> It's patently insane to demand that humans alter their behavior to accommodate the foibles of mere machines
Talking to chatbots is like taking a placebo pill for a condition. You know it's just sugar, but it creates a measurable psychosomatic effect nonetheless. Even if you know there's no person on the other end, the conversation still causes you to functionally relate as if there is.
So this isn't "accommodating foibles" with the machine, it's protecting ourselves from an exploit of a human vulnerability: we subconsciously tend to infer intent, understanding, judgment, emotions, moral agency, etc. to LLMs.
Humans are wired to infer these based on conversation alone, and LLMs are unfortunately able to exploit human conversation to leap compellingly over the uncanny valley. LLM engineering couldn't be better made to target the uncanny valley: training on a vast corpus of real human speech. That uncanny valley is there for a reason: to protect us from inferring agency where such inference is not due.
Bad things happen when we relate to unsafe people as if they are safe... how much more should we watch out for how we relate to machines that imitate human relationality to fool many of us into thinking they are something that they're not. Some particularly vulnerable people have already died because of this, so it isn't an imaginary threat.
> So this isn't "accommodating foibles" with the machine, it's protecting ourselves from an exploit of a human vulnerability: we subconsciously tend to infer intent, understanding, judgment, emotions, moral agency, etc. to LLMs.
Right, I'm saying that this framing is backwards. It's not that poor little humans are vulnerable and we need to protect ourselves on an individual level, we need to make it illegal and socially unacceptable to use AI to exploit human vulnerability.
Let me put it another way. Humans have another weakness, that is, we are made of carbon and water and it's very easy to kill us by putting metal through various fleshy parts of our bodies. In civilized parts of the world, we do not respond to this by all wearing body armor all the time. We respond to this by controlling who has access to weapons that can destroy our fleshy bits, and heavily punishing people who use them to harm another person.
I don't want a world where we have normalized the use of LLMs where everyone has to be wearing the equivalent of body armor to protect ourselves. I want a world where I can go outside in a T-shirt and not be afraid of being shot in the heart.
I think you're mixing up the laws and the implementation/enforcement. There's nothing wrong with moral laws around behavior (you shall not kill), but you're right that society-wide enforcement requires laws and repercussions. It sounds more like to agree with the laws and want them enforced.
I had a similar thought, that parent commenter sounded like they were in Canada or something. Interesting that their solution is to impose constraints on technological process, rather than finding novel ways to elevate individual and collective human functioning in spite of our limitations. Ironically it's his view that is more anti-human
You take the placebo (whatever it is: could be a pill; could be some kind of task or routine) and you believe it is medicine; you believe it to be therapeutic.
The placebo effect comes from your faith, your belief, and your anticipation that it will heal.
If the pharmacist hands you a pill and says, “here, this placebo is sugar!” they have destroyed the effect from the start.
Once on e.r. I heard the physicians preparing to administer “Obecalp”, which is a perfectly cromulent “drug brand”, but also unlikely to alert a nearby patient about their true intent.
But, puzzlingly enough, it's the definition of open-label placebo, in which the patient is told they've been given a placebo. And some studies show there is a non-insignificant effect as well, albeit smaller (and less conclusive) than with blind placebo.
One, a placebo does not need to be given blindly. A sugar pill is a placebo, even if the recipient knows about it.
An actual definition: "A placebo is an inactive substance (like a sugar pill) or procedure (like sham surgery) with no intrinsic therapeutic value, designed to look identical to real treatment." No mention of the user's belief.
Two, real hard data proves that the placebo effect remains (albeit reduced) even if the recipient knows about it. It's counter-intuitive, but real.
In psychology, the two main hypotheses of the placebo effect are expectancy theory and classical conditioning.[70]
In 1985, Irving Kirsch hypothesized that placebo effects are produced by the self-fulfilling effects of response expectancies, in which the belief that one will feel different leads a person to actually feel different.[71] According to this theory, the belief that one has received an active treatment can produce the subjective changes thought to be produced by the real treatment. Similarly, the appearance of effect can result from classical conditioning, wherein a placebo and an actual stimulus are used simultaneously until the placebo is associated with the effect from the actual stimulus.[72] Both conditioning and expectations play a role in placebo effect,[70] and make different kinds of contributions. Conditioning has a longer-lasting effect,[73] and can affect earlier stages of information processing.[74] Those who think a treatment will work display a stronger placebo effect than those who do not, as evidenced by a study of acupuncture.[75]
The hypotheses hinge on the beliefs of the recipients. "The placebo effect" has always been largely psychological. That's the realm of belief.
To veer even further off-tangent, isn't it hilarious how the Wikipedia illustration of old Placebo bottles indicate that "Federal Law Prohibits Dispensing without a Prescription". Wouldn't want some placebo fiend to O.D.
> That uncanny valley is there for a reason: to protect us from inferring agency
You’re committing a much older but related sin here: assigning agency and motivation to evolutionary processes. The uncanny valley is the product of evolution and thus by definition it has no “purpose”
Well yes because just like your earlier point, we can't help but anthropomorphise the world around us.
Just like we see a person in an LLM, it's easy to assume that because we create things with a purpose, that the world around us also has to be that way. But it's just as wrong and arguably far more dangerous.
Do Hindus and Buddhists generally agree there is a purpose? Perhaps too escape suffering and reincarnation? Sounds more like a western theistic view of existence. Like the deity has a plan for everyone's life kind of thing.
I didn’t say any such thing like the universe has no purpose. Merely that in a scientific sense evolution has no motivation. It is an emergent phenomenon which tends to maximize fitness to reproduce and cannot be said to do anything for a reason. Saying otherwise is just anti-science.
The "we the theists (or I guess non-nihilists?) all agree that..." falls apart once you start finishing the thought because they don't agree on much outside of negative partisanship towards certain outgroups before splintering back into fighting about dogma. Buddhists and Baptists both think life has meaning, and that's a statement with low utility.
Is it even true? I assume he’s referring to religion but I thought the irreligious population of the planet had broken 20% between China already and the West becoming increasingly agnostic/athiestic.
The 15% cap likely only applies to IRS-reportable gains on the congressperson's personal tax return. That unfortunately doesn't preclude insider trading by spouses, within IRA accounts, or within wholly or partially owned c-corporations controlled by the congressperson or a close family member.
We need a federal law that says: "the definition of material non-public information (MNPI) is extended to mean any non-public information those in federal, state, or local government are privy to that may affect securities prices, and individuals in or adjacent to government are equally subject to prosecution for trading on it".
I think a better counter is the question "Is there a meaningful difference between binary discretization and Planck units? Aren't those discrete/indivisible as well?"
That's not really a good counter - Planck units are not a discretization. Space-time is continuous in all quantum models, two objects can very well be 6.75 Planck lengths away from each other. The math of QM or QFT actually doesn't work on a discretized spacetime, people have tried.
I should add one thing here: no theory that is consistent with special relativity can work on a discretized spacetime, because of the structure of the Lorrentz transform. If a distance appears to be 5 Planck units to you, it will appear to be 2.5 Planck units to someone moving at half the speed of light relative to you in the direction of that distance.
2 is only weirder if you don't already accept non-material reality, i.e. the proposition There exist real things that are not themselves composed of matter and/or energy.
That's crossing into metaphysics, which isn't usually a welcome topic here, but the fact remains that more than 80% of the current and prior world population believes/believed in a non-material reality.
The persistence and stickiness of that belief throughout history ought to at least make us sit up and pay attention. Something's going on, and it's not a mere historic lack of scientific rigor, notwithstanding science's penchant for filling gaps people previously attributed to spiritual causes. That near-universal reflex to attribute things to spiritual causes in the first place is what's interesting - why do people not merely say the cause is "something physical we don't understand"?
Ubiquiti is really taking up the slack in some areas Apple has abandoned.
I bought a UNAS-2 (and a couple of 12 TB IronWolf Pro drives) a few months ago when the "time capsule will not be supported in a future version of macOS" warning first appeared. It has been outstanding alongside the rest of my UniFi setup, and perfectly supports Time Machine backups. The UniFi Identity macOS app means my family's computers always stay authenticated/connected and my wife & kids don't have to do anything to make Time Machine just work.
If you're a power user who loves the Apple aesthetic and you already have a UniFi setup at home, you'll feel right at home switching from Time Capsule to a UNAS.
What format is the destination drive? My ideal is APFS clone backups to a remote drive, but I don't know if there are any network setups that support that, even though you can do it to a local drive.
Have you tried it also working to backup files from Linux and windows machines ? Was hoping for a good mixed backup solution and I'm getting Ubiquiti would deliver here.
Also why the 12TB ironwolf drives specifically ? Personally I always was a fan of buying true enterprise (the ones designed for "online" or near line storage) but sometimes specific models and sizes of random drives do very well in Backblaze testing
I don't have any Linux/Windows machines, but I've seen nothing that would dissuade me from using it when I eventually migrate my current laptop to Asahi Linux.
As for IronWolf Pro drives, I chose them because they seem to have similar longevity to enterprise drives with less noise (my equipment is in a closet under the stairs).
It's been more than a decade since they replaced AFP with SMB as the default protocol for file sharing, and they've been warning that AFP would be going away for years.
Yeah but AFP is still performing way better than SMB on Mac for any fast networking. Like 10GigE and faster. Apple SMB stack is a disaster, and thoroughly unprofessional. NFS is faster, too, but unfortunately the Finder, being the rat nest of bugs it is, has often trouble with NFS shares.
macOS 26 still has a hard kernel panic if you try to mount an NFS share with krb5 auth but don’t have a valid Kerberos ticket. 100% reproducible.
Every OS update I try mounting with no ticket, get a panic, fill in the error reporting dialog with a nice “hope you had a nice holiday break!” message or whatever is seasonally appropriate, with the same simple steps to reproduce. It’s just kinda comical at this point.
My guess is kerberized NFS has absolutely zero users within Apple, and it’s likely hard to find an engineer there who even knows what Kerberos is anymore.
I used to work at Apple and I’d have filed a radar for it but now I’m just a customer so I’m powerless.
> I used to work at Apple and I’d have filed a radar for it but now I’m just a customer so I’m powerless.
I filed a radar while working there on a bug that was introduced in 2009 and it's still not fixed because it was low in the stack and the person responsible for it said they didn't think it was wise to make changes that late in the beta cycle (it was close to the annual release). It's never been fixed. I stopped checking major releases about five or six years ago.
Hah. I actually had opendirectory, OSX clients, and CentOS/RedHat clients running krb5 NFS off of netapp filers circa … 2008? Lots and lots of NFS in the (mansfield) hardware org at that time. I think krb on osx started getting hard around 2010 when they moved tickets and other credentials to a process aware in memory store. Became difficult to use TGT or machine identity for automation.
And yes, Im sure theres a very lonely radar bug for this. But even MM of revenue wont fix “edge cases” like this.
Nice! Awesome coincidence, happy to hear from you. I feel like that team was somehow both the tail end of the system admin hacker era and on the forefront of what would become “devops” and system management infra. And now, cloud… cloud, as far as the eye can see.
It's been a while since I worked at Apple, but back in the day the entire OS X Server team made extensive use of kerberized NFS shares for moving around large files...
...the last version of Server shipped in 2021 (and the last real version shipped almost a decade before that).
Hmm, the more I think about I think you’re right, they likely still do use kerberized nfs, but I think the auth layer they use is… different. Without giving too much away, the internal SSO software ends up either wrapping or providing Kerberos tickets in some way, so I’m imagining that code path doesn’t panic.
In fact that’s probably the clue… everyone internally at Apple using krb5 auth with nfs is probably using the internal SSO software and the code path for “vanilla” Kerberos (ie. Ticket Viewer.app and so on) has zero testing. Maybe I’ll write that into the next crash tracer report I type up :-D
It's not "officially" supported, but iFixit has a guide for swapping the drive on a time capsule. I used mine with a 4TB drive for years with no trouble.
My old trusty readynas should still work i think.. probalby. Supports smd for time machine and smb3 generally. If it doesn't I might finally be pushed onto a nas that isn't discontinued.
From a risk assessment standpoint, I’ve seen my Time Machine backups corrupted much more frequently than I’ve experienced drive failure. Happened with both my Time Capsule and then my Synology RAID.
It’s a “nice to have” automatic backup, but not a primary backup destination for me.
the one i have is my second readynas.. its a later one and is x86 but it's still kickin'. The first failed suddenly so i bought the second hoping to migrate the disks, but they changed the architecture so that wouldn't work. I determined that all that happened to the first was that the power supply gave up. Sourced one from ebay and it was back to working but i went ahead and did a migration then gave the old one to a friend. It's apparently also still doing just fine.
I too deeply appreciate the commitment to user privacy they've demonstrated. Their head of user privacy is a man of integrity and commitment.
At the same time, privacy on internet-connected devices is like true liberty and justice -- rare, precious, fragile, and easily lost without active pursuit and sacrifice.
I hope Temus has the courage and principle to keep fighting the good fight.
We're a bit odd though. Highly budget conscious, 4 kidsto feed (including 2 teenagers), and European tastes in food.
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