> I think it's a very common human trope to believe that we are in end-times. I imagine the overlap between the people that believe that AI will end humanity and those that believed climate change will end humanity 10 years ago is pretty significant.
Everyone knows why they're building this stuff (to replace labor, and damn the consequences of people who work for a living), and I think that's the root of popular resistance.
Fears of species-ending catastrophe is an elite preoccupation (as the more likely economic catastrophe will leave them relatively unscathed). They also serve to show the utter insanity of the AI labs and the people who work for them: they have these fears but they're building the machines anyway.
> Of course, with great effort and moderate expense, you could setup a burner phone with access to many of your same accounts and resources, but the more features you add to the burner phone, the more it begins to look like the device you're leaving "safe" at home.
The trick is to have alternate accounts, and not have your "real" ones configured as you transit sensitive locations like borders. Once you're past, download your apps and log in to your real accounts.
With LLMs that's even easier. I suppose you could set one up to populate your fake Facebook account with convincing, up-to-date "local sports team" fan activity.
Don't call attention to yourself, make noncompliance look like compliance.
> Sure, but if you’re defending against a nation state actor hopefully you aren’t expecting a raspberry pi to keep you secure.
Is there anything about these techniques that are raspberry pi specific? It seems like they're using lasers to identify and flip particular bits in registers.
There are HSMs that are effectively immune to this attack by way of their construction and packaging. You need an optical path to the secure device. The only way to get at this is to tamper with the tamperproof part of the system.
Some very high end HSMs must be actively powered at all times which makes disturbances in their local environments detectable at all times as well. Getting lucky and drilling through a part of the enclosure that isn't directly protected won't help you if a barometric pressure sensor is tripped as a consequence of breaking the hermetic seal.
It sounds like a more cleaner method to obtain the keys versus using solvents and a lot of trial and error hardware. As described by Chris Gerlinsky with "How Do I Crack Satellite and Cable Pay TV?" [0] [1]
> Getting lucky and drilling through a part of the enclosure that isn't directly protected won't help you if a barometric pressure sensor is tripped as a consequence of breaking the hermetic seal.
That's interesting. I suppose if that technology is in use, the attack would have to occur in a pressure-controlled chamber, so breaking the seal wouldn't cause a change in pressure.
A more likely measure, which I recall seeing years ago, is to measure the impedance of the enclosure of the thing you want to protect. If someone tampers with it, you would be alerted. It works at many scales, from a protective metal mesh over your IC to a PC case.
You can find the pressure through destructive trial-and-error if money is no object - which it isn't for governments when the target hardware is juicy.
Why would you make each device have the same pressure inside it? That's a bit like hardcoding the same password in each one. Any attacker is only going to have one shot on the actual device they care about no matter how much money they spend.
I expect typical smart cards like the one in your credit card are harder to crack than the raspberry pi was. Those cards are (or were) also used in TV set-top boxes and back in the day, there was a decades-long arms race between the chip makers and cable TV pirates. The TV pirates were also willing to make large expenditures to crack the chips so they could clone them and sell the clones. There's more about this in Ross Anderson's book "Security Engineering".
I've also heard that the Google Titan security enclave chip (used in Pixel phones) is very hard to crack. Apple has something similar for Iphones, I believe.
A Yubikey is basically a single chip and a bunch of plastic. At their $50 price point, there's plenty of room for some chip manufacturer to skim off a couple of dollars per chip to add an additional metal layer for a tamper protection mesh, and some other gizmos.
Your phone isn't going to have a "very high end HSM" any time soon. n
Not until you're paying mid range car prices or more for your very specialised secure phone (and then that phone will probably be factory backdoored AN0M-style).
> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen - it's still there - nor are the people involved selling it back in any form.
But there's a real [1] transgression there, and attempting to lawyer it away is disingenuous. This isn't a perfect analogy, but it's sort of like if you blocked off the sun, and a farmer complained you stole his land, and then you retort "your land has not been stolen, you still have title and can occupy it." Your actions damaged him. Again, not a perfect analogy, but I think our efforts should go to recognizing the transgression instead of trying to deny it.
> And let's not forget what we got back for this: reified intelligence on a chip almost too cheap to meter, available to everyone across the world - not just rich West, inference is so dirt cheap that whole world uses it. It exploded in popularity organically, because of how many real problems of real people, including individuals and non-profits, it addresses.
We don't have a society where "we got back" anything, and if you weren't aware, this "intelligence" is definitely getting metered. If anything "we" got undercut, and "our" assets lost a lot of their value, while others will get very rich from that loss. Come back with communism, and then maybe you'll have a point.
[1] Fuck you, Claude, for making me wince at that.
> Allow me to suggest a third: these two options are black and white thinking and there is no objective answer to "intellectual property is real". Property is at best a social construct that is possibly supported by instinctual behavior.
Intellectual property is as real as private property (which is a lot more elaborate and weird than possession and territoriality, which is the most that has any natural basis). It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished and the other this fundamental sacred thing that should be respected absolutely (as many do).
We made it up. We made all this up. We do it for an outcome.
Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property. That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely. That’s why IP rights expire at some point, or have fair use that doesn’t harm the IP rights holder, something other forms of property don’t have. Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
I think AI training falls most likely in the fair use category of intellectual property: there is some societal benefit* that requires no actual harm** to the IP holder, therefore it’s a good trade-off for society if we poke a hole in the social construct of property to get that benefit.
*Let’s put aside the question of whether AI is good for society or private ownership of AI models is good for society. Important questions but separate from the theory. IF IT IS GOOD, it follows the above. If it is not good, then of course it does not.
**Also not a fully settled question. Again, an important debate to have and the tradeoffs here matter. If the harms are small enough, the societal benefit could be worth it. Both notes have to be true for this to be worthy of “fair use”.
> Intellectual property exists as a concept to foster the creation of more intellectual property.
The idea of IP as an economic tool to foster creation comes out of the UK and subsequently the US. In mainland Europe, IP comes out of the French Revolution and the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something. This viewpoint has de facto won out because as global commerce and global culture has become more and more widespread, everybody has standardized on the longest durations (the standard has long been "life + 50 years" in Europe) so one country doesn't have to worry about freeing up its works for "exploitation" by another country.
> the idea that copyright is like a "moral right" that you intrinsically deserve for putting in the effort to create something
Nope. "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The ends is promoting progress. The means for that is prescribed by a limited monopoly as an incentive to those ends.
> That is not the case for all private property, because I cannot copy your land or your car infinitely.
All property is fundamentally about exclusion and control to allow for private exploitation. That common bit of rhetoric about copying misses that point. The reason private property exists is not because land (for instance) can't be copied.
> Saying that they are equivalent is not foolish—I think that’s a bit extreme—but it doesn’t recognize that they have fundamental differences, and the laws around them have different intended outcomes.
You should note that you misread me: I didn't say they were identical in every respect, I said their "reality" is the same. They're both made up social constructs. One isn't more fundamental than the other.
This is going to blow your mind, but people created music, literature, art long before intellectual property laws existed. IP laws are nothing but rent seeking.
Yes, and we lived in a world of guilds, Orders and secrets which kept their knowledge tightly within themselves.
Music and art was created by patronage. Entire periods o where the art that mattered was made by the powers that moved the world.
For my whole life the goal was to move away from that era, not to see it recreated.
Also, this is a debate that English speakers can enjoy on a website for an US based accelerator. Most of humanity doesn’t even have the standing to be heard in this conversation.
> It's really foolish to claim one doesn't exist and should be abolished
Hear me out. Property rights exist to assign stewardship and use rights over rivalrous goods. goods where the use of the good precludes the use of that good for its purpose by another party. If you take my bike, I cannot ride it to work. This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons (see the highly successful fisheries rights, NOx and SOx emissions markets as propertization schemes)
"Intellectual property" (except for trademark if you want to get pedantic), is not rivalrous, and its primary purpose is to be shared, not hoarded. Therefore intellectual property isn't a thing, creating it as a legal construct was a mistake that has hamstrung society for a long time.
Copies are not rivalrous, but the underlying creativity absolutely is. If I pay someone to draw a picture, that's labor, and they've got a finite number of hours to sell. Except it's also very inconvenient to pay for creative works this way: drawings and artists are not fungible with one another. More importantly, quality and desirability of the work is incredibly variable. The buyer of the art is bearing the risk of the art being bad.
What copyright lets you do[1] is offload that risk onto a publisher[0]. Instead of having to pay to commission every piece of art, a publisher can do that, and then sell the now-monopolized copies of whatever art turns out to actually be valuable.
A lot of hay was made during the Piracy Wars over filesharing tools breaking this bargain. A bunch of data hoarders with an interest in sharing media made it possible to just get the shit for free. This created a social dynamic where artists were annoyed about it, but publishers were Fucking Pissed. You could even measure how publisher-brained an artist got by how angry they were over Napster[2].
AI generated art also breaks this bargain, by making creative labor nearly non-rivalrous. The only cost is electricity and GPUs. This has created nearly the opposite reaction: artists are pissed while publishers don't care, because AI is to publishers like tort reform is to insurance companies. A publisher that gets art for free doesn't care if everyone else has it, because they have the payola dividend: they can push whatever slop they want onto the market and the market will eat it because they're big and powerful.
> This concept exists to prevent violent conflict over non-shareables and to prevent the tragedy of the commons
The copyright maximalists would argue that free reuse of creative works is a tragedy of the commons. I certainly remember hearing that phrase bandied about a lot during the Piracy Wars.
It's also important to note that "tragedy of the commons" is not a natural law, but a specific framing that is used to justify antisocial ends. The communal ownership so decried worked perfectly well in England for hundreds of years until the ruling classes found it inconvenient and abolished it. The kind of ecological collapse the tragedy attempts to invoke did not happen because there were already communal means of preventing overuse of the land. In fact, an emissions market is probably closer to communal management than enclosure.
Also none of this changes the underlying logic that AI companies are trying to enclose the intellectual commons, and that their business model relies on being able to replace human brains with machine intelligence they can rent out by the megatoken.
[0] Individuals who self-publish included.
[1] To be clear, copyright was created as a censorship regime, it just happens to be useful for other things.
[2] In Lars Ulrich's defense, they weren't just angry that Metallica songs were on Napster, they were specifically angry that Napster had their latest album before it was in stores.
You're confusing a primary use from a secondary (the right to make money/exchange for labor). In the case of "drawing a picture", being able to "make money from a picture" is not primary
> Despite the never-ending thirst for knowledge of all branches of the order, most Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus have lost the ability to innovate or carry out basic scientific research.
> No longer the master of its creations, the Cult Mechanicus is enslaved to the past. It maintains the glories of yesteryear with rite, dogma and edict instead of true discernment and comprehension.
> For instance, even the theoretically simple process of activating a vehicle's engine is preceded by the application of ritual oils, the burning of sacred resins and the chanting of long and complex hymns.
> In an utopian society, lawyers are an unnecessary profession. Laws should be clear and simple so the common person can be their own "lawyer".
Not really. Modern society is complicated, and law is a technology that is a reflection of the complexity of society.
To make an analogy: you wouldn't say that "in a utopian society, engineers are an unnecessary profession. Buildings should be clear and simple enough that a common person can be their own structural engineer," because that would mean that building technology would no longer handle a lot of the problems we expect it to handle. It wouldn't be utopia, it would be primitivism.
> LLMs help with that goal.
Not really. What they'd actually do is help them produce output they don't understand and lack the competence to evaluate.
It was so refreshing to see a video with a clear and direct title. In 2026 this would have been "We cracked open a motor. You won't believe what we found inside! <emoji>". Checking the channel, it seems they have succumbed to this for their latest videos.
FYI, it looks like you've been banned for the last ~8-9 months, for no obvious reason I can see. I vouched for your comment to make it visible, but they appears to show up as [dead] by default.
> Why couldn't you express all those as test cases rather than instructions?
How would prevent removing the test case and the code that it tests? That's a legitimate thing to do when you're modifying a codebase. My intuition is "corrective and preventative actions (CAPA)" is a level or two up from test cases.
Everyone knows why they're building this stuff (to replace labor, and damn the consequences of people who work for a living), and I think that's the root of popular resistance.
Fears of species-ending catastrophe is an elite preoccupation (as the more likely economic catastrophe will leave them relatively unscathed). They also serve to show the utter insanity of the AI labs and the people who work for them: they have these fears but they're building the machines anyway.
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