I think you're missing the actual problem.

I'm not worried about this project but instead harvesting, analyzing all that data and deanonymizing people.

That's exactly what Karparthy is saying. He's not being shy about it. He said "behave because the future panopticon can look into the past". Which makes the panopticon effectively exist now.

  Be good, future LLMs are watching
  ...
  or humans using them might be

That's the problem. Not the accuracy of this toy project, but the idea of monitoring everyone and their entire history.

The idea that we have to behave as if we're being actively watched by the government is literally the setting of 1984 lol. The idea that we have to behave that way now because a future government will use the Panopticon to look into the past is absolutely unhinged. You don't even know what the rules of that world will be!

Did we forget how unhinged the NSA's "harvest now, decrypt later" strategy is? Did we forget those giant data centers that were all the news talked about for a few weeks?

That's not the future I want to create, is it the one you want?

To act as if that future is unavoidable is a failure of *us*

▲ jacquesm 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, you are right, this is a real problem. But it really is just a variation on 'the internet never forgets', for instance in relation to teen behavior online. But AI allows for weaponization of such information. I wish the wannabe politicians of 2050 much good luck with their careers, they are going to be the most boring people available.

▲

godelski 2 days ago | parent [-]

The internet never forgets but you could be anonymous. Or at least somewhat. But that's getting harder and harder

If such a thing isn't already possible (it is to a certain extent), we are headed towards a point where your words alone will be enough to fingerprint you.

▲

jacquesm 2 days ago | parent [-]

Stylometry killed that a long time ago. There was a website, stylometry.net that coupled HN accounts based on text comparison and ranked the 10 best candidates. It was incredibly accurate and allowed id'ing a bunch of people that had gotten banned but that came back again. Based on that I would expect that anybody that has written more than a few KB of text to be id'able in the future.

▲

godelski 2 days ago | parent [-]

You need a person's text with their actual identity to pull that off. Normally that's pretty hard, especially since you'll get different formats. Like I don't write the same way on Twitter as HN. But yeah, this stuff has been advancing and I don't think it is okay.

▲

jacquesm 2 days ago | parent [-]

The AOL scandal pretty much proved that anonymity is a mirage. You may think you are anonymous but it just takes combining a few unrelated databases to de-anonymize you. HN users think they are anonymous but they're not, they drop factoids all over the place about who they are. 33 bits... it is one of my recurring favorite themes and anybody in the business of managing other people's data should be well aware of the risks.

▲

godelski 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think you're being too conspiracy theorist here by making everything black and white.

Besides, the main problem of how difficult it is to deanonymize, not if possible.

Privacy and security both have to perfect defense. For example, there's no passwords that are unhackable. There are only passwords that cannot be hacked with our current technology, budgets, and lifetime. But you could brute force my HN password, it would just take billions of years.

The same distinction it's important here. My threat model on HN doesn't care if you need to spend millions of dollars nor thousands of hours to deanonymize me. My handle is here to discourage that and to allow me to speak more freely about certain topics. I'm not trying to hide from nation states, I'm trying to hide from my peers in AI and tech. So I can freely discuss my opinions, which includes criticizing my own community (something I think everyone should do! Be critical of the communities we associate with). And moreso I want people to consider my points on their merit alone, not on my identity nor status.

If I was trying to hide from nation states I'd do things very very differently, such as not posting on HN.

I'm not afraid of my handle being deanonymized, but I still think we should recognize the dangers of the future we are creating.

By oversimplifying you've created the position that this is a lost cause, as if we already lost and that because we lost we can't change. There are multiple fallacies here. The future has yet to be written.

If you really believe it is deterministic then what is the point to anything? To have desires it opinions? Are were just waiting to see which algorithm wins out? Or are we the algorithms playing themselves out? If it's deterministic wouldn't you be happy if the freedom algorithm won and this moment is an inflection in your programming? I guess that's impossible to say in an objective manner but I'd hope that's how it plays out

	▲	jacquesm a day ago \| parent [-]
		I have enough industry insights to prove that your data is floating out there, unprotected, in plain text and that those that are not bound by the law are making very good use of it. Every breach leaks more bits about you. This is the main driver behind the targeted scams that ordinary people now have to deal with. It is why people get voice calls from loved ones in distress, why they get 'tech support' calls that aim to take over their devices and why lots of people have lost lots of money. If you think I am too conspiracy theorist by making everything black and white that is maybe simply because we live different lives and have different experience.