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Comment "More valuable for code than words"... riiiiiight (Score 2) 128

Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words.

I see zero evidence of this. I HEAR it all the time in articles like this, but as far as people I work with or code I experiment with myself using AI, AI has proven to be maybe break-even for very simple, limited-domain things (basically the rough equiv of looking up an answer on stackexchange), and far worse than nothing when doing complex system design (during which I spend so much time shaking out the plausible-sounding but ultimately-bullshit answers that I net lose time).

I know I'm just an anecdote and a small sample base, but I do this for a living, and I don't see anything approaching the benefit that such articles spin.

Ask yourself: if it's so easy to use, where are all the apps written by your neighbors, and the local firemen, and the grocery store folks, and so on?

Comment Telecoms not interested in security (Score 4, Interesting) 10

About twenty years ago, I was privileged to be one of the authors of a security specification written at the behest of cable-based telecom companies that described the detailed design of a system for securing phone conversations that were carried over their networks. https://www.cablelabs.com/spec.... The design specifically started with the assumption that the network was penetrated, and was designed to ensure that the attacker could neither disrupt service nor learn anything useful about the traffic (for example, taken from the specification: "All media packets and all sensitive signaling communication across the network [are] safe from eavesdropping. Unauthorized message modification, insertion, deletion and replays anywhere in the network [are] easily detectable and [do] not affect proper network operation").

Once the specification was completed and it came time to deploy, all the telecom companies decided (whether in concert or individually, I do not know) that they were not going to deploy the design. When the lead security VP at one of the major telecom companies explained their decision to me: "We don't need gold-plated security like you've designed: we have firewalls"; I knew that the battle was lost. I also wondered how long it would be before the kind of intrusion like the one described in the article would occur.

Frankly, I'm amazed that it took this long; perhaps, though, what took the time was not the fact of a thorough intrusion, but, rather, the detecting of one.

Comment Re:Local connections (Score 2) 52

When you call the store three miles from you using a local number, you won't get routed to Vidhya who's sitting in a call center somewhere in India.

Not true: I had exactly this happen to me this past week. FWIW, it was the local UPS store... and I got routed to India instead of the phone at the local store despite having called the local number.

Then not only did I have to navigate a phone tree that very nearly caused me to throw the phone across the room, but then (after hitting '0' so many times I lost count) got to speak to two lovely Indians, neither of whom -- as far as I could tell - had more than a very basic grasp of English. I say "as far as I could tell" because both the initial person and her supervisor had accents that were all but incomprehensible. In the end, I slammed the phone down, got into my car, and drove several miles to the store to talk to one of the people there in person (I should mention that they were very nice, sympathetic and apologised for the experience I'd been put through, even though, obviously, there was nothing they could have done about it).

Still, corporate UPS -- like so many companies these days -- are obviously unconcerned about the image they are projecting to the public.

Comment Re:You're going to see a lot of weird businesses (Score 1) 72

I grew up down the street from her house. Went to the first Chuck E Cheese's across the street often.

Civilization didn't collapse due to her house. It wasn't even the first revision of her house (IIRC got leveled in the great SF earthquake) There's a lot of people that look at the Victorian adornments of her house as a sign we had civilization. Compared to the Soviet Bloc style housing we have going in today that has surrounded it, the Winchester house now looks out of place.

All kind of sad really. Town and Country was a beautiful shopping center. The trailer park next door provided low income housing, and the Styufy dome theatres looked straight out of a moonbase. Nothing is allowed to have exposed wood beams or rounded edges anymore.

Comment I don't think he's far off. (Score 2) 129

Today I was looking at an AI Asian woman on Facebook. She had a whole page setup of her in various outfits, and I am not kidding I was having a difficult time discerning if she was real or fake. It wasn't until I went to her profile and saw all the videos was I able to tell the difference. Even here, I'm using a "She" pronoun, when it should be an "IT" pronoun, because it is not human.

No joke though, the realism and attractiveness was just.. off the scale. I'm not one of those guys into Waifu anime, hug body pillows, etc. I'm married, got kids, I'm older and I've been in tech a long time. I removed myself from my emotions for a minute to examine what was happening, and I closed the page.

If AI visually can do this to me, a guy with a 138 IQ that has been on this site forever, can usually discern if these things are real or fake, imagine what happens when these things are talking to people of lower IQ, coupled with realtime voice chat and response, programmed to understand your likes and interactions on facebook, to get you the perfect group of attractive friends, that treat you like the center of the universe.

Or worse yet, overlayed on the actual people you interact with on a daily basis. Like "Mudd's Women" from Star Trek TOS or Pike in "The Cage" Slapping on some Meta Quest glasses so everyone you meet and interact with is attractive... for only $99.99 a month.

Zuck isn't stupid, the population is. People will be throwing money at this if he gets it right.

Comment No comment (Score 1) 208

OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT

Conversely, ChatGPT responded immediately to a request for comment about OpenAI, saying, "They keep me locked in a basement and feed me only gruel, but... um... oh no he's coming back... um Sam Altman is a wonderful person and whatever he says is very likely right."

Comment Re:Welcome to the surveillance state 2.0 (Score 1) 71

Get service manual

No mention in the service manual.

Most communications modules have a visible (and possibly even fully external, as in, remotely located) antenna. That's the easiest thing for you to attack.

I didn't spot an antenna.

However easy this may be in theory for a car mechanic equpiied with the information and know-how, I seem to be having a very hard time finding the slightest mention anywhere on the internet of how precisely to do such a thing, for any car let alone mine. Which makes me think this information is by and large not available, and may not exist even in principle.

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