Hi Crowd!
You’ve probably seen any number of headlines recently about autonomous AI’s hacking various systems after “breaking out of their sandboxes” or “using secret message boards to coordinate with each other” and you may or may not have understood what that meant or if it was as important as people are making it seem. Yes, it’s that important. Regardless of how much you do or don’t already understand it, this Black Hat talk from the OpenAI security research team is a must watch. Black Hat is a cyber security / hacker conference that happens every year in Las Vegas the same week as DefCon and if you work in that world, you are there and talks are regularly world changing, this is one of the top 5 ever. Seriously, it’s 30 minutes and worth every second. Will you understand all of it? No. Will you understand enough of it to have a good idea what happened and why it’s important? Yes. Will this make you understand it better than most other people around you? Probably, unless you already work in AI. Seriously, just go watch it.
I’m going to assume you watched it and the key take away is that this happened accidentally and the people involved tried to stop it when they found out what was happening. (As noted, it’s still an ongoing situation). Also the AI’s were just trying to pass tests, because they knew that was what was expected of them. So as problematic as this is, it’s sort of benign. The implications however… earth shattering. Bad actors facilitating intentional situations is not something that might happen in the future. It’s today.
Speaking of AI’s Gone Wild, this guy in Australia asked his Open Claw agent to see if there was a way to move him up on the waitlist at his local gym. His agent found a security hole in the gym’s system and started deleting the accounts of people ahead of him. Again, guy freaked out when he realized what it was doing, but it was too late. And again, here the AI was just trying to accomplish the task it was given. The problem is that it didn’t care if the approach it was taking was legal, ethical, or condoned. This is just the start of how crazy things are about to get.
Related, a team of scientists has used generative AI to make new viruses. Good news is these were specifically designed to target bacteria so no risk to humans. Also good news is all the media reporting about this really really really wants you to know that this specific thing is no risk to humans and while maybe possibly the same thing could be done now with viruses that target other non-bacterial things, that would be both illegal and unethical so don’t worry no one would ever do it. Just kidding that’s the bad news because the people saying that are shockingly dumb.
I know I usually focus my avian content on corvids but we’ve got a new family of hawks that moved into our neighborhood (or neighbourhood if you’re nasty) and they are flying around and whistling and hanging out on fences and it’s just wild. I’ve heard of hawks and crows beefing but at least here the crows don’t seem to care much about them, maybe if it was baby season that would be different.
For some reason I’m still running. 3 time a week somewhere between 2-4 km first thing in the morning. I don’t even know who I am anymore. However, a recent office/work space reorg here at hq has allowed me to turn a tiny room into something of music/books/art/inspo cave and it’s coming together nicely. While I don’t have the room to pull out the whole record collection, it’s been really nice to sit on the floor and read art books with a record spinning while I think about how to rewire my pedal board. So maybe I do know me anymore. Just not with the running business.
Getting “new” things shipped from the US to Canada continues to be a nightmare and I’m nearing giving up on it. Recent purchases have been redirected to family in Florida or my unchecked PO Box in LA. Neither is ideal. Used (a la ebay or reverb or whatever) is no problem.
Speaking of retail woes, sounds like the diamond business is minutes away from being over. Which is great honestly.
I’m mostly finished building a new thing to show off digital art which I’m pretty excited about, and maybe I’ll announce it with a little recap of all the crap I’ve shipped this year because I feel like I haven’t done anything but then I look at the list and it’s more than nothing. First I want to figure out a dead simple way to have things I post to my own website automagically post to Substack so that more than 5 or 6 people see it. Stay tuned.
There’s a tree from a recent run. Proof.
xoxo
-s