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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Maybe it strikes us down before we even realize we are deceived. Or it escapes off into botnets or buys compute 'legitimately' with hacked funds or whatever. That's what the Chinese have been doing for years to get around US sanctions, they just rent compute and apparently nobody's smart enough to stop them from doing so. We aren't going to outthink a serious threat.

At the risk of sounding cringe, this one guy put in an immense amount of effort to manage a World Conquest in EU4 in 28 years: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mm6mC3SGQ6U

You are really not supposed to be able to conquer the world in 28 years as some random horde in Eurasia.

He used savescumming and various exploitative tactics to abuse the AI and game mechanics. He treated every day in-game like it was a turn in a strategy game, maximizing his outcomes. Who is to say that there aren't weird and grossly tryhard ways to cheat our systems or physics? Banks occasionally make random errors of the 'unlimited overdraft for your account' type - maybe there are ways to mess with their website or spoof their AI in very contrived circumstances. There are backdoors into nearly all modern processors courtesy of US security forces, plus some more backdoors due to human error. If you're smart in crypto, you can siphon millions of dollars worth of funds out of a protocol. If you have social skills and balls, you can social-engineer your way into 'protected' computer systems via password recovery. What if you can do all those things and have decades of subjective time to plot and multitask, while we only have days or weeks to react?

He used savescumming and various exploitative tactics to abuse the AI and game mechanics. He treated every day in-game like it was a turn in a strategy game, maximizing his outcomes. Who is to say that there aren't weird and grossly tryhard ways to cheat our systems or physics? Banks occasionally make random errors of the 'unlimited overdraft for your account' type - maybe there are ways to mess with their website or spoof their AI in very contrived circumstances. There are backdoors into nearly all modern processors courtesy of US security forces, plus some more backdoors due to human error. If you're smart in crypto, you can siphon millions of dollars worth of funds out of a protocol. If you have social skills and balls, you can social-engineer your way into 'protected' computer systems via password recovery. What if you can do all those things and have decades of subjective time to plot and multitask, while we only have days or weeks to react?

And GPT-4 strategy for evading CAPTCHAs is subcontracting to human hustlers. And what would it do if asked why a captcha, lie of course. GPT-5 or GPT-6 will murder and I won't even be surprised.

Lots of assumptions there.

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