"Those satellite photographs -- the landsat photographs -- are so darn good that when they re fully enhanced by computer, we can actually tell how high the waves are out in the middle of the Pacific; we can tell what the temperature of the ocean is 20 feet below.." - Grace Hopper in 1982 NSA lecture. YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9iqF5uTFk&t=1612s
I bet current spy satellite will be doing a lot things we can hardly imagine, may be we will know in 40-50 years down the line.
There are a few open-literature papers already on how a submarine's wake might show up in analysis of surface patterns. Doesn't seem hard to imagine that the classified literature is a few steps ahead.
100% agree on pay. Also Intel is ossified, there is less and less team where you are held accountable. Empire building is rampant. One of the fundamental thing missing is vision and how each team is relate to that vision.
A friend left his SWE position at Intel(He was part of the Altera acquisition) about 4 years ago. His weeks consisted of answering one email on Monday and working out the rest of the work week because his lead did pretty much nothing, and their manager not only did nothing, but made shit up regularly.
One problem with paying people significantly below market is that some of your people will be disgruntled and will optimize for working as little as possible without getting fired.
Soon enough there are entire groups whose culture aligns with cutting corners and pretending to work.
I wonder what stopping three letter agencies to secretly push for keyboard manufacturers in such way that each keystroke has unique sound and it becomes easier to detect keystrokes.
even if its not, enough decent fidelity data with letter/word frequency analysis
paired with small Neural net will quickly disambiguate keystrokes after the first paragraph.
The problem is, as stuff becomes easier and cheaper, usage becomes more widespread.
DNA tests used to be in the many thousands of $ range, so they were used for heavy crimes like murders and rape only. Nowadays, it's routine for police to use them for petty crimes like graffiti [1].
It's just the same for camera surveillance, mass exfiltration and analysis of just about the whole Internet's worth of traffic... even searching phones and datamining them is cheap enough these days that US CBP does it for travellers, and German authorities for refugees (until a court order stopped that crap [2]).
This kind of conspiracy theory mindset really just doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. Every keyboard manufacturer is going to build this in without anyone ever giving away the secret? How many people have to be in on the secret for this to work?
the problem with these rebuttals is that these types of exploits are regularly leaked (well on average: rather occasionally but in large batches, like Snowden leaks).
its like saying, humans haven't reached the moon, even though humanity witnessed it in the sixties.
Over the time I can see my dad getting that feeling. He is 76, it took him years to make peace with that feeling. Apparently it's unfortunate reality that we all have to go through it.
dumb question. I can understand LLM can be used for disinformation as it can generate text/image at scale. can you explain how it can do large scale surveillance?
LLMs can be fed a conversation and understand the intent of its participants, even if no particular keywords are used. Before this, surveillance was limited by how many human agents you could have sifting through recorded data.
Put another way: most people only get charged with a crime if it's worth a law-enforcement officer's time to catch you, but many small violations are ignored in favor of higher priorities. We may have to contemplate a future where AI is clever enough to notice everything that can be construed as a violation of some law and put on a prosecutor's backlog.
I wouldn't say that they can be used to do large-scale surveillance, but they can definitely facilitate it, especially with CV integration. I think one can easily imagine the following scenario: you fill a LLM with photos from people (taken from a public camera for instance), it finds the closest matches (via a web search for instance, as Gemini does). From then, you can easily gather the most essential information: first and last name, age, usernames... And then use this information to structure even more precise prompts and find even more potentially interesting data: posts on forums, relatives... And with this data, you can create an exhaustive database with a plethora of information and data about these people.
That's what any good stalker or person experienced with social engineering is able to do right now, but it takes a lot of time and energy. Resorting to LLMs would considerably decrease both. And it gets easier the more people you have information about.
almost always I really liked the book when a friend recommended it or i stumble upon online thread/conversation where somebody recommended a book. I rarely liked any book that was recommended from some recommender platform like goodread or other variants
This may sound troll post, but i assure you its not, I'm genuinely curious.
Can someone currently in USA on h1b or F1 but didn't get selected into lottery go to Mexico, enter USA illegally like many others these days. Register himself/herself and get some sort of work authorization and start working in tech?
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