This is the theme of almost all of the “toppling”. Mostly they’ve just… resigned. They probably keep all the perks, and then take up a corporate advisor position once there’s less heat.

Headlines like this make it sound like there’s been real impact beyond generating articles about a few of the more public figures. But reading article, it’s really just a few politicians and bureaucrats resigning. Mandelson’s firing was already months ago. The investigation into a former Norwegian PM sounds like that’s as harsh as it’s got so far for politicians this time. And nothing except one law firm board member resigning for private companies?

They’re all getting away with it, and all the victims get is a hundred headlines about Musk being named in the files, and having their lives endangered from the terrible Don-centric redaction.

I assumed billionaires could afford better signs. Were all her EAs on leave that week?

Perhaps something like this: https://lemmy.world/post/42528038/22000735

Deferring responsibility for risk and compliance obligations to AI is bound to lead to some kind of tremendous problem, that’s a given. But the EU has been pretty keen lately on embedding requirements into their newer digital-realm laws about giving market regulators access to internal documents on request.

This is not to suggest it’s anywhere close to a certainty that an Enron will happen though. There is still the exceptionally large problem of company executives are part of the power structures which selectively target who to prosecute, if their lobbyists haven’t already succeeded in watering the legislation down to be functionally useless before they’re in force. So it will take a huge fuck up and public pressure for any of the countries to make good on their own rules.

Given that almost all the media heat from the Trump-Epstein files has been directed at easy target single public personalities, completely ignoring the obvious systemic corruption by multiple corporate entities, I don’t have high hopes for that part. But if the impending fuck up and scale of noncompliance is big enough, there’s a chance there will be audits and EU courts involved.

It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?

I read both of these and what struck me was how both studies felt remarkably naive. I found myself thinking: “there’s no way the authors have any background in the humanities”. Turns out there’s 2 authors, lo and behold, both with computer science degrees. This might explain why it feels like they’re somehow incredulous at the results - they’ve approached the problem as evaluating a system’s fitness in a vacuum.

But it’s not a system in a vacuum. It’s a vacuum that has sucked up our social system, sold to bolster the social standing of the heads of a social construct.

Had they looked at the context of how AI has been marketed, as an authoritative productivity booster, they might have had some idea why both disempowerment and reduced mastery could be occurring: The participants were told to work fast and consult the AI. What a shock that people took the responses seriously and didn’t have time to learn!

I’d ask why Anthropic had computer scientists conducting sociological research, but I assume this part of output has just been published to assuage criticism of trust and safety practices. The final result will probably be adding another line of ‘if query includes medical term then print “always ask a doctor first”’ to the system prompt.

This constant vacillation between “it’s a revolution and changes our entire reality!” and “you can’t trust it and you need to do your own research” from the AI companies is fucking tiresome. You can’t have it both ways.

Same for Japan. No chance they’re wearing full hiking boots or sneakers inside the house in Japan - the shoe cabinet is built in right next to the front door of houses, tiny apartments, temples, many restaurants, etc. I assume the schools still do too.

I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.

Pick Up That Can

Actually, just because the document is not awesomely formatted, and because mentioning the thanking part undersells the contradiction:

Epstein: is there a 501 c3 that i could give the 50k to/?
Goertzel: Yes: the Singularity Institute for AI (redacted).
Epstein: please send details i will send 50k monday.
Goertzel: many many thanks! … You won’t regret it ;) The AI we build will thank you one day! I am driving now and will send details when I get home

Goertzel, you say? That makes this part of the statement interesting:

Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn’t a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

Goertzel specifically asked for funds first, $2k for video editing and personally thanked Epstein for the 50k too

Apparently he’s a Quaker, so maybe that’s how the euthanasia stance can pass muster. But Quakerism might also make even less sense with his views on race? I don’t know enough about the reality of Quakerism to say.

Also, looks like Harris also deliberately side-stepped the dinner bait but I don’t know how much of that was because of Chomsky’s presence. Epstein tried again a year later without the Chomsky attendee name-drop, but Harris might have just not replied.

At least there are no surprises with Dawkins, even his sleazy friend Brockman seemingly finds him tiring

Glib jibes aside, I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at many of the docs that aren’t just quasi-celeb emails, the few I did see were far too much for me. I’m horrified at nearly everyone from all ideological stances on a number of different levels I never considered. I can only hope the remaining victims someday are able to find some peace, and some kind of huge systemic reform can come from this. What a vile world we live in.

So Krauss tried to introduce Joe Rogan to Epstein

But Rogan may have been unwilling to do so

How is it Joe Rogan is (possibly) the smartest person in this situation?

Risk and limitations: the study is inherently risky. While it is highly likely that STIs that alter female sexual behavior exist in the wider mammalian order, whether or not they current infect humans remains unclear. Challenges exist in successfully culturing newly identified STIs and adapting microbes to standardized lab models for testing. Finally, any new STIs will be relatively easy to test for efficacy in animals but costly and otherwise challenging to test in humans, and it is possible that success in animal models will not translate into human efficacy. Risks can be mitigated by simultaneously conducting animal and human studies, increasing the probability of identifying at least a single mammalian agent that modifies female sexual behavior.

Fucking terrifying.

I’m sure many of them are somewhat accidental ladder climbers, but looking at some of the names in the list:

• Herr: At MIT, just had yet another Ted talk in 2018 about his exoskeleton work
• Shotwell: 2018 Business Insider named her the “Most powerful female engineer”, Musk lackey
• Li: ex-Google, 2019 became Stanford co-director of their AI hole and “won” a bunch of prizes from various places
• Zucman: Published book on tax havens 2019, loads of media work to sell the book, award from Le Monde, billed as “No. 1 enemy of billionaires” (paraphrased)
• de Roode: previous Ted talks, 2018 time magazine list for top 50 in healthcare (a sharp fall from his listing in 2014 of the 100 most influential people?)
• Mac: bunch of lectures in 2019 after his 2017 pulitzer, 2018 tv circuit including Colbert, a bunch more awards, 2019 Broadway play that had seven Tony nominations, etc.
• Topol: 2019 book on AI and med, bunch of media for that to sell the book

These were just the ones I looked at out of curiosity for what they were up to around 2018-2019. There’s clearly the TESCREAL theme across the list, but it strikes me that there’s also a lot of very active PR/promotion effort across the board. Award nominations don’t exactly spontaneously generate from impartial awe-struck onlookers, and media book reviews aren’t chosen based on literary merit.

The inclusion of Mac especially is what made me think this might just be a slightly wider list of candidates a grotesque parasite would want to ingratiate themselves with by inviting them give private lectures - he doesn’t strike me as a great fit otherwise.

That was my take as well. It’s basically anyone in academia/tech who had a PR machine working for them at the time, and a couple of weird extras.

How Gromov only landed the underwhelming summary of “American” is interesting, I assume the list copy paste was cut short and the next word was “mathematician”.

If these people did all end up in the same location it’s probably safe to assume it was a private and unpublicized event. Some of them seem to have been in and around silicon valley at the time, so maybe one of the tech fake charity “foundation” events.

Who needs pure AI model collapse when you can have journalists give it a more human touch? I caught this snippet from the Australian ABC about the latest Epstein files drop

The Google AI summary does indeed highlight Boris Nikolić the fashion designer if you search for only that name. But I’m assuming this journalist was using ChatGPT, because if you see the Google summary, it very prominently lists his death in 2008. And it’s surprisingly correct! A successful scraping of Wikipedia by Gemini, amazing.

But the Epstein email was sent in 2016.

Dors the journalist perhaps think it more likely is the Boris Nikolić who is the biotech VC, former advisor for Bill Gates and named in Epstein’s will as the “successor executor”? Info literally all in the third Google result, even in the woeful state of modern Google. Pushed past the fold by the AI feature about the wrong guy, but not exactly buried enough for a journalist to have any excuse.

Out of curiosity, what sort of customizations are you doing with it? I’m just a bit surprised that docker rebuild or a non-trivial fork would be needed, so I’m assuming they’re pretty big changes.

I’m not a spice merchant, and most exploits rarely involve a single step. This screenshot is just a system design red flag.

You’re free to examine the repo yourself and find your own spice, my 5 min look tells me that piefed needs to expend a significant amount of effort on infosec to maintain user trust in the longer term.

As others have pointed out, it does still require (with some caveats about the infra setup) the user to be an admin. But if someone manages to get in to the interface, or another person is granted admin access who shouldn’t have been, it makes it more risky than it needs to be. It also for me is a design choice that indicates other parts of the system should be carefully examined for how they’re handling and sanitizing input.

Any webserver you browse is possibly capable of ACE depending on the implementation. When it starts to hold user data is when that starts to be a big concern. The more points of entry, the more that needs to be secured.

I don’t have any experience with piefed admin, or any opinion on piefed itself, just too many years of web admin experience. And as soon as I see intentionally made doors that allow code input, I start to worry about how much experience the devs who made it have with web admin.