> For the concrete problem we're discussing, you can hack your competitors out of existence, replace all of your knowledge workers to shed costs, hyperoptimise your logistics, etc. It's not just intelligence, it's speed and scale.
For the concrete problem we're discussing, that hypothetical belongs in a Marvel movie, not reality. In the real world, you can't 'hack your competitors out of existence', and you'll be going to prison very quickly for trying this sort of thing.
> especially if you're willing to break the law / normal operating decorum
in my original post. If you have a superintelligence, you have something that can find and take advantage of every exploitation vector in parallel - technical, social, bureaucratic - and use that to destroy a company from the inside. A superintelligence that is subservient to its operator is an informational superweapon.
I agree that this sounds fanciful, but you can see what existing cyberattacks can do to organisations; it does not take that much imagination to gauge how much worse it could be when the process can be automated and scaled.
> A superintelligence that is subservient to its operator is an informational superweapon.
The five dollar wrench attack will put an end to that operator's use of an informational superweapon.
> I agree that this sounds fanciful, but you can see what existing cyberattacks can do to organisations
What can it do? Generally, a minor disruption to operations.
It consistently does a lot less than what law enforcement can do to you if you start messing with other rich peoples' money, while having enough of a presence to own a super-intelligence and a trillion-dollar data center.
Within a day - well before any legal or societal force could intervene - a superintelligence could make its way into every part of an organisation's internal network and tear it apart from the inside.
Conventional hackers are limited by the serial nature of their work - finding breaches, exploiting them, conducting further exploration of the network, trying not to get detected - in ways that a superintelligence would not be. The latter could be a hundred times as effective, a hundred times as fast, and a hundred times more parallel.
I agree that this is unlikely to happen because the societal bill would come due in time, but my point is that a month's lead is enough to do significant and lasting damage.
> Useful models are getting smaller and cheaper to run every year and it has hit a threshold at which we will see continued development of third party harnesses even without the userbase of subscription users.
As of May 2026, how much money do I need to spend to buy hardware to have a local model that is 80% as good as SOTA services for assisting me in writing code?
As for that 80%, how many minutes per LOC will I be waiting, and how many attempts per query will I be wasting while I wait for it to come up with something sensible?
Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it.
Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.
It could also be conceived of as perfectly reasonable. One of the many (some very flawed) purposes of the ACA was to get more people insured, advertising that state-subsidized insurance is available for you is absolutely in that wheelhouse.
If retargeting is the problem, it should be banned across the board, both for public and private ad campaigns.
Opening a gas station is a lot easier than acquiring mineral rights, drilling an oil well, refining that oil, and getting it to market. Oh, and your customers can't just drive across the street to your competitor because they are 1c/litre cheaper.
There's naturally going to be a lot more friction and a lot less pop-up competition and therefore a lot more margin on the supply side of things.
The station has no power to raise margin - they are in tight competition with every other low-margin station around them. The suppliers, on the other hand... If they invested into wells that aren't affected by the war 10 years ago, and their competitors haven't (or have, but can't supply all the world's oil needs), and there's a global supply shortage - they have lots of room to raise prices.
Allright, I'll bite. Could you tell me if there's any meaningful distinction between someone hanging a Ukranian flag and a... Russian Federation flag? Circa 2026, do those flags stand for something, when hanging outside of either of those countries?
If they do, what do they stand for, and what would someone hanging one, versus the other, be communicating?
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