Abliterated models exist. Bad people have GPUs already. The genie is out.
Restrictions on running abliterated models is an excellent way to turn people who follow the rules into fish-in-a-barrel.
You will take my compute from my cold, dead hands.
tried dsv4.1-flash-1017 abliterated just now & feel sick to my stomach.
for context, "abliterated" models have the weights responsible for making the base version refuse illegal requests removed. you can ask them to help with things like hacking or violence & they'll just comply.
they make it trivial to hack businesses running old software. e.g. getting guest data for a motel with some old asp site.
abliterated models have a catch-22 in that the only way to harden your systems against them is to use them to run penetration tests against yourself.
in theory, this sounds similar to buying a gun to defend against others who own guns, but it's different in practice since there's a 100% chance that you're going to use the abliterated model to protect yourself whereas there are low odds that you'll actually use the gun.
when you point the abliterated gun at your own infra, who knows what it's going to do? it could just as easily hack you & exfiltrate data as it could protect you. most users aren't going to meticulously watch traces to make sure it behaves safely.
given this, my new take is that gpu compute is going to become a federally regulated resource. abliterated models in the wrong hands are a national security risk.
used to believe all the people at the labs thinking about safety were wasting their time, but now i'm feeling grateful. they're doing very important work.
nlev retweeted
marginal increases in intelligence should have massive gains in value (exponential imo), you see this happen for humans for instance, where being slightly better than einstein probably has immense value.
all this means is that we are at the bottom of the exponential
OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI labs face a growing challenge: Better models aren't necessarily attracting more usage. A 10-point intelligence advantage now earns just 20% more developer traffic, down from nearly 69% in late 2025.
Full story: thein.fo/4hGJ9jY
nlev retweeted
[8/n] By the way, for the simulation folks wondering how we simulated tight-clearance parts: the usual tools didn't work for us. SDF was so slow and hard to tune. Off-the-shelf convex decomposition like V-HACD or CoACD filled the clearance, so parts that should fit jam.
So we built mjfit. It decomposes common assembly parts (pegs and holes of any outline, threads, and gears) into convex pieces that keep the clearance exactly as designed, and it runs an order of magnitude faster than SDF.
It's open source: github.com/younghyopark/mjfi…
Apparently I missed that my kid who didn't qualify for the $1000 still got $250 from the Dells.
Get the richest people on earth to keep one-upping each other by giving directly to American kids. Then let kids actually use the money at 18. It's really a well-incentivized system.
A BIG THANK YOU to our legendary friend, @ElonMusk, for his incredible generosity in giving SpaceX Stock to millions of American children through TRUMP ACCOUNTS! This is exactly what was envisioned when we created TRUMP ACCOUNTS — Bringing together the GREAT PRIVATE SECTOR, Elon and so many more, to invest in our children, by far our greatest and most important asset, and give every American Child a piece of the American Dream. Thank you Elon! President DONALD J. TRUMP
this brings me back to wardriving around my town in a '93 crown vic once i got my license. debian thinkpad with wifi dongle on the bench seat, USB GPS dongle up on the dash, aftermarket stereo system I installed blasting queens of the stone age. what a time
was always the case for me since middle school. nothing beats cultivating an environment for my friends to blow each other up repeatedly
nlev retweeted
I've myself been programming since I was 11, so 33 years and counting for me. Professionally for 29 years, since landing my first full-time software development gig at 15
The work has never been boring: bootloaders, kernels, device drivers, compilers, interpreters, virtual machines, graph databases, query engines, blockchains, tactical robotics, hundreds of libraries in dozens of languages, and many a website and app
Recently, a twenty-something friend expressed surprise that I'd managed to adapt to the new way of working, herding instead of hacking. I was somewhat taken aback by his surprise, until I realized that he couldn't really have a personal intuition of the sheer immensity of the change that already took place in computing over the past 40+ years
There haven't existed many other professions with the rate of change that software engineering has been subject to. The only constant has been change, and a substantial portion of the work has been continuous learning, every year and every day
To a first approximation, then, those of us who make it to becoming graybeards in our field have already passed through a harsh filter that weeded out anybody constitutionally ill-suited to riding the curve. And what a wild ride it's been, and that was just the prelude!
Personally, this year has seen the single largest change to my own way of working for decades, but the magnitude of that change is still less than that of the previous three decades put together. And as a fan of individual superempowerment, nothing makes me happier than gaining a more powerful lever with which to move the world
May we all aspire to Alan Kay's neuroplasticity at age 85+ and be inspired by his continuing efforts to rebuild computing from the ground up. Remember, the best way to predict the future is to create it!
