The “dark forest” vibe feels real, but it’s less sci‑fi and more boring economics: scraping is cheap, attribution is hard, and trust is fragile. I worry the default outcome is everything drifting toward logins/CAPTCHAs/walled gardens—not because people want that, but because “public + unmetered” turns into “free training data + abuse surface.” Feels like we need better primitives for proof-of-origin (signing/publisher identity) and some kind of tiered access for bulk crawling. Anyone seen a non-centralized approach that could actually get adoption?
For anyone not familiar with the concept of "dark forest":
> […] In Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, the author proposes a literary explanation for the Fermi paradox in which countless alien civilizations exist, but are both silent and paranoid, destroying any nascent lifeforms loud enough to make themselves known.[181] This is because any other intelligent life may represent a future threat. As a result, Liu's fictional universe contains a plethora of quiet civilizations which do not reveal themselves, as in a "dark forest"...filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost".[182][183][184] This idea has come to be known as the dark forest hypothesis.[185][186][187]
> The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life such as theirs as an inevitable threat and thus destroy any nascent life that makes itself known. As a result, the electromagnetic radiation surveys would not find evidence of intelligent alien life.[8][9] […]
> The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest,[11] as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts".[12][13] According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilisation can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.[2]
Fancy. Much more likely they just ruin their own environment and die. It has happened many times before, since the Great Oxygenation Event 2.4B years ago.
All the quotes miss the simplicity of 3 rules of Cosmology or whatever it was called in the trilogy.
—
The essence of the Dark Forest theory:
1. Survival is the primary goal of any civilization.
2. Life expands to fill all available space, but resources are finite. Roughly speaking, like humans cutting down forests to expand cities without caring what happens to the ants living there — if expansion is needed, it’s done.
3. Progress is unstoppable. If one group hasn’t mastered fusion yet, they will say in a thousand years — and then they’ll come for the others because of points 1 and 2.
—
The author builds the novel on the idea that we shouldn’t be sending signals into space, but rather stay quiet and avoid drawing attention. Because in his view, once one civilization detects a signal from another, the safest move is to eliminate it immediately — without taking the risk of finding out whether it’s friendly (for now) or already not.
This sort of low effort post, we can all recognize right?
Read the book series. Battle with a culture different than your own. The absolute depression by the third book helps you experience this more than this bullshit Cliff’s notes.
And yes, Greg was 100% about grappling with the nuances. One of the smartest men I’ve known.
We had an awesome book club talking about historical sci-fi and modernity. He always saw the optimistic side, how humanity could conquer, but I, child of Amazon, could see the end-stage capitalism.
Makes for fantastic dialogue. Read the book series. It’s worth it!
This entire page seems incredibly cheaply machine generated, including the text and images. If you want to make a case for your product, you should at least make it look like some effort went into this.
The website is pure slop with an infinitely low information to noise ratio. Judging by their documentation[0] it's just access control for web servers, so the better question would be how it compares to TLS client auth (which uses proper standards, doesn't require users to install extra software, and doesn't require any extra daemons server-side)
Some time around 2010 I update th virus and Trojan definitions on a windows 95 machine that wasn't really used beyond 2004. It had every free scanner one could download. They found over 1500 things. Apparently someone ran a trojan generator on my machine. I don't know when they all became known trojans or if it found all of them but when the box was in use the scanners found nothing.
God knows what is sleeping on our machines today.
I once hear there are very very expensive tools with luxurious gui's that bundle bags of fresh exploits and receive new ones over the tubes.
The guy told me that most of the code involved cleaning up after it self.
I think the AI will only run known exploits? Its nice to find those but if anyone really wants in it's just a matter of money.
I'm curious what applications we can bake into hardware. You can't insert malicious bread into a toaster to gain access to other things.
There is an economic asymmetry between having a frontier model that people pay to use vs. being someone paying them so they can keep improving it.
Also, from the outside, we only know about the advances that get shipped/put on servers. Presumably, a lot more promising advances are uncovered than are shipped. Maybe they don't fit the product, maybe they are not ready, or maybe they provide a competitive advantage if used and improved internally without disclosure.
So there is a potential growing development/information/frontier asymmetry, of unknown magnitude and velocity.
Yep. I agree. I’m assuming that the best model for coding is always six months advanced ahead for the investors. Even with that assumption, there’s a huge democratization effect.
I’ve never seen a tool more accessible for people of all backgrounds and abilities. It should be celebrated. And yet “engineers” are worried about their identities.
Just s/AI/surveillance state/ and it reads pretty much the same. People in the US you should read NSPM-7 which is obviously simply targeted at this admin's out group. Things seem to be well in motion already from the outward indications we have about DHS spending and disregard for legal processes. People are just still in denial or not paying attention.
> […] In Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, the author proposes a literary explanation for the Fermi paradox in which countless alien civilizations exist, but are both silent and paranoid, destroying any nascent lifeforms loud enough to make themselves known.[181] This is because any other intelligent life may represent a future threat. As a result, Liu's fictional universe contains a plethora of quiet civilizations which do not reveal themselves, as in a "dark forest"...filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like a ghost".[182][183][184] This idea has come to be known as the dark forest hypothesis.[185][186][187]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is...
> The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life such as theirs as an inevitable threat and thus destroy any nascent life that makes itself known. As a result, the electromagnetic radiation surveys would not find evidence of intelligent alien life.[8][9] […]
> The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest,[11] as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts".[12][13] According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilisation can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
* Kurzgesagt (10m): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE
(Cixin's novel probably made the idea famous, but others (Brin, Bear) have explored it previously.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
—
The essence of the Dark Forest theory:
1. Survival is the primary goal of any civilization.
2. Life expands to fill all available space, but resources are finite. Roughly speaking, like humans cutting down forests to expand cities without caring what happens to the ants living there — if expansion is needed, it’s done.
3. Progress is unstoppable. If one group hasn’t mastered fusion yet, they will say in a thousand years — and then they’ll come for the others because of points 1 and 2.
—
The author builds the novel on the idea that we shouldn’t be sending signals into space, but rather stay quiet and avoid drawing attention. Because in his view, once one civilization detects a signal from another, the safest move is to eliminate it immediately — without taking the risk of finding out whether it’s friendly (for now) or already not.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXYf47euE3U
Read the book series. Battle with a culture different than your own. The absolute depression by the third book helps you experience this more than this bullshit Cliff’s notes.
Spend a few hours. Jesus.
I didn’t draw the original premise. I just pointed out that they didn’t understand the Dark Forest. At all.
We had an awesome book club talking about historical sci-fi and modernity. He always saw the optimistic side, how humanity could conquer, but I, child of Amazon, could see the end-stage capitalism.
Makes for fantastic dialogue. Read the book series. It’s worth it!
How does it compare to tor hidden services?
[0]: https://docs.opennhp.org/nhp_quick_start/
[0] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=the-dark-fo...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-opennhp-saag-nhp/
God knows what is sleeping on our machines today.
I once hear there are very very expensive tools with luxurious gui's that bundle bags of fresh exploits and receive new ones over the tubes.
The guy told me that most of the code involved cleaning up after it self.
I think the AI will only run known exploits? Its nice to find those but if anyone really wants in it's just a matter of money.
I'm curious what applications we can bake into hardware. You can't insert malicious bread into a toaster to gain access to other things.
AI in our context is the inverse. Everyone can spend “credits” to get a supergenius coder.
There is an economic asymmetry between having a frontier model that people pay to use vs. being someone paying them so they can keep improving it.
Also, from the outside, we only know about the advances that get shipped/put on servers. Presumably, a lot more promising advances are uncovered than are shipped. Maybe they don't fit the product, maybe they are not ready, or maybe they provide a competitive advantage if used and improved internally without disclosure.
So there is a potential growing development/information/frontier asymmetry, of unknown magnitude and velocity.
I’ve never seen a tool more accessible for people of all backgrounds and abilities. It should be celebrated. And yet “engineers” are worried about their identities.
Anthropic just launched Claude Code Security.
AI is entering cybersecurity — permanently.
But here’s the uncomfortable question:
What happens when attackers automate faster than defenders react?
Attackers have always been ahead. Its been reality since we've been permanently online