I am honestly still confused about this limitation. I can understand cybersecurity, because mass "hacking" can be automated and Claude itself can help you do it, but biology...? Is it that easy to manufacture and distribute viruses and whatnot?
You can order genes online, and some say you can assemble using stuff cobbled together in a home lab rather easily. For the last 20 years, I've personally felt that bio-terrorism is the highest possible risk, well above nuclear, or chemical warfare. But it does take training, expertise, or, it did.
It’s like saying you sell ammonium nitrate and fuel oil online and then saying it’s too risky to let people have computers in case they use them to make ANFO. They can only make bioweapons because you’re selling them bioweapon components! They can’t make genes at home!
The companies selling genes online already scan the orders and do not fulfill anything considered a possible hazard (presumably unless it is to a known and certified lab at a serious organization).
And, this is not the only way to make genes at home.
You joke but it's really easy to develop viruses at home. You can order everything you need online, and it's not expensive nor does it require a particular skill set.
God I wish people on HN would just shut up with snarky takes about things they don't understand. This place used to be better.
I'm pretty sure one reason is to influence public opinion about LLM regulation. Open-weights models cannot be restricted as effectively and they want to ban those for obvious reasons.
Considering there are many high-school competitions in genetic editing, some listed at [0] as well as a whole biohacker culture, and labs providing gene sequencing as a service e.g., [1,2], we can reasonably assume it is not beyond the reach of some garage lab to accidentally or deliberately spread a deadly pathogen if it can find the right sequence.
So, yes, having an unconstrained frontier AI doing the searching and analysis to find the right (i.e., wrong and deadly) sequence would massively increase the odds some garage biohacker or small aggrieved nation-state starting the next pandemic.
HN doesn't give a shit about AI safety. The people here might care after thousands of people die, but they'll probably just call it a "marketing exercise" or blame the company - certainly won't blame themselves for cultivating an environment in which safety isn't taken seriously amongst technologists.
I'm convinced everyone here thinks of engineering ethics as some sort of joke.
rephrased for ease of interpretation - venting about a problem is nice just as stretching a muscle is nice. stretching doesn't fix the root cause of muscle soreness though, just as venting does nothing to fix the issue. emotionally re-reacting is likely to result in strengthening of existing associations, which is more likely to cause repetition of a problem scenario, as opposed to leading to scenario avoidance.
"talking about your mental health" does not mean re-parroting your trauma. there's understanding, re-framing, forgiving, all kind of other things that go beyond the limited belief that talking just calcifies trauma.
Yes, me. I suffered some serious depression that I cured through therapy and medication. Discussing it openly with my family and friends certainly helped.
As the saying goes, recognizing that you have a problem is the first step to being able to solve it.
venting is a form of talking about mental health. there are other forms that the problem statement doesn't apply to, like your examples. but the statement does apply to my example, therefore we can't say that talking about mental health is exclusively a positive behaviour.
Can you think of anything you can do that is exclusively a positive behavior? Drinking water in excess kills you, excess breathing kills you, excess exercise kills you, I think the logic here can be used to sow the seeds of uncertainty in nearly anything, honestly.
Only if it can be turned into gray market business: additional layers of proxies and VPNs, and whatever new is invented.
As simple "I care about privacy" need is not a reason to bother with setup for a regular person. So it could work only if it's as easy, as current internet. And for profit businesses provide it.
As for another protocol all together: there are some experiments already, but again, why use those?
I don’t know if you’re being silly but it is orders of magnitudes easier to modify an existing virus to selectively target certain snps than make “antiviral nanobots”
Claude, modify the existing 6ft killer virus so that it only makes my balls itch slightly for a day and gives me lifetime immunity to all further stamms of the 6ft killer virus. Make no mistakes, double check so the virus causes no unforseen complications.
Or when I wanted to write a novel and went into world-building fantasy enciclopedia for two years... I didn't even pass the page 2 of the novel, lol. Now it's all forgotten.
I remember seeing stacks of cards being carried into/out of the university "computing center" in the mid 1980s, on more than a couple of occasions. Though in retrospect, these were probably just old programs that had been in various professors offices since the mid 70s, being taken to get read into some disk in the mainframe.
We still learned how to use them in the 80’s high school computer classes, mostly because we had a balance of CP/M plus card-reader/early DOS machines, eventually .. in the labs. Rich kid schools had Apples though, and some of them also had card readers for BASIC ..
Finally, a sensible use case for BASIC's "READ" and "DATA" commands. Learning BASIC as a kid on a micro, it always struck me as an odd way to get input into a program. Sure, with INPUT, you'd have to hand enter your input every time, but baking into the program meant that you'd have to edit your program any time you wanted to change anything.
But with a card reader, you could "cut the deck". Keep the program cards, and then just stack on whatever set of data cards you wanted.
From this vantage point, in the 21st century with our flying cars and what not, it seems really quirky that back then, even your data could be a tangible thing.
Indeed, we still pay homage to the era with terms such as the stack, pushing and popping, and all kinds of things .. i remember we had fun inserting random infinite loops in other students cards on occasion until we all realized we could just have marked “finished” stacks with an X across the spine, and also to ease sorting, and so on .. i would mark certain sub-routines with different color markers on the spine too, just to see a budget for how much computing time i expected to be billed for, and so on and on .. lots of valuable hands on came from the card-based computing, its a lost art ..
My firt job out of college in the early 1990s was at an equipment manufacturer who was still using them. They had a big chart on the wall titled "punch-card elimination" and a line trending down, but it wasn't at zero yet.
My work there was all new code and didn't involve any of that, however.
I found that adding "philosophy" descriptions help guide the tooling. No specs, just general vibes what's the point, because we can't make everyone happy and it's not a goal of a good tool (I believe).
Technology, implementation may change, but general point of "why!?" stays.
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