Human beings mostly are. People mostly support their neighbors, and selflessly help each other in times of crisis.
The problem is the 5% of us are sociopaths. We let them have all the money and power because they're the only ones that want it. Then we let them use that money and power to convince us that the "REAL" problem is the people with no money or power in the neighboring political region (the border having been drawn by a sociopath).
Regular people, not sociopaths, are responsible for most of the evil in the world.
There is no tiny minority of 'evildoers' that we could root out and be pure from.
Other bad things happen because of unintended consequences or the collective behavior of many people. Climate change or deforestation are not caused by greed or scheming CEOs; it's a side effect from the actions of billions of people individually trying to better their lives.
I'm familiar with it. The "banality of evil" in that book isn't about regular people, it was about the leadership of the Nazi party willing to go along with the Holocaust for personal power, then trying to get out of responsibility for it by claiming they were "just following orders". Those aren't regular people, those are sociopaths.
Regular people don't all independently decide to "do evil". There is banality in the ones that agree to go along with it, to save themselves from being ostracized or mildly inconvenienced. Do they perpetuate evil? For sure. But are they the villains responsible for it?
The "evildoers" are the tiny minority of sociopaths doing the convincing, because it nets them more personal power, and they don't care who they hurt along the way.
There is a huge amount of injustice in the world, morally speaking I should be out there fighting against it with everything I have. But I'm also the sole breadwinner for my family and I have a mortgage, so I mostly keep my head down and try to survive. Does that make me an evildoer? I sure hope not.
No. For most of human evolution, we were hunter-gatherers. Imagine trying to hunt game with the accuracy of LLMs. You'll starve. Picking edible fruits from plants also requires precision, both in terms of the hand/eye coordination of actually picking it as well as in terms of knowing what's edible and what's poisonous.
When you fill up your coffee cup in the morning, I sure hope you aim accurately and don't pour half of it all over your desk. And don't even get me started on the process of making coffee that isn't completely unpalatable.
Flipper zero themselves try to present the flipper zero as a device that "hacks things with a button press".
And they love the free advertising they get along the same lines by youtubers desperate for clicks.
Ultimately it just sells more devices. The flipper zero can't "hack" anything. It can only be used as a tool to perform hacking, by a skilled individual who is doing all the work/discovering an exploit.
> The flipper zero can't "hack" anything. It can only be used as a tool to perform hacking, by a skilled individual who is doing all the work/discovering an exploit.
Would be pretty rad to see what happens I suppose.
Same goes for other tools. If Mythos can find vulnerabilities (through smarts or just extensive combinatorial testing who knows) what's to say it can't help find physical vulnerabilities as well.
I'm sorry, but I'm so sick of seeing "omg hacker man" mystique surrounding flipper, which is exactly what they want because it drives sales. Ofc you can muck about with open and unsecured stuff...like duh.
But it annoys me to no end when I have reasonably intelligent friends parrot claims like "flipper can clone the nfc in your credit card and you can steal people's money wow much hack!"
kind of a circular argument though? the reasonable definition of "unsecured" is "stuff you can't muck about with". That might change over time as attacks/exploits are developed though.
Yes exactly. But for llms it's more that it's not really "thinking" about what it's saying per se, it's that it's predicting next token. Sure, in a super fancy way but still predicting next token. Context poisoning is real
Just as a human would use a task list app or a notepad to keep track of which tasks need to be done so can a model.
You can even have a mechanism for it to look at each task with a "clear head" (empty context) with the ability to "remember" previous task execution (via embedding the reasoning/output) in case parts were useful.
The article makes it seem like the author expected this without emptying context in between, which does not yet exist (actually I'm behind on playing with Opus 4.7, the Anthropic claim seems to be that longer sessions are ok now - would be interested to hear results from anyone who has).
That is probably the next step, and in practice it is much of what sub-agents already provide: a kind of tabula rasa. Context is not always an advantage. Sometimes it becomes the problem.
In long editing sessions with multiple iterations, the context can accumulate stale information, and that actively hurts model performance. Compaction is one way to deal with that. It strips out material that should be re-read from disk instead of being carried forward.
A concrete example is iterative file editing with Codex. I rewrite parts of a file so they actually work and match the project’s style. Then Codex changes the code back to the version still sitting in its context. It does not stop to consider that, if an external edit was made, that edit is probably important.
I have the same experience of reversing intentional steps I've made, but with Claude Code. I find that committing a change that I want to version control seems to stop that behaviour.
Long context as disadvantage is pretty well discussed, and agent-native compaction has been inferior to having it intentionally build the documentation that I want it to use. So far this has been my LLM-coding superpower. There are also a few products whose entire purpose is to provide structure that overcomes compaction shortcomings.
When Geoff Huntley said that Claude Code's "Ralph loop" didn't meet his standards ("this aint it") the major bone of contention as far as I can see was that it ran subagents in a loop inside Claude Code with native compaction; as opposed to completely empty context.
I do see hints that improving compaction is a major area of work for agent-makers. I'm not certain where my advantage goes at that point.
Specifically, the two reasons that it's no longer taught is that 1) rushing to get under a doorframe caused accidents 2) doorframes are no longer reinforced the way they used to be.
But that ain't happening anytime soon.
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