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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17555 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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This is a dangerous type of company. They are (presumably) thinking they are engaged in well-doing by democratizing intelligence or something like that. But soon the worst scum of the world will have very powerful and uncensored, non-refusing models running on cheap hardware and probably smartphones too, in not too distant future. This model you've linked can even be run in a browser. No know-how required at all.

Yeah, imagine having a model that does what you tell it, how horrible.

Did you know that this existed in other forms called "books" for the last hundred years? And what was the maximum we actually got in terms of terrorism? Arguably the scariest it got was Aum Shinrikyo, who had a bunch of people intelligent enough, and driven enough, to wage chemical and (if they actually had the materials) nuclear civil war. The secrets behind those mechanisms were at the time widely-published; everyone knew how the Hiroshima device (and sarin gas) worked maybe 20 years after it was used.

The only really dangerous thing I could think of would be biology, and perhaps after the inevitable novel biological attack (which will likely be least-effort) we'll see agar become a controlled substance. But the models aren't ready for that yet and it still requires a researcher with their head on straight, which is selected against when we look at the average (for example) mass shooter or mass car-driver; even Aum's highly sophisticated attack in one of the most crowded places in the world only managed half the death toll of an angry retard attacking an office with a gallon of gas).

Then again, I kind of believe in the American way where "having every tool necessary to destroy your neighbor should they piss you off, and every day of your existence is a choice to deal within the rules" is probably more stable than highly authoritarian regimes simply because the existence of the veto helps ensure those rules remain fair. If the State is otherwise capable of complete totalitarian control, which with the coming tools they will, then individuals under it must have some power to check it or there's no reason, from a realpolitik perspective, not to go full 1984 and enslave them.

Even then, political violence (which the more intelligent types prefer) tends to be targeted; the prototypical example perhaps being an autonomous turret set up in northern Ireland trained on pictures of Oranges, set up as non-lethal simply to make a point, or otherwise depending on how angry they are.

soon the worst scum of the world will have very powerful and uncensored, non-refusing models running on cheap hardware

What do you mean soon? You can already run completely uncensored, non-refusing models on regular consumer hardware. Huggingface is chock full of heretic uncensored model weights.

You need decent consumer hardware/vram to run the good models. Soon the models will be much smaller, and thus much more accessible to poors.

Even I, with a 7 years old second hand laptop can run surprisingly decent models. Any gamer with midrange GPU can run Qwen 35B A3B models at a decent speed (~20t/s or better) without having to have any particular technical skill beyond knowing the magic word "heretic" and doing a huggingface search for it. Anyone with a 24 GB GPU can run uncensored Qwen 3.8 even without any "dangerous company".

Anyone "dangerous" already has full access to those models right now if they only so desire.

Oh god. Pandora's Box is already open. hides under bed

I already like them. No need to sell them to me harder.

Oh. Cool. How will you and yours prevail in the Cyberpunk 2077 world of tomorrow?

As a corpo I'll do well. Be overworked and scared of terrorists perhaps, but materialy wealthy.

By being smarter, more ruthless and more inventive. What your ilk don't understand is that Cyberpunk 2077 is the good future awaiting humanity. Leaving AI under government control means 1984 ... at best.

I don't even disagree, but you are aware of that whole the-AIs-are-about-to-break-through-the-blackwall thing happening in the background of C2077?

Yes. But I am more worried about UK government sending everyone with anti immigration sentiments using AI powered robots and surveillance tech to reeducation camps, than skynet using terminators to eradicate us all.

The real alignment problem always was other humans.

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