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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • This scream into the void has been on my mind for a while: Apparently I work for an AI company now.

    Kinda.

    When I had the interviews with my now-employer at the beginning of the year, they were an open-source cybersecurity startup. Everything sounded great, we got along, signed the contract. I took a long vacation before starting the position, and when I got back, I was… amused? bewildered? to find that a), we are no longer open source; and b), we have pivoted, hard, towards AI.

    Luckily, I still get to work 100% of the time on the core (cybersecurity) product (which is actually a really good and useful thing, sorry, not going to be more specific), it’s just that part of the dev team, as well as all of marketing and sales, now work on building and selling an AI product built on top of that.

    At least it’s not a wrapper around ChatGPT, and does offer something kinda new and actually beneficial, but still, it’s an LLM product.

    Now, for the actual scream-into-the-void: Once a month, in a company-wide meeting, I have to observe how people praise LLMs to the the moon, attribute nonsense or downright bugs to something akin to proto-sentience, and give absurd estimates of profitability based on the idea that AI will totally be used everywhere and by everyone, very soon now, you’ll see. What finally prompted (pun intended) me to post this is the CEO yesterday unironically referencing AI 2027’s “predictions”.

    Can’t wait for the bubble to burst. I’m really curious to see if I’ll keep my job through that. At the end of the day, the stuff I work on luckily has nothing to do with AI, and basically every other application of the product makes more sense; but now the entire company has shifted gears towards AI…





  • I’d have imagined something along these lines:

    • USER visits porn site
    • PORN site encrypts random nonce + “is this user 18?” with GOV pubkey
    • PORN forwards that to USER
    • USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
    • GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
    • GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
    • GOV returns that to USER
    • USER forwards that to PORN
    • PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
    • but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)

    There’s probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of “GOV should know nothing”.