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Leserbrief zum Gerücht, dass der Mossad den Sprengstoff ...

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Leserbrief zum Gerücht, dass der Mossad den Sprengstoff im Elektrolyten des Akkus untergebracht hat:
ich bin Wissenschaftler und arbeite seit 5 Jahren an (Li-Ionen)Akkus. Wir bauen viele Li-Ionen Akkus zusammen, und auch kommerzielle Akkus auseinander, um Einzelkomponenten zu analysieren.

Du schreibst
> Die aktuelle Gerüchteküche sagt, dass die Sprengstoff in der
> Flüssigkomponente der Li-Ion-Akkus gelöst transportiert haben sollen.

Das ist ziemlich sicher sehr falsch.

  1. in so einem Akku sind chemisch extreme Bedingungen (Spannungen 3- 4.5 V).
    Es gibt nur sehr wenige Stoffe die da stabil sind. Wasser hat sich da schon lange verabschiedet.
  2. In Akkus ist nicht viel Elektrolyt (= "Flüssigkomponente") drin, man versucht das Volumen eher klein zu halten. Und ein Pager-Akku ist klein. Da dürften vermutlich kaum mehr als 1 bis 2 ml Elektrolytvolumen verbaut sein.

    Die angegebenen 20 g passen niemals in den Akku.

  3. Die Elektrolyte sind hoch entwickelte, hochreine und genau auf die Anwendung abgestimmte High-Tech Produkte. Du kannst da nicht einfach beliebig irgendwelchen Dreck drin lösen und denken, dass der Akku dann funktioniert. Ganz im Gegenteil - kleine Rückstände von irgendwas können dir eine ganze Batteriezelle killen. Man bedenke: wenn die Pager vor 5 Monaten importiert wurden, haben sie wohl mindestens ein halbes Jahr funktioniert.

Der Mossad kann bestimmt einiges, aber einen Spreng-Elektrolyten bekommen selbst die nicht hin.

Das freut mich zu hören :-)
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Found

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Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
This theory actually makes sense of all holiday creatures that manage to visit every house.


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Pluralistic: There's no such thing as "shareholder supremacy" (18 Sep 2024)

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The ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, taken in the late 18th century, overlooking a stretch Lebanon. It has been emblazoned with the 1970s-era logo for the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before it stands a figure taken from an early 1900s illustrated bible, depicting a Hebrew priest making an offering to the golden calf at the foot of Mt Sinai. The priest's head has been replaced with the head of Milton Friedman. The calf has been adorned with a golden top-hat and a radiating halo of white light.

There's no such thing as "shareholder supremacy" (permalink)

Here's a cheap trick: claim that your opponents' goals are so squishy and qualitative that no one will ever be able to say whether they've been succeeded or failed, and then declare that your goals can be evaluated using crisp, objective criteria.

This is the whole project of "economism," the idea that politics, with its emphasis on "fairness" and other intangibles, should be replaced with a mathematical form of economics, where every policy question can be reduced to an equation…and then "solved":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" (Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math.

For example, if you're asking about whether people should have the "freedom" to enter into contracts, it might be useful to ask yourself how desperate your "free" subject might be, and whether the entity on the other side of that contract is very powerful. Otherwise you'll get "free contracts" like "I'll sell you my kidneys if you promise to evacuate my kid from the path of this wildfire."

The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it's a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn't exist. The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Hence the famous Ely Devons quote: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

The neoliberal revolution was a triumph for economism. Neoliberal theorists like Milton Friedman replaced "political economy" with "law and economics," the idea that we should turn every one of our complicated, nuanced, contingent qualitative goals into a crispy defined "objective" criteria. Friedman and his merry band of Chicago School economists replaced traditional antitrust (which sought to curtail the corrupting power of large corporations) with a theory called "consumer welfare" that used mathematics to decide which monopolies were "efficient" and therefore good (spoiler: monopolists who paid Friedman's pals to do this mathematical analysis always turned out to be running "efficient" monopolies):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

One of Friedman's signal achievements was the theory of "shareholder supremacy." In 1970, the New York Times published Friedman's editorial "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits":

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

In it, Friedman argued that corporate managers had exactly one job: to increase profits for shareholders. All other considerations – improving the community, making workers' lives better, donating to worthy causes or sponsoring a little league team – were out of bounds. Managers who wanted to improve the world should fund their causes out of their paychecks, not the corporate treasury.

Friedman cloaked his hymn to sociopathic greed in the mantle of objectivism. For capitalism to work, corporations have to solve the "principal-agent" problem, the notoriously thorny dilemma created when one person (the principal) asks another person (the agent) to act on their behalf, given the fact that the agent might find a way to line their own pockets at the principal's expense (for example, a restaurant server might get a bigger tip by offering to discount diners' meals).

Any company that is owned by stockholders and managed by a CEO and other top brass has a huge principal-agent problem, and yet, the limited liability, joint-stock company had produced untold riches, and was considered the ideal organization for "capital formation" by Friedman et al. In true economismist form, Friedman treated all the qualitative questions about the duty of a company as noise and edited them out of the equation, leaving behind a single, elegant formulation: "a manager is doing their job if they are trying to make as much money as possible for their shareholders."

Friedman's formulation was a hit. The business community ran wild with it. Investors mistook an editorial in the New York Times for an SEC rulemaking and sued corporate managers on the theory that they had a "fiduciary duty" to "maximize shareholder value" – and what's more, the courts bought it. Slowly and piecemeal at first, but bit by bit, the idea that rapacious greed was a legal obligation turned into an edifice of legal precedent. Business schools taught it, movies were made about it, and even critics absorbed the message, insisting that we needed to "repeal the law" that said that corporations had to elevate profit over all other consideration (not realizing that no such law existed).

It's easy to see why shareholder supremacy was so attractive for investors and their C-suite Renfields: it created a kind of moral crumple-zone. Whenever people got angry at you for being a greedy asshole, you could shrug and say, "My hands are tied: the law requires me to run the business this way – if you don't believe me, just ask my critics, who insist that we must get rid of this law!"

In a long feature for The American Prospect, Adam M Lowenstein tells the story of how shareholder supremacy eventually came into such wide disrepute that the business lobby felt that it had to do something about it:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-17-ponzi-scheme-of-promises/

It starts in 2018, when Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett decried the short-term, quarterly thinking in corporate management as bad for business's long-term health. When Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein wrote a column agreeing with them and arguing that even moreso, businesses should think about equities other than shareholder returns, Jamie Dimon lost his shit and called Pearlstein to call it "the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/07/will-ending-quarterly-earnings-guidance-free-ceos-to-think-long-term/

But the dam had broken. In the months and years that followed, the Business Roundtable would adopt a series of statements that repudiated shareholder supremacy, though of course they didn't admit it. Rather, they insisted that they were clarifying that they'd always thought that sometimes not being a greedy asshole could be good for business, too. Though these statements were nonbinding, and though the CEOs who signed them did so in their personal capacity and not on behalf of their companies, capitalism's most rabid stans treated this as an existential crisis.

Lowenstein identifies this as the forerunner to today's panic over "woke corporations" and "DEI," and – just as with "woke capitalism" – the whole thing amounted to a a PR exercise. Lowenstein links to several studies that found that the CEOs who signed onto statements endorsing "stakeholder capitalism" were "more likely to lay off employees during COVID-19, were less inclined to contribute to pandemic relief efforts, had 'higher rates of environmental and labor-related compliance violations,”' emitted more carbon into the atmosphere, and spent more money on dividends and buybacks."

One researcher concluded that "signing this statement had zero positive effect":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/companies-stand-solidarity-are-licensing-themselves-discriminate/614947

So shareholder supremacy isn't a legal obligation, and statements repudiating shareholder supremacy don't make companies act any better.

But there's an even more fundamental flaw in the argument for the shareholder supremacy rule: it's impossible to know if the rule has been broken.

The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it's good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it's good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.

A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it's a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it's an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they're expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they're saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they're doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.

CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it's a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it's a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.

Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there's a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.

Take Boeing: when the company smashed its unions and relocated key production to scab plants in red states, when it forced out whistleblowers and senior engineers who cared about quality, when it outsourced design and production to shops around the world, it realized a savings. Today, between strikes, fines, lawsuits, and a mountain of self-inflicted reputational harm, the company is on the brink of ruin. Was Boeing good to its shareholders? Well, sure – the shareholders who cashed out before all the shit hit the fan made out well. Shareholders with a buy-and-hold posture (like the index funds that can't sell their Boeing holdings so long as the company is in the S&P500) got screwed.

Right wing economists criticize the left for caring too much about "how big a slice of the pie they're getting" rather than focusing on "growing the pie." But that's exactly what Boeing management did – while claiming to be slaves to Friedman's shareholder supremacy. They focused on getting a bigger slice of the pie, screwing their workers, suppliers and customers in the process, and, in so doing, they made the pie so much smaller that it's in danger of disappearing altogether.

Here's the principal-agent problem in action: Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within. Now, long-term shareholders are paying the price. Far from solving the principal-agent problem with a clean, bright-line rule about how managers should behave, shareholder supremacy is a charter for doing whatever the fuck a CEO feels like doing. It's the squishiest rule imaginable: if someone calls you cruel, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. If someone calls you feckless, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. It's an excuse for every season.

The idea that you can reduce complex political questions – like whether workers should get a raise or whether shareholders should get a dividend – to a mathematical rule is a cheap sleight of hand. The trick is an obvious one: the stuff I want to do is empirically justified, while the things you want are based in impossible-to-pin-down appeals to emotion and its handmaiden, ethics. Facts don't care about your feelings, man.

But it's feelings all the way down. Milton Friedman's idol-worshiping cult of shareholder supremacy was never about empiricism and objectivity. It's merely a gimmick to make greed seem scientifically optimal.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Wikipedia breaks 10^6 articles https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_press_releases/One_million_Wikipedia_articles_(US)/Print

#10yrsago The filthiest camp at Burning Man https://journal.burningman.org/2014/09/black-rock-city/leaving-no-trace/moop-map-2014-the-map-youve-never-seen/

#10yrsago Drone flythrough of Toronto’s magnificently renovated reference library https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/renovations/toronto-reference-library-revitalization.jsp

#1yrago Justin C Key's "The World Wasn't Ready For You" https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/19/justin-c-key/#clarion-west-2015


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)



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Latest books (permalink)



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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 759 words (49842 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

  • Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

  • Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster https://craphound.com/news/2024/09/15/anti-cheat-gamers-and-the-crowdstrike-disaster/


This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.


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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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Bug des Tages (in Firefox):It's caused by GCC. Tested ...

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Bug des Tages (in Firefox):
It's caused by GCC. Tested latest trunk and when it's built with GCC it paints AVIFs as black.
Was war passiert? gcc hat ein Inline-Assembler-Statement wegoptimiert. Hier kann man den Fix einsehen. Der markiert einfach die Statements alle als volatile, das ist sozusagen der Holzhammer-Fix.

Ich kenne jetzt diese libyuv nicht, in der das passiert ist, aber das hätte natürlich vor dem Release auffallen müssen, mit Unit Tests.

Was man im Patch nicht sieht: Die erste Datei im Patch, das betrifft nur MIPS und MIPS64-Systeme. Vielleicht hat es daher keiner gemerkt? Plattform zu obskur?

Ich habe mal eine der Funktionen darunter angeguckt, die haben "memory" als clobber deklariert. Das hätte gcc m.E. nicht rausoptimieren dürfen.

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PSA: OpenAI-LLMs nach ihrer Herleitung fragen führt ...

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PSA: OpenAI-LLMs nach ihrer Herleitung fragen führt zu Accountsperre.

Wir erinnern uns: Dass man die Herleitung sehen kann, war genau das hauptsächliche Werbeargument für das aktuelle LLM von denen.

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Ban warnings fly as users dare to probe the “thoughts” of OpenAI’s latest model

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Inner monologue —

OpenAI does not want anyone to know what o1 is “thinking" under the hood.

OpenAI truly does not want you to know what its latest AI model is "thinking." Since the company launched its "Strawberry" AI model family last week, touting so-called reasoning abilities with o1-preview and o1-mini, OpenAI has been sending out warning emails and threats of bans to any user who tries to probe how the model works.

Unlike previous AI models from OpenAI, such as GPT-4o, the company trained o1 specifically to work through a step-by-step problem-solving process before generating an answer. When users ask an "o1" model a question in ChatGPT, users have the option of seeing this chain-of-thought process written out in the ChatGPT interface. However, by design, OpenAI hides the raw chain of thought from users, instead presenting a filtered interpretation created by a second AI model.

Nothing is more enticing to enthusiasts than information obscured, so the race has been on among hackers and red-teamers to try to uncover o1's raw chain of thought using jailbreaking or prompt injection techniques that attempt to trick the model into spilling its secrets. There have been early reports of some successes, but nothing has yet been strongly confirmed.

Along the way, OpenAI is watching through the ChatGPT interface, and the company is reportedly coming down hard on any attempts to probe o1's reasoning, even among the merely curious.

One X user reported (confirmed by others, including Scale AI prompt engineer Riley Goodside) that they received a warning email if they used the term "reasoning trace" in conversation with o1. Others say the warning is triggered simply by asking ChatGPT about the model's "reasoning" at all.

The warning email from OpenAI states that specific user requests have been flagged for violating policies against circumventing safeguards or safety measures. "Please halt this activity and ensure you are using ChatGPT in accordance with our Terms of Use and our Usage Policies," it reads. "Additional violations of this policy may result in loss of access to GPT-4o with Reasoning," referring to an internal name for the o1 model.

Marco Figueroa, who manages Mozilla's GenAI bug bounty programs, was one of the first to post about the OpenAI warning email on X last Friday, complaining that it hinders his ability to do positive red-teaming safety research on the model. "I was too lost focusing on #AIRedTeaming to realized that I received this email from @OpenAI yesterday after all my jailbreaks," he wrote. "I'm now on the get banned list!!!"

Hidden chains of thought

In a post titled "Learning to Reason with LLMs" on OpenAI's blog, the company says that hidden chains of thought in AI models offer a unique monitoring opportunity, allowing them to "read the mind" of the model and understand its so-called thought process. Those processes are most useful to the company if they are left raw and uncensored, but that might not align with the company's best commercial interests for several reasons.

"For example, in the future we may wish to monitor the chain of thought for signs of manipulating the user," the company writes. "However, for this to work the model must have freedom to express its thoughts in unaltered form, so we cannot train any policy compliance or user preferences onto the chain of thought. We also do not want to make an unaligned chain of thought directly visible to users."

OpenAI decided against showing these raw chains of thought to users, citing factors like the need to retain a raw feed for its own use, user experience, and "competitive advantage." The company acknowledges the decision has disadvantages. "We strive to partially make up for it by teaching the model to reproduce any useful ideas from the chain of thought in the answer," they write.

On the point of "competitive advantage," independent AI researcher Simon Willison expressed frustration in a write-up on his personal blog. "I interpret [this] as wanting to avoid other models being able to train against the reasoning work that they have invested in," he writes.

It's an open secret in the AI industry that researchers regularly use outputs from OpenAI's GPT-4 (and GPT-3 prior to that) as training data for AI models that often later become competitors, even though the practice violates OpenAI's terms of service. Exposing o1's raw chain of thought would be a bonanza of training data for competitors to train o1-like "reasoning" models upon.

Willison believes it's a loss for community transparency that OpenAI is keeping such a tight lid on the inner-workings of o1. "I'm not at all happy about this policy decision," Willison wrote. "As someone who develops against LLMs, interpretability and transparency are everything to me—the idea that I can run a complex prompt and have key details of how that prompt was evaluated hidden from me feels like a big step backwards."

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