I recall a PBS documentary that had video of people who snuck across the Chinese border to film. I remember them meeting a 5 year old boy living on the street who said his mom moved away for work and “she didn’t come back”.
That's actually sort of impressive, that a 5-year-old survives without parents or a home.
In the USA they would be immediately scooped up and placed in a protective foster home of some sort. Teenaged runaways can evade capture and return, but a 5-year-old cannot go trotting around wherever they please. I cannot imagine the fate of a girl in those circumstances.
Surely, this boy could not be surviving without support and guidance from elder allies. I am not sure what "fending for oneself" looks like in NK culture, but I can envision a lot of people taking pity and giving help and handouts of some kind.
My impression was that abandoned children sort of live in bands, the folks sneaking across the border brought them food and money. They were in pretty rough shape visually. It wasn’t clear how long they last.
I am not necessarily opposed to putting things like messaging or email on my personal phone but I’m not going as far as allowing the company to administer my personal device.
Outside say redundancy across sites (a thing many offer in one way or another) ... there's not much you can DO.
When I used to work with US bank and financial institutions we used to do "disaster recovery tests" and it effectively meant they shut off a whole site and ran on their backups to see what happened.
Offering redundancy across zones is one thing (and I'm pleased to offer it to my customers). Getting them to use it is quite another thing.
Even if it was "only" 2x or 3x the expense to have a completely multizone setup, the ongoing operational burden is too high to justify over the 2, 10, or 100 year timeframe when no outages happen which could have been avoided.
Companies dependent on a single Amazon zone just give up and wait during a zone outage, blame it on Amazon, then get back to making money the next day.
Well that's a long way of saying even in military offensive scenarios, Amazon is expected to have some zone up to use which is to say they're doing a decent job.
Contrast with no AZ now or in the next quarter. Then surely people would take precautions like switching to Google or equinix at a minimum.
IABIED [1] lays out step-by-step descriptions of how the “wipe out humanity” outcome could come to pass.
The huggingface attack was a demo of one of the most difficult, most implausible steps happening nearly exactly as predicted. Many AI researchers' doubts of the IABIED thesis were underwritten by the belief that this particular step was impossible. Thus, after huggingface many skeptics have flipped sides and human extinction is in the public conversation much more.
Read the AI2027 paper, it's got a scenario that's pretty realistic (except for the part where there's a functioning American government making choices that are at least partially motivated by wanting to avoid outcomes such as these).
Low enough price for me to be speculative. I go hunting for my iPad to frag it in the kitchen… often.
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