glossed over in your response.
Yes, the US stopped credit card payments and destroyed some payment terminals. I imagine they weaponized the apple and android devices, maybe this still continues. For a couple of days, we had those impressive russian rockets which turned around and destroyed their launcher. And of course the geofenced US weapon systems. But was US able to shut down any vital russian systems except starlink and McDonald's?
Old lavrov still walks around openly with his apple watch just to farm payloads. US had to keep up social media access and steam for russians because that's their most convenient surveillance capability. Even Porsche was able to remotely shut down their cars allover russia, last I heard the American car brands are still working within russia.
> Who do you think is operating in Ukraine and advising the Ukrainians
There are observers from many countries on the ground in Ukraine, and US might even be testing some weapons. However US efforts are overshadowed by better performance of European weapons systems, both old and new. As Germany was unable to supply Taurus, European engineers stepped up and helped Ukraine design long range missiles.
Meanwhile the US artificially limits supply for US systems, so they get destroyed because they need to preserve ammo. I don't see how the situation for US gets better in the future as more and more proud boys take over key positions. Look at the defense minister who can't use a damn phone and is more interested in tattoos.
There is a lot of empty posturing and the results are really not speaking for the US.
> I mean that by ignoring Minsk agreement and being a bitch about weapons deliveries on top of that, the US incentivized every single country to pursue access to nuclear capabilities.
Heh ok. I guess so. The US was a "bitch" about weapons deliveries (quick hide the numbers) therefore every single country is incentivized to pursue nuclear capabilities. Great argument you have there.
> They started with the public humiliation after they felt empowered because there was no credible US response to all the previous hacks that you glossed over in your response.
Name the hacks that were glossed over and what you feel is the appropriate response.
> Yes, the US stopped credit card payments and destroyed some payment terminals. I imagine they weaponized the apple and android devices, maybe this still continues. For a couple of days, we had those impressive russian rockets which turned around and destroyed their launcher. And of course the geofenced US weapon systems. But was US able to shut down any vital russian systems except starlink and McDonald's?
Sanctions seem to do the trick. But you probably aren't reading about and paying attention to the state of the Russian economy, or what equipment they're sending their soldiers to war in Ukraine with. Well, when they're not supplied by China that is.
How many Russian energy and oil facilities have been targeted by Ukrainian drone and missile strikes, and who do you think helped with the targeting?
> Old lavrov still walks around openly with his apple watch just to farm payloads.
Sure, why isn't the EU arresting him then? Why don't they launch operation Lavrov and go capture him? There's got to be a reason right? What reason do you think that is? It can't have anything to do with the US though, you can only explain why the EU isn't doing it.
> There are observers from many countries on the ground in Ukraine, and US might even be testing some weapons.
Yes, there are, but the relevant ones are from the United States and the United Kingdom. There's no "might" about the US testing new weapons, it's just a simple fact. And they're testing those weapons, both offensive and defensive, against drone warfare. Ukraine shares intelligence with the US.
> However US efforts are overshadowed by better performance of European weapons systems, both old and new.
What specific US efforts are overshadowed by better performance of European weapon systems?
> Meanwhile the US artificially limits supply for US systems, so they get destroyed because they need to preserve ammo.
Which ones?
> There is a lot of empty posturing and the results are really not speaking for the US.
Well we took down Iran and Venezuela, both Russian allies. Cuba is not looking good either. We're seizing Russian shadow fleet tankers (we've seized more in a month than the EU has since the start of the war), we've upheld sanctions and increased sanctions while Putin and his henchmen's kids galavant around Europe and the US continues to provide intelligence sharing to help Ukraine with targeting, advice, materials and equipment, and more.
The EU of course has helped too, but unlike you I'm not downplaying one party's involvement and participation and instead defending one party, as I would defend the EU if someone claimed they weren't doing anything either.
Please don't break the site guidelines, regardless of how badly another account may be doing so. Your comments have not been nearly as aggressive as the other's (that's good), but you've still gone over the line in several places.
You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread. In particular, the way you've crossed into personal attack and nationalistic flamewar is not ok and will get an account banned.
We've had to warn you about this kind of thing in the past. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Europe had Ukraine sabotage (according to European reports) its gas lines and gave it more weapons as a reward… so I guess the answer is that it’s complicated.
German intelligence thinks so… maybe they’re garbage. Also “the island” and “the guardian” maybe they’re garbage when they report on this but not on other things.
The former German president has/had a consulting contract with Gazprom, and refused to stop it after the invasion. There are large groups in government who received payments from russian sources. A state minister actively worked to circumvent US sanctions.
So unless someone from German intelligence goes on the record I'd be very reluctant to believe any of these anti-Ukraine claims leaked to the press.
There's an interesting book called "BND: Bedingt Dienstbereit" which talks about German intelligence headquarters in Munich. The eastern German spies from the Stasi had their offices right across the street and they used that location to train new spies.
At some point BND learned that the Stasi was actively monitoring their offices, but they could never figure out where the Stasi was located in Munich. The BND always suspected a Turkish national who rant he vegetable shop at the ground floor of their building to be a foreign spy, but never noticed the Stasi offices used for training purposes right across the street.
So while I'm confident German intelligence has improved from those days it shows that the variance in skill level is quite high.
Russia conduct cyber attacks on US all the time. North Korea did a high profile attack too. China flew a balloon over the whole country, not bothering a single airport, without any response. US never does anything to anyone that can hit back.
> Yes, you're missing that if you mess with the power grid the US will go and kinetically strike back (read: bomb your country) or attack you with its own cyber warfare capabilities, unlike the EU.
Sounds too good to be true. I'd love to believe it.
Didn't russia claim to have the full Epstein files, so how did they get them if not by hacking US government?
Attribution of cyber attacks is extremely difficult, and US seems to notoriously under invest into infrastructure. Unlike other countries, most of the power grid is above ground. How can you be so sure that it is safe?
> Unlike other countries, most of the power grid is above ground. How can you be so sure that it is safe?
I didn't say it was safe by virtue of defensive capabilities, but it's safe by virtue of the US will very likely come bomb you or use its own cyber capabilities if you do something to the US. This is in contrast to the EU which was the comparison point, which is unable and unwilling to do much against cyber attacks.
My original post was more focused on defensive capabilities, but those things are hard to discern - you need to know about vulnerabilities in order to protect yourself from them.
If the damage is done, of course the US can massively retaliate. But ideally no damage is done :)
Ideally yes, but there's a cost. All I was saying was that the US is better equipped than the EU because both are vulnerable but the US actually has and is willing to use offensive capabilities, which provide a defensive deterrent to an aggressor.
If US had such amazing offensive cyber capabilities, why are bug bounties like HackerOne not already bankrupt? The NSA hackers could just easily farm all those bounties and make significantly more than they earn at the government.
I feel the answer to this is that most of what we call NSA offensive capabilities are not "real" offensive capabilities in terms of vulnerabilities and exploits, but simple backdoors in US equipment and US tech companies.
And I think they got really complacent because analyzing Facebook, Google and Apple data combined with credit card payments, phone call and browser history is doing the job just fine in 90% of the cases.
Due to large size of US traditional military, they have advanced capabilities in terms of physical network tapping that many other countries don't possess. Maybe they have super binoculars to spy on people typing in their passwords through the window from space. But in the end it is again white-collar "analysts" going through the data instead of clever people actually finding novel vulnerabilities in software, which is also the skill that is rewarded in bug bounties such as HackerOne.
Why invest into learning how to reverse engineer a cisco router if you can just call your buddy at Cisco and tell them to commit a new backdoor to the code.
By not using these skills they atrophy and once you hit a "real" adversary who is not on Windows and permanently uploading their data to Facebook and iCloud while using a credit card with apple pay, they might struggle very much.
I recall things like omg cable being a revolution in red team pentesting. Of course they had prototypes before, but I don't think it was widely utilized. Because why invest into such fancy hardware gimmicks if you can get the data directly from a US tech company who is forced to provide access for you anyways. It's much cheaper and more reliable.
Edit: I just noticed that due to this significant reliance on backdoors in US equipment they also hurt the defensive posture much more. It's difficult to have different versions of firmware floating around and to ensure they are deployed for your own companies. It's much easier to add backdoors to companies from your own country than to add backdoors to foreign equipment. This is totally in line with what we observe with endless CVEs and backdoors in US networking equipment.
Let's not take Maduro at his word, he's great at playing the victim to hide their corruption. Venezuela has been in an energy crisis since 2009 with rationing still happening everywhere in the country except in Caracas [1] big part of it from the Odebrecht corruption scandal [2]
> New construction on thermoelectric power plants and other hydroelectric plants has been stalled for years, and localised power cuts are a daily occurrence around Venezuela.
> There have also been problems with the supply from the Guri dam in the past.
> In 2010, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, declared an “electricity emergency” after a drought caused by the El Niño weather phenomenon left waters at the dam dangerously low.
> Six years later, Venezuela’s worst drought in four decades again affected the Guri dam, which then provided about 70% of the country’s electricity.
> In May last year, a union leader representing workers in the state power corporation, was arrested by Venezuela’s intelligence service, Sebin, after warning that poor maintenance and systemic problems meant that a blackout was likely to happen.
I will use an extract from the Spanish Wikipedia article[2] about the 2019 blackouts because it summarizes the situation pretty well:
> On March 9, Ángel Javier Sequea, head of office and operations in Guyana, was found dead after being detained by SEBIN.[3] Ángel Javier left a recorded audio message about the lack of maintenance on high-voltage power lines. He worked for 13 years in the powerhouse next to the turbines at the Caruachi Plant.
> Between the night of March 11 and the early morning of March 12, 2019, SEBIN agents arrested and raided the Caracas home of journalist Luis Carlos Díaz, who was then transferred to the Helicoide.[4] Díaz was accused of inciting the blackout.[5] On the night of March 12, 2019, he was released after a hearing in the Caracas courts, in which, according to the organization Espacio Público, he was charged with the crime of “incitement to commit a crime” and was required to appear in court every eight days and prohibited from leaving the country, speaking to the media, and participating in public demonstrations[6]. On March 22, Francisco Alarcón Orozco, secretary of the Corpoelec union, was found hanged under strange circumstances[7]. Govany Zambrano, a Corpoelec worker, was arrested after participating in a press conference[8]. “Our infrastructure at the national level is in a state of neglect, vandalism, abandonment, and terrible conditions...” The government never accepted failure due to lack of maintenance as the main cause, as explained in 2010 by José Aguilar, an expert in electrical risk and international advisor[9].
As a Venezuelan, I can say that the national electrical system is in a terrible condition, with constant blackouts and power surges that damage household appliances and industrial equipment. Depending on the time of year, blackouts become more and more intense. It's very common to see news reports of areas that have lost power, and it can take weeks for CORPOELEC (the national electricity company) to fix the problem and depending on the location, even months.
No one here doubts that the blackouts of 2019 and all those that followed have been the government's fault due to lack of maintenance, failure to renew equipment, and failure to build new power plants.
Years ago, there were plans to install renewable energy sources such as windmills on the coast, but all the money disappeared thanks to the typical corruption around here[10].
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