← Back to context

Comment by throwawayffffas

9 days ago

Can you imagine if AMD or Intel throttled your cpu if it detected you were working on "cybersecurity" or if you were designing a cpu?

Or if your "self-driving" system such as FSD / waymo slowed the car down once it detected you work in cybersecurity or at a rival automaker and you were attempting to reach the train station or the airport to make you miss a conference meetup.

Or if GPU companies detected you were trying to train a model and injected intentional numerical errors.

  • Nvidia already did something similar with Lite Hash Rate (LHR), limiting performance on purpose just when running mining apps...

    • Well they did tell everyone explicitly and sell it as different SKUs. There's no Fable (Full ML) edition, just silent prompt injection.

It would suck, but guardrails on new technologies like this aren't unheard of. It's like when consumer GPS used to stop working at very high speeds because they didn't want people to use it for missile guidance systems.

  • Consumer GPS is still disabled at high speeds. I would argue the analogy doesn't carry due to harm and error rate differences.

    • Yep a totally different use case and set of guardrails. There’s very little (not zero) consumer utility in GPS above say 15k feet AND 400 MPH or whatever the actual limit is. That’s basically tracking model rockets that are incidentally impacted and nothing else, from what I can think of.

      3 replies →

  • Didn't early GPS have fudge factor on the most precise bits? As such you could only get to a few meters of accuracy. Not critical for sea navigation or even to general positioning when paper maps were still used.

    • The term of art here is "Selective Availability" and the added error margin was up to 100 meters.