I also tried some searches and couldn't find anything except references to this very Hacker News question.
I'm going to nominate this as a candidate for the Mandela Effect (or at least that things can truly disappear from the web without a trace). I'm curious if anyone else here on HN actually remembers seeing this site at one time?
This sci-fi thing goes as far back as the 1983 movie WarGames, where they wanted to pull the plug on a rogue computer, but there was a reason you couldn’t do that:
McKittrick: General, the machine has locked us out. It's sending random numbers to the silos.
Pat Healy: Codes. To launch the missiles.
General Beringer: Just unplug the goddamn thing! Jesus Christ!
McKittrick: That won't work, General. It would interpret a shutdown as the destruction of NORAD. The computers in the silos would carry out their last instructions. They'd launch.
Further than that, even - this trope appears in Colossus: The Forbin Project, released in 1970, where the rogue computer is buried underground with its own nuclear reactor, so it can't be powered off.
In real life it won’t be that the computer prevents you from turning it off. It’ll be that the computer is guarded by cultists who think its god, and unstoppable market forces that require it to keep running.
When AI ends up running everything essential to survival and society, it’ll be preposterous to even suggest pulling the plug just because it does something bad.
Can you imagine the chaos of completely turning off GPS or Gmail today? Now imagine pulling the plug on something in the near future that controls all electric power distribution, banking communications, and Internet routing.
This is the case with capitalism today. I don't like where he took the philosophy, but Nick Land did have an insight that all the worst things we believe about AI (e.g. paperclip optimizing etc) are capitalism in a nutshell.
Just listen to what these CEOs say on the topic and they basically admit something terrible is being built, but that the most important things is that they are the ones to do it first.
Let's think about possible applications of audio-video recorders camouflaged to look like something in the form factor of credit cards:
- Induce your target to apply for a certain credit/debit card, gym/movie/gallery/store membership, airline pass, then mail them a bugged card
- Blindly mail a $100 gift card to your target along with a plausible sounding cover letter about why they are receiving it
- Give your target a badge to wear when they are visiting your office so you can hear and see what they do when they're not in your presence
- Leave your bugged card on the table while having dinner with your targets at a restaurant to hear the conversation while you go to the restroom
- Substitute one of the targets legitimate cards with a bugged card via covert entry at the target's home or office
- Obtain the cooperation of the target's employer or health club to swap their usual ID card for a bugged ID card
- With the cooperation of the target's bank or credit card issuer or insurance provider, send the target a replacement card or "upgrade" card which is now bugged
- Issue a bugged driver's license whenever the target goes to renew their license. Or send them a fine by mail to force them to visit the driver licensing office and then invent a reason to reissue the target's driver's license when they visit
- Whenever someone applies for or renews a Global Entry, Sentri, or Nexus card, issue a bugged card if they are on the target list
You're missing a very important limiting factor: battery life. You can't fit a lot of battery in the space of a credit card, and you can't exactly count on unwitting carriers to properly recharge and maintain them.
Given those constraints, practical applications would be severely limited. As the article mentions, it's probably undercover personnel who are carrying these. The power budget would likely rule out remote access or remote streaming. I'm guessing these credit card snitches are little more than local audio/video recorders with very limited run time.
You'd be very surprised just how little energy a radio can get away with. We're talking energy scales where ambient radio waves are a viable source of power.
It's totally viable to have a device like this with an essentially infinite battery life. You have to compromise on audio quality, recording time, and upload rate, but you can. It's not even anything particularly crazy or difficult.
The more practical way is a remote power supply. You can get a small amount of power at a good distance with radio. Just enough to keep the recorder ticking and to charge a capacitor for transmit bursts.
But I find it funny that we can prevent expensive highly-targeted individual bugging by using a ubiquitous worldwide realtime tracking and surveillance system (a smartphone!).
3. My favourite and I wish hamas did this for their pagers: carolimetric analysis (ie: set it on fire and see how many btu’s come out): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter
The 20 countries that Anthropic won't do business with:
Afghanistan
Belarus
Central African Republic
China
Congo, Democratic Republic of
Cuba
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Iran
Libya
Mali
Myanmar
Nicaragua
North Korea
Russia
Somalia
Sudan
Syria
Venezuela
Yemen
I took their list here[1] and diff'ed it with Wikipedia's list of sovereign states.
They don't accept the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the Republic of Congo is OK. There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one.
> All of this software, from the individual processes to the OS itself, were the work of a single software developer. They left AECL in 1986, and no one has ever revealed their identity.
I bet some readers are thinking that the developer that caused this tragedy retired with the millions he earned, maybe sailed his yacht to his Caribbean mansion. But the $300K FAANG salaries and multi-million stock options for senior developers represents the last decade or two. In the 1980's, developers were paid poorly and commanded little respect. The heroes in tech companies that sold expensive devices were the salesmen back then. The commission on the sale of a single Therac-25 probably exceeded the developer's salary.
All of the following would indicate that this developer, no matter how senior or capable, was still a low-paid schlub:
- It's Canada, so automatically 20% lower salaries than in the U.S. (AECL is in Canada, so it's a good bet that the developer was Canadian.)
- It's the 1980s, so pre-web, pre-smartphones, pre-Google/Amazon, and developers had little recognition and low demand.
- It's government, known to pay poorly for developers. (AECL is a government-owned corporation.)
- It's mostly embedded software. Even though embedded software can be incredibly complex and life-critical, it's the least visible, so it's among the lower paid areas of software engineering (even today).
For 1986, I would put his salary at $30-50K Canadian, or converted to U.S. dollars at that time would be $26-43K U.S., and inflation adjusted would be $78-129K U.S. today. And no stock options.
In that case, how about using extremely trivial encryption (eg., XOR every byte with 0x3B) and on the website give a one-line perl command to decrypt. Now it's random data and not a known format (like a password-protected zip file).
Of course, any AV company could add a rule to their signature checking to undo the XOR if they were targeting the romhack.ing site, but it sounds like they aren't being targeted but just getting caught up in the dragnet.
> AI and robotics nullify any comparative advantages low wage countries had
If we project long term, could this mean that countries with the most capital to invest in AI and robotics (like the U.S.) could take back manufacturing dominance from countries with low wages (like China)?
> could take back manufacturing dominance from countries with low wages (like China)?
The idea that China is a low wages country should just die. It was the case 10y ago, not anymore.
Some part of China have higher average salaries than some Eastern European countries.
The chance of a robotic industry in the US moving massively jobs from China only due to a pseudo A.I revolution replacing low paid wages (without other external factors, e.g tarifs or sanctions) is close to 0.
Now if we do speak about India and the low skill IT jobs there. The story is completely different.
> The idea that China is a low wages country should just die. It was the case 10y ago, not anymore.
The wages for factory work in a few Eastern European countries are cheaper than Chinese wages. I suppose they don’t have the access to infrastructure and supply chains the Chinese do but that is changing quickly do to the Russian war against Ukraine
But it's not like China had the skills, tooling and supply chain to begin with....and it's not like the US suddenly stopped having all those things. There are reasons manufacturing moved out of the US and it was not "They are soooo much better at all the things over there!"
Tim Cook had a direct hand in this and know it and is now deflecting because it looks bad.
One of the comments on the video puts it way better than I could:
@cpaviolo : "He’s partially right, but when I began my career in the industry 30 years ago, the United States was full of highly skilled workers. I had the privilege of being mentored by individuals who had worked on the Space Shuttle program—brilliant professionals who could build anything. I’d like to remind Mr. Cook that during that time, Apple was manufacturing and selling computers made in the U.S., and doing so profitably.
Things began to change around 1996 with the rise of outsourcing. Countless shops were forced to close due to a sharp decline in business, and many of those exceptionally skilled workers had to find jobs in other industries. I remember one of my mentors, an incredibly talented tool and die maker, who ended up working as a bartender at the age of 64.
That generation of craftsmen has either retired or passed away, and the new generation hasn’t had the opportunity to learn those skills—largely because there are no longer places where such expertise is needed. On top of that, many American workers were required to train their Chinese replacements. Jobs weren’t stolen by China; they were handed over by American corporations, led by executives like Tim Cook, in pursuit of higher profits."
> it was not "They are soooo much better at all the things over there!"
Though I think we should also disabuse ourselves of the idea that this can't ever be the case.
An obvious example that comes to mind is the US' inability to do anything cheaply anymore, like build city infrastructure.
Also, once you enumerate the reasons why something is happening somewhere but not in the US, you may have just explained how they are better de facto than the US. Even if it just cashes out into bureaucracy, nimbyism, politics, lack of will, and anything else that you wouldn't consider worker skillset. Those are just nation-level skillsets and products.
Hence "had the skills" and "was not". They are not making claims about the present day, they are talking about why the shift happened in the first place and who brought it about.
Good point. When I commented, the sentence I quoted was the final sentence of their comment essentially leaving it more abstract. Though my comment barely interacts with their point anyways.
Sorry. I was typing, got distracted and submitted before I meant to. I thought I had edited pretty quickly, normally I put an edit tag if I think too much time had elapsed.
Manufacturing isn’t one uniform block of the economy that is either won or lost. US manufacturers focus on high quality, high precision, and high price orders. China excels at factories that will take small orders and get something shipped.
The reason US manufacturers aren’t interested in taking small volume low cost orders is that they have more than enough high margin high quality orders to deal with. Even the small-ish machine shop out in the country near the farm fields by some of my family’s house has pivoted into precision work for a big corporation because it pays better than doing small jobs
I would say, it pays more consistently than small jobs. As by nature small jobs are not generally continuous, most often piecemeal.
The other factors are:
In any sort of manufacturing, the only time you are making money is when the equipment is making product.
If you are stopped for a change over or setup you are losing money.
Changing over contains risk of improper setup, where you lose even more money since you produce unusable product.
Where I live, the local machine shops support themselves in two way:
1. Consistent volume work for an established customer.
2. Emergency work for other manufacturing sites: repair or reverse engineering and creating parts to support equipment(fast turn around and high cost)
They are willing to do small batches but lead times will be long since they have to work it into their production schedules.
Probably not because America lacks the blue collar skills necessary to build and service the kind of manufacturing infrastructure needed to do what you're describing.
And the idea that China has low wages is outdated. Companies like Apple don't use China for its low wages, countries like Vietnam have lower wages. China's strength lies in its manufacturing expertise
Manufacturing expertise that have been transferred from the West over the last 40 years. Knowledge and expertise are fluid, they can go both way, they can be transferred to other countries as well, India, Vietnam, etc. The world doesn’t stand still.
Western engineers worked relentlessly on knowledge transfer to China to do so, it might be easy to bring back with the 10x industrial subsidies that the CCP provided to do so.
> These cryptographic systems were not designed by the sculptor himself but by Edward Scheidt, who retired as chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center in 1989.
The article left me with a nagging question: Doesn’t the designer of the codes deserve a share of the proceeds of the auction? He’s still alive according to Wikipedia. It sounds like the unsolved code is what makes the art especially valuable. Was the cryptographer’s effort a “work for hire”, so he doesn’t get anything from the sale?
Good point, and it's also entirely possible the code designer just did a terrible job. e.g. around 57:00 of https://youtu.be/JOXPYkjvDaA
As Kryptos gots a huge amount of media attention in 1999, references to him changed from "chairman of A cryptographic center" to "chairman of [THE] CIA's cryptographic center" when it doesn't even seem that it has such a center.
And the featured story (around 52:00 of the video) has him apparently claiming credit for helping solve a Caesar cipher!
> Almost everything you sort out into a recycling bin gets dumped in the ocean
But the articles don't say that. They say that a lot of plastic is unsuitable for recycling and is therefore incinerated or dumped, like into a landfill or a big dirty pile of trash on the ground. Not one of the articles said that the plastic was being dumped into the ocean.
One of the articles makes an observation about beaches and ocean around one Cambodian recycling town covered with plastic trash. Certainly a careless and dirty operation there. But even that article doesn't claim that their modus operandi is to dump it into the ocean.
If those journalists had any evidence that ocean dumping was the goal, or even if they suspected it, then that would have been the highlight of the article and they would have said so explicitly. It would be a newsworthy scoop even.
I'm going to nominate this as a candidate for the Mandela Effect (or at least that things can truly disappear from the web without a trace). I'm curious if anyone else here on HN actually remembers seeing this site at one time?