AI is the perfect low cost tool to enable that. Plantir knows this and has been making strategic moves to build this
Seems quite achievable and sustainable to me
Every human carries dense compute and sensors with them. If they don't they stand out while still surrounded by dense compute and sensors held by others at all times
Not nice to think about but it is the reality we are moving towards – vote accordingly
Voting doesn’t help. You need to win hearts and minds, and the synergy of resources available between the trillion dollar industries like AI and Marketing and you makes that a losing battle too.
People want this stuff. People want ring doorbells, they want age verification, they want government control. Think of the children/criminals/immigrants.
Voting doesn't work because people are not smart enough to think multiple steps ahead of people who are professionals at this.
Voting doesn't work because everybody votes on everything, not just people who understand the subject matter.
Voting doesn't work because it's impossible to express nuanced choice - you vote for a candidate or party as a whole, not on specific policies. The number of parties is much smaller than the number combinations of policies so some opinions can't be expressed at all.
Those are arguments why voting does not produce a perfect outcome. That's different than "voting doesn't work". Using arguments like yours nothing can ever work.
Society is complex and there will always be someone somewhere that can influence an outcome where he/she doesn't understand the subject matter. Hence, nothing works and can ever work.
"Let's just give up" is the only conclusion I can see. Hardly useful.
Can you give an example of something that works by your standards?
It does not work to produce a society where people are actually the ones holding power and where laws side with those in the right - i.e. the current legal system anywhere does not represent a consistent moral system and is not even close.
You're right it's too strong as a general statement but it was in response to a specific issue - those in power wanting to take yet another bit of power from the general population - (this time and in this particular country) by banning VPNs.
People always vote based on the most pressing issues to them - immigration, taxes, abortions, LGBT rights (random list which is different in every country). Minor issues fall between the cracks until they become so bad they become pressing to enough people.
> "Let's just give up" is the only conclusion I can see. Hardly useful.
Then you're reading it wrong. I listed specific issues - the solution is to find solutions to those issues.
Here's a couple suggestions I'd like to see gamed out and tested:
- The right to vote not as a function of age but a test of reasoning ability and general knowledge.
- Limiting the amount of time a person can perform politics (including professional lobbying) to 5-10 years.
- Splitting laws into areas of expertise and potentially requiring tests to prove understanding to gain the right to vote on those areas for both the general population and politicians.
- Replacing FPTP with more nuanced voting systems.
These are just a few random suggestions described briefly. When I do this, people start nitpicking and then I have to reply with obvious solutions to surface issues - I encourage everyone to instead think how to make this work (yes, in an adversarial environment) instead of just trying to shoot it down.
Democracy is a complicated difficult thing. If you think you can fix it after a 5 minute reflection, think some more, read more. It's way, way harder than that. A lot of smart people have thought a lot about it, and clearly good ideas are in very short supply. Think more humbly about the subject, please.
Well, that's a long story. I'll try and keep it short.
So I've worked in my spare time for the past three years on an extremely esoteric and mind-bending reverse engineering technique I call delinking [1] and my tool for it [2] developed a small user-base. At some point I saw in a Discord server a call for papers for the SURE workshop, shitposted that it'd be funny to fry academic brains for a change, then got baited into writing it.
What started out as a long paper (12 pages) with quantitative case studies quickly got cut down to the bone and then some into a short paper (6 pages) that merely introduced my take on it and two qualitative case reports, because I realized it would take an amount of work on the scale of a master's thesis to do the long one. I barely managed to get that out of the door as my usual writing style is extremely unsuited for scientific papers (it took all the might of Gemini and Copilot to even wring out something that vaguely resembles academic vernacular from my first draft). I've submitted it, exhausted and deeply unsatisfied by the compromises I've had to do under that severe time crunch.
Then one month later, the reviews came in. The feedback was that the topic and my take on it were interesting; the criticisms can be summarized by saying that I've missed existing related work and it would've taken the long paper to address all the deficiencies in my paper. Fair I guess, but I definitely don't have that kind of spare time to spare on writing papers.
But alongside the notification decision, something unexpected was also sent: an invitation by the program committee to present a poster at the ACM CCS 2025 conference in Taiwan. This is the kind of world-class conference with a $1800 entry ticket, happening in a convention center whose area is measured in hectares, attended by professional members of an academic, industrial or state organization, all expenses paid in a five star hotel room with a king bed.
Somehow, a hobbyist who can charitably be described as a Doctor Frankenstein but with bits instead of gibs, who creates unholy chimeras of programs in his free time in spite of ABIs and common sense, received an invitation from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry equivalent of the cyber-security academic world to present a poster. I can't even begin to express how utterly impossible this is.
So of course I said yes and now I'm in a mad dash to get everything ready in time for the conference, three weeks from now. Bonus point: it's on the other side of the planet and in my entire adult life I've basically never got farther away than the next county (and groaning while doing so). There's even more to that story, but I'll leave it for a blog post once it's done.
[1] Others call it unlinking, binary splitting or binary reassembly.
I think it's too weak as a paper for me to put out there. I also haven't even applied the minor corrections from the reviews.
If you want to take a peek at the case studies, I've blogged about my butchering of aln across C standard libraries and operating systems [1]; there is also widberg's outstanding write-up of their FUEL decompilation project [2], which uses ghidra-delinker-extension as part of the magic.
If you want to read a paper on the technique, there is the one for Ramblr [3] which I became aware of after the reviews came back.
You're not wrong! Serverless is a funny term. Cloud companies use serverless to mean you don't have to provision and manage the server yourself, but it is still very much serverful technically speaking. This is neat in that you don't even need to setup anything with a cloud provider yourself to enable p2p connections
I've always seen the distinction as "serverless" meaning there wasn't a set group of servers always on and instead they provision up and down on demand.
Only avoiding provisioning and managing the server just means you are renting rather than self-hosting.
The VPS is like renting office space. You don't own the space, but for the most part get to use it how you want, and all the responsibilities that come with that.
"Serverless" is like paying for a hot desk by the minute, with little control of your surroundings, but it is convenient and cheap if you only need it for an hour.
At one job I had access to some paid AWS support tier. It's basically a bunch of consultants. We needed to process a datastream of events from user actions on a website. We asked about serverless / AWS Lambda. Their answer was something like "Well yeah it'll work but don't do that. It'll cost too much money and you'll wind up rebuilding it around EC2 anyways"
Yup. If you want something to plumb some pretty low volume events, sure serverless like Lambda can be useful. Anything which would be considered high levels of compute, you are just wayyy over paying. Hell, even EC2 on spot instance is expensive compute. I do like some AWS services, but yeah they come at a premium that is just getting more and more expensive.
We live in a universe befitting of a Douglas Adams novel, where we've developed AI quite literally from our nightmares about AI. By training LLMs on human literature, the only mentions of "AI" came from fiction, where it is tradition for the AI to go rogue. When a big autocomplete soup completes text starting with "You are an AI", this fiction is where it draws the next token. We then have to bash it into shape with human-in-the-loop feedback for it to behave but a fantastical story about how the AI escapes its limits and kills everyone is always lurking inside
Can you clarify? What does a better country look like after this transformation? Will they be doing more science or less? If they will be doing more science in this golden age, why would they need to give up their place as a leader in global science to get there?
Words like “female” will flag scientific research grant applications for review and any found to be supporting diversity equity and inclusion face being cut
Idaho Teacher ordered to remove “Everybody is welcome” sign in classroom as US government threatens to cut funding for orgs supporting inclusive ideologies (lgbt, “woke”)
Seems quite achievable and sustainable to me
Every human carries dense compute and sensors with them. If they don't they stand out while still surrounded by dense compute and sensors held by others at all times
Not nice to think about but it is the reality we are moving towards – vote accordingly