TallGuyShort

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

You are discussing concerns that are completely orthogonal to the thread. The availability of digital banking was the concern. Not end to end privacy.

You know, I didn't rush my laptop to the vet with me. If you're going to argue with the "mobile phones and banking app" line to this extent, I will freely admit: yes, if you want to be a Luddite, satellites are indeed unnecessary. You are absolutely right. But still not convincing me that's a weird thing for them call out here.

Asbolutely. Tap to pay options, and the better ones have stopped pushing SMS for 2FA and they will prefer their own apps over third-party ones. JPMC, Capital One and E-Trade (now Morgan Stanley) definitely all do this.

It's classic what-aboutism though. Availability is part of security and that's what seems to be considered here. It's also the more immediate concern. Yes, the software supply chain and where your data goes has high potential for compromise. But I'm not actually seeing rampant fraud in my accounts or data leaks from my bank very often.

So yeah that sucks, but... what does that have to do with the concerns being discussed here?

Digital banking in some form is pretty unavoidable for me unless I want a "live in the woods" type lifestyle and all the consequences of it. And I don't even live in the UK where they've embraced it more. My mortgage was sold to a very distant company and we've had mail problems. My dog recently needed middle of the night surgery and they wouldn't start without payment that exceeded normal cash reserves + daily.

Yes, all these things suck, but shooting digital banking in the knee without a solution to all that isn't helpful.

Look, I'm a big believer in the importance of cash as an option in our society and the importance of keeping a supply on-hand for emergencies, but my mortgage company, employer, and a lot of other financial concerns are hours away from me, so yeah - my banking app is pretty fucking important to my daily life, and I don't even live in the UK where they have embraced digital banking even more.

It's light on the details of what they're disrupting and how, but there is zero suggestion in the article that they are disrupting digital banking, the Internet, or consumer services at all for for other countries.

It's a direct quote, formatted as written. And actually so many people read it that he got invited to do conference key notes on his articles. Nice flex, though.

I'm thinking back to some of my interactions with corporate lawyers and you know what? My bar (<- pun) for trusting Astra more than a lawyer is pretty low.

"The “threat model” section of a security paper resembles the script for a telenovela that was written by a paranoid schizophrenic: there are elaborate narratives and grand conspiracy theories, and there are heroes and villains with fantastic (yet oddly constrained) powers that necessitate a grinding battle of emotional and technical attrition. In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you’re either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you’ll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don’t respond to emails from [email protected]. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU’RE GONNA DIE AND THERE’S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them." -- James Mickens

For every Tweet that goes out on the company account and every blog on the company blog. But that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about vague sources like low-impact social media snippets getting cited on low-reputation blogs until someone more reputable comments on the apparent trend. There are absolutely marketing people who do that "unofficially".

> Apple does not have a psyops division

No, but they have marketing people, and marketing people in my experience (even in "big" corporate America) have personal (anonymized, but just created themselves) accounts they do stuff like this on all the time.

I often chuckle at the observation that Tim Curry and Michael Caine's respective roles in the Muppet films were so beloved because Michael Caine acted like all the muppets were real actors, and Tim Curry acted like he was a muppet. He would have an impressive range of serious / comedic roles anyway, but I admire the ability for an actor that successful to be able to put himself be in such a silly role that well too.

Yes, and that's not what people are reporting flaws in. The reports are "this daemon accepts arbitrary code and then runs it!"

This is common in the hype era of AI models that can look for security bugs. An open-source project I used to work on that is basically "distributed code execution as a service" keeps getting reports that the job submission function is a vulnerability. The reporters don't even understand what the project does.

Okay but why did this chip have anything to do with that?

I really can't see where the 0.7nm is coming from. The white line looks like it's just an edge of a feature that is "15 rows of silicon atoms", which by some quick arithmetic on Wolfram Alpha has to be AT LEAST ~1.6nm, and the way the rows of atoms appear to be packed in that image and by the provided scale, it seems to be significantly more. Using the white line as a meaningful measurement seems to me to be more misleading than any other interpretation here.

1 picometer = 0.001 nanometers, 0.01 angstrom

1 angstrom = 0.1 nanometers, 100 picometers

1 nanometer = 10 angstroms, 1000 picometers

I always feel like I'm not quite getting quantum stuff no matter how much I read and learn: what does this advancement have to do with quantum computers?

I disagree - there's already a reproducibility crises in the literature of many fields. And medical adjacent-field like nutrition science are among the worst. I think the trends in our culture of people going against medical professionals and "doing their own research" (poorly, and from poor sources) is a net harm on society, and things like the reproducibility crisis and genuinely misleading studies described in the article only serve to harm and dilute the legitimate work done in the field and feed into that cycle. If even "research" by qualified professionals is actually allowed to be garbage by the responsible institutions, we truly are doomed.. It does no good to do discovery if you can't refine or even validate those discoveries.

I was having a conversation with someone about AI taking over medical jobs the other day, and one of the things that came out of my thoughts about it is related:

It obviously has flaws, and we should never stop trying to improve it, but I think AI can be a great way to help connect a bunch of information they have to a bunch of information they don't, or to help spot patterns and potential avenues that they happened to miss. And obviously you want to be careful about becoming over-reliant on it, or being too trusting when it can be wrong. But I think we've been at the point for a long time where a doctor using a search engine to find medical literature should be a very reasonable thing to do, and I think AI can at least be an incremental (but massive) improvement on that workflow.

But I hope the end result of that is that doctors can not only deliver better (and maybe better-informed and more open-minded) treatment, but can spend the time focusing on patient care, managing expectations / risk management around uncertainty, managing the emotions inherent in someone who may be losing their life or the lives of their loved ones. Those are things AI is definitely not well-equipped to do as you point out.

"Use your brain before you use mine"

    $ login -n root
    Login incorrect
    login: backdoor
    No home directory specified in password file!
    Logging in with home=/
    #

I don't agree with the interpretation that Sam tried and failed to login as root, and THEN tried to login as a different user, backdoor. Because if that's what happened, shouldn't there be another $ prompt before he types `backdoor` and gets the #? It seems to me that's an unobfuscated password field and `backdoor` is the password.

I used FreeBSD on a laptop 2008-2010 and it was usable, other than needing a USB Wifi adapter. Definitely not as usable as Linux, but I was able to do 18 credit hours per semester. Quite a lot more than 10 minutes a day.

Notably, you and I aren't FreeBSD Foundation Executive Directors.

That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County.

Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?

Sorry, what is AD in this context?

edit: oh, automatic differentiation?

The morality of it aside, Palantir is probably a much safer investment bet than most others in the AI space. They're older and more established than a new startup picking up the steepness of the hype curve with a half-baked idea, but they're also newer and more agile than an aging tech giant that suffers from the innovator's dilemma and a ton of bloat. They have a strong reputation among their target market and they've been building a sound business and a lot of tooling and infrastructure on Big Data and machine learning for well over a decade.

I would feel icky investing in them but any comparison to junk bonds would be the last of my concerns.

Actually every time I've seen something like what I've described above it pre-dated that person's current employment.

> What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc.

I definitely saw people have concerns about vimrc files and their personal library of shell scripts well before 2020, and I've seen people early in their career get burned by sharing it too. They had a tool that made them productive, it got out of their hands, and suddenly they're getting negative feedback from someone who tried using it and it didn't meet their expectations, or it got checked into the repository and now the script they used at their last job too has their current job's copyright notice and license on it, and they're perceived as being petty for trying to claw back their own intellectual property because they didn't go to the trouble of slapping legalese all over their personal tools.

I tend to agree with you - a rising tide lifts all boats and I want my team to be a rising tide. If I'm at a startup and I'm confident my tool is a good fit for what the rest of the team is doing and there's a genuine teamwork dynamic, oh absolutely I share things like this.

But when I've been stuck for a while in a dysfunctional team, I've definitely seen the flip side where other people will find ways to take a lot of credit for minor iterations on my work, where management will reward my productivity with high expectations and high pressure to continue the trajectory they perceive in a single idea, and when the tool becomes a support burden because too many people think it should solve all of their other problems too and I'm now perceived as being the owner of this thing they depend on.