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Comment It runs the Sony Entertainment virus (Score 1) 252

I found a copy of the virus that was used to exfiltrate data from Sony Entertainment's computers and then wipe them (supposedly the virus was developed by North Koreans, in response to the movie The Interview, but actually, my own forensics suggest that the authors were South Korean). In the process of studying the virus, I must have accidentally double-clicked on the executable in Nautilus when I was trying to drag it to move it into another directory. For whatever stupid reason, Nautilus is set up to run Windows executables in Wine when they are double-clicked. A couple of minutes later, I noticed files were starting to disappear all over my hard drive. I panicked and held down the power button for 5 seconds to hard-shutdown the computer. Sure enough, when I rebooted, I discovered that tens of thousands of files were gone. It's a real victory for Linux compatibility with Windows when Wine can run viruses just as well as Windows.

Comment It starts with bad programming languages (Score 1) 354

It all starts with bad programming languages that give you enough rope to hang yourself with, or a gun to shoot yourself and others in the foot with. I'm not even a Rust fanboy, but consider Rust for future projects, as it is probably the safest language today (at least from a security point of view). And even better languages are coming.

Comment The irony (Score 1) 240

This is highly ironic, given Elon musk's completely baseless claims that humanity is facing an existential risk from the threat of AI superintelligence. Literally all that we are building today, even using deep learning, amounts to nothing more than fancy statistical regression.

Comment This doesn't show we're winning at AI (Score 2) 133

This doesn't show we are winning at creating AI. It simply shows that the game of Go is more tractable than we previously thought. Claims about the number of positions in Go being vastly greater than the number of atoms in the universe (something like the number of atoms squared) completely miss the point: this is a straw man argument for why algorithms weren't good at Go until recently, since (obviously) humans are not searching the entire space of all possible board positions either. It stands to reason that once a sufficiently flexible fuzzy hierarchical pattern matching algorithm were produced, it would be able to play Go much better than a human.

Comment Re:Interesting but... (Score 1) 79

This is not Chrome-only. Variable fonts (OpenType Font Variations) were jointly developed by Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Adobe. It's part of version 1.8 of the OpenType font format specification. It will be built into a Windows release this year, and Apple will also release support in the near future.

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