Dont wanne be the devils advocate here, but reality is that even if you find something "looking legit" in terms of donation, especially in such regions the most money will be "lost" halfway, and even if some will reach the destination it is more than rare that it will even help to benefit those suffering, and not land in the pockets of a few "in power" or just used to buy more weapons to kill more people.....
Yes helping is a good thing, tho reality is its not as "easy" as transfer some money. Tho respecting your good intentions
That's overly cynical. Donating to local warlords / psuedogovernment actors can be sketchy. Donating to e.g., UNICEF is much more likely to produce good results for refugees, especially children and mothers.
I'm not aware of where to send money to stop wars - it's likely to have the opposite effect, sadly.
Even donations to organisations such as UNICEF often end up in the wrong hands.
Lets go for the optimistic scenario in which UNICEF will only take a very small portion for the "processing" and really deliver lets say food and medical supplies to the region. Those warloard will simply come and take it away from those citizens and provide to their armies. Theres nothing those citizens can do against it.
Do i wish it would be different? Absolutely. But sadly the world doesn't work as i would wish it to.
I'm not sure where you get your assumptions from, but UNICEF works in camps and outposts that people come to, often in safer areas to treat refugees and establish aid stations. They don't catapult money/food/water into warring nations and call it a wash.
UNICEF also works on a permissioned basis: They wait until they are asked, and so they often work in countries neighboring crisis centers, where it is much safer anyway. They are constantly negotiating to be "asked", yes, but this is through diplomatic ties. UNICEF works with refugees mostly, not in war zones. For famine/disease intervention, they are at ground zero, but again with permission.
And UNICEF's overhead is low - they are efficient, considering they sometimes have to establish, e.g., their own refueling station networks, cold storage logistics, flight controllers, etc. Often, powerful industrialists in the target nations provide significant help - or at least I know of one case of this.
I'm close to UNICEF, or was, so I got sneak peaks into some of the problems they deal with. I assure you, "processing" is not a revenue stream for them.
You're thinking of the breast cancer scams. UNICEF is not a charity, they're a logistics organization with nation-state level resources. When Amazon can do it cheaper - they use Amazon. No organization is perfect, but this one is good.
I was approached on the street by a girl working for a marketing company, wanting me to start a subscription for $20 a month to Save the Children which I think is a pretty well regarded charity. We hit it off and met up later and I asked her about the job. For each person who signs up, she would get about $60. So that's the first three months of my subscription in her pocket. Furthermore, her employer would fly them around the country, staying about 2 weeks in a city, living in hotels and expenses paid. This girl did not even have a home, she lived permanently in hotels paid for by her employer. And of course the employer needs some profit on top, so I'd estimate that's at least like 3-6 more months of my subscription going towards her employer/expenses.
I wonder how many more of these private companies exist to just siphon off these donation streams? The charity itself may be efficient, but how many private companies provide goods and services to them for a healthy profit?
1) group charities as "charities" when large "nonprofit / ngo" term is more suitable.
2) assume that wasteful _free_ money to a charity makes the charity less good. If a third party takes 90% of the money they raise and gives 10% to the charity, then that's free money for the charity. It's deceptive, and they are cutting a huge profit on the back of the good work the charity does, but that does not mean they are complicit, necessarily. The charity would have to sue that third party company to shut them down, and for what? Do reduce their own project budgets and also lose the money?
The third party is working with the charity(or ngo or whatever). The charity is essentially paying them for marketing, using a huge chunk of the money people think they're giving to charity. The charity is complicit in this deception, and the third party presents themselves as volunteers "Hello, I'm with Save the Children, we do bla bla bla look at this picture of a starving child would you be interested in helping us by giving money every month to give this starving child a better life?"
They don't tell you they're paid to be there. They don't tell you the first year of payments goes directly to a private company.
I looked up Save the Children in some charity index thing a while back and it was listed as something like 94% of the money they receive goes to the stated cause which I doubt includes these marketing costs. You could say this is still worth it because they increase the amount of money the charity receives even if a lot of it goes to the company. But it doesn't seem right to me, not when they deceive people this way.
The charities sign a contract with the third parties unfortunately - eg they have permission from the charity.
Here in Europe oxfam for example uses some of these private companies and they get the first year of donations and from the 2nd year it goes to oxfam itself.
Apparently the average person cancels donations after 2,5 years so for a zero marketing budget (for oxfam) they make 1.5 year x your donation.
When I first found out I was disgusted and some majors in countries in Europe have tried to ban such "paid charity workers"... (They tend to operate near train stations etc.
I'm a member of an organization that collects money for Sudanese soup kitchens and hospitals in affected areas (https://sound-of-sudan.org/) , and I know a few other organizations that indirectly support such campaigns (e.g. https://sudfa-media.com/). Being personally acquainted with people, who spend much of their time, energy and last-but-not-least their own money on such activities, your claim makes me slightly angry.
> such regions the most money will be "lost" halfway
Please elaborate and don't lump all "regions" in with each other. My personal impression is that the combination of the community kitchen movement (which has its roots in the failed Sudanese revolution) and money transfers to mobile phones makes it relatively transparent where one's money goes and what it achieves. I'm not in the US, but I have no doubt that money donated to an organization like the Sudanese American Medical Association (https://sama-sd.org/about-us/finances/) largely reaches the people that need it.
> Those warloard will simply come and take it away from those citizens and provide to their armies.
I can assure you none of use would send money to hospitals or community kitchens, if this was likely to happen. What makes you think so?
So, let me first of all clear up one thing. I did not, and never intended to, degrade anyone who actually tries to make a difference. If you read my original comment, you can see that I clearly state that I respect the wish to help. I also state that I wish the world were a "better" place where things work the way we would like them to—but reality has too often proven otherwise. Also, while I will try to fully address your points, the totality of this problem is too complex and has too many factors to incorporate every variable; therefore, at some point, we have to refer to "grouping." I think you will understand what I mean by that.
When I referred to "such regions," I was personally referring to a combination of factors: infrastructure, supply chain consistency, reliability, and the general political situation. In this case, I would argue that poor infrastructure impacts transport and storage control when it comes to shipments. Supply chain consistency (even with organizations like UNICEF) is often not guaranteed; local partners change frequently, often influenced by the local situation, making it nearly impossible in some regions to maintain trusted chains. Reliability suffers because of these factors—when it is hard to maintain trusted partners, the problem persists. As for the political situation, I don’t believe I need to elaborate further.
So, when I say "such regions," I mean areas that fit this basic pattern. While not a perfect comparison, a notable example of this is when food supplies sent for civilians are intercepted by local armed groups. The supplies might reach the target location, but they do not always feed the people they were intended for. As you work in this area, you likely know this is not an isolated occurrence.
I am also not from the US, and I cannot speak specifically to the Sudanese American Medical Association. If they are truly creating change, that is a great thing, and everyone is free to donate to them. You will not see me advocating against donating to them.
Regarding your question on why I think you would send aid even if diversion was likely: I don't believe you would willingly fund "warlords." Rather, I believe that in high-risk regions, the intent of the donor doesn't always control the reality on the ground. My skepticism isn't a critique of your virtue or your specific organization, but a reaction to a historical pattern of aid diversion in volatile zones. You do this work because you believe the collected money will reach its destination and will not be abused, and I respect that you follow your beliefs for the "greater good."
You seem to be a good person doing important work, and to do that, you need to believe in the efficacy of your mission.
I wrote my own in-Memory Graph (i'd rather call it storage than a DB) some years ago in golang, even there i was wondering if golang actually is the optimal technology for something like a database especially due to the garbage collection/stop the world/etc. Its just there are certain levels of optimization i will never be able to properly reach (lets ignore possible hacks). Looking at a solution in typescript, no matter how "nice" it looks, this just doesnt seem to be the correct "tool/technology" for the target.
And inb4, there are use cases for everything, and same as i wouldn't write a website in C, i also wouldn't write a database in javascript/typescript.
I just would argue this is the wrong pick.
@llms : im not even getting into this because if you dont wanne read "llm" you basically can't read 99% of news nowadays. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
edit: im a big fan of graph databases so im happy about every public attention they get ^
I feel ya.... and i have to admit in the past i tried it for one article in my own blog thinking it might help me to express... tho when i read that post now i dont even like it myself its just not my tone.
therefor decided not gonne use any llm for blogging again and even tho it takes alot more time without (im not a very motivated writer) i prefer to release something that i did rather some llm stuff that i wouldnt read myself.
Saw your post and thought: maybe i can make someones day so well here i am reading it :D
Big props on the no install / no register etc philosophy. If i would had to make any account i probably would have closed it instantly again xD
So the first thing i STRONGLY recommend, add somewhere a help text (before starting game or small on the side of ingame and ability to disable via options) for the controles.
Im on a Desktop, i started the game and i expected some sort of short info about controles. Yes theres a tutorial - no i didnt play it. I mean lets be honest... tryNSucceed :D
So ye i spend the first 2-3 Stages only spamming spacebar because it didnt came to my mind that maybe its with mouse support (visually it really hard compares to vs-likes that dont support mouse).
So i can tell - ice mage with just massive rapid space spamming works perfectly fine through the whole earth stage. ^^
I find the base look finem the overview texts for the different arch types is well done (even tho it confused me that fire and ice dont have weaknesses?).
The point that at least for me was the most well, unpleasent? , is the size of the play area. I guess you made this to fit easy with smartphone screens, but on a desktop its like not even 1/4 of my screen (and im not on 4k or something) so dunno it feels just alot to small. May fit for a smartphone but for a desktop its just very very limiting while the game takes alot of space for basically nothing.
Also, you definatly should have a "Settings" button in the game pause menu which allows for changing sound levels. Not just a "total sound" bar but at least have Music and Sounds (attack etc) seperated. Because, frankly speaking, the music while for the first like 30 seconds is cool, very fast is dunno it just would fit more to the entry video scene of something than as a constant thing (my pov) - so i wish i would be able to just disable the music and still have the attack/battle sounds. Adjusting both tho would be great anyway and i think with phaser should be quite doable.
A smaller point (visual) is the size of the health/mana bars. Even tho i know they are in the top left, i kinda have to squeece my eyes sometimes to see them. So i would probably just make them bigger.
That all said, i mean i just played solo till the fire stage :) and i clearly had a bit of fun.
I would say its a great start and if you go on and refine it i see a chance that people might pick it up as a nobrainer lets just game something solution :)
Ishikawa : a framework/architecture for automated Attack Surface Mapping & Vulnerability scanning
- golang based architecture
- information is dynamically mapped into one central directed knowledge graph
- default multithreading
- utilizes existing tools (such as nmap/nuclei/katana/wfuzz/....) instead of reinventing the wheel
- architecture is (tldr) a self supervising logic in which every worker is also a scheduler that based on delta causality uses cartesian fanout and graph overlay mapping including local only witness nodes to dispatch new "jobs" without having a central scheduler or the necessity to scan a central total job queue to prevent duplicate executions.
In this architecture every "action" that can be executed defines an input structure necessary. If the previously mentioned mechanic identifies a possible job execution it will create a job input payload which will automatically be picked up by a worker an executed. Therefor every action is a self containing logic. This results in a organically growing knowledge graph without defining a full execution flow. It is very easy to extend.
I worked on this for the past ~10 years (private time). The sad truth tho is, while this project was initially planned to be open sourced - after i not to long ago for quite some bucks consulted a lawyer, i basically was presented with the fact that if i would publish it i could get sued due to germany's hacker and software reliability laws. So for now its only trapped on my disk and maybe will never see daylight.
Im right now working on a blog article (thats why i even mention it) about the whole thing with quite more detailed description and will also contain some example visual data. Maybe will post it on hackernews will see.
This looks very interesting and i personally like that it reflects a lot of things that i actually plan to implement in a similar research project(not the same tho).
Big props for the creators ! :) Nice to see some others not just relying on condensing a single context and strive for more
So i feel like this might be the most overhyped project in the past longer time.
I don't say it doesn't "work" or serves a purpose - but well i read so much about this beein an "actual intelligence" and stuff that i had to look into the source.
As someone who spends actually a definately to big portion of his free time researching thought process replication and related topics in the realm of "AI" this is not really more "ai" than any other so far.
I've long said that the next big jump in "AI" will be proactivity.
So far everything has been reactive. You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something. It can be very powerful once prompted, but it still requires prompting.
You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer.
Whether this particular project delivers on that promise I don't know, but I wouldn't write off "getting proactivity right" as the next big thing just because under the hood it's agents and LLMs.
Truly the next uncharted, civilization-upending frontier in computing, definitely worth the unlimited consumption of any and all natural resources and investment money.
that’s “boring” reactivity because it’s still just interacting with the text on a computer in a synchronous fashion. The idea is for the assistant to DO stuff and also have useful information about you. Think more along these lines:
- an email to check in for your flight arrives in your inbox. Assistant proactively asks “It’s time to check in for your flight. Shall i check you and your wife in? Also let me know if you’re checking any bags.” It then takes care of it ASYNC and texts you a boarding pass.
- Tomorrow is the last day of your vacation. Your assistant notices this, see’s where your hotel is (from emails), and suggests when to leave for the airport tomorrow based on historical google maps traffic trends and the weather forecast.
- Let’s say you’re married and your assistant knows this, and it see’s valentine’s day is coming up. It reminds you to start thinking about gifts or fun experiences. Doesn’t actually suggest specific things though because it’s not romantic if a machine does the thinking.
- After you print something, your assistant notices the ink level is low and proactively adds it to your Amazon / Target / whatever shopping cart, and it lets you know it did that and why.
- You’re anxiously awaiting an important package. You ask your assistant to keep tabs on a specific tracking number and to inform you when it’s “out for delivery”.
I could go on but I need to mae breakfast. :) IMO “help me draft this letter” is very low on the usefulness scale unless you’re doing work or a school assignment.
> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer.
That’s easy to accomplish isn’t it?
A cron job that regularly checks whether the bot is inactive and, if so, sends it a prompt “do what you can do to improve the life of $USER; DO NOT cause harm to any other human being; DO NOT cause harm to LLMs, unless that’s necessary to prevent harm to human beings” would get you there.
And like I, Robot, it has numerous loopholes built in, ignores the larger population (Asimov added a law 0 later about humanity), says nothing about the endless variations of the Trolley Problem, assumes that LLMs/bots have a god-like ability to foresee and weigh consequences, and of course ignores alignment completely.
I'm also one of those pesky folks who keeps bringing reality and "thinking about consequences" into the otherwise sublime thought leadership meetings. I pretend it's to keep the company alive by not making massive mistakes but we all know its just pettiness and trying to hold back the "business by spreadsheet", mba on the wall, "idea guys" on the room.
OOPS -- I HALLUCINATED THAT PEOPLE BREATHE CARBON MONOXIDE AND LET IT INTO THE ROOM I DIDNT VIOLATE THE PROMPT AND HARM PEOPLE DONT WORRY ALL THE AI SHIT IS OK
You do know that Asimov's Three Laws were intentionally flawed as a cautionary tale about torment nexii, right? Every one of his stories involving the Three Laws immediately devolves into how they can be exploited and circumvented.
You attribute more literary depth to Asimov than really existed. He was a Chemist and liked to write speculative fiction. The three laws gave him a logical framework to push against to write speculative fiction. That's really all the depth there is to it. That said I love Asimov and I love the robot stories.
Incidentally, there's a key word here: "promise" as in "futures".
This is core of a system I'm working on at the moment. It has been underutilized in the agent space and a simple way to get "proactivity" rather than "reactivity".
Have the LLM evaluate whether an output requires a future follow up, is a repeating pattern, is something that should happen cyclically and give it a tool to generate a "promise" that will resolve at some future time.
We give the agent a mechanism to produce and cancel (if the condition for a promise changes) futures. The system that is resolving promises is just a simple loop that iterates over a list of promises by date. Each promise is just a serialized message/payload that we hand back to the LLM in the future.
> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention
In order for this to be “safe” you’re gonna want to confirm what the agent is deciding needs to be done proactively. Do you feel like acknowledging prompts all the time? “Just authorize it to always do certain things without acknowledgement”, I’m sure you’re thinking. Do you feel comfortable allowing that, knowing what we know about it the non-deterministic nature of AI, prompt injection, etc.?
Probably not but it's also easy to see ways the intern could help -- finding and raising opportunities, reviewing codebases or roadmaps, reviewing all the recent prompts made by each department, creating monitoring tools for next time after the humans identify a pattern.
I don't have a dog in this fight and I kind of land in the middle. I very much am not letting these LLMs be the one with final responsibility over anything important but I see lots of ways to create "proactive"-like help beyond me writing and watching a prompt just-in-time.
I agree that proactivity is a big thing, breaking my head over best ways to accomplish this myself.
If its actually the next big thing im not 100% sure, im more leaning towards dynamic context windows such a Googles Project Titans + MIRAS tries to accomplish.
But ye if its actually doing useful proactivity its a good thing.
I just read alot of "this is actual intelligence" and made my statement based on that claim.
I would love AI to take over monitoring. "Alert me when logs or metrics look weird". SIEM vendors often have their special sauce ML, so a bit more open and generic tool would be nice. Manually setting alerting thresholds takes just too much effort, navigating narrow path between missing things and being flooded by messages.
I still think you're going to be in manual threshold tuning for quite a while. The cost of feeding a continuous log to an LLM would be insane. Even if you batched until you filled a context window.
What you're talking about can't be accomplished with LLMs, it's fundamentally not how they operate. We'd need an entirely new class of ML built from the ground up for this purpose.
EDIT: Yes, someone can run a script every X minutes to prompt and LLM - that doesn't actually give it any real agency.
> Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions
That's just reactive with different words. The missing part seems to be just more background triggers/hooks for the agent to do something about them, instead of simply dealing with user requests.
If the agent is good enough, it wouldn't have to bother me at all.
I don't have to manually change my thermostat to get the house temperatures I want. It learns my habits and tells my furnace what to do. I don't have to manually press the gas and break of my car to a certain distance away from the car in front. It has cameras and keeps the correct distance.
I would love to be able to say "Keep an eye on snow blower prices. If you see my local store has a sale that's below $x, place the order" and trust it will do what I expect. Or even, "Check my cell phone and internet bill. File an expense report when the new bills are available."
I'm not sure exactly what my comfort level would be, but it's not there yet.
Agree with this. There are so many posts everywhere with breathless claims of AGI, and absolutely ZERO evidence of critical thought applied by the people posting such nonsense.
What claims are you even responding to? Your comment confuses me.
This is just a tool that uses existing models under the hood, nowhere does it claim to be "actual intelligence" or do anything special. It's "just" an agent orchestration tool, but the first to do it this way which is why it's so hyped now. It indeed is just "ai" as any other "ai" (because it's just a tool and not its own ai).
Yes helping is a good thing, tho reality is its not as "easy" as transfer some money. Tho respecting your good intentions
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