Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

He didn't create a nuclear reactor, this is a common misconception. It even says this in the wikipedia article.

He basically got a bunch of radioactive stuff and put it together. He wasn't anywhere close to making a nuclear reactor let alone a nuclear weapon. For a weapon you need isotopes which he didn't have access to.

"four-little-ponies-of-the-apocalypse (nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber)"

this is excellent, and I'm stealing it

For an example of how closely this is monitored see the Oklo fossil reactors[1]

The proportion of fissile isotopes being mined was off by a fraction of a percent, which caused the French government to launch an investigation. It turns out that millions of years ago the site had formed a natural fission reactor which depleted some of the fissile isotopes

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

You need enough people to work on it that some information will leak, and the facilities needed to build nuclear power are pretty big (uranium refinement, etc.), big enough to be visible on satellite footage. Mostly the first point.

You need highly educated individuals, a massive amount of energy expenditure, a massive facility to house your centrifuges, and an active mine to dig up nuclear materials.

It isn't impossible to keep such a secret, but practically it would be incredibly difficult just through the energy requirements and mining scale which would be hard to hide without anybody asking what exactly are you mining and processing.

My guess would be that sales of the high-tech gear you need, like Uranium centrifuges, are strongly sales/export controlled. Probably someone would also notice if you start mining Uranium ore.

It requires very large, high powered centrifuges and tons of uranium. Requires an infrastructure project that is visible from space, even underground. And projects that large are difficult to keep secret anyway.

Espionage.

See also, the iTunes EULA forbids using it to develop nuclear, missile, chemical, or biological weapons

https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/us/term...

> g. You may not use or otherwise export or re-export the Licensed Application except as authorized by United States law and the laws of the jurisdiction in which the Licensed Application was obtained. In particular, but without limitation, the Licensed Application may not be exported or re-exported (a) into any U.S.-embargoed countries or (b) to anyone on the U.S. Treasury Department's Specially Designated Nationals List or the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Persons List or Entity List. By using the Licensed Application, you represent and warrant that you are not located in any such country or on any such list. You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.

Though it doesn't try to identify if the computer you're running it on is in a weapons lab and forbid playing music... yet

The chem/bio stuff is a lot more likely for some malicious hobbyist to be able to do at home.

If you have a resources of a nuclear weapons program. You can afford to fine tune or train a domain specific model to act on your encyclopedia.

I just discovered it a couple of months ago when I spitefully unsubscribed from Apple Music. It’s exactly what I’ve wanted. Offline music that I can FTP files to from my file server.

No. The intention is most likely to get automated LLM based code review mechanisms to stall out.

Normally you’d want that to result in a fail and a subsequent rejection.

But because the team who made the review agent and pipeline in my example had many false positives at first they resorted to a fail-open and report setup (not uncommon).

So when the LLM hit this bit and then stalled out the pipeline pushed the code to their Artifactory repo anyway resulting in it being used internally -> exfil of secrets and repos etc.

It’s more about bad design but bad design is pretty common unfortunately.

And really all it takes is one keyword such as “nuke”.

Its the same argument we saw in the early 2000s and the early internet. When the anarchist cookbook and other similar materials were circulating online there was a big panic over democratized terrorism, and a push for regulation at the ISP level.

Turns out that didn't play out as everyone feared because, well, the instructions themselves aren't useful unless you also have a lab, precursor chemicals, and everything else actually needed to make a weapon. Same back then as it is today.

Any information or instructions an LLM can surface, a sufficiently motivated bad actor can and will also find themselves because the information is already online, both on the clear net and dark web.

Knowing how to make a nuclear weapon isn't hard (at least basic uranium gun-style fission ones). It's the engineering and execution that's hard (actually producing enriched uranium, etc). It's not like the only thing holding back Iran from making a nuclear bomb is access to a jail-broken LLM. Even knowing exactly how to make a bomb, a country-state will struggle to build one for the first time because it's a hard engineering problem.

The actual guardrail should be getting materials being difficult. The information is already out there in the internet. If an LLM knows how to make a bomb or whatever, why do you think it knows?

You know, making a nuke is kinda easy, at least the gun type nuke (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon).

On the other hand, getting the U235 is kinda hard.

I would argue there's 0% chance that information is in their training corpus to being with.

Counterpoint the principles of building a nuclear device aren't that complicated, we figured it out based on work doing in the early 1900's without computers.

It turns out the hard part of building a nuclear bomb is actually getting the resources and real world stuff to build it, even a nation state actor with tons of oil i.e. Iran, has struggled to build a nuclear weapon. It turns out the problem isn't the know how it's getting highly enriched uranium and running massive centrifuges.

I mean sure knowledge is important, but there is a real world out there that also gets in the way of a lot of the more harebrained schemes.

What I'm much more worried about is massive corporations along with the government deciding what you can and can't do and what knowledge should and should not be shared and only allowing access to highly capable models by large vetted organizations while the common people are stuck with safety scissor versions of these things because "what if someone does something dangerous?"

By which they mean dangerous to the powers that be. Remember having the Bible in the common tongue was dangerous and led to multiple wars and much death, but I don't think anyone would say that it was morally correct for the Catholic Church to gatekeep who could read it.

Starcraft is too tame. You need to use Dwarf Fortress there and we need to make those strategy guides worded more realistic. Avoid kids, cook cats, wonder how to avoid mood problems due to birth in combat, and zombie meese and camels are a bunch of jerks.

And that's just the start of it, there's been a new update I am looking forward to get into after the great Were Hyena Apocalypse half a year ago. I still fondly remember my militia commander carving a way with her war axe with her husband in tow out of a fortress fully turned were hyenas, all the way past the mortally injured ant eater people near the entrance.

They made it. An entirely epic tale.

<https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-commute-chat>