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gizmo686

If you have a model of the programming language, then you can make proofs about the source code itself. At this point, your assumption is that you are accuratly modelling the compiler.

You can go a step farther and model the instruction set and architecture, and which point you can make proofs about the final binary directly (thereby sidestepping the problem of compiler bugs). At this point, your assumption is just that your physical hardware actually matches your model.

The environment around Chernobyl has already recovered, and is now healthier than it would have been without a nuclear disaster (due entirely to it's function as a human repellent).

The area is still bad for humans; but not terrible for the ecosystem.

Re:RPKI now protects 70% of internet routes on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:22PM (#50113134)
Without RPKI, it would be easy for many governments to cut off Russia's internet access by launching a BGP attack.

Assuming the Netherlands was acting unnilaterally, Russian ISPs would be able to coordinate with other ISPs to get back online via other routes. Assuming Russia's enemy wanted to press the issue, it would quickly devolve into a political question of who wants to allow Russian peering, who does not, and who is willing to not peer with peers of Russia (and peers of peers, etc).

This has always been the case. The internet is a network of networks; all of which are subject to control by their host governments should they choose to exercise it. With or without RPKI, a partitioning of the Internet for a significant period of time was always going to be a political decision.

> You should look into how many air craft carriers the US has

Air craft carriers such as the USS Abraham Lincoln? Which had to remain at sea for 286 days, including 208 consequtive days without making port. During which time, the military suffered a massive logistical failure to adaquetly supply it, presumably due to them moving their logistical base from Bahrain to Diego Garcia. Then, was relieved only by diverting the USS George Washington and USS Theodore Roosevelt to the region, leaving no carriers in the West Pacific

> Also there are somewhere between 20 and 28 US military bases in the middle east alone

Bases which have been comming under repeated air attack; the extent and damage of which is kept quiete, but appears to be much more substantial than the US military wants to admit. And which are increasingly vulnerable as they loose air defense abilities due to both loss of supporting infastructure, and a depletion of interceptors.

Re:Market selloff, rising rates test AI data centre deal boom on Thursday October 15, 2026 @05:24PM (#50110498)
You can get rich by stealing pennies, if you steal them from enough people. It is still wrong, even if no individual lost enough to care about going after you.

If enough people try profiting by stealling pennies, the cumulative losses are significant; and can threaten confidence in and the strenght of the market.

Re:Market selloff, rising rates test AI data centre deal boom on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:37PM (#50109124)
You would have made a lot of money betting against technology back in 2000 ... assuming you got the timing right.

There are a bunch of ways that AI the technology could be massivly successful, while AI the industry crashes.

Re:Market selloff, rising rates test AI data centre deal boom on Thursday October 15, 2026 @03:32PM (#50109039)
When a stock hits the public market, it gets incorporated into broad market index funds (subject to the rules of those funds). If an overvalues stock gets dumped onto the public market, then crashes after being bought by index funds, then holders of those index funds are harmed.
If you invested in XLK (State Street Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF) In March of 2000 (just before the .com bust), you would have underperfomred SPY (S&P 500) until June 2026. As of today, the spread between the two is just over 1%, with good reason to believe that we are in another tech bubble.

https://www.etftimemachine.com/en/compare/XLK-vs-SPY?start=2...

Had you invested in XLK when it opened in 1998, then following the .com crash, it would take until early 2020 to return to parity to the S&P 500.

Re:BB(10) > Graham's Number on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:16PM (#50090085)
There is some notational subtletly here. Strictly speaking, BB(n) represents the output of the BB function for the input n. In that sense BB(n) is computable.

However, the BB function itself is not computable. It makes sense to ask "for what inputs is the BB function computable?". When people talk about BB(n) not being computable, they are really talking about the computability of the BB function at n, not the computability of the integer that happens to be BB(n).

Re:BB(10) > Graham's Number on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @03:41PM (#50077484)
The integer C is computable. However, we do not know what integer C is without first computing BB(10); and doing that might be not be possible.
Re:BB(10) > Graham's Number on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:55PM (#50074865)
Given a constanct C, you can construct a constant sequence f(n) = C.

Since f(n) is trivially computable, we know that BB(n) grows faster than f(n). It follows that there must be some n such that BB(n) > C.

Re:BB(10) > Graham's Number on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:49PM (#50074758)
The BB sequence still has infinitely many entries. Any turing machine will either halt or not halt. For any N, there is a finite set of N-state turing machines which halt, and there is therefore a finite number of steps after which all halting N-state turing machines would halt.

There is a point where these values become uncomputable, but they still exist (for some definition of exist).

Re:AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @12:27PM (#50074354)
Where is the association being stored if not the model? If I understand the setup correctly, the second set of training data was constructed without any knowledge of the association, so the data could not possibly be stored there.

This looks like a pretty classic case of stenography. You are able to hide the data in the weights such that the data is not apparent on casual (or even careful) inspection. However, the information is still there, and someone who knows to look for it can still find it, even if they do not know the specific message.

Re:Solar Panels That Plug into Your Wall on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:30AM (#50057869)
It backfeeds onto the grid and becomes the utility companies problem to deal with. This is similar to them dealing with a house that is an unbalanced consumer between the legs.
Re:Solar Panels That Plug into Your Wall on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:25AM (#50057790)
We know how to make inverters that can produce an AC voltage on their own. It is not particularly difficult or expensive. The reason why we do not put those inverters in plug-in solar units is entirely because we don't want them to have that ability.
Re:Solar Panels That Plug into Your Wall on Monday October 12, 2026 @11:08AM (#50057535)
Plug in solar doesn't make your house resilient to grid failures either. You would need an inverter that can generate an AC output without having an existing one to follow; a disconnect to isolate you from the grid during an outage, batteries to smooth the output, an electrician to install it, and an inspection to certify that it was all done correctly.

If you are going through all of that, there is not much benefit to plug-in solar instead of traditional.

Re:I think we might lose public key cryptography on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:52AM (#50016497)
> There are no shortcuts to factoring a (sufficiently large) number, and that's not even touching on other kinds of PKC.

This has never been proven. The entire point of the post is that all of public key cryptography is based on a small number of "hard" problems for which we have no deep reason to think are hard. In the pre-AI world, that was a pretty safe situation to be in. Math is a very old field, so the pace of progress was a known quantity. If we started to solve those hard problems, there would be plenty of time to find new ones before they all went away. With AI, the pace of math in the medium term is a much more unknown quantity; so the possibility of loosing all of them before we have time to find a new one is much more of a possibility.

> RSA and ECC still rule the world and no amount of AI will "break" them.

RSA has been theoretically broken for decades, as it is based on integer factorization, which is known to be vulnerable to quantum computers. Even if we ignore quantom computers, we still have no solid reason to believe that there are no solutions to integer factorization that can be realized on normal computers. At best, that gets us to 3 hard problems.

ECC is based on the assumption that ECDLP is a hard problem; and was deployed because we were concerned that integer factorization was broken.

MLWE is the backup plan if ECDLP ends up being broken.

Re:Reducing undefined behavior in the C language on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:06AM (#50016206)
A high level assembly would not have a UB problem, because the generated machine code would closely map to your source code, so even technically undefined behaviour would end up doing the expected thing for the given hardware.

The problem with C is that modern compilers do a lot of transformations between your source code and the final machine code, so the actual behavior could be very far afield from what you would expect.

> And I'm not even sure if Rust solves this case as far as UB is concerned.

If your entire program is inside unsafe, then Rust is actually worse than C as far as UB is concerned. On the other hand, no one writes Rust like that, and Rust restricts all UB to unsafe blocks.

Re:Factorio that you can touch on Friday September 25, 2026 @12:15PM (#49846535)
As far as the game in concerned, the sprites are all just 2D assets. The fact that those assets came from a 3d model during development has no effect on performance. They also do manual post-processing on most of the 2D renders.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-146

Re:Prompts Aren't Real on Monday September 21, 2026 @12:12AM (#49782973)
At that point, companies could just provide an API and let users bring their own user agent, be it AI or traditional.

The problem is that history has shown that companies really do not want to do that. They will happily pay to maintain an inferior interface and go out of their way to disrupt third party clients.

Because there is an infinite loop that makes the epilogue unreachable, so it is safe for the compiler to remove it!

Sure, that optimization interacts badly with the optimization that removes the infinite loop. But half the point of UB is to avoid needing to deal with such interactions, because they are defined out of existence.

Re:The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities on Thursday September 17, 2026 @11:33PM (#49749906)
Where I live (America, but waste processing is all handled at the local level and policies differ), the landfill has a "resident convenience center" with a bunch of dropoff stations for various types of stuff, along with a big ledge you can toss things over to be sent to the landfill. When you arrive, and attendent will ask and/or look at what you have and tell you where to put it. Sometimes the answer is "you can't dump that for free. Go to the transfer station and pay by the pound".

In theory, there is also an annual wait limit to free dumps, but they can't actually enforce it.

Re:We Are Still Living in the Broken World Sept. 11 Created on Thursday September 10, 2026 @03:17PM (#49648926)
What strategic objective did Bin Laden achieve?

If we look at his stated reason for the attack [0], it is hard to reconcile post 9/11 history with a claim of his victory.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20040615081002/http://observer.g...

Re:The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:22PM (#49541928)
Why is that the most likely outcome?

The history of automation is filled with cases where the result has been lower quality goods at lower prices.

Re:Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @03:22PM (#49541114)
The premise of dark matter is that it is something with gravity that does not otherwise interact with any of our detectors (e.g. "normal" matter); or that any such interactions are weak enough that it is plausible we have not noticed.

By itself, that does not exclude the possibility of dark matter having other interactions which do not interfere with our detectors.

Re:Black hole singularity is a surface not a point on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @04:20AM (#49445596)
"Visible" in this case means "able to influence in any way".

If a problem is not able to influence anything, even in theory, then by definition, it cannot possible influence any testable predictions we have.

Re:SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64 on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @01:18AM (#49429374)
Interesting, but not unheard of. Think of attacks like Row Hammer. No revolutionary physics needed. But chip designers cannot fully apply quantum field theory to an entire CPU, so they necessarily use simplified a simplified physics model. The resulting chips then need to be empirically verified to correct places where that simplified model diverges to much from the messy reality, which means that the chip design is only as good as the empirical testing done to it.

Add to that the potential for unknown and mis-moddeled manufacturing defects, and manipulated electrical voltages and signals, random particle interactions, and there is a lot of room for known physics to break a verilog level proof of correctness.

Re:SeL4 security proofs now complete on AArch64 on Monday August 24, 2026 @04:09PM (#49425207)
You don't need to prove the hardware correct to prove that the software is free from timing side-channels. You just need a model of the hardware that captures timing information.

Sure a hardware or model bug would render your proof non-applicable, but that is already the case for the existing proofs.

The bigger problem is simply that hardware designers do not care about timing side channels. Even if you did accurately model the timing behavior of a modern processor, you would just discover that trying to write software free from timing side channels is a practical impossibility.

> And then you'd need assurance that the Verilog is faithfully transcribed in the silicon, which is a can of worms in itself.

You would also need to prove that our model of physics accurately describes how that silicon would behave, and the the environment around the silicon is within the physical parameters you modeled...

Re:Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful on Thursday August 20, 2026 @01:12PM (#49377392)
It is not sufficient to work against current AI. It needs to also work against AI that has been trained by a competent team aware of your mitigation. Or worse, a competent developer with no particular AI skills.

Otherwise, you are relying on obscurity, and will lose as soon as you become interesting enough to matter.

You will also break non-AI machine processing use cases. That isn't just accessibility, it is things like search.

It doesn't matter what they charge if the patient doesn't pay it; which is what often happens with uninsured people showing up at the ER.

> Any excess money at the end of the year should be moved to the pool for the next year, not as a bonus on CEOs' 100m+ salary

Under the ACA, excess money in the pool must be rebated to policy holders. In practice, this worked for a few years, but eventually insurance companies ended up increasing cost in order to increase the absolute amount they were allowed to keep. Maybe this is still good (more claims approved), but it is counter productive to the goal of reducing healthcare costs.

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