Holy crap! That is one big rattler. Stay out of the pumpkin patches, y'all!

Just saw this from the school that accuses Oklahoma State of stealing everything 🤔

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended. I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.) Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration. Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. [Original text (with links): deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is… ]

"We as OAN... we were never treating the White House as if it was some privileged thing we were granted... we always knew we were there at the grace of the White House... which is how it should be. In this latest lawsuit Dan... CNN... Politico... they're acting like... their argument is... their access to the White House is a first amendment right." Tonight, on Real America w/ @DanNewsManBall – Host of 'Fine Point' on One America News Chanel Rion @ChanelRion Watch Real America on OAN Live!

You ever watch those asteroid movies from the 90s and wonder what your emotions would be knowing impending doom is coming and all you can do is just wait for it to happen? Six days till OU plays #2 UGA in Athens

Hey @Polymarket what are the odds Washington is named The Redskins by the end of Trump’s term?

The U.S. delegation leaving Copenhagen with the deed to Greenland. .

Damn! Hope he’s ok.

Watch the “Parade of Loons” music video starring @IainLoveTheatre and directed by Peter Sluszka out now! This imaginative new video takes us into an animated world of Heartbreakers fandom. The previously unheard track is an outtake from the Heartbreakers’ 1978 studio album ‘You’re Gonna Get It!’, and is the opening track of ‘No Sleep Til L.A.,’ the first disc of the ‘Origins 1971-1978’ box set. Unearthed from 70s archives, “Parade of Loons” is one of 27 unreleased, live, extended and hidden gems in the box set. Watch the video now on @YouTube. piped.video/o074UPAjFxc ‘Origins 1971-9178’ – the comprehensive early years box set – Out November 6! Pre-order now: tompetty.lnk.to/Origins1971-…

There we go!

Since Butler is in the news again today, I thought I'd post what I saw from the front row after the shots rang out. Not staged.

At a loss for words on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Then I watched nearly 200 @FordhamNYC students, many born years later, climb 2,200 stadium steps in honor of the ascent FDNY firefighters undertook that day. They showed up. They remembered. I have hope for this generation.

These are the faces of the people who did this to us. .

Got to visit with some of the Oregon fans this morning as they were setting up their tailgates. More highlights to come!

The community notes coming to the rescue!

Boy George