Reposted by Shafik Yaghmour
#9 Spooky Halloween C++
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What potential C++ feature do vampires find least useful?
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Reflection
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#cplusplus
Shafik Yaghmour
@shafik.bsky.social
1K followers 242 following 892 posts
Compiler Engineer clang front end. Interests: C++, C, and undefined behavior. Martial Artist, Book Worm and Dad. he/him Mastodon: hachyderm.io/@shafik Blog: shafik.github.io #cplusplus #compilers
![Owens: Yeah, Groundwork teamed up with More Perfect Union and Consumer Reports, and we ran an experiment that exposed a massive experiment that Instacart was running on millions of Americans while they shopped for groceries. We recruited 400 secret shoppers, [had them] pick the same pickup location — a Safeway grocery store in Seattle, Washington — [and] pick up the same basket of groceries.
For about 75% of items in that basket of groceries, different people in the experiment were offered different prices. Across all of the baskets in the study, [there was] about a 7% variation. So, we took Instacart's own estimate of how much a household of four spends on groceries in a year and calculated that it could be as much as $1,200 — the result of this sort of Instacart experiment tax for shoppers.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:k5fyc6rcfymrclduzvnigvlf/bafkreiewyr7moouypppn2nvtl3lyme777rktydyrlfwm27rnhhi6m6wyra)
![I think this is ultimately why within two weeks of releasing our study, Instacart reversed course, effectively promising to shut down the lab. But this was a big part of Instacart's business model. They acquired the AI pricing giant Eversite in [2022], and Eversight promised to help companies run these pricing experiments without consumers' knowledge. This was a big part of what they sold retailers.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:k5fyc6rcfymrclduzvnigvlf/bafkreicja7wmdhg6ia3xe5wo36gboowiack5rbgwvnzv5k5wirvpb7kttm)
![Big AI believes they should not be held accountable for the consequences of their AI systems because these systems are unpredictable and perhaps uncontrollable. A certain AI researcher said of recent AI hacking incidents: “AI agents … took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them”—seemingly taking it as axiomatic that these were not human-controlled activities and therefore cannot qualify as crimes. But they were and they do. This outrageous position inverts decades of US law about dangerous items generally and computer hacking in particular (e.g., the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). So let’s call this narrative what it is: an attempt to thwart the rule of law. Individual human programmers have been sentenced to prison for far less than what AI companies have done recently. This relates to what I foresaw in 2023:
If AI companies are allowed to market AI systems that are essentially black boxes … we will not delegate decisions to AI systems because they perform better. Rather, we will delegate decisions to AI systems because they can get away with everything that we can’t. … [W]e could end up with something truly novel: technology systems that deserve much higher levels of legal scrutiny (because of the consequentiality of their outputs) but simultaneously resist such scrutiny (because of the opacity of their inputs and reasoning).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:k5fyc6rcfymrclduzvnigvlf/bafkreifbf3fqe2txlawqgsg6rjvi5f2ebamutvi7sipw6xnebetmnrmpbq)
![Big AI believes that the burden is on government and citizens to affirmatively stop Big AI from proceeding. Since overtly opposing regulation is a bad look, Big AI CEOs have occasionally made noises about being open to regulation. As one AI CEO said recently: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.” But as Big AI is well aware, there’s no chance of AI-specific domestic laws or international treaties being enacted soon enough to matter. Indeed, the same AI CEO blamed democracy for not meeting his KPIs: “[u]nfortunately, passing laws can take time”. A widely signed March 2023 letter sought to pause AI research; like all chain letters, it accomplished nothing. After a genuine AI catastrophe arrives, we can be sure these same AI CEOs will say “gosh—why didn’t you make us stop?”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:k5fyc6rcfymrclduzvnigvlf/bafkreifupjuhf2mvzkfhqfoj3wysoikmml3v2lkzg63e3bfzj254xvsfzm)
