One could argue that this is just more layers of LLM, but at the end of that argument is the observation that a 2-layer neural network with a nonlinear transform between the layers is a universal function; yes, but nobody does that because it's unrealistic to do so.

However, it's good to keep perspective here. We don't know enough about what consciousness or reason (inside our own brains) really are to make claims that LLMs do those things.

One could, perhaps, make the case that the inherent randomness in the LLM algorithm makes it a fundamentally different thing than an expert system.

... but we've had Monte Carlo analysis as a tool for ages too.

I'm not sure we promote the thing to "not a tool" by gluing a Monte Carlo algorithm onto an expert system.

To take a big step back from the LLM question and look at a similar space that perhaps sheds light on the question...

A lot of chip design these days involves a step where the desired circuit is described in a goals-and-constraints-oriented language and then fed to a layout algoirthm that is semi-deterministic and attempts to solve the optimization function based on specified goals (like fabrication cost, size, or power consumption).

The output of this process is a chip you can fab. The process is random (it's an important industry-standard step to capture the input seed, because if the chip ends up in something audited and the auditing firm needs to know how the chip was made, it's not good enough to shrug and say "Enh, we rolled some dice," they need the layout schema deterministically reproducible too).

I don't, generally, think anyone considers the fact we use these in the hardware space to be anything but using yet another tool. It's a tool that searches a solutions domain much faster than a human could doing something not too dissimilar from what a human would do (with perhaps a little human intuition thrown on the top to avoid obviously-pessimistic branches of exploration, but you can bake those shortcuts into the tool also).

If you don't know if you can hot-swap your certs, you probably can't.

Human error was selecting the wrong output file and promoting it forward.

It's not at all the kind of thing you want to see in a reliable, secure, mature process... There shouldn't be a step where a human even makes a choice there.

And it's exactly the kind of thing most companies are doing, most of the time, more often than we would like.

An awful lot of the world runs on spit and bailing wire and things too easy to automate yet, and the parts that don't cost more.

I have to assume the fact this didn't get discovered suggests they weren't investing in trying to break their own crypto. A good takeaway for anyone else who wants to be in this space.

Certainly can't speak for the rest of the world.

~ Not a quote from the press release

I strongly suspect it doesn't include 4chan of the future operating like 4chan in the early 2000s. Things do change sometimes. But hey, in the short run? They certainly can in the US. They will probably be banned in the UK very soon for anyone who doesn't know how to set up a VPN or access Tor, but across that bridge when we come to it right?

> You don't get to trade my freedoms for your convenience

Precisely that trade is most of politics and regulation, be it "You have to drive on the right side of the road" or "You can't swear on FCC-licensed airwave broadcast." We took a very liberal stance to the Internet, and much of Western society seems to be reevaluating that stance in this era.

The challenge with the Internet is that accessing it is so ubiquitous that even if a parent wants to keep a child off it, it's pretty impossible. You can get on it at any public library. Certainly we're not banning children from libraries to keep them safe? That's unworkable.

You yourself assert that children will always find a way to access the Internet. The unfortunate conclusion drawn from the strongest form of that assertion is that we must therefore make the Internet they can access child-safe.

(I recognize how this is a non-starter for many. My concern is that failure to engage the argument may leave those for whom it's a non-starter at a severe disadvantage as the opposing view consolidates political power to effect change. I think the result of saying l assuming the status-quo holds is we're going to wake up one day to find half the Internet ID-walled and the other half behind Tor).

This reminds me of the time you could use Twitter as a sort of an oracle to tell whether Twitter thought an account was probably pro-fascist. This wasn't something they'd necessarily surface in the US, but for compliance reasons in Germany they had to suppress fascist propaganda so the backend was aware of flags on individual posts and entire accounts.

At some point, at least, the API did expose that state; after the API got yanked, you could still hypothetically find it by accessing Twitter from Germany via VPN and comparing visibility of posts and accounts in and out of that environment.

Which was very funny to me, because it meant that institutionally, Twitter had an opinion on these accounts but they made it increasingly difficult for US users to know that opinion.

"Freedom of speech" indeed. ;)

That's the experiment we're running right now. The Internet is different from TV. It's interactive and bidirectional. Most importantly, it's decentralized. Network television could control what showed up in your living room without you expecting it. Verizon and Comcast can't (nor should they, but the "can't" matters quite a bit here).

(To be clear, there are definitely tradeoffs, and I see them. But I think it's important to steel-man the counter-position because the counter-position doesn't just go away. Especially since there's a non-ignorably-trivial number of citizens, in both the US and the UK, who feel the trade-offs are acceptable because they really do not like what they perceive open and unfettered Internet access to have done to one or two generations of humanity exposed to it in childhood at this point.

To argue against it, we have to face it, not dismiss it).

Here, 4chan's design works against answering the question satisfactorily; their commitment to anonymity makes it difficult to say whether they really keep minors off the site (purely anecdotally, the answer seems to be "Not really; everyone knows click-through confirmation is a joke," but that's anecdote). OFCOM allegation, indeed, is more-or-less that 4chan pays lip-service to keeping minors out but fails in practice, and they demand better of service providers then "Well, we told them they're not allowed and if they make it too obvious to ignore we give 'em the boot; what more could we possibly do?" Because OFCOM has a list of what more they could possibly do.

There is a nonzero possibility that the Internet as a whole - including fora like 4chan - has become deeply enough integrated into daily human experience that 4chan having an "Are you over 18" clickthrough is no more acceptable than a 21-and-up club leaving the back door unlocked and never carding once you're inside.

This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...

... I can see two positions on the topic which have merit. So it's a good thing there are separate nations to decide on different bars of safety.

I would have no problem with a world where 4chan is free to operate in the US and blocked in the UK. Different countries with different cultures.

Emotional maturity is important. So is platform maturity. We are long past the point where "reader beware" and "it's just a hobby site" are good enough in an era where under-policed fora result in actual harm. I appreciate 4chan's strong stance on the topic of it not being their job to police their house... But I do often find myself cheering when someone compels them, as a site that receives 22 million unique monthly visitors, to act like they have any host responsibility.

It's hard for me to be deeply supportive, beyond my legal requirements to be so, of a site that hosts /b/, /pol/, /hc/, and /gif/ because it chooses to host them too.

And they got it. "I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake." But that doesn't mean anyone needs feel sympathy for the devil. We're not obligated to cheer when the wretched hive of scum and villainy keeps its liquor license another year. The law was followed and we can move on.

> If your disgust for an entity prevents you from being able to recognize when they're doing something that's an unalloyed good

... It is usually the case when we're talking about 4chan (and always when talking about Kiwi Farms) that "unalloyed" is doing a lot of the kind of load-bearing one probably wants an alloy for. 4chan's most positive benefit to society is as a litmus test for precisely how far the [xkcd-1357](https://xkcd.com/1357/) principle goes. They are 100% welcome, per their freedom of the press (and the freedom of speech of their users), to host their website. On their infrastructure. With their own DOS protection. In a country that recognizes those rights and protects them. That's the system working as intended.