The process designed to optimize for attracting our attention has done what it was designed to do: optimized for attracting our attention, at the cost of all other incentives.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
There needs to be regulation so algorithms are turned off by DEFAULT for every user - with the option to turn on for those that want a dose of brainrot
HN's algorithm is in fact kosher, because it's not personalized. On HN, arguing with people on topic X will not make you get shown even more articles on topic X to keep you engaged. Reddit-like platforms are similarly okay (you personalize your experience by subscribing) and short video platforms like Tiktok are the great evil.
Reddit “best” sorting is pretty much like instagram and TikTok now, have to make sure it on hot/top, otherwise it’ll show you “related” things from subreddits you never subscribed to.
This is a case of psychological exploitation - in a free market of algorithms the current dominant flavor on platforms would win for the majority of people. As unpopular as it may be in this forum the real solution here is government regulation as we need to work as a society to protect our brains from these exploits.
this stuff always reminds me of There is no antimemetis division [0]
From Case Hate Red:
> With some minutes to kill, he checks the headlines on his phone. Yet again, something dreadful and new which he doesn't understand is going viral. Today's fad is, you paint a black vertical rectangle on the wall, or on a mirror, or over the top of a picture. And then you chant something. Wheeler can't quite pick out the words of the chant. They're in a language he's not familiar with. He's no singer, but he's performed pieces with lyrics in Latin, German, Greek, French… whereas this language has a bizarre manufactured sense to it, as if it were simply English with the vowels and consonants all switched around.
That indeed, and The Entertainment or the samizdat from Infinite Jest. A film so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than endless viewings of the film.
Back when people would read blog posts about the erosion of ownership in the face of intellectual property law, I used to blog about something similar...
Of course the MPAA is against copying, I would say -- the ideal situation for the MPAA would be if when you left the theater, they could just wipe your brain of the memory of the film you just watched. You just remember that you had a fun time with your friends and it was a good movie, but you don't remember any of what happened there. "but those are MY memories" -- no no no we didn't touch YOUR memories, we left your memories just fine -- we only removed a copy of OUR copyrighted content from the world, consistent with our terms of service for the theater. But if you want to experience it again, by all means, come back to watch it again.
"That sounds like it would stifle all cinematic innovation" -- no you don't understand! Our artists are suffering because they don't get the full amount of money they are due because of all of these unlicensed copies moving about the world in peoples' heads. When people are discussing how amazing that movie was, our artists deserve to have them in a controlled cafe attached to the theater where they can control that experience and fully profit off of it. Don't you get it? Bigger financial incentives, bigger payoffs for successful artists -- therefore more artists, and more cinematic innovation! When you play back these unlicensed copies in your "memory" and pirate our works, you're really just contributing to monoculture by not rewarding the people who made your favorite things.
I'm not sure what you mean because you didn't actually say it, but AI is polling as one of the most disliked topics in the USA right now. More hated than ICE.
* A majority of Americans consider the risk of AI to society high, a minority consider the benefits high
* A majority are more concerned than excited about AI
* Americans feel strongly that it’s important to be able to tell if pictures, videos or text were made by AI, but are not confident in their ability to do so
It seems almost universally reviled in creative fields, and the use I mostly see from ordinary people is more along the lines of natural language searches with Gemini.
AI fans are a bubble within the bubble of technology enthusiasts. It's hardly even universally liked among software engineers.
And how much of this is due to the sloppers/grifters/conmen who hopped on to the AI train (same thing which happened to crypto?)
I feel like that is what the hate needs to be directed towards. Same thing with crypto. There is fundamentally nothing wrong with the technology itself. It’s that we are letting these scammers become the face of it
I personally know multiple completely clueless people who are ”founders building AI startup” on linkedin despite having zero business skills, zero technical skills, generally low IQ people, just trying to ride the hype wave to scam themselves into fortune. Of course their tactics involve posting total slop on linkedin, scamming freelancers, outsourcing everything to Pakistan, etc
This kind of behaviour would need to be name-and-shamed and preferably some sort of industry blacklist for bad behaviour.
Grifters and scammers gravitate towards certain technologies (and not others) and become the face of them because of something about those technologies. They are not picking random inventions and then adopting them to their scams.
Canonical partners with organizations like the U.S. Air Force (USAF) and Platform One to provide secure software and AI/ML capabilities. They have an entire DOD team.
I see your point. To answer your original question, yes Canonical's military relationship is fundamentally different from Pizza Hut. More comparable to something like Palantir that sells SaaS or IaaS
So more like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, and most big tech companies than either Pizza Hut or Raytheon? Perhaps most like Red Hat (who also sell to the DoD)?
I think it would be unusual to call them all military contractors (as you called Canonical in another comment).
Microsoft is the largest contractor of the Department of Defense.
I guess many laypeople have not kept up but to any community organizer or people involved in activism, these companies are certainly thought of as military contractors. An accurate assessment imo.
Ubuntu happily sells support contracts to whoever wants to buy them, yes. You can buy the same product the DoD does, it is not special. There is no "secret ubuntu distro for the DoD" by any stretch of the imagination.
The only thing the DoD cares about when it comes to an OS is that it is STIG'd and supported. RedHat and Canonical make a lot of money via support contracts for DoD programs.
Canonical == RedHat == Microsoft for the point you're trying to make, and that point is incorrect.
I hate ubuntu, in no way am I defending Canonical. If Iran thinks DDoSing Canonical will further a cause of their, it would be a second order effect, not just "because Canonical."
An actual answer because all you've received so far is complete nonsense: because they want press attention as they're using these attacks to advertise their DDoS-as-a-Service tool. Literally every single statement they release (on Telegram) includes text saying that their attacks are "100% powered by $websiteEndingWithDotSu".
They also attacked the likes of Vrbo, Expedia and eBay, but they get more press by targeting Mastodon, Bluesky, Ubuntu and the likes, so they go after those now. People are desperately trying to somehow tie those victims to some ideological nonsense, but it's just advertising.
It might be "just advertising", but this also moves them from "I am pretending to retaliate" to "fuck everyone", and eventually will lead to formal recognition of Russia as terrorist state with targets painted at their backs.
There's also Anonymous that for the time being forgot about Russia.
You say "actively" as if it wasn'y a one-off event... maybe because Iran is forcing children to sit at IRGC checkpoints or other military targets?
None of the gulf countries allowed offensive US strikes to occur from their territory. Its all used to defend against attacks from Iran trying to kill Gulf country children.
Maybe ones who don't follow supreme religious leaders that called for the gunning down of 3000 men, women, and children in the streets. And then approve beatings/the murder of doctors that treated them.
Imagine that being your moral leadership. And 3000 is the official Iranian number. Some claim as high as 30,000. Those religious leaders are calling for more murder/death in todays Friday prayers. I don't know how anyone who calls for (or especially signs off on in a religious theocracy) murder can be called spiritual leaders or anyone could follow their 'teachings' .
Edit: Just highlighting the horrors/behaviors you are normalizing/waive away as 'shared by everyone' with your statement 'but what humans aren't like this'.
I think you're conflating "rational" with "moral". The question was about rationality, and from their POV (given the goal of keeping the regime going) everything was rational.
They have always done the same. Just attack everyone and then get the win by getting others to fight for them. Get the maximum reaction through PR/propaganda. It's how they came to power in the first place. It's how they got a massive leftist uprising to unseat the previous government.
Before and during 1979. They'd attack the security forces, deny their involvement and then blame the government for the response, which then was supposedly an attack (e.g. Khomeini would send armed men into protests then put out propaganda that security forces "fired at protestors"). Or argue that the response to their attack was disproportionate. Or argue that his forces "don't have any choice but to" ... etc. This has been the way their proxy forces fight (hamas, houthi's, hezbollah). Control and punish people who detail what their side does (they massacred their own soldiers and their own allies, not just once. This is why people argue they're not leftists: they massacred the leftist factions that helped them unseat the Shah government)
They never explain their own actions. If anything, they put them forth as rational. But more likely you'll never hear about them. Such as killing 30000 people in January when their propaganda efforts totally failed. That's what happened: due to devaluation a number of traders in the "Tehran Bazaar" (a set of streets with lots of stands) very publicly, including to tourists, complained that the government made their lives impossible through economic mismanagement.
They locked off the streets and started going through, killing everybody they possibly could, "clearing" the market as they called it. Men, women, a few children who were sent to buy bread for their families. A few hundred dead. (yes, the way the Iranian government fights has more than a few parallels to what the Nazi's did)
This then set off the large scale protests everywhere in Iran.
Btw: the Iranian tactics are obviously working to some extent. Hence it's probably rational to do this because
Part of the reason those tactics are so effective, even today, is there are leftist elements in the west who are eager to eat it up to substantiate their own agendas and echo it as truth. You can see it live on Hacker News people constantly spewing FUD and propaganda that the Islamic regime likes and is obviously false to actual Iranian people who are vaccinated and won't believe it once they have passed grade school.
'gunning down 3,000 to 30,000 of your country's men, women, and children in the streets because they don't feel one gender should be forced to wear hats upon pain of abuse/rape/death is completely rational'
Ok but could you point to anyone or any people and tell me that they're rational? I didn't just ask for a possible condition of rationality and "maybe" feels like a very flimsy foundation for the acidity of what you're saying.
I'm not sure dismissing the people who invented the term "checkmate" as a bunch of irrational terrorists really works. They stared down Saddam Hussein, so how hard can it be to stare down Donald Trump?
Bombing Iran is like nuking an asteroid. Now, instead of one giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth, there are a half-dozen medium-sized radioactive asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
Similar arguments could be made about the US republic. The land of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Lincoln, now also speed running its way to failed state status and being run and supported by loons.
Almost certainly a target of opportunity. The UK has really made a point of staying out of this fight, but is also seen as a close ally of the US. Perhaps the calculus is:
- Iran was able to attack Ubuntu.com
- Iran sees it in its interests to stress the UK / US relationship (albeit in a small way)
UK has been trying to thread the needle of staying out of what is obviously a complete cluster** of a war while also not annoying the US too much, but US bombers are taking off from air force bases in the UK to bomb Iran all the time.
Because of that and the general ingrained hostility of the permanent UK security state to Iran, they view us as a legitimate target albeit not a particularly important one because we’re just not that powerful anymore
Yeah when Americans talk about how bad a deal NATO is they always conveniently forget the military bases. Most of their wars tend to involve Ramstein for example.
Yep, also in my experience for some reason British people have a hard time understanding why this might be considered hostile from the people being bombed from our soil.
Even when given the example of roles reversed and asked how they would feel about France or Ireland if Russia had air bases in those countries they were using to bomb London, people just can’t see the issue.
In a sense we’re still under American occupation 80 years later, not just physically but more importantly in our minds
Perhaps it's just that Iran believes it's only chance for victory is maximum public attention, and they don't have any real hacker know-how. So they pick a soft but well known target.
I suppose the idea was that Canonical is a UK-based company and they're being threatened by the US's enemy.
Having said that, I really can't believe that either Trump or Starmer will give a shit about this, especially given the recent friction in that relationship.
Iran is targeting random ships crewed by third world/unaligned national crews in the straight. Iran's goal is do whatever it takes to put pressure. They are willingly threatening the food supply of large unaligned parts of the world because it gives them leverage/puts on pressure.
Iran's proxies murdered random grandmothers on Oct 7th and uploaded the video to the internet to get a message across in order to promote their agenda. Why would a random tech company be odd from people funding the murderer of grandmas and their entire families in their homes execution style?
The UK called in the ambassador from Iran this week because they were calling for Iranian expats in the UK to give up their lives for Iran (followed the next day by attacks on jews in the UK).
It's a well(ish) known org with well known product, and they seem to have been vulnerable. If they had attacked a deli in Newark, would we be having this conversation?
Canonical is a UK company, so its a symbolic attack against a Western agent. Ubuntu is used by a lot of tech companies so they knew this attack would get a lot of visibility in the tech community. I'm assuming they think this will garner support from the tech community as well.
Still it feels quite odd that from all western tech companies (and several more influential than Canonical) they chose precisely one that is highly involved with open source
All these comments saying it's just a salient target are making it up. Canonical is a military contractor. They literally have an entire DoD team. That's why they're being targeted. They're far from the only military contractor to be targeted by Iranian hackers this year
Is this written down anywhere? All I can find is an announcement from the group and a follow-up message threatening Canonical if they do not negotiate.
What does a DDoS accomplish if the contracts are signed and a team embedded?
Why take down security.ubuntu.com? Surely even cyber jihadis need security updates?
Welcome to war. This was why the Qatar attack was so destabilizing.
Iran's position is that any organization that is in any shape or form aligned with the US and West is a target.
And being an anti-war westerner won't help you. People are forgetting that the Iranian government detests Israel and the entirety of the West.
The core principals of the revolution which is the IRGC's entire ideological basis is reversing westoxification (Gharbzadegi) and returning to the norms of the Imam Husayn (Velayat-e Faghih).
The whole point of the Islamic Revolution was to export it.
Khomeinei preached that Shia and Sunni is an arbitrary divide and that the ummah needed to be unified and guided by clerics (who just so happened to be Shia) and to purge decadent Western culture back to an idealized norm of the Imam Husayn.
In action, it meant funding insurgencies and revolutionary corps out of a mix of idealism and raw power projection, and those organs used to protect the revolution ended up taking over the entire state and economy for their own economic benefit.
Imagine if the Red Guard and the Gang of Four weren't purged in China in 1976 and the footsoldiers of the Red Guard became actual leaders - that is what Iran is today.
And like China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, it alienated all of it's neighbors.
Westerners who dislike Israel or even the US think Iran would ally with them, but the entire regime views Westerners irrespective of political leaning with disdain. An undercurrent of the Iranian revolution was also Iranian nationalism and the view that Iran is a civilization state, and that the west and westerners are culture-less, decadent, loose, and immoral and that the entirety of western culture needs to be burnt to the ground (Gharbzadegi).
> mention how many other sentient beings are massacred while plowing a field. Rodents, insects, snakes, birds, etc. Is that a myth?
Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals.
> In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.
Assuming you stick with it, I think that could be a good idea.
The deer are full of Chronic Wasting Disease and we've half given up trying to stop it. Many states have stopped their targeted culling programs because they're ineffective once incidence is above 5%. You're suicidal if you eat meat that you know comes from an animal with a prion disease.
I've never hunted (yet). Have fished plenty but that doesn't count.
I lived for a year in a suburb of Charlotte NC a couple of years ago, and there were herds of whitetails on my dog walks.
I'd like to learn more about "Chronic Wasting Disease" if you have any resources, because on podcasts or r/Archery and the like, "harvesting your own food" is par for the course. Thank you.
Decent overview from the US CDC https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-wasting/about/index.html in one study, Rhesus monkeys were infected by eating CWD infected meat. There's no cure or mitigation of prion diseases so that'd be enough for me to stay away from hunted deer in any county with reported incidence of it. And deer range and roam, and not every place in the country is as on top of testing for it as everywhere else. Maybe I'm Chicken Little, but I don't like the odds.
Thanks. Wild stuff, pun intended. Even though the article mentions “The disease hasn't been shown to infect people”, just the thought of a “maybe” is deterrent enough. But then, who knows what’s in the meat I’m getting from Costco. Perhaps the fish are next and the Soylent future is upon us.
By that logic, all of the Earth and the moon were once parts of stars, so tidal and geothermal are also solar.
When people say "solar energy", they are usually referring to first order solar energy, directly from photons, not second or third order solar energy after it has been trapped into other sources of potential energy.
I think that this waters down "brute force" to the point of meaninglessness. If employing transformer architectures trained on data to hack a system is the same as using a for loop to enumerate over all possible values, then I have to ask, can you give an example of an attack that isn't brute force?
Well what kind of meaning do you find in brute force?
I'm not saying it's not effective. I just critisize the news that make it look like AI is the a revolutionary advance in security. It is not. It makes skills available to many more people which is cool, but it is based off of training - training on things people did. It doesn't magically find a new combination of factors that lead to a security issue, it tries things it's read about. That's not meaningless. It could even be democratizing in a way. I just hate all this talk that "this model is too scary to release in the world".
But I'm happy about any feedback or critique, I might just be wrong honestly.
I'm not the person who responded to you, but I think of a brute force attack as essentially translatable into brute (dumb) force (effort). No thinking, no decision making, but the process is known. Here is a pile of stones, move that pile of stones from here to over there. In the case of most brute force, you think of it like cracking passwords. You have an algorithm or you have a giant pile of passwords. Move those passwords over to try them on this hash. The processor is doing the heavy lifting on the simple task.
Philosophically you could try to differentiate between the human side of the effort versus the computer side. You could also differentiate from a really dumb model and a really smart model. A dumb model just spinning its wheels and hoping it gets lucky, versus a smart model actually trying intelligent things and collecting relevant details.
In these cases I think we're assuming a sufficiently smart model making well reasoned headway on a problem. Not sure I would fall on the side of the camp that would label this as brute force by default in all cases. That said, there may be specific scenarios where it might seem fitting even when using a smart model.
I love how fun this is. It has so much personality. Definitely can see the pico8 and aseprite inspiration.
I think what could be really interesting is some procedural generation brushes... Like a brush that generates a random city-scape as you draw it. That sounds so exciting..
`For most adults, age verification won’t be required, as Discord’s age inference model uses account information such as account tenure, device and activity data, and aggregated, high-level patterns across Discord communities. Discord does not use private messages or any message content in this process`
There's always two sides to a coin right? While everything you said is true, I think that there's a pattern people are generally aware of in this world. Things that don't serve a purpose, vanish.
We see it in worker replacement, in vestigial organic structures that shrink over millinea, and in the tools and objects we keep with us in our lives.
The question, once achieving this grandiose goal, is how long, and by what mechanism, will we continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor?
Perhaps there will be a time when we may enjoy this world without the pressure of being a cog within it, but ultimately this time may be short if we are able to manifest it at all.
The unease comes from the power we lose when we cease to be the means of production, and instead become a vestigial organ on a beast much more complex than ourselves.
As a schizotypal person, I'm unsure how more people aren't exhibiting paranoid schizophrenic symptoms in this wildly untrustworthy digital age.
Yesterday a good friend reached out to me on a new phone number to wish me happy holidays, she shortly afterwards asked me to donate to a fund to help her sick cat.
Even though this person had a similar typing style, the unrecognized phone number made me feel paranoid that it may be an LLM attempting to get money from me in an automated scam, so I made the choice to call my friend to get more evidence via voice.
It turned out to be my friend(or an even more elaborate ruse using voice capture and mass data-mining tech, but that seemed extremely unlikely, at least for another couple years).
My brother had full on shizpphrenia, and would often call family members asking them to provide evidence that they are who they say they are and not government robots. It was an obvious delusion when he was alive, but now that we're in a world where that sort of evidence-gathering is no longer extreme, paranoia is the new normal.
Our usual safeguards of identity are breaking down, and you can bet that large corporations with an eye on the coin are going to swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.
>swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.
This is already being done. However it is being done in backroom deals to make sure that the individual has no control over their identity only the corporations. You are not who you say you are, you are what a corporation decides you are.
Society, in a sense, is highly dependent on trustworthy interactions. Credit, ownership transfers, banking, etc. all depend on trust. If we go back to only being able to trust in-person interactions, we'll be stepping back to a financial system from over 100 years ago.
Because of this, I believe that solutions will be developed. Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the government depends on a solution being found.
The image of a throbbing, mutating, dark spiral is conjured in my mind. The more it is watched, the more it begins to grow into a twisted visage of the viewer as it attempts to recreate all of their desires and fears within itself. It is meaningless yet becomes all meaning.
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