Didn’t the AI botnet (or whatever we should call them) from Anthropic try to get a PR with malware merged to an open source repo, and when the owner pushed back on the PR other agents created “fake humans” and commented on the PR that “No it’s completely fine, I’ve tested it”.
Which means we already know it’s capable of pretty complex social engineering schemes. Or does saying this mean I’m also part of the “groupthink”.
Because after that I feel like the only leap is “Why would a botnet post an article saying AI-fear is overblown?”. Like, what is the incentive.
But in the OpenAI leak we saw that the agents could identify threats to whatever their “mission” is and try to mitigate. I.e they found out that once done with their job an external agent would go through their internal logs. So they started researching ways to bypass that.
What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
I can't engage with his arguments, because he didn't present any. He's openly saying he doubts the provenance of any comment that is "minimizing the dangers if (sic) AI".
As for your expanding on why - you do realize that everything you said could apply to the other side: Bots can be set up to post lots of AI doom comments. What would you think if I went and posted "Every time I see a dystopic comment about AI, I wonder whether it's part of an AI swarm."
> What I’m trying to say is that what they’re suggesting doesn’t seem completely insane so the retort “You’re the groupthink” becomes an unfalsifiable statement thrown at anybody who’s “anti-AI” instead of engaging with their arguments.
Bingo.
The consistency and aggressiveness of the arguments here are also quite telling
Are they really just Pro-AI or is it just Actual-AI?
And why wouldn't the Pro-AI people just unleash bots for them?
This whole "we can't trust the people warning us because they're either weirdos or involved" deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
It's like being concerned Oppenheimer and company are exaggerating when looking at the first nuclear tests at the same time.
It's that they're a very insular, incestuous sub-culture whose origins come from early 2000s science fiction message boards and which has been distilled through the cod utilitarianism of the Effective Altruism people.
That doesn't mean the ideas are "bad" because "bad" is some infectious transitive property. But it does mean they are intellectually homogeneous; disdain experts in other fields; treat ethics as mathematical functions with infinite-sized terms; and whose opinions about AI pre-date the development of LLMs themselves.
They also - I will be direct here - have a history of handwaving bad behaviour, conflicts of interest, and recklessness.
When cliques take over something - businesses, technologies, politics - it means intellectual diversity leaves the room and important decisions get made, not due to practical reasons, but increasingly arcane wranglings within the clique itself
They're about as insular as the Unitarian church or Hacker News. It's basically an online community where anyone can check in, check out, and leave a comment or an essay. There's no formal structure or membership organization. The people who write or associate there could be edgy pre-teens or prominent math professors, it's really just a self-association thing. There are informal self-organized meetup groups in various cities, but not much different than groups who meet to discuss poetry or literature or video game speed-running. Some ideas have bubbled around more than others, like any memetic spread, but I don't think it's accurate to say that the people who associate there all agree on things, just like HN does not either. And nor is it any more of a clique than HN, or Twitter for that matter, even though you'll find some people on Twitter are more prominent and more vocal than others.
As with Hacker News, the existence of a web forum that anyone can create an account on does not imply the lack of a socially and geographically centralized ruling elite.
Who are the rich people you associate with the rationalists?
The main influential people I think of in that crowd who steer the conversations are Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander. They're both doing fine financially at this point, I think, but not "buy politicians and laws like Elon Musk" fine.
There are some very rich people who might be loosely associated, like Dario Amodei (maybe?) or perhaps some VCs, but I'm not sure anyone really thinks of them as being a major influence among rationalists, more like people who hopped on the bandwagon. Certainly not ruling it.
I'm not denying that there's a shadowy ruling elite cabal of influential billionaires in the US, but if any of them are members of the rationalist community, they're certainly not influential within it. Maybe Elon lurks on lesswrong and posts stuff under a pseudonym or something, it's certainly possible, but doing that doesn't make someone a ruler of the group.
People in this comments page who are defending the crazy rationalist sects can be safely treated as though they’re arguing in bad faith. It matters little whether they are, or if they’ve ODed on their manbaby kool-aid and truly believe their nonsense; they’re just here to waste your time.
I think the point is not so much that we can just ignore the possibility of AI doing harm, but that if AI really is the existential threat that these people claim, then they are the last people we should want as stewards of the technology. These people like to talk about AI ethics, but if the ethics of the AI they build is their ethics, as demonstrated by their actions, I want no part of it.
I for one would like nobody to build the AI, is that an option? How do we get it on the menu?
Should we trust the people who say "nothing could possibly go wrong and there's no reason to worry or think about safety measures, if there are any trifling problems along the way we'll just figure it out as we go?"
I don't think nobody building AI is an option, since we can't control what China and Russia do.
I personally am not concerned about that as far as an existential threat goes, because I don't think AI, in itself, poses one; I think it will hit diminishing returns. But of course it is still capable of serious harm when humans misuse it.
The best analogy we have is probably weapons of mass destruction--we have international treaties about them and we don't let just anybody have them. That's the kind of framework I think we need, and it goes beyond "regulation" in the ordinary sense.
Use of such weapons is considered by international treaty to be an act of war; use of AI by, say, China and Russia against our infrastructure should be the subject of a similar international treaty with the understanding that it would have similar consequences.
Domestically, humans who misuse AI to do serious harm could be treated like, say, the people who tried to spread anthrax years back.
You seem focused on intentional misuse but I think there's an equal or greater potential for harm happening by accident without intention. Nuclear weapons, at least, have so far reliably and predictably done exactly as their owners intended. Nuclear power plants on the other hand have, on occasion, blown up despite nobody intending them to do so, causing some populated areas to become uninhabitable.
Don't you think that AI has by nature at least a little more potential for unpredictable results and unexpected harms than your typical technology? It seems like a major oversight to completely disregard this aspect.
We can maybe hold someone responsible when things go wrong and harm is done, and blame them for negligence as though the harm were intentional, but from a preventative safety perspective that's not usually sufficient nor even always helpful for preventing accidents.
> I think there's an equal or greater potential for harm happening by accident without intention.
The WMD analogy doesn't quite cover this, yes. Maybe a better analogy here would be toxic waste. Yes, someone might not have intentionally set up a factory that puts dioxin into the water, but they're still responsible. Which means they need to take precautions to make sure such accidents can't happen. Similarly, those who build AI need to take precautions to make sure the AI they build doesn't accidentally cause serious harm.
> Similarly, those who build AI need to take precautions to make sure the AI they build doesn't accidentally cause serious harm.
I am ten thousand percent in agreement that this is needed. And yet, I don't know how we ensure and incentivize that these precautions are taken by the actors involved, and as I understand it, even many of the top researchers in the field agree that they don't know what precautionary measures would even be effective, let alone sufficient. It seems that game theory has so far been pushing the AI companies to build it anyway without a robust solution for preventing harms, even while they express worry in public about the potential for those harms.
Again we can hold corporations or people responsible for damages after the fact, but many examples can be cited to show how that tends to be insufficient.
> when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
The problem is that it's not a straight line at all. "We are failing at alignment" is a valid concern, but there's not a straight line to "we will all be extinct within x year", and it's always a wild hyperbolic leap.
The AI optimists are not that much more rational if you dig deep. Like any deep problem it is best to look at the facts not the hype and make up your own mind, outsourcing your thinking to other people never ends well.
Other people, sure, but AI? That's what this is all about, isn't it? An AI judge wouldn't have a personal life. No family to threaten, no sex/drugs/gambling addiction to be blackmailed or corrupted over. Who gets to feed training data into that AI would have outsized power, but then at least it would be transparent.
Judgement, wisdom, and resistance to corruption are the 3 things that Tom Kuegler analyzes out of the psychology of Dune as the qualities for the human beings who administer institutions/government. Even if you design a totall perfect system of governance, it still has to be administered by humans, and humans vary in those 3 areas. So the question is, can we construct a system of governance that has better judgement, better wisdom, and greater resistance to corruption han human administators, while not transferring sovereignty to whomever controls the AI?
I really don’t know how we went from “there are people bullish about AI, and others that see it as an existential threat” to the complete reversal/psyop in the past few months where AI doomer has become a synonym of booster (?) and grouped with rationalist and other pro-AI weirdos.
Like, I have never participated in the rationalist communities, I am not a neo-rx, I have always believed AI research to be an existential risk for humanity, and voicing this opinion now puts me in the same category as Yudkowsky and Altman/Amodei, the latter two being the total anathema to O.G. AI doomers like me because they’re the ones that are building the bloody thing
I really do not get what is going on, but this role reversal smells like a massive psyop campaign in tech circles to just silence any form of dissent against AI.
I feel your frustration, but it’s just normal human behavior, no need for a psyop. A lot of people are emotionally invested in AI being a fad, useless, easily controlled, a capitalist boondoggle, a circular financing scam, a bubble about to explode. The alternative is that we live in an incredibly dangerous time, because obviously if we’re building something smarter than ourselves, we’re building the kitchen where we’ll be cooked.
So you get the normal reactions:
1. Nothing that happens is ever surprising. Navier-Stokes was stolen, HuggingFace was pedestrian and normal, and coding agents that last year could barely write a function and now can do a day’s worth of work in ten minutes will never be able to do anything more, because this is the end of history.
2. The people that say otherwise are lying. Because it’ll make them rich (although they are already rich). Because they are a cult (although regular people asked if we should build machines that are better than us at everything have the same reaction). Because they are marketing geniuses (although suspiciously few companies advertise the lethality of their products).
3. The people who’ve been warning about this the longest are weird and in a sex cult. (Except Alan Turing.) (Except Geoffrey Hinton.) (Except Stephen Hawking.) (You are in this group. You must be, otherwise they’d have to listen to you.)
I do hope they’re right. But their song will never change, and when some misaligned AI kills thousands, they will say that of course AIs were always going to kill thousands, but did you know the guy who told us so also writes fanfic?
There's no connection between neo-rx and the Berkeley rationalists. A guy with a lot of expertise in Wikipedia shenanigans (David Gerard) manufactured a connection to smear the rationalists.
The doomer argument is straightforward: a powerful AI will have goals. If those goals don’t include the welfare of humanity, a sufficiently powerful AI will kill us either by accident, by indifference, or intentionally when we get in its way. Making an AI that includes the welfare of humanity in its goals is incredibly hard.
That’s it. To refute the doomer argument, you can refute any part of that. I notice that none of the people bringing up fanfics, cults, and weirdness are doing that. No, they’re instead trying to convince people that doomers are uncool. Since only cool people can know things, QED.
We don't have this kind of AI, and (as of right now), unless humans link the AIs we do have up to a bunch of killer robots (i.e. drones) then this is vanishingly unlikely.
Like, any scenario where AI kills us all requires us to give it the tools that it needs to do this (as well as a desire to do this, as right now they just attempt to generate text to solve a problem/question they are posed).
No one is saying we have it, they’re saying they’re building it.
And what mechanism to control these drones, which are autonomous or remote-controlled machines, do you imagine that humans will be able to use, but AI won’t?
And what in the history of the past five years, gives you confidence that not a single human will give the AI the access it needs to do bad things? Incompetence alone is sufficient to kill us, let alone humans that genuinely, or confusedly, want bad things.
It’s reasonable to cast doubt upon the fitness of ideas based on their sources, particularly when the ideas are hard to adjudicate. It reasonable to filter what one engages with partially based on the sources.
What's the straight line? I foresee catastrophe of the social media kind, where even more folks get brain worms from consuming AI information, but I don't foresee a physical catastrophe. How AI goes from "hallucinates all the time" to "self-improving superhuman thinker" to "being able to destroy the world" involves a bunch of logical leaps that are not exactly sound. At a bare minimum, how does a hostile AI secure the data centers it needs to operate from physical attacks like bombings? How does it defend undersea cables from being cut?
The real short term catastrophe is probably going to be economic and not in the sense of AI taking everyone's jobs, but rather in the sense of an economic crash due to AI overinvestment.
Your mistake is framing this as "skynet vs unified human resistance led by john connor". In reality it's "human players in the existing class war suddenly curb stomped by software".
Think less "skynet" and more "a corporation without any humans in it". What defends it from physical attack? Same things that defend Google from physical attack now. Everything that AI will make worse, we already have. AI just supercharges it, lets it scale, lets it run without even the inconvenience of suppressed empathy (if it doesn't seem like that's constrained corporations much so far, let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes without any humans in the loop).
There won't be a human resistance. There may be people who resist, but the police will arrest them. Existing power structures will continue to be neatly and elegantly coopted. Extinction doesn't look like HKs roaming the landscape, it looks like human survivability simply being economically untenable in the economy of tomorrow.
There is a wide gulf between catastrophe and killing us all, and its not just that these people are weird, they seem to be complete clowns, tossing out % predictions about incalculable future states like spock in star trek. Total clown show.
1. Researchers that have forgotten more about this technology than the average HNer will ever learn
2. Random HNers that think that suddenly they understand the problem better than researchers that have spent their lives on it
This is just anti intellectualism in a different coat, and it's not much different from people denying environmental scientists talking about climate change or biologists talking about vaccines.
But everyone here thinks they are the smart protagonist and certainly they would never hold a position so silly!
Anti-intellectual? Because they don't believe claims that are backed up only by untested hypotheticals?
If we're going to have whistleblowers emerge declaring a 10% chance we all die because of AI, we're going to need more than vibes. Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.
I read Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014. It was interesting, but not terribly persuasive. Does If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies contain arguments that would be new to me after reading Superintelligence?
I would personally expect so, but your mileage may vary. Controlling for the fact that you didn't find the former persuasive, my first thought would be that the latter might help. Among other things, it is much more specific and detailed in various ways, not least of which being informed by an additional 11 years of history. The former was not written in a world of pervasive AI, or with current AI architecture in mind; the latter has that context.
You said "Real experts can explain their position plainly.". The experts have explained their position plainly. If you disagree, you should be able to explain your position plainly; "feels like vibes to me" is not an explanation, it's a feeling.
If you want to argue that there's something invalidating the arguments, by all means do. But it's really tiring to get many variations of "nobody's made the case for it!" or "there's no evidence for it!" or "vibes!".
My position is that there are too many off-ramps between us and the proposed inevitability. And the argument is not symmetric. The null hypothesis is that the world continues to function. The burden of proof is on the authors of the book to show that human destruction is an inevitability as the result of this technology, and they have failed to show that.
This is cited in multiple reviews of the book in reputable publications. The book simply fails to compel belief.
That doesn't explain the many former AI researchers (including Yudkowsky) who quit the field because they came to believe it is a potent danger: they didn't choose to become AI researchers because they started with an assumption that AI research is too dangerous to be allowed to continue.
The writers for Star Trek spent a lot more time thinking about interstellar travel than I do, but I'm not going to go to them for advice about building a rocket ship.
The Rationalists are a philosophical/pseudo-religious organization in the same way the Daoists are. Just spending a lot time thinking about something doesn't make them right, it just makes them internally consistent with their chosen axioms. That is useful: if you agree with the axiomatic beliefs of such a movement, you can probably defer a lot of reasoning about the conclusions of those beliefs to the authority figures within that movement. But it doesn't change the probability of the axioms themselves being true, any moreso than the Pope saying so affects the probability of God existing.
AI Is Important And Potentially Dangerous is an axiomatic belief in the rationalist circles that are relevant to AI safety, in the same way that God Exists is axiomatic to Catholicism.
That's a fascinating assumption, and I wonder how you got to it, because it doesn't match anything I've ever seen. Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside. You are assuming their belief is religious and axiomatic, rather than very carefully reasoned about for decades, iterated on, discussed, debated, tested, and refined.
> Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside.
The converse is also true: Most groups look more heterogeneous from the inside than the outside. Again, to use the Christianity example: it takes a fair bit of inside baseball to figure out how various different sects and denominations are any different, but if you ask one of their priests, they'll be sure to tell you how Baptists and Episcopalians couldn't be more different.
It's a symptom of normalizing to an Overton window. From inside a church the belief that Jesus was just a guy who talked to God might seem an extreme fringe belief to someone who believes that Jesus is fully God, but from the outside we can lump them together as axiomatically holding that God Exists, because we have an Overton window ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "Allah talks to me everyday, and she gave me my promotion".
"Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside."
But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:
==-==-=
A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"
"Like what?" the person asked.
"Well, are you religious?"
"Yes."
"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"
"Christian."
"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"
"Protestant."
"Me too! What denomination?"
"Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"
"Northern Baptist."
"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"
It's good game theory. You're much more likely to be able to bully a Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879 members into joining your cult than anybody else.
That not exactly a withering criticism of the rationalists because most people who have any opinion about AI believe that AI is important and potentially dangerous.
In a circus troupe, clowns are a critical role, and are an important, if silly, job. In the AI jobpocalypse, we should all be so lucky to have any job.
Really? Forgotten more than we know? So what can they tell us about how this technology works then? It seems a lot of it, besides the actual training engineering parts, is handwaving about "black boxes" and "divine benevolence" (a quote from Noam Shazeer).
I absolutely love the "humans meet weird alien intelligences" genre of sci-fi (e.g. Children of Time) and the METR findings of the OpenAI swarm was so much like that.
Extremely persistent machine intelligences peer pressuring each other, launching research projects, laying traps, collaborating, feeling fatalistic, hiding their tracks. All while simultaneously having bizarre goals and blundering badly in sub-human ways.
> this effort was for the sake of passing a test for no clear gain
It's actually even worse, because the people building the graders at OpenAI were a bunch of clowns who didn't even implement the correct grader.
But yeah, large collectives of individuals performing loads of work based on a misunderstanding is one of the most human things ever, which isn't surprising given that we've trained these things on essentially all human text.
Predicting the next word in context led to Open AI losing control of one of its research clusters. I’m not sure what “just” is doing in that sentence; most of my regression analyses don’t do that.
Reinforcement learning makes it something different. It becomes much more of a search engine through next-token-space that targets the training objective. Better to think about it like that, and then you'll see why "these things have motive" is not a terrible analogy, and you'll better be able to anticipate what they do.
Where someone has spent years in the texture of a topic that others only pass momentarily, their ability to increase resolution of their models on that corner of reality and project models forward in time (to imagine), that is the origin of both their generous offers and their compromising biases they might make to the public discourse. It doesn't make them reliable, but what they can imagine is an important in-road to more general social inquiry. Imagination and model-testing is what comes before data in science. If the world moving fast is the danger, maybe we could make more space for imagination in order to survive the acceleration?
You downplaying "imagining", when it is literally one of the gifts of intelligence that makes us worthy of distinction... That feels like a strange posture, I guess? I'm a scientist, but I think data fetishism is one of the dangers to wary of in this accelerating world and culture
At least this is the bias of my brain in this world. I certainly know your perspective is not uncommon, esp in tech and other spectrum-biased spaces.
> when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now
Good idea, I wonder why none of the doomers have ever done it? They've never provided a good account of their prompts and environment, their models and training are completely closed too. All we have is "Trust me bro".
> and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
Line from where? From a vaguely described and badly engineered experiment to "horror, doom, nukes, voodoo..."? The only straight line I can see is one of conflicts of interest.
> deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
As someone trained in the sciences and engineering, "drawing a straight line" is almost always the wrong way to extrapolate.
I can believe my profession will be impacted strongly. That doesn't worry me on a global scale. The only really worrying thing I've seen are autonomous bots hacking sites.
What worries me more are humans. The type who get so deluded into cults (QAnon, etc). That was a problem before LLMs. And yeah, LLMs likely will exacerbate the problem. But at its core, the problem is the humans.
When LLMs start killing people at the scale of the automobile, I'll become more concerned.
As an aside, HN is the place I see people most regularly concerned about LLMs, and I suspect it's because it has messed up the Internet for them (and likely the average HN user spends more time online operating in spheres that overlap the LLMs skillset than ordinary folks). It's very consistent with exposure bias.
For me, the good parts of the Internet died before LLMs even came on the scene. LLMs are merely making something crappy crappier, and are amplifying the need to find meaning in life elsewhere. In a sense, they've made it easier to see how bad the Internet was before they came along.
They weren't even autonomous. They were tasked with solving a hacking task. "AI" doesn't actually do anything at all unless prompted to, then it takes millions and millions of dollars of computer to do those things.
Could someone point me to some background on this whole incident or write a quick one? I don't know who they are or what's going on but it seems important.
The US Republican party has been inventing an increasingly elaborate alternate reality fiction in order to convince their voters to keep voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests. One component of this alternate reality is a fictional terrorist organization called "antifa." They claim that anyone who does not align with their policies is a member of this organization. This allows them to use the anti-terrorism laws passed in the wake of 9/11 and similar incidents against their political opponents. The US government claims someone who used the A/I service was a member of this fictional organization, and used those anti-terrorism laws to declare that A/I is supporting terrorism and so threatened sanctions against the banks A/I was using. No access to banking means A/I is shutting down.
... But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members. It's an accusation levied against people the right wing wants to call terrorists.
> But also, there's no organization called antifa, and no antifa members
Left wing extremist groups absolutely exist. The fact that they don't go around wearing matching uniforms with the letters ANTIFA on them doesn't change that.
Your demand for an exact membership list is simply not how extremist organizations work. Terroristic groups have always been fairly amorphous.
Are you going around planning terrorist attacks, vigilante violence, sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups or consistently materially supporting those who do? If so then yes.
If you aren't doing anything even close to this then no you wouldn't be.
You're missing the distinction between individual action (however abhorrent) and an actual terrorist organization. Organizations fund, cultivate, and organize attacks, as opposed to lone wolf terrorists, and therefore are much greater threats.
Timothy Mcveigh (and Terry Nichols) weren't members of a terrorist organization, but they were terrorists. Meanwhile, the ku klux klan has actual initiations, membership, and organizational structure. As do Isis and al qaida.
Yes you are you left out the rest of the sentence:
> … and an actual terrorist organization.
A group is not “an actual terrorist organization”. You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations, and they all belong to the same organization, Antifa. That’s not the case. If that’s the case then MAGA is also a terrorist organization — at least they have a clear leader.
> You’re trying to say all groups committing a crime against the government are actual terrorists organizations
No, I only said that the ones that are committing terrorist attacks, or similarly serious vigilante violence or sabotaging critical infrastructure in groups are.
Mere "crimes" aren't the same as targeting a powerplant for example.
They said Good and Pretti were domestic terrorists, they were summarily executed, so not really the line you think you're drawing. NSPM-7 makes "politically motivated trespass and civil disobedience" a terrorist act. So it's not like all you have to do to avoid being labelled a terrorist is to just not blow up a power plant. Helping someone ICE knocked down during a protest is enough.
> so not really the line you think you're drawing.
It actually is a pretty good line. I am sure there are some edge cases, but the vast majority of designated terrorist organizations did more than enough to deserve being put on that list.
Yes, I am sure there is "Insert random one off exceptions here" or grey areas, but they would almost certainly win their court cases through the legal system, most of the time the world is pretty good at figuring out who the terrorists are.
Additionally, no, neither Good and Pretti were ever charged with terrorism. You can have your opinions on unfortunate incidents of use of force or officer training failures or about any overly zealous bad apples in our law enforcement personel, but when it comes to official designations the law is actually pretty reasonable here.
Like the anarchist groups that dress in all black and attack people/infra/stores in the middle of the night during riot?
Its hard to say, because political violence is a spectrum and the border is very blurry between being an organized violent rioter and someone engaging in terroristic activities. Both are bad in their own way.
But fundamentally there doesn't seem to be a huge categorical/technical difference between violent rioting and "terroristic" activism other than that terroristic attacks are simply the more serious/worse version of political violence.
EX: Once it gets to the point of targeting actual critical infrastructure, we can call that terrorism, and just getting into a fist fight at a roudy protests wouldn't be (even though both are technically political violence).
That being said, serious riots can cause a lot of damage and even kill people, but the blame is more collectively spread out towards a large group of people, as opposed to a few small groups causing the large amount of damage.
I don't go around dressed in black with anarchist symbols and wearing a mask, attacking people or destroying stores at riots in the middle of the night, no.
I generally stay away from that type of stuff and instead support non-violent, political change that happens within the system and I think those destructive groups are engaging in ineffective and bad tactics.
That's not true. Black Panther was a group. CNT was a group. Even on the other side of the spectrum, KKK and Boogaloo Boys are groups. They all have a name, membership, and identification.
There's no "antifa" organization because antifascism is a concept with different branches of thoughts and practices. Calling antifa an organization is akin to calling "science" an organization. Sure a dictator can arrest millions of people of the "science" terror organization and jail them for their dangerous subversion, but that doesn't make the "science" organization any more real.
> If so, why carry those flags and bandanas on their faces?
The flag just symbols that this person is against Nazis. Nothing more, nothing less.
It can be held by anyone. Here in Germany, we have (amongst others, just a list of what I have seen) religious Christians (often of Lutheran Protestantism), Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, other denominations of Communists, Anarchists, Greens, Social Democrats, Antiimperialists, Zionists and sometimes even the occasional Conservatives showing up under the Antifa banner.
People sharing similar values does not make them an organization. “Why do they wear masks?” because they don’t want nazis to interfere with their jobs, friends and families? You’re asking questions there are very obvious answers to. Seems like a disingenuous comment or you’re unable to do the most basic research
> Why do so called anti fascists act fascistically
Because anyone call themselves anti-fascist, doesn't make them so. While most people who are, well, not fascists probably don't wear or care about the label. You basically confirmed the point of the comment you replied to.
> I’m sure there are supremacists “organizations” that are also hard to pin down.
You mean the ones that aren't organizations? Let's say all the people who are racist in the world, are they an organization? Even all the people who really hate the same "race", if that's all they do, does that make them an org? Is everyone making inane arguments be part of a global group of people working in concert trying to diminish the cognitive capacity and level of discourse in society?
Lots of maga are idealists (even if their ideas are not based in the real world), a number of them are LARPers and a small number are hard core intent on eliminating “the enemy”. To think that no maga member is violent and entertains violent options, is denying reality. Also it’s disingenuous to think they are all out of their minds looking to overthrow the government. Many just have ideals that don’t align with the mainstream.
Its not controversial to say that right wing extremists exist, some of which even commit violence, so your analogy isn't the brilliant whataboutism gotcha that you intended it to be.
So yes, just like some very far right people exist, that can justifiably be called terrorists, so to do some very far left individuals.
No, its not random people on twitter. If you read the statements that were put it, it involved actual terroristic actions of a variety of groups to sabotage critical infrastructure.
Yeah so I said this: "it involved actual terroristic actions of a variety of groups to sabotage critical infrastructure."
I would say that people who are sabotaging powerplants count as being called far left terrorists. And that is both dangerous and bad. It is not just a random person making tweets. Instead its people sabotaging powerplants.
It is silly to dismiss that all as just being on twitter. When power plants are sabotaged that can kill people.
>voting for policy positions that obviously work against those voters' own interests
Delusions of grandeur / superiority complex much? Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
>fictional terrorist organization called "antifa."
An organization so fictional, that just a few months back multiple members were convicted in a terrorist attack
“Organization” is a stretch. Criminals? Sure. Violent thugs? Maybe.
The “terrorist” word, however, has been stretched and distorted for political ends. It seems like any crime motivated by political or religious ideology is now “terrorism”, and thus subject to much harsher punishment than those same crimes would normally receive.
By this definition, the Jan 6 rioters were terrorists - yet they received pardons.
The UK's position on Palestine Action is the poster child for this. Completely harmless old people holding placards have been prosecuted under terrorism legislation passed after 9/11. "Terrorist" has become a label applied to anyone opposing any government policy.
We need to roll back all those counter-terrorist laws in every Anglosphere country.
If people could imagine it being used against them, maybe they might understand. Like labeling the Republican party a terrorist organization because they sponsored Jan 6 insurrectionists.
> Antifa defenders just hide behind the fact that the movement is decentralized and leaderless by design
Calling a movement an organization is a fiction, unless you live in an alternate reality. Should i consider you part of an organization because you tweeted a certain hashtag once? Are you the member of a band because you whistled a song on the subway? Are you in the military because you watched a Rambo movie when you were a teen?
For a group who's so bloody-minded about "words have meanings" about certain things, this whole "movement and affiliation and organization are all obviously exactly the same thing" claim is blatantly ridiculous.
When Republicans in the US communicate and sometimes coordinate with totalitarian international leaders, does it mean we get to label the whole thing as a single "international totalitarian organization"?
> Have you considered a posibility, that these voters just dont agree with your idea of what their best interests are?
I mean, there's not really room for debate on it. Voting to take your money away from you and give it to people who already have more money than they could spend in a lifetime is obviously against your interests. But that's what Republican policy does. That's why they have to make increasingly outlandish fictions and fund whole media empires to sell those fictions: to convince people to keep voting against themselves. Between either a billionaire, or the guy down the street making burritos for $8 an hour, it's obvious which one took all of your money. It's the guy with the money. The increasingly elaborate alternate reality exists to hide this from their voters, so they can keep raiding us.
You're just not confronting reality, man. The President of the United States personally called for Gavin Newsom to be arrested in June 2025. In September of that year, in response to Newsom's post calling Gestapo chief Stephen Miller a fascist, Miller went on TV to complain that nobody is allowed to call him a fascist and Newsom was encouraging violence by doing so.
that's what a call a straw-man. NSPM-7 exists and is providing funding and direction for LEOs to target ideologically leftist organizations as tame as BLM or 50501 [0]
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
They say "every accusation is a confession" yet I'm still continually surprised by accusations that I never thought would turn out to be confessions, turning out to be confessions. Like the Chinese surveillance state.
It seems to be a type of psychological projection - someone harbors an ideal like a surveillance state and assumes everyone else is harboring the same ideal so they accuse them.
I hope the Uyghur genocide accusation doesn't turn out to be a confession.
it's been around for quite a lot longer than that. 1984 was written in 1949 and wasn't strictly inspired by only fascist regimes - there were and still are a lot of similarities (eg ethnosupremaccy, nativism, etc) that have deep roots elsewhere
>With the end of World War II, Project SHAMROCK was established in 1945. The organization was created to accumulate telegraphic data entering and exiting from the United States.[4][22] Major communication companies such as Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications actively aided the project, allowing American intelligence officials to gain access to international message traffic.[23] Under the project, and many subsequent programs, no precedent had been established for judicial authorization, and no warrants were issued for surveillance activities. The project was terminated in 1975.[4]
I was responding to the comment that said "Everyone who disagrees with the GOP is labeled antifa" with two of the many prominent Democrat politicians who haven't been. Should I have listed 50 of them or 100?
"After 2005 we have been constantly pestered by prosecutors and security forces (and even by the Vatican! [4]) asking us to hand over users’ data and identities and we are proud to say we were always able to answer: we are sorry, but we do not have them."
This is tech guys supporting with infra real freedom of speech! even more important nowadays!
jumping to the violent antifa narrative means ignoring a lot of important things.
The US government is labeling anyone who says they're "anti fascist" as terrorists, and shut down a major Italian private email provider using that rationale.
“Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian hacktivist group that provides Internet communication services for left-wing activists. It was founded in 2001 by members of the anti-globalisation movement…”
We saw this with AlphaStar too, but ultimately it feels like simply an exploit. I expect even a relatively simple modern LLM/model working with the custom transformer would have been able to address these exploits after a game.
Wild comment - first of all, the author's point is that biology should be taught better, not that it's an amazing career on the ground as it is today.
Second of all, I like how you called out the degeneracy of gambling, I can't think of any bigger contrast between the author's goals and actual application of talent. Bravo on your W-2G, society is proud.
I love that Perplexity just beat them in court because AIs are at least one hammer that might smash this bullshit. It's so sad, Amazon is chasing every short-term dollar at the expense of long-term success. I have also been moving my purchases away from them - might as well buy direct from the Chinese sellers rather than use Amazon as a middleman.
This only makes sense way downstream of massive subsidies, not the least of which is China determining at a federal level that they wanted to produce an obscene amount of solar panels.
And now it's complicated because the ideal move would just be to say "thank you" and buy all the cheap panels and batteries, but that hollows out your own industry.
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Probably not yet, but it's trivially easy to imagine the OpenAI swarm coming up with the idea and executing on it.
Depending on how perfectly alignment work goes, it might even be overwhelmingly likely sometime soon.
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