Elon makes Grok developers install intrusive surveillance software on their laptops. They're being told to enable screen captures and URL tracking.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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In conjunction with his comments about making it antiwoke by modifying the input data rather then relying on a system prompt after filling it with everything, it's hard not to view this as part of an attempt to ideologically monitor these tutors to make sure they're not going to select against versions of the model that aren't in the desired range of "closeted Nazi scumbag."
prompt injection phish by email
so glad these things have a solid security model and this totally won’t result in a scrambled half-assed fix
A prompt-injection attack on Google's Gemini model was disclosed through 0din, Mozilla's bug bounty program
Whenever I think Mozilla can't get any worse...
So now they do "Agentic Security" and "Real-time GenAI intelligence on emerging threats".
mozilla has for years had a habit of tailchasing some utterly fucking weird shit instead of focusing on their core business, and this feels very much like part of that. but fucking still
This isn't an original thought, but a better matrix for comparing the ideology (such as it is) of the current USG is not Nazi Germany but pre-war US right wing obsessions - anti-FDR and anti-New Deal.
This appears in weird ways, like this throwaway comment regarding the Niihau incident, where two ethnic Japanese inhabitants of Niihau helped a downed Japanese airman immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Imagine if you will, one of the 9/11 hijackers parachuting from the plane before it crashed, asking a random muslim for help, then having that muslim be willing to immediately get himself into a shootouts, commit arson, kidnappings, and misc mayhem.
Then imagine that it was covered in a media environment where the executive branch had been advocating for war for over a decade, and voices which spoke against it were systematically silenced.
(src)
Dude also credits LessOnline with saving his life due to unidentified <<>> shooting up his 'hood when he was there. Charming.
Edit nah he's a neo-Nazi (or at least very concerned about the fate of German PoWs after WW2):
This is, sadly, pretty unsurprising, as carrying forward the anti-FDR/anti-New Deal movement was a foundational pillar of the libertarianism that Trump co-opted. Heavily promoted by the LewRockwell.com/Mises.org crowd.
So random thought, you now how LW is worried about an seed AI going foom right, how it bootstraps itself into a new AI with better capabilities which bootstraps etc all the way till the singularity.
Why isn't it happening? Gpt-2 was released 2019, 3 2022, 4 2023, so where is 5 and 6? Where is our double event?
Remember Devin, the AI coding bot that turned out to be a complete scam?
Well, looks like Goldman Sachs decided to let it loose on its code base. In YOLO mode too, it seems.
Devin will be supervised by human employees and will handle jobs that engineers often consider drudgery, like updating internal code to newer programing languages, he said.
Good luck to the workers having to debug that shit.
Goldman is the first major bank to use Devin, according to Cognition, which was founded in late 2023 by a trio of engineers and whose staff is reportedly stocked with champion coders.
Being good at Codeforces contests surely translates to any other domain. I expect the Cognition guys to fully deliver on their promises.
It would be really funny if Devin caused a financial crash this way
Total fucking Devin move if you ask me.
LW:
Please consider minimizing direct use of AI chatbots (and other text-based AI) in the near-term future, if you can. The reason is very simple: your sanity may be at stake.
Perfect. No notes.
the comments are wild "yes good post having my brain taken over by a superintelligent autocomplete is a reasonable concern"
The top comment begins thusly:
I think you make a reasonably compelling case, but when I think about the practicality of this in my own life it's pretty hard to imagine not spending any time talking to chatbots. ChatGPT, Claude and others are extremely useful.
I didn't think it was possible, but the perfection continues! Still, no notes!
They're LWers, they already baked their psyche long ago
LW'er: "sorry can you excuse me for a moment? I'm having a bad day, somebody gave me a stack of papers with a paperclip in it"
(I do now worry if there are actual LWers who for real gave themselves ptsd like reactions from seeing paperclips. Like the woman who mistook 'free parking' for 'free palestine' a couple of years back).
wonder if that's why they tried and failed to change it to "squiggle maximizing"
A hackernews muses about vibe coding a chatbot to provide therapy for people in crisis. Soon, an actual health care professional shows up to butcher the offender and defile the corpse. This causes much tut-tutting and consternation among the locals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535197
Edit: a shower thought: have any of yall noticed the way that prompt enjoyers describe using Cursor, tab completions, and such are a repackaging of the psychology of loot boxes? In particular, they share the variable-interval reward schedule that serves as the hook in your typical recreational gambling machines.
One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370
the psychology of loot boxes?
yep! https://awful.systems/post/4568900
the book is "Hooked" and it's Don't Build The Torment Nexus I'm Now Providing You A Detailed Blueprint Of
Ye gods! Also, great write-up!
Do you reckon that Altman recognized the gacha potential from the get-go? That Big LLM has always been FanDuel for dorks, but on purpose?
I’ve been making casual observation how a number of the adhd people I know to have addiction tendencies tend to get real into prompts, but hadn’t observed the lootbox thing
that’s going into the ponder bucket.
you should be read up on the gospel of @fasterandworse never shutting up about "Hooked"
Musk objects to the "stochastic parrot" labelling of LLMs. Mostly just the stochastic part.
"We made it more truth-seeking, as determined by our boss, the fascist megalomaniac."
Wake up babe, new alignment technique just dropped: Reinforcement Learning Elon Feedback
I have become aware that there is a very right wing Catholic podcaster who has a Catholicism AI chatbot app. It's called Truthly.
Your Trusted Catholic AI Conversation Companion Deepen your understanding, explore ideas, and engage in meaningful dialogue—anytime, anywhere.
If someone could call up Pope Leo and get him to excommunicate the guys who invented this, that would be great.
Nah, we just need to make sure they properly baptise whatever servers it's running on.
really, really thoroughly baptise. not just drops but fistfuls of water. the more water the more holy. the servers will love being really holy!
Just throw the whole unit into the font, just to be safe. Or better yet, a river!
Can’t find the angle to spin this out into a grown-up buttcoin post, but if I did, the title would be “Horse_ebutts”.
Anyway: recently I’ve been burdened with the knowledge that there’s a bunch of horse racing related crypto companies. They’re all obviously terrible.
- Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
- EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
- BTX Racing: a blockchain platform for buying stake in horses. Not sure if you get to choose which cut of the horse you own. Also, not sure if when you liquidate your equine tranche you get cash or a bucket of glue.
Also, insert obligatory stablecoin reference here.
Wait wtf I once built a blockchain called equestreum *as a joke* https://github.com/hat-festival/equestreum I need to step away from the lathe
think of all the rug you could have pulled...
Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.
They're also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who's winning this particular fight for people's cash.
EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.
It'd arguably be helpful if the caregivers are helping themselves to the stash, but I doubt there's anything stopping then from BSing the blockchain, too.
Yeah that "they can just input bs" has always been the whole issue with those whole logging bit on the blockchain stuff. Esp considering the costs and risk of implementing a thing like this and the low costs of normal existing logging I dont see how this could ever become mainstream viable. (And that is ignoring the ease of use).
They’re also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who’s winning this particular fight for people’s cash.
It's almost as if people don't want to spend money on bland low-poly 3D models of horses and would instead prefer waifu art with surprisingly intricate character design that I definitely do not know anything about*
*I actually do not, but for the bit, pretend that I do and am being defensive
I can honestly say that I have never played Umamusume Pretty Derby ^because^ ^on^ ^my^ ^PC^ ^the^ ^sound^ ^keeps^ ^cutting^ ^out^ ^and^ ^the^ ^cutscenes^ ^don't^ ^play^ ^which^ ^greatly^ ^disappointed^ ^me.^
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.
womp, hold on let me finish, womp
had a quick scan over the blogposts earlier, keen to read the paper
would be nice to see some more studies with more numbers under study, but with the cohort they picked the self-reported vs actual numbers are already quite spicy
and n=16 handily beats the usual promptfondler n=1
Also the attempt to actually measure productivity instead of just saying "they felt like it helped" - of course it did!
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JspxcjkvBmye4cW4v/asking-for-a-friend-ai-research-protocols
Multiple people are quietly wondering if their AI systems might be conscious. What's the standard advice to give them?
Touch grass. Touch all the grass.
Username called "The Dao of Bayes". Bayes's theorem is when you pull the probabilities out of your posterior.
知者不言，言者不知。 He who knows (the Dao) does not (care to) speak (about it); he who is (ever ready to) speak about it does not know it.
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HN commenters are slobbering all over the new Grok. Virtually every commenter bringing up Grok's recent full-tilt Nazism gets flagged into oblivion.
this particular abyss just fucking hurts to gaze into
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