Tootfinder

The thesis I was reading spent the majority of it's time focused on John Boyd's OODA loop as a tool for critical analysis in high pressure or constrained situations. Table top exercises could also benefit from using these steps to slow down the thought process, expose what's actually happening, and sharpen these tools.
So each step could start by observing (which is generally what the GM will tell you, but you may ask additional questions to refine observational thinking). What do you look for in any given situation? How do you gather data? What sources do you use?
Next you would orient. Talk through this out loud. What does that data mean? How this fit what you already know, or does it challenge your assumptions? Are you observing something related to a previous action? What does that tell you about your previous action or actions? How do you turn the data you observed into intelligence you can act on? How do your observations narrow the options for the next possible action?
Then you decide your action. But you're not simply deciding, you're coming up with a hypothesis that your action will test. Anything you do is an opportunity to learn something about the world, about your situation, about the accuracy of the model you're using to make decisions. What belief does your next action imply? How will you know if that action was correct or incorrect? What observations would challenge your hypothesis? What observations would confirm it? Are those mutually exclusive, or are there additional observations or actions you must make to clarify things?
Then act. Finish your turn by choosing your action or actions (individually or collectively). Perhaps take a moment to write down notes, like what your observations, your hypothesis, and if you think your previous hypothesis was confirmed or refuted. You can review these all later to refine your thinking.
By exploring these ideas in a safe environment, you can train your brain to run through the process at high speed when under pressure. This helps you avoid panic. It's a lot like slowly practicing marshal arts moves until they become muscle memory, which then just happen without thought when needed.

Sources: Tencent and Alibaba are in talks to invest in DeepSeek at a $20B valuation, partly benchmarked against Moonshot's pending round at an $18B valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tencent-alibaba…

Tencent, Alibaba in Talks to Invest in DeepSeek at $20 Billion-Plus Valuation
Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group are in talks to invest in DeepSeek, the AI upstart that recently started fundraising for the first time, according to four people with knowledge of the conversations. DeepSeek, owned by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, is ...

🤔 Update (Business Name): Odin's Off-Ramp — divine intervention for conversations
Thinking of moving to the Scandinavian region of the world and selling my services of getting people out of uncomfortable small-talk situations.
Hit a button on your app, and I'll be there in a few minutes to get between you and your emotional assailant. How dare they ask you, “How was your weekend?”

So one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.

In summary then, it is indeed quite like being at school. Half hour lessons on things that probably won't ever actually be useful to know in your particular job of varying levels of interest. Mostly pretty low interest honestly. Bumping into colleagues between lessons.
Learned the names of a couple of tools I might try. One google search would have gotten me those but I guess it's a question of thinking to look for them.
If you can judge the mood of an industry from a random selection of talks from a single conference then the industry is very optimistic that they can make AI write a lot of software.
It seems to think this is likely to mean fewer programmers rather than there being more software meaning more workers.
It wasn't as AI heavy as I thought when I first glanced at the program. Managed to mostly be not-ai I think.
Nobody talking about the ethical implications or suggesting joining a union and only one talk about the environment issue at all, it not really noting how much power the industry is about to take.
Liked having a few meals in amserdam with colleagues I never usually see (mostly remote workers, including me). The boss is pretty good at picking people really.
Get a day or so of holiday now too.
#devWorld

Thinking about some things that @… said in another thread, and as someone who advocates against AI hype and against the use of most generative AI in most circumstances, I feel it's important to say: many of the ethical issues with using generative AI mirror almost directly the ethical issues with living/working on land stolen by colonists, except that they're less harmful.
Arguments like "well we don't really know whose work it's ripping off this time" and "artists that post their art online know it's going to be looked at; this is the same thing" and "well it's inevitable and everyone's doing it so it's unreasonable to make a big deal about it" directly echo arguments like "well now we don't know whose land it was any more exactly" (yes, we do; you can literally go look up the website of their descendants), or "the natives weren't really using the land anyways", or "it's all in the past now, and it's unavoidable." That unavoidable one is actually somewhat true of using stolen land, at least compared to LLM usage.
If you can see through those lies in the case of AI hype but choose not to do so in the case of colonialism, that says something about your priorities and allegiances.
This is not at all a call for people to talk less about AI; rather it's a call for those who take opposing AI hype seriously to look around and make some noise about other injustices too (I realize many of you already do this).
#AI #LLMs #LandBack #GenAI