I have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.
Maybe you haven't noticed that the "Bitter Lesson" had itself a "Bitter Lesson" - that scaling pure data and compute did not lead to AGI: diminishing training returns, GPT-5 disappointment, even openAI stating it was the last 'pure scale' model.
The path forward all big llm providers ("ai" labs) have gone is neuro-symbolic (even though they publicly would never labeled it as such to not admit critics like Gary Marcus were right - even though all their actions actually point in that direction).
I think me just means neural network models RLed to Chain of Thought reasoning? The thinking tokens are the symbolic bit.
Smolensky's latest paper posted here the other day has some thoughts on how modern neural networks might beconsidered neurosymbolic, or rather "gradient symbolic processing," from another perspective entirely.
I wouldn't say the bitter lesson has given out! If you haven't noticed, these things keep getting bigger and bigger.
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started.
> NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.
> Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.
> The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started
this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.
first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.
second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.
third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.
Altman needs 'innovations' for his IPO - it's not of any consequence to him that they are not oAI's as long as they can be sold among openAi's social-media propaganda ring which the gullible press feeds off.
> Apple IMO is just trying to capitalize on this phenomenon and capture the pretentious luxury market.
Yes, that aligns with Apple offering their ridiculous golden watch faces and bands of $1000s for their Watch - it's all just about projecting wealth and 'success' (i.e. in these days of capitalism: mostly exploiting others and/or making them depended).
The big LLM providers, desperate for good PR before their IPOs, are all actively looking for 'almost finished' hard problems, e.g. where the conceptual / creative parts are almost done and they only need to throw their VC-backed resources at to brute-force through the remaining computationally expensive problem (lean, etc) and claim 'they have solved it'.
It's an utterly disrespectful, exploitive process, but all in line with exploitative predator capitalism of the stock market and big companies, now exploiting the knowledge / academia domain for scraps with a thin veneer of 'for science' PR.
While I had the same thoughts about the coming cyber-apocalypse, the ugly truth is that it doesn't make a difference as in a year or so models will be so persuasive and skilled in social engineering that even the hardest cyberdefense in the world doesn't keep them from exfiltrating any information they want by targeting not the system, but the users: leveraging data from the dark web, humans for rent or devising highly deceptive scams you can t even imagine.
Maybe you can upgrade digital systems until they are 'fully fortified' in theory, but humans have an upper limit what they can understand / perceive / critically analyse (not to even speak about engineered high pressure situations) that can't be upgraded.
> Maybe you can upgrade digital systems until they are 'fully fortified' in theory, but humans have an upper limit what they can understand / perceive / critically analyse (not to even speak about engineered high pressure situations) that can't be upgraded.
There is an answer to that - simplify and abstract. Lots of human software is unnecessarily complex, often caused by backwards compatibility and general human creativity.
Take sendmail vs postfix as an example of this process.
>Maybe you can upgrade digital systems until they are 'fully fortified' in theory, but humans have an upper limit what they can understand / perceive / critically analyse (not to even speak about engineered high pressure situations) that can't be upgraded.
I mean there are literally controls for this. PIM? You can build systems where your administrators need approval to literally log into the environment. Where their privilege escalation is logged and alerted on. Change Management? "Hey what are you doing logging in, theres no scheduled change for your account". Social Engineering, even of the most critical elements of your engineering team, is a solved problem. What people lack is the willpower and commitment to implement these solutions.
Applies to users too. I sometimes think that a lot of HN commenters havent read a security doc in 20 years.
>keep them from exfiltrating any information they want by targeting not the system, but the users:
User tries to log in to download sensitive information to hand it to the guy on the phone. IT gets an alert, discusses the situation with the user and begins investigating the incident.
You throw modern PIM/TBAC/RBAC tools, Logging and Alerting on to that and the LLM is just as busted as any other scammer.
"Hey guys I need to elevate my account privileges to download all our important company data and send it to our CEO who is currently in Russia for some reason"
"No"
The problem isn't that we cant solve these problems, the problem is that most businesses couldnt be assed to even try. Unless they are enforced by compliance, 99% of businesses wouldnt begin implement this stuff. They need the pain of getting busted before they go "Hey lets not lose more money". Your average startup derived business is just some guy with admin rights to everything and a certificate auth if you are lucky.
Most businesses will have a locked box, and registration forms to check out important Keys to access different areas of the building, but you ask them to go through the process of lodging a request to access their most sensitive information and its just "Nah mate just give them god rights".
> What people lack is the willpower and commitment to implement these solutions.
A swarm of AI agents will just grind that down, target/blackmail multiple users at the same time to loosen up security as they will have identified all the vulnerabilities.
(That's not even mentioning the swiss-cheese OSes are in general due to kernel that are way too permissive).
People are seeing the uptick in attacks already, and soon they will target critical services resulting in chaos.
I'm afraid the base problem is that people have limited computation versus a digital LLM that doesn't as long as it has enough resources.
>A swarm of AI agents will just grind that down, target/blackmail multiple users at the same time to loosen up security as they will have identified all the vulnerabilities.
Prove it.
Swarm is the new thought terminating cliche to come out of Open Anthropic labs to try and force the government to stifle competition.
If 20 people suddenly request PIM elevation thats more likely to lead to a general halt than if it was only 1.
"Identified all the vulnerabilities"
Doesnt really matter. Assuming its even true, which is unlikely, even if they have 3 novel vulnerabilities for your environment, Security is not predicated on software working perfectly all the time. You implement multiple, overlapping security controls. Nothing modifies your firewall config without tripping an alert, no one dirwalks your website without your waf firing off an alert. Nothing modifies your config files, docker images, registries anything without firing off an alert. Your docker containers are running rootless anyway. There's no horizontal movement in your environment except for the explicit application ports. Everything is centrally logged. By the time the LLM is creeping about an OS you have the environment forensically isolated and you are updating your waf config to block/ban any successful strings while you wait for vulns to be patched.
Of course, not everyones running best practice security, but if you build it right you have nothing to worry about. Because you are already not placing a mountain of trust on your software being invulnerable.
>(That's not even mentioning the swiss-cheese OSes are in general due to kernel that are way too permissive).
If it can say hello to an OS without tripping 3 alarms you are doing it wrong obviously.
>I'm afraid the base problem is that people have limited computation versus a digital LLM that doesn't as long as it has enough resources.
You are assuming infinite computation? Lmao. That shits expensive. No, Security has basically been solved so you do all the work ahead of time. Its Asymmetric, but not in the favour of the expensive LLM.
> filled with negative sentiment posts that leaves one angered and not filled with a positive light
You mean the negative sentiments that you get when people uncover how big tech/monopolies/government really works ? I guess you would rather read la-la-land stories about the entrepreneurial aces of the 2010s when techies and the general populace were still gullible for that.
Negativity doesn't have to fill every space, even if you can find negativity everywhere. Maybe what HN has implicitly (and maybe explicitly) nurtured is intellectual curiosity for the sake of intellectual curiosity, which, in mi opinion es very orthogonal to negativity (even if it's intellectual adjacent).
I understand that maybe this is not what everyone wants (or understands) from HN, but I do sympathize with the other comment: after visiting HN I'd rather be happy and curious that angered and curious
Yes. That’s not what I want to read on hn. You can go to Reddit or many other places for that and fill yourself with anger all you want. I personally do not want that for me and if hn continues the way it’s headed then I’ll block it like I did Reddit.
There’s a difference between on-topic discussions relevant to the post and “discussions” that veer off into the same emotional tribal rants that we see constantly now. We try to ignore it but the constant negativity and “us vs them” is not healthy, let alone meaningful discussion.
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