This author disagrees with this take. They are setting a scene here, and explicitly saying that the Block story wasn't about AI at all a few paragraphs later.
If that "bait" caused you to stop reading despite the fact that you probably agree with the author's sentiment, it's not very good bait.
I agree with none of this. It's clickbait slop, very obviously, and that did make me skim it faster than I normally would have, but I read it. The burden shouldn't be on me to try to understand the point clickbait slop is making. This "style" is unreadable and exhausting and that was my salient point. Read what I just linked, it makes the complete opposite conclusion just a few months ago.
How good, non-slop writing usually works is - you lead with your main point, and break it down further throughout the main article. The fact he contradicts his leading hook indicates slop and bad writing, not failure for me to understand whatever the hell the point of this nonsense is (other than to get clicks).
But, on the whole, the server seems to be doing well enough for something near the top of HN. The website is served by nginx and appears to be mostly static pages.
Pretty sure that's 20% of revenue, and I'm assuming that their business plan relies on skimming from settlements, not just taking donations. But they are also paying investigators and lawyers out of all of that.
If this is a business, which it sure seems like it is, then this is such a messed up idea. Exploiting whistleblowers and the whistleblowing system for profit. And they're trying to incentivize whistleblowers with money too.
Whistleblowers take all of the risk here, and only get 20% of the proceeds. Seems like a pretty shit deal, besides being confoundingly greedy.
There already are people you can trust, who aren't anonymous, who are professionals bound by ethics, and who aren't out to sue for profit: Journalists. investigations@icij.org
And don't forget that Sony and Microsoft have compilers teams, working on specialised GCC and LLVM backends, and sometimes upstreaming general improvements.
Transparency logs like [Certificate Transparency](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962) use permissioned chains (and other things) to distribute trust in the internet public key infrastructure.
My understanding is that CT uses Merkle trees, which can also be used in a Blockchain, but that seems to be where the association dies. Just because two things use the same underlying data type doesn't mean one is a use of the other.
My point is: when was the last time when K-means clustering or the Bayesian theorem got a cult, spawned a 10000 fake currencies and were touted as a panacea for all societal problems? The hype behind blockchain, which is just a distributed mathematically sound log of stuff, is just a bunch of misinformation shouted loudly by charlatans and uninformed enthusiasts.
It's the same thing with LLMs, they are basically an extremely sophisticated autocomplete, but I'll be damned if I don't see 1911 articles per day that claim they are sentient, and Sam the perv needs just a couple more billion dollars to reach AGI, just behind the corner. The average pundit's critical thinking is just so disappointing.
I'm not sure if you meant to reply to me? I generally agree with your points, but my specific reply was dismissing the idea that Certificate Transparency is a good use of Blockchain..
The "keyed SHA-256" in key transparency's leaf_hash is ok in its current state, but limits future evolution (or presents a risk if that evolution is not done carefully): SHA-256 is subject to length extension.
I could not follow where the leaf_hash is used carefully enough to figure out exactly how dangerous this is in the broader context and taking future evolution into account. But it's clearly safe as it is used now because all expected inputs have the same length.
And since you apparently haven't seen, the abstract now includes the following note.
> Note: Update on April 18: Step 9 of the algorithm contains a bug, which I don’t know how to fix. See Section 3.5.9 (Page 37) for details. I sincerely thank Hongxun Wu and (independently) Thomas Vidick for finding the bug today. Now the claim of showing a polynomial time quantum algorithm for solving LWE with polynomial modulus-noise ratios does not hold. I leave the rest of the paper as it is (added a clarification of an operation in Step 8) as a hope that ideas like Complex Gaussian and windowed QFT may find other applications in quantum computation, or tackle LWE in other ways.
Self-response: the article does consider this (section 6), argues that the exceptions to restrictions on the use of publicly available data in GDPR are exactly in places where it makes sense to prevent AI usage, and further argues it makes sense to consider AI profiling a more severe breach because of the higher potential for harm.
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