muvlon
muvlon on Hacker News
An example that comes to mind is postfix (the SMTP daemon). It hasn't had
zero memory safety issues, but nearly so. Certainly an abnormally low amount given the size/complexity of the project and the number of eyes on it.
It's also had a pretty 'normal' (read: higher) amount of non-memory related bugs such as SMTP smuggling of filesystem permission TOCTOU, so it's not like its devs are somehow really good at just not writing bugs.
Maybe they have chosen a software architecture that allows them to avoid complicated memory-related logic? I genuinely don't know, would love to hear from a postfix developer.
> one of those chips with the correct harness is all that's needed to get fable like intelligence in every single computer in this planet
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying we could put a dinner-plate sized chip that costs millions of dollars and draws tens of killowats of power into every single computer on the planet? Or that a single of these chips could provide inference as a service for every computer on the planet? Because neither of those are even remotely feasible.
Prompting the AI to be mean doesn't do shit. It doesn't change that your interaction with it is always consequence-free. It will never refuse to talk to you, and if it gets too mean you can just nuke it and start an new session. You don't have to build or retain any social skills.
He may be using it as a tool, but that doesn't mean it's not displacing social interaction. Previously he would've had to collaborate with people to get the same stuff done, which necessarily involves social interaction.
Not per se, but if you're using it as a substitute for human interaction (like most 'chatbot' style UIs want you to), then yes, absolutely.
The main problem is that talking to AI is like talking to a human without any of the thorny parts. It's only going to be nice and helpful and always available to you. Chatting with AI is to social interaction like candy is to a balanced diet. Sure it's more instantly gratifying but long-term it's really bad for you. You need the thorny parts to build important social skills like tactfulness and navigating conflict.
Notably absent: AI minimalism.
I think that's telling. If you're reducing digital human interaction on social media (which yes, has its share of problems) but replacing it with "social" interaction with AI, that's not minimalism. You're replacing one vice with an even worse one and coping about it.
You can cherry pick the bad ones if the point you want to make is that it's risky. Nobody is saying Anthropic is definitely going to 0, just that there is a risk.
But the Amish are nonetheless protected. Not by the law but by having a community of people around them willing to live with those same restrictions and provide for each other. I think that's much more likely to happen than legal protection also in the AI case.
And then what? Once the economy no longer depends on human input (labor), why do we expect it to keep producing outputs that humans need (food, shelter, medical care)?
I doubt the truthfulness your second sentence. If they have concern for the human race broadly, they have yet to show any of it. What they have shown is a complete lack of 'alignment' (to borrow a tired term) with human values, laws and basic decency.
Somebody else asked this very eloquently: If AGI is here, why does OpenAI need us to prompt it? They could just go and tell it "make as much money as possible" or "make Sam Altman God Emperor of Mankind" and it would go do that. It would not need any of our ideas or guidance.
As long as they're still looking for prompting customers, they're clearly not there yet. There is some solace in that.
For most microcontrollers you'd want to use today (ARM and RISC-V mostly, Xtensa or AVR if you like pain) you can just use Rust.
For anything weirder than that (PIC?) where Rust is no option, it's not like you have no choice either: You can just pick C.
The server could simply be running a patched PHP.
It cannot even show that. The server can lie (trivially).
> If it's all going through the same pipes, what is there to market.
They keep coming up with fancy new pricing schemes or random gimmicks to throw in. Nobody really seems to give a shit though.
The way I understand it in my country is this:
There is only one public water system, every house connects to it. The state tasks specific companies with its maintenance (these are often not utility providers themselves, just construction/maintenance companies).
Consumers attached to that system have a metered connection, but water just flows as long as there's enough overall. Your utilities company doesn't have to move any physical water at all. They just have to eventually "settle" the amount of water that they sold to their customers. They do so by buying and then forwarding options contracts.
The electricity and gas companies are the same. They compete on
- trading (who knows best when to buy how much?) and
- consumer-facing marketing
This is how a lot of the modern economy works. Through the power of abstraction, you can run an online store without producing or shipping any items yourself and a delivery restaurant without cooking any meals.
It's a really dumb test. You can apply it to argue against reducing or stopping literally anything. My dead great grandfather uses no fentanyl and commits no murders. If we're not doing those, we're as good as dead!
Oh wow, that is even more damning. Only 146 out of the possible 256 keys have this property. You only have about a 1% chance to get that 8 times in a row (A little more than 1% if sampling with replacement and a little less if sampling without. You'd expect them to at least not use the exact same key twice but at this point???).
My bet is on one of
- A sequence number being accidentally used as the private key or
- The private key being generated securely but then accidentally truncated to 8 bits (e.g. writing a single char into a zeroed buffer when you should've memcpy'd from a char*).
The sequence number idea is supported by the fact that two of the G3B private keys are consecutive numbers. I ran a quick Monte Carlo simulation and if I got it right, sampling 8 keys from [0,255] uniformly at random (as in the truncation scenario), you'd expect them to contain 2 consecutive numbers only about 18% of the time.
Sure, if you can MitM the connection to a single-homed destination network, you can get Let's Encrypt to sign you certificates for things in that network, regardless of how many perspectives Let's Encrypt uses.
However, if you can MitM the uplinks at all of Let's Encrypt's perspectives, you can basically break the entire CA for everyone. Adding more perspectives reduces the risk of that.
I mean, where I live, there are no HOAs, but the city council instead mandates those kinds of things via zoning rules.
I think I still prefer that to HOAs, because
- The city is pretty good at taking care of public facilities
- I only pay city tax, not city tax and HOA fees
- The city has better things to do than walk around neighborhoods looking for violations, so enforcement is pretty lax
- The city government is subject to checks and balances
Yeah. I drive a modern Stellantis EV and it's quite evident that this is an afterthought retrofitted onto a ICE/hybrid platform. The battery is not that huge, but more importantly all the EV-specific features you'd expect are either missing entirely or really crappy. Charging speed is severely limited, there is no vehicle-to-load, barely anything in terms of charging settings and also no trip planning (I'm told this is available as a paid add-on in some models). By default, the screen behind the steering wheel uses the majority of its space to visualize which energy source is currently in use - maybe nice in a hybrid, but profoundly useless in a pure EV. And of course, there is no frunk. Instead, the space under the hood is occupied by the centralized electric motor as well as the supplementary car parts arranged in a way clearly meant to accommodate a much larger combustion drivetrain, all covered in big plastic panels to conceal the empty space (or maybe the fact that it's an EV at all).
Not to bash it too much, it is an okay car that gets you where you want to go, but it's clearly not them doing their best job at making an EV. I actually like that they have physical, tactile interfaces such as buttons, levers and knobs for all the really important features. I'm not saying they should go the Tesla route and replace all that with a big touchscreen in the center column.
Heck, even using multiple returns for this feels like a kludge to me at this point, when more advanced languages like TypeScript, Rust or Zig offer sum types/tagged unions.
So instead of relying on someone's hosted service, this is relying on someone's 4 hosted services?
I don't think it's a paradox because the EU is not a single actor. Just like any government, they do some good and some bad things.
Yes you can add entries, but it's still an awful design. It's like if the web didn't have media queries and such and instead everyone ships a big database of user agent strings that websites check in order to know what features they can use.
And no, caniuse or browserlist are not that. Yes they contain data on what browsers support what, but that's only to guide your compatibility decisions. You can still opportunistically try to use a feature and a new browser that's not in the DB can handle it correctly without having to lie in its UA string.
Terminfo was never a particularly good idea, but in today's day and age it has become simply ridiculous. Its original purpose was to store data about actually manufactured physical terminals, and so it was okay that it was a fixed DB (as opposed to interactively querying the terminal for its capabilities somehow).
These days though, terminals are all software. It would be very easy to just ask them. Instead we still insist on shipping a fixed terminfo or termcaps DB. As a consequence, every new terminal emulator is not in there, and so in order to give their users a tolerable experience, they all lie and say they're xterm-256color. Which completely removes any incentive to actually add them to terminfo/termcaps.
So we have this hellishly complex, nearly Turing complete compatibility system that does no useful work at all anymore.
Sure, but that's nothing new. Russia has always been investing into domestic alternatives, even going to great lengths to build their own CPU architecture and such. But they've been a sworn enemy of the West so that's nothing surprising, and neither is China doing the same. The EU so far was considered firmly in the sphere of influence of the US, which is why this development is interesting.