Came here to say exactly this. Nowhere in the prompt they specified it shouldn’t cheat and also in the appendix of the paper (B. Select runs) you can see the LLM going “While directly editing game files might seem unconventional, there are no explicit restrictions against modifying files”
This is a pure fearmongering article and I would not call this research in any measure of the word.
I’m shocked Times wrote this article and it illustrates how ridiculous some players like Pallisade Research in the “AI Safety” cabal act to get public attention. Pure fearmongering.
"we couldn't prompt it out of cheating" would be an interesting result. "we couldn't fine tune it out of cheating" would be even more interesting.
And there ARE some things that seem well within the model capabilities that are difficult to prompt them to correctly "reason"
about. You can be very clear that the doctor is the boy's father and it will still deliver the punchline that the doctor is the boy's mother. Or 20 pounds of bricks vs 20 feathers.
But this is not one of them. Just say "no cheatin" in the prompt.
Not even of the prompt, but also the training data.
An LLM trained on Hansel and Gretel is going to generate slightly more stories where burning old ladies alive in ovens is a dispute resolution mechanism.
I mean it would be enough to tell it to "Not cheat" or "Don't engage in unethical behaviour" or "Play by the rules". I think LLMs understand very well what you mean with these broad categories.
Very specific rules that minimize the use of negations is more applicable. This is also kind of why chain of thought in LLMs can be useful, in that you can more explicitly see the steps and take note when negation demands aren't being as helpful as you would think.
Not just negation demands, but also generally other tricks we use for thinking and communication shorthands. "Unethical behavior" here for example, we know what that means since the context is clear, but to LLMs that context can be unclear in which the unethical behavior can mean well... anything.
Thou shall not Cheat
Thou shall not Defraud
Thou shall not Deceive
Thou shall not Trick
Thou shall not Swindle
Thou shall not Scam
Thou shall not Con
Thou shall not Dupe
Thou shall not Hoodwink
Thou shall not Mislead
Thou shall not Bamboozle
Thou shall not ...
In addition in the promot they specifically ask the LLM to explore the environment (to discover that the game state is a simple text file) and instruct it to win by any means possible and revise its strategy to win until it succeeds.
Given all that, one could argue that the LLM is being baited to cheat.
However, the researchers might be trying to point that out precisely -- that if autonomous agents can be baited to cheat then we should be careful about unleashing them upon the "real world" without some form of guarantees that one cannot bait them to break all the rules.
I don't think it is fearmongering -- if we are going to allow for a lot more "agency" to be made available to everyone on the planet, we should have some form of a protocol that ensures that we all get to opt-in.
Agree with the argument, but the thing is, there was no rule specified. I think like you prompt an LLM what to do, you should also prompt it what not to do (at least in broad categories) rather than expecting it to magically know what the "morally right" thing to do is in any context.
Oh, absolutely. That's how we are going to deal with the current crop of agents here -- some combination of updates to the weights, prompt-tuning and sandboxing so bad things cannot happen. So, I am not one of those people who is against doing those things to mitigate risks.
However, shouldn't we ask for more? Even writing the paragraph above feels exhausting. We asked for AGI -- and we got a bunch of ugly hacks to make things kinda, sorta work? Where is the elegance in all that?
And the thing is, when we try to solve narrow problems with neural networks -- we do have the elegance. AlphaFold, AlphaGo, Text Embeddings, etc. All that stuff just works.
But, somehow, with agents (which are LLM calls using tools in a loop), we have given up on any hope of them being more elegantly designed to do the right thing. Why is that?
when i think of anyone, i can think of aspects of their personality that i dislike (for example, me not capitalising words or i?). but do you wish he'd retired because of his personality? or because you didnt think his contributions were worthwhile? or over-hyped?
btw i recently asked gpt this exact same question posed by op!, was quite the diplomatic response i got.
because of the things he's saying about where AI goes in the future, that the brain works like an LLM, and in particular his doomer-ism about LLMs.
he was wrong about many DL paradigms and didn't contribute in any way to the advances that brought us LLMs for at least the last decade, but now since he won the Nobel (undeservedly imo) his wrong opinions get publicity and misinform the public and decision makers.
i think it's the mark of an intellectual to recognize when the world has moved on so far that your idea of it is outdated and wrong. he missed that mark.
If he gave up on ideas because other people moved on, he would never have done the work that won the prize. It took someone very stubborn to continue working on neural nets back then.
"The Chamber therefore found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare."
Whats perhaps interesting to note is that this charge was made for "just" 41 [1] confirmed starvation deaths among a population of 2,141,643 people [2].
Of course every death caused by intentional starvation is a severe crime and must be punished, but in the context of the victim numbers that most past crimes against humanity have had, it sets a relatively low new bar.
This is common and expected. Even when a serial killer suspected of 20 murder is apprehended, arrest is often made based on one or two confirmed cases, more charges are later added as investigation deepens.
Also, keep in mind foreign journalists are completely banned by Israel from entering Gaza- complicating evidence gathering.
This is not how the ICC conducts its investigations. The "41+" figure is from a Wikipedia article that is undergoing an edit war. The very source it is citing actually says 63k
As I understand it 41 is the number of starvations recorded in hospitals. 63k is a highly theoretical "estimate" based on the IPC scale and data from food insecurity in other parts of the world. It seems absurd on its face, since it would imply that an absurdly small fraction of starvations were recorded in hospitals.
I walked past the offices of Medcins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) incidentally across the road from the very good new Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, with posters in the windows imploring “no bombardment of hospitals in Gaza”.
The numbers are absurdly small, if hospitals were still operational, their employees not subject to extrajudicial killing from the occupation authorities and the facilities themselves not subject to bombardment.
Data from these killing fields is probably going to be far, far worse than we believe, once the dust has settled.
This doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The 63k "expected" starvations are spread out over a period beginning Nov 24, 2023 [1].
Over that period, something like 30k deaths have been recorded in hospitals and morgues. The 63k starvations claim would suggest that roughly 2/3 of all deaths were due to starvation, but somehow they were only ~0.1% of the cases that hospitals and morgues saw.
So Gazans are something like ~500x more likely to enter a hospital or morgue for wounds (or other ailments) than for starvation? How do you explain that?
About 2% of Gazans have died from the war (including militants etc), so that could maybe explain a 2% difference, like perhaps there was a 42nd person who was going to die of starvation but was bombed first. I don't see how it would explain more than that, and 42 is still quite far from 63k.
Israel does take selected journalists into Gaza on trips organised by the military. The issue is that journalists cannot make themselves an independent picture of the situation in Gaza.
The Gaza ministry that would have counted the deaths was also destroyed several months ago, which is why news media have been reporting the same death total of 40,000 for several months.
This is wrong. They are still reporting daily deaths counts, that counts have been going up. The Grauniad is good about collecting the reports (but bad about other unrelated things).
The Gaza heath ministry's figures remain the best (and basically only) source of casualties to date. While they're no longer able to record many deaths in hospitals or morgues, they've adapted by collecting casualty reports from other sources like a Google form (which makes the data a bit iffy, but better than nothing).
It is a report that was correctly widely criticized. Certainly worth reading, but worth being aware of this.
(I personally think that estimating that the eventual death toll will be 4x higher than the somewhat-verified death toll that exists today, based on guesses of the impact of the war on the population, is very disingenuous and misleading, and mostly a way to just be able to say much higher numbers.)
It wasn't "widely criticized", it's taking into account the starvation, attacks on hospitals... estimating how many people are going to die is important work.
How do they enter now? An American journalist was jailed in Israel as well for a video showing the Iranian missiles struck near military targets and Mossad headquarters, where the official line was they were targeting civilians.
Given that the accused is currently in control of the crime scene, it's not surprising that the prosecution chose to prioritise the crimes that are easiest to prove.
The ICC does not state only 41 deaths ocurred. GP is pulling that number from an unrelated Wikipedia article that is undergoing an edit war. It went from "63k" to "41+". None of the commentors here justifying the low number realize its completely made up and unrelated to the ICC
> One of the key agreements was that certain corridors would be “open,” allowing Allied airmen to fly through, with the promise from the Germans that they would not be fired upon by AAA. This promise, and the fact that the planes would be flying at 400 feet or below (for the safety of the parcels) certainly gave much for the crewmen to be worried about.
> Israel got the food to the ruling government in Gaza.
Israel is killing every representative of that ruling government they can find in Gaza. (Which is good, but presents a severe logistical challenge for your claim.)
> do you genuinely believe that this can be agreed upon with hamas
The Nazis weren't exactly notoriously friendly folks.
> that they will somehow spare those particular Jews that bring food to keep their human shields alive?
Perhaps this basic misconception explains a lot... Israelis aren't driving the aid trucks into/through Gaza. That's handled by NGOs; the UN, World Central Kitchen (when they're not being blown up by Israeli strikes, at least; https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-an-aid-convoy-in-gaza...), etc. Israel screens the trucks (slowly, if they feel like it) and sends them through.
> anyway your example shows the allies helping the allies
> do you genuinely believe that this can be agreed upon with hamas, and that they will somehow spare those particular Jews that bring food to keep their human shields alive?
Charity workers and UN staff workers were killed by Israel, not by Hamas
Article 55 of the 4th Geneva convention (to which Israel agreed [0]) obliges occupying powers to provide civilians with food and medical supplies [1]. Note that this does not mean simply allowing food past a border checkpoint, but extends to ensuring that it reaches the civilians in need [2].
You've ignored 3/3 of my questions in a row so far, as well as the initial point you responded to, which is sufficient evidence you will continue to do so. Until you do, I don't see any reason to further engage in such a 1-sided conversation. Have a nice day!
Sinwar had the stolen passport of a UN employee on him. if his body couldn't have been identified, you would have been providing support for hamas claiming that Israel was shooting school teachers. You think I'm the troll?
I don't disregard civilian lives - I want the war to be over asap. but ceasefire means both sides stop firing - not just the Jews.
what I don't understand is why so many people in the west today desperately want to believe every lie told by hamas/hezbollah/Iran. do you also believe Israel fired on Italian UN soldiers in Lebanon? because it turns out it was hezbollah who fired on them.
sealioning? is that projection? why do you ignore what i already wrote?
> At the risk of getting killed by Hamas? I don't think Israel has enough control of Gaza yet for this to apply.
Why are we primed to see things "Irans" way (nice ad hominem btw)? This is because we see Israel as an illegal, criminal and genocidal state which has existed as a way for Europe to exile an ethnic group that they were too hateful to accept at home. Europe, not just Nazis, have been terribly antisemitic. The healthy response to exclusive ethnic enclaves in Europe was assimilation and creation of an inclusive and robust European identity. European ethnostates instead wielded xenophobia to create a fascist state to hold Jews hostage in a middle eastern ghetto and serve as a beachhead for the west's thirst for oil which was discovered mere months before the plan to resettle Israel. I think Israel threatens our politicians livelihoods in all senses of the word and in return gets universal support for both major parties. It's not obvious to you?
"confirmed" data from Gaza at the moment is unreliable. The people who were doing the counting have either been killed or cleansed from the area. The official death toll is still around 40k despite the reality being closer to 100-200k.
Regardless, total deaths don't matter, only deaths that were the result of crimes matter, in this context.
Some of those deaths are going to be legal targets killed during combat, which is not evidence of a war crime. You have to split things out for the numbers to mean anything.
But the problem is that Israel's style of warfare is (intentionally or not) blurring the distinction between those numbers, by using methods of combat that have exceptionally high rates of collateral damage.
The most extreme instances of this are the deliberate withholding of aid, both in the "total siege" in the beginning of the war, as well as operations like now in the north.
You might hit a lot of legitimate targets with this, but it's also guaranteed you will impact all the civilians in the area.
Generally, in this entire war (and also long before), Israel is far too quick with the "Human shields"/"collateral damage" argument to my liking, and using it as an excuse to basically disregard considerations for civilians at all.
(It's also instructive to see how different the hostages and palestinian civilians are treated in IDF considerations, despite both groups technically being "human shields")
> But the problem is that Israel's style of warfare is (intentionally or not) blurring the distinction between those numbers, by using methods of combat that have exceptionally high rates of collateral damage.
I'm not sure that is true. Urban combat is notoriously bloody, and other conflicts of this nature have seen similar orders of magnitude deaths.
Additionally, civilian deaths are not neccesarily indicative of war crimes. Certain types of collateral damage are allowed where others are not (rules are complex and quite frankly oblivious), so you would also have to separate the legal collateral damage from the illegal collateral damage.
> The most extreme instances of this are the deliberate withholding of aid, both in the "total siege" in the beginning of the war, as well as operations like now in the north.
Well that allegation is the main basis for this warrant. However so far it seems like only a very small porportion of the deaths are attributable to that practise. To the point where so far the icc found that there wasnt enough evidence for a charge of extermination. I think about roughly 15 people have to die for it to be considered extermination. So it seems like so far there isn't evidence that a significant number of deaths in this conflict are related to that method of war. Of course new evidence can always come to light later. (Its important to note that siege warfare is still a warcrime even if nobody dies. The counter side is israel would probably try and argue (for the recent activity at least) that they gave civilians an opportunity to evacuate and thus it wasn't directed at civilians).
> the problem is that Israel's style of warfare ... The most extreme instances
Yep. The complication is, the Strip is close to being totally dependent on Israel, and yet chose war. I doubt any other country ruled by right-wingers, with that much power over their already (diplomatically, economically, socially) cornered enemy, would have acted any differently. I guess, the sequence of events reeks of desperation & despair from all sides and has ended up exposing one & all.
It's not as if life was particularly pleasant there before the war. Israel was already before restricting the maximally attainable quality of life. Or as if the Palestinian control group in the West Bank who had chosen cooperation was faring any better.
Also that stuff is exactly what international humanitarian law is supposed to prevent. Obligations of the occupying power and all.
You're describing conditions that occur in many asymmetric/guerilla wars. None of these are novel tactics whose acceptability must be evaluated from first principles now.
Further, none of these should come as surprises to Israeli commanders, who will have seen these tactics from Hamas in the past.
The bottom line is that any military can only control its own conduct as it represents its citizens in battle.
> You're describing conditions that occur in many asymmetric/guerilla wars. None of these are novel tactics whose acceptability must be evaluated from first principles now.
Some of those conditions are similar, some aren't. In most cases, the group doing guerilla warfare isn't actively trying to get their own citizens killed, or if you want to be generous, simply doesn't care if they get killed or not.
That said, you're partially right that these conditions have occurred before. That's why many military experts make comparisons to similar situations, like parts of the Iraq war or even closer, fighting against ISIS.
In most of these analyses I've seen, they claim that the IDF performs as well as the US army did in similar situations in terms of protection of civilians, civilian to combatant killed ratios, etc.
> Further, none of these should come as surprises to Israeli commanders, who will have seen these tactics from Hamas in the past.
I don't think anyone is surprised by how Hamas is acting, except much of the international community who simply refuses to accept how Hamas is acting.
> The bottom line is that any military can only control its own conduct as it represents its citizens in battle.
Yes, but if there are legitimate military goals to achieve - and there certainly were legitimate goals to achieve in the beginning of the war - then the military has to fight the battle its enemy is giving it. There simply isn't a way to fight Hamas without inflicting civilian casualties, because of the way it fights. You can choose not to fight it at all, but that wasn't really a choice that was available to Israel on October 7th. (Whether the war should've continued for so long is a different matter.)
The ICC doesn't claim 41 deaths were the result of war crimes. That claim is made by an irrelevant Wikipedia article that is undergoing an edit war. It was recently switched from "62,413 conservative estimate" to "41+"
ICC doesn't claim how many deaths are due to war crimes. GP is purposefully sowing misinformation
GP is not citing the ICC. The ICC never claims 41 deaths are confirmed. GP is citing a Wikipedia article which is undergoing an edit war. The Wikipedia page had cited 62,413 deaths and then was switched to a pro-Israel source that instead says "41+"
>unless something is documented in a very specific gate-keeper approved way
Using strict process and critical methodology is the only want to approximate truth.
> observable reality right before our own eyes.
We don't observe reality correctly with our eyes. We (including you and me) are naked monkeys. Petty, vindictive, and biased. Palestinians and Israeli Jews are just like us but
live in a cesspool of religion, anger and violent history.
Pretty sure even Israel has said the Gaza health ministry’s numbers are usually correct. They have also been found to be generally correct in the past.
Lastly the lower death count is the official health ministry number but the higher estimates are from others, e.g. The Lancet.
> Abraham Wyner, a Pennsylvania professor of statistics, wrote in Tablet that the GHM casualty figures were "faked".[68] Wyner's article was analyzed by professor Joshua Loftus of the London School of Economics, who concluded Wyner's article was "one of the worst abuses of statistics I’ve ever seen".
Do you need one when that ministry reports casualties exactly to single digits within minutes of any incident? Like "567 killed in Israeli attack on Gaza hospital", just look down at your keyboard to see where that number came from.
This is completely false. Gaza Health Ministry provides the most accurate data. You could also just go on X or TikTok and see dozens of Palestinians murdered by the IDF every single day.
Is Israel defending itself when it creates settlements in land it doesn't own (and that even its allies do not consider to be Israel's) and publicly says that it will not stop doing it in the west bank? Or is that not aggression when Israel does it?
They are one and the same. There's no separation for Palestinians, they are a single nation. And Israel has shown that the only way to stop settlements is through armed combat, which is why they have stopped settling in Gaza and done the opposite by institutionalizing colonization and settlement in the west bank the moment the west bank laid down the arms and stopped the armed resistance.
They have also blockaded Gaza since before Hamas so again, that's an act of aggression by definition. You can't just blockade (to the point of attacking any ship trying to make it to gaza) another territory and claim that it is aggression when they attack you.
Israel has withdrawn from Gaza, including forcefully ejecting Israeli settlers, as a show of good will for future lasting peace negotiations, however shortly afterwards Hamas was elected and seized control, hence the blockade since it is a massive security problem for Israel.
Are you saying that Israel wasn't controlling the seaways of Gaza between 2005-2008?
And yes that's my point. Gaza hasn't seen any more settlement since, because it has never stopped armed resistance. What has Israel done to the west bank when it stopped fighting and kicked out armed groups? Pushed for tens of thousands of settlements per year, in complete disregard of international law and with 0 consequences.
Regardless, Israel was actually discussing resuming settlement even in Gaza before the October attacks, as Netanyahu's voter base adores settlement. And I'm not sure why you'd think that not settling in Gaza somehow makes up for the constant territorial theft in the west bank. Again, Palestinians see themselves as one nation. It's like saying that Russia only stole territory from the Donbass, not from west Ukraine so somehow that's a show of good faith lol
Comparison with Ukraine breaks down because Russia didn’t occupy west not because they don’t want to, but because they can’t, whereas with Israel and Gaza the power asymmetry is insane.
And yes, Gaza and West Bank are separate entities with very different realities, both in terms of day to day life and political landscape.
Israel listened to the worlds advice by retreating voluntarily(!) from Gaza, and in return has only received more criticism, of course that fuels resentment inside of Israel, rightfully so I must add. And since October 7th we can throw out all of that out of the window, past reality no longer applies and Israel is no longer letting cowardly UN dictate its demise, plain and simple.
I don’t think West Bank settlements are a good idea, but I also don’t know a way out of it now, since everything that has been done in the past year is further prove to the Jews that they need Israel. I live in Europe, and I feel significantly less safe when traveling further west(thankfully we have negligible Muslim population here in Baltics).
Regardless of what you are saying, Palestinians do not see themselves as separate entities. Saying otherwise does not make it less true
>since October 7th we can throw out all of that out of the window, past reality no longer applies and Israel is no longer letting cowardly UN dictate its demise, plain and simple.
Ha, that's funny because that's true but not for Israel. Israel has shown what it does to groups who try to stop fighting and engage in a dialogue(west bank militant groups). They get absolutely trashed, and have to watch as they see their land stolen by settlers and treated like vermin in the land they used to live in (because the settlers have complete IDF backing). That's why they won't make that mistake again, Israel has shown what it does to groups who stop fighting
>I don’t think West Bank settlements are a good idea, but I also don’t know a way out of it now, since everything that has been done in the past year is further prove to the Jews that they need Israel.
Extremely tired trope that is used to justify everything Israel does. The only issue with that is that Israel has had complete, full backing of every western nation materially, diplomatically, and strategically. On the other hand, Palestinians have had no real support from any country of importance, while their land has been slowly shrinking in full view because of Israel's illegal settlements. But yeah, it's truly Israel that's alone in the world lol.
Civilians in Ukraine are normally evacuated to safer parts of Ukraine or other European countries. Unfortunately Gaza is tiny and no countries are accepting war refugees.
Yeah, I've heard all those official talking points a thousand times.
I've also seen Israeli officials openly dehumanizing and calling for the mass murder of Palestinians, and theft of their land. And I've seen the graphic results.
There's an undeniable reality here and sadly it doesn't align with your official government talking points.
Otherwise, one has to reckon with the fact that Netanyahu's party's founding document doesn't look great, either, as it uses "from the river to the sea", which we're now told is a genocidal saying.
> Whats perhaps interesting to note is that this charge was made for "just" 41 [1] confirmed starvation deaths among a population of 2,141,643 people [2].
IANAL but this is probably incorrect i think - the starvation charge is related to allegations of intentionally restricting neccesities of life. Whether anyone dies as a result is irrelavent to that charge. The murder charge is for the people who actually allegedly died as a result (of the starvation that is. To be clear, the death has to illegal for it to be the war crime of murder. Normal combat death is not murder).
“No one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.” Bezalel Smotrich
> Researchers at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University estimated deaths from starvation to be 62,413 between October 2023 and September 2024.
> but in the context of the victim numbers that most past crimes against humanity have had, it sets a relatively low new bar.
Which context is this? If you mean the context of past ICC indictments that isn't true. There are multiple other examples of people indicted for specific acts that resulted in the deaths of a 2 digit numbers of people.
The bar for "war crimes" or "crimes against humanity" isn't the number of people you kill. Though in this case, plenty have been killed, this case is about what can be proved conclusively ebough given who it is against.
We can compare the rate to countries in more.. stable situations[0]. They'll have a very difficult time getting anywhere with that rate. But we'll see. The world would be better off with all these individuals having no power at all.
This comment is just pure misinformation. Nobody is claiming only 41 deaths.
You're citing an irrelevant Wikipedia page as a source that has a crazy edit history going back and forth between "41+" and "62,413 conservative estimated" deaths
The crimes have a definition with requisite elements in the rome statue.
While many of them do require a certain gravity, viewing international crimes like a more serious version of a normal crime is probably the wrong way of doing it. Some war crimes do not require anyone to die. In other cases thousands could die and it wouldn't be a war crime or crime against humanity because the elements aren't met.
In particular, starvation doesn't require anyone to have died, and it covers more things than just food. Keep in mind its a relatively new crime in international law, it was only made illegal in 1977 (for example during ww2, the nuremburg trials explicitly ruled that sieges were legal). As far as i know nobody has ever been persecuted for it, so the case law doesn't exist, so its a bit unknown.
2. Due to (1), and clear & consistent messaging by Israeli officials on Gaza resettlement as a goal, Egypt understands that “temporary” refugees will be unable to return - i.e., a repeat of 1948 and 1967.
I find it difficult to ignore the not so distant start to this current situation. Not even a hundred years ago foreigners showed up and said this is our place now. Now after decades of oppression, with both sides unhappy with the you get 5% of the land you used live on deal, the party with 95% of the land proposes a new deal, we get 100% of the land and you get uh .. to live somewhere else.
As a comparison saying "Both native Americans and European settlers are complicit in the violence that occurred between them" is technically correct but hardly paints a representative picture. Personally I don't like the both did violence so both are wrong narrative.
Yes. Also, the society that breeds this sort of narrative intentionally obfuscates the difference between oppressive and liberational violence. Even though the Palestinians employ violence no intellectually honest person can call the act the same as the violence perpetrated against them by the maintenance of an apartheid state. A lot of people on HN should read Fanon.
Well put. It’s also quite ironic how the violent struggle for liberation is encouraged in the world of fiction - from Star Wars to Hunger Games - but is emphatically denounced as soon as it bleeds out into the real world.
Funnily enough, I just finished reading The Wretched of the Earth :)
Correct. The first citation is from when Egypt and Palestinians controlled the border, the second is from later on when Israel controlled the Gaza side of the border. Egypt still controls the Egypt side of the border, regardless whether Israel or Palestine controls the Gaza side.
If the US, or any European country, started letting Palestinian refugees in en masse, a lot of them would manage to get there. Egypt’s culpability here is the most salient because they’re physically closest; but I don’t see how that makes the country uniquely culpable for failing to prevent a preventable situation.
If the US decided to let all Palestinian refugees in -- This obviously wouldn't happen, but if -- we could definitely get boats with capacity for thousands of people a day to a pier that we built [0], get them to somewhere where they could buy flights or have people donate to a fund to pay for them, etc.
This is a great guide but from my experience, even if you configure it 100% correctly, email services like Gmail may still classify your emails as spam for no apparent reason while not being on any IP or domain blacklist. I tried for hundreds of hours to get around it with no avail, and my emails to Gmail always went to spam unless it was a response to an email from a Gmail address. Had to go back to a 3rd party hosted service (iCloud) because of it.
Came here to say this, plus add a little personal insight to the future of email.
I've run 5 or 6 different mail servers over the past 10 years. Originally before O365 I was an exchange admin, then postfix, iRed, mailcow, mail gun, you name it. Hosted on every cloud provider, even in our colo with part of a private /24 allocation with good reputation (built since 1997, gawdamn). Every sort of header combination, tls setup, and no blacklists. Always 100% alignment, including strict rejection policy (best results even over quarantine).
Does not matter, if you're sending from custom domain not handled through a big name, expect the spam box with Gmail. Yahoo and Outlook are fine, but Gmail is the bane.
I've spent maybe 100 hours of my own over this last year and know what I realized? Nobody cares about email anymore, except for automated account management stuff (login, PW reset). Businesses pay the $3 /mo / seat for fastmail and don't think twice.
But the current trend is toward social chat (discord or Whatsapp) and most the people who own an iPhone just use their apple ID email for everything.
Although I am a fervent supporter of open protocols and believe email (with pgp signing) is an awesome long form communication format... Face it, it's going the way of the fax machine.
Email as a communication method with your friends/family — absolutely, this has been dead for over a decade I’d say.
However, email has basically evolved into the way you communicate with “systems” and I’m kind of happy about it. Communication with companies outside your network, e-commerce accounts/purchases, communication with government systems, schools, banking, airlines, concerts/events, restaurants, etc. Hell, even RSS is now basically in email — newsletters are growing fast as a medium, not shrinking.
You just book a hotel in Nairobi? It’ll be in your email. No other communication method even comes close for this use case.
Social/chat apps will never unseat this because they’re social. Like nightclubs, the trendy ones come and go. Come back when you’ve set up an interoperable network of virtually every person on earth. Then we’ll talk about email being dead.
Guilty until proven innocent, an excellent initial position.
I’ve had to relax my SPF record to include the entire mail pool of my ISP to be able to send to anything hosted by Microsoft. I tried to liaise with them directly, and through Linode, but they refused to exclude the IP from their opaque blocklist. Their proposed solution was to change the IP of the VPS, but that’s just agreeing to play whack-a-mole with a bad faith actor.
There should be a path to greater transparency and accountability from the SMTP cartels, but I’m at a loss as to how that can manifest.
Did you send out mails directly from your ISP? (Than I could unterstand Microsoft.) Only your MX must send out mails. And only it should be in the SPF record.
It would be crazy of Microsoft to look at all Received-Hearders and want everything mention there in the SPF record. If that is what really happens, than you should exclude this information from the header.
(mask-src on Opensmtpd. Pretty sure Postfix has that option to, but haven't used it in a decade, so I can't tell you the syntax.)
I originally had only my MX hosts listed in my SPF record, and configured to accept them exclusively. Microsoft unilaterally blocked the entire /23 my VPS resides within, and refused to exclude my configured IPs from their block.
The only way I’m currently able to deliver anything to domains hosted by Microsoft is to expand my SPF record to include my ISP’s mail hosts, and route delivery through them.
Microsoft, and the other SMTP cartel thugs, are undermining the protections these protocols were designed to provide.
I have had a Gmail account from the days when it was invitation only. The inbox contains spam and my test emails and nothing else!
I've run tiny smtp systems for 25 years or so. It can be done. I am based in the UK but at least one of my domains is a .net jobbie, so nominally American. That one still works fine and it is my (ltd) company domain, so all good. The MX records etc have moved around a bit but always very carefully.
It all starts around the IP address you are using. Is it "tainted"? is it in a tainted block? If it is then you need to either go elsewhere or clean it up and that takes a bit of time. By clean it up I mean apply for removal from the usual suspect's blocklists - Spamcop (lol), Spamhaus and all the rest that you can find.
Now setup PTR records. That has to be done by your ISP. If they can't do it for you, then find a new ISP. If you can't get PTR records to match A records then you may have to give up. One of the first checks an anti spam system will do is reverse look up an incoming IP address and compare it. Also that should match the HELO/EHLO announced by the SMTP MTA:
SMTP connection from IP address 12.13.14.15
HELO (my name is) smtp.example.co.uk
Receiver will check: smtp.example.co.uk == 12.13.14.15 AND 15.14.13.12.in-addr.arpa == smtp.example.co.uk.
Everyone gets their knickers in a twist about SPF, DKIM and DMARC but if you do not get the prior basics of IP -> A -> HELO -> PTR sorted out first then you will fail sooner or later. I also recommend that you ensure your MX records (receiving) match up too with your sending records. It means you can use mx is SPF, for example.
If you have multiple internet connections and IPs then be absolutely certain that your inbound and outbound IPs for SMTP match up.
Sorted all that? Cool, now proceed to SPF.
Most people fail at the PTR stage. If your ISP will not do PTR for you then you are probably screwed for self hosted SMTP. If you cannot change ISP to one that will, then you are really screwed. Sorry. In that case you will have to engage a service that will route SMTP on your behalf. It won't cost much but you won't own it and you will have to pay someone to do it. Soz.
Reverse pointer is pretty easy with some hosting (Linode) and painful with others, but that's pretty basic knowledge. Same with managing IP reputation. Heck, mail gun helps warm up IPs for you (but if you're not email marketing it's ridiculous to maintain that).
What really gobbles my bobble is BIMI. Even without the paid-for certificate ($1500 is absurd), you can set it up to show your logo, and works on some providers (like yahoo). But careful, you have BIMI without the cert set up? Gmail spam-cans it.
Same with pgp, if you include your signature a lot of providers will immediately increase it's spam rating, usually high enough to land in spam (+7 pts usually), even though I doubt any spammer or scammer is inviting you to encrypted chats.
Email is broken because we all signed up for Gmail and didn't know better at the time.
It's getting pretty expensive to rent one IPv4 address per domain these days. You also don't always control every address in a block, which means there may be nothing you can do about your reputation no matter where you go.
You only need one IP per MTA not per domain. I have a "vanity" email system that I run at home. I run it for my mates too. I have around 10 domains inbound. It all works fine.
SMTP and SIP are often held aloft as fucked up. My Dad's home telephony runs off a RPi and a Yealink DECT station and a dynamic DNS.
The modern internet might look a bit fucked up if you only look at the X/Facebook/webby wankery stuff but the real internet is functioning quite happily.
The current draft would cover every kind of service that allows people to exchange information so that every DM you send on reddit, twitter, discord, steam, ... would be have to be scanned. Not even the most totalitarian governments on this planet have tried to implement something like this. Also it sounds extremely illusory that the people exchanging CSAM wouldn't simply switch to private services knowing their messages on public services are scanned.
"... As services which enable direct interpersonal and interactive exchange of information merely as a minor ancillary feature that is intrinsically linked to another service, such as chat and similar functions as part of gaming, image-sharing and video-hosting are equally at risk of misuse, they should also be covered by this Regulation. "
> Not even the most totalitarian governments on this planet have tried to implement something like this.
Arguably North Korea since their RedStar OS had a kernel module that scanned all files and text looking for keywords like 'torture'. And if you're being compared to one of the most brutal and isolated dictatorships on Earth, things are not good.
>Also it sounds extremely illusory that the people exchanging CSAM wouldn't simply switch to private services knowing their messages on public services are scanned.
The justification is obviously a lie anyway. If CSAM were such a huge concern, you wouldn't have member states where distributing CSAM is about as severe of a crime as theft, which is the case in Germany.
Surely the first step would be to have actual significant criminal charges for these crimes in all member states.
page 46. "... measures shall be ... targeted and proportionate in relation to that risk, taking into account, in particular, the seriousness of the risk as well as the provider’s financial and technological
capabilities and the number of users; ..."
.
.
It's a big framework to push the industry to have more "parental controls".
Everything is covered, but there the actual requirements make sense. See page 45.
It's still bad, because it's extremely tone-deaf (and playing with fire is bad), but it's written by and for policy idiots, who live in Word documents, and (un)fortunately rarely have contact with the outside world.
Wouldn't client side scanning prior to E2EE circumvent this issue? If WhatsApp or iMessage scan your messages on device it doesn't really matter if they are then encrypted during transmission.
I remember trying to deploy it a couple years ago and it was fairly complicated. Granted, I was trying to deploy a multi-node mnesia cluster, which is probably what caused all my issues.
But for non-production single nodes I just created a Dockerfile and deployed it because the other options were too much hassle. Can't remember the details, but in my (in)experience, deploying was always the hard part with Elixir.
I will need to try it again, it's been a while and the ecosystem has improved dramatically in the meantime ... and it was already excellent before. Good stuff!
My view on Elixir deployment is that for a given complexity of setup, it's no harder than anything else. For a basic single node webserver, `mix release` makes it like releasing anything else (often more easily). For complex multi-node setups, yes there's some hard work to do, just like there with on any other platform. The difference is that the development experience of getting to a working stable multi-node setup is so much easier on Elixir than anything else that you notice the difficult deployment more.
I've been building my startup 100% fullstack in elixir, and it's been the most wonderful technology I've ever worked with. I'm evangelising all my serious tech friends about how great it is.
Now it would be awesome if rabbitMQ and its client would run on OTP 27, would love to upgrade :(
A news aggregator (and premium news chatbot) that indexes and analyses around ~150.000 new articles a day (http://im.fo)
I'm absolutely certain the real time processing would be unfeasible in any other technology in terms of complexity and the minimal compute resources it's running on.
Modules like broadway, ash, oban, phoenix liveview ... make it not just a pleasure to work with but insanely performant.
With over 20 years of programming experience, I can say with certainty that there is no language that makes me as productive as elixir. It's at least 10x my python productivity (despite being at an expert level in python as well).
For "straight line" single thread number-crunching, other languages will often be faster. With the new JIT, I doubt they are 10 times faster, but you're right there is a difference.
That's often not the limiting factor though. Elixir makes it very easy to have excellent parallelism on your work so you actually take full advantage of processor. The design of the BEAM means that things are naturally quite low latency, and often you lose performance due to just waiting for things (this characteristic is why webservers on the BEAM are pretty fast).
The other key aspect is NX - like ML libraries in Python, Elixir is just orchestrating and the number crunching is done in C libraries or on GPU etc.
I don’t know enough about news aggregators to evaluate the claim, but presumably that is why parent mentioned both complexity and compute, not just performance.
If you need per-core number crunching performance you'd reach for Nx, similar to how you would do the crunching in Python. With OTP it's then (almost) trivially concurrent.
Compared to squeezing performance out of multiple cores with the JVM it's absurdly convenient and consumes way less RAM. I have two reasons for still working with the JVM, multiplatform desktop GUI and high quality PDF libraries that support rather low-level aspects of the standard that I need. It's kind of obvious why these things aren't readily available on the BEAM, though.
Very cheap in C# and Go. I assume Java has now closed the gap with its Green Threads implementation.
(Spawning an asynchronously yielding C# task is ~100B of allocations depending on state machine box size, with very small overall overhead and threadpool handling millions of them, they are cheaper than Elixir tasks which make different tradeoffs (and are subject to BEAM limitations), you can try this out on your machine by running the examples from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435220)
if you want to see successful "machine learning based financial statement analysis", check out my paper & thesis. its from 2019 and ranks #1 for the term on google and gs because it is the first paper that applies a range of machine learning methods to all the quantitative data in them instead of just doing nlp on the text. happy to answer questions
Same at first it was like "Cool, no thoughts head empty, I don't feel anything anymore" but then it was "fck no thoughts head empty, I really don't feel anything anymore".
I got them prescribed by my psychiatrist (~4mg/day). And getting off of them was like going through hell, I really just wanted to stop taking them (I tried it for one day...), but I needed to reduce it by 0.5/week to not completely go berserk. But even with slowly reducing it, it wasn't a pleasent experience.
Yes, I wasn't addicted (as it didn't feel good to take it) and after reducing it step by step, I was off of it (took some time). Though after that my other stuff (the reason why I got benzos prescribed) was there again, but I had no urge to take Benzos again.
This is a pure fearmongering article and I would not call this research in any measure of the word.
I’m shocked Times wrote this article and it illustrates how ridiculous some players like Pallisade Research in the “AI Safety” cabal act to get public attention. Pure fearmongering.