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Comment The challenge (Score 1) 101

Is to set coursework and exams that are specifically crafted to exploit where AI is weak or prone to hallucinate.

You do not ban cheating, because those who cheat will inevitably find ways to circumvent the ban.

Rather, you exploit the properties of the mechanisms of cheating to ensure that those who actually understand the ideas are marked relatively highly (regardless of whether they reach the textbook conclusion) and whose who do not understand the ideas cannot do well even if they give what is in the textbook.

The interest should not be in precise answers, but in precise use of tools of reasoning and analysis, because this is what actually matters when it comes to understanding. Yes, it means you can't standardise so easily, and you have to devise things in ways that don't penalise intuitive thinkers over methodical thinkers, but you cannot teach a subject properly if you are only concerned about the surface.

Comment Bleagh, (Score 1) 67

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

Comment Broken analogy. (Score 1) 65

Bulldozer flatten the physical world. AI generates content and code in the virtual world. Huge difference.

So being smart isn't a rarity anymore? Boo hoo.

When a smartphone can do a diagnosis just as good as a doctor (or better), when it can cough up a legal document that is 80% finished after 30 seconds, that's overall a good thing. Some desk jockeys like us will lose their prestigious jobs. Really no big loss for society as a hole.

The problem is, of course, that running a fascist surveillance state has just gotten 5 orders of magnitude cheaper. That sure is a problem we need to be aware of.

Comment This isn't news. Read the TOS. (Score 3, Informative) 70

The TOS of these commercial services say they basically own your content, unless it's illegal, then all the burden is on you. This has been the case ever since those services became a thing, more than 25 years ago.

That's why any computer and internet expert worth their reputation does not use these services without a throw-away alias account or for anything mission-critical.

Comment Re:The secret word is "trust". (Score 1) 2

The DoD is known for viruses transporting payloads across airgaps onto Internet-connected machines. One thing it isn't is "so secure".

But, to the extent that it IS secure, it uses pretty much what I outlined. They use Class 3 certs for all users and all machines, and have done since about 2001. The US Navy got to trial run thei system to shake down the defects in the design, before they rolled it out to everyone. Beyond that, they use segregated networks (in principle, physical separation rather than logical separation, but who knows?) and encrypted communications.

What I've done above is take what the US DoD uses today, threw in what the US DoD recommended but never actually implemented in the 70s to fill in some of the gaps, and also included what the US DoD implemented and actually used in the way of Trusted OS deisgns in the 70s and 80s. The NSA and IRS likely use some variants on the same techniques.

So, what I've got above is pretty much why the DoD is as secure as it is.

What I've done is augmented it to handle the fact that you need to verify the hardware and not just the endpoint, and that you need to verify the physical host independently of the logical host. But that's pretty much it.

Comment I always wait a generation. Still happy with my... (Score 3, Interesting) 45

... Xbox One X. Awesome machine. Console affordable, games dirt cheap, all the bugs ironed out. I'll be getting the Xbox Series X when that drops in price ... which is likely not going to happen for a while but is totally fine by me. I still have plenty games to play on my current main console.

I always wait until the end of a generation before I buy. I've still got 80+ games, most of them unplayed. Even my Xbox 360 library is half unused. Someday I want to finish the Orange Box on that one.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Thoughts on confidential computing 2

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/04/confidential-computings-core-trust-mechanism-is-broken-the-fix-may-not-exist/5266056

The claim in The Register is that confidential computing might not be a fixable problem. I am not going to claim I have "the solution", or that the solution I have come up with meets either the requirement of being necessary or sufficient, but I would argue that it adequately challenges the assumption that the problem cannot be solved at all.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Thoughts regarding confidential computing

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/04/confidential-computings-core-trust-mechanism-is-broken-the-fix-may-not-exist/5266056

The claim in The Register is that confidential computing might not be a fixable problem. I am not going to claim I have "the solution", or that the solution I have come up with meets either the requirement of being necessary or sufficient, but I would argue that it adequately challenges the assumption that the problem cannot be solved at all.

Comment Re:Interesting and disappointing (Score 1) 19

That is true, but the archaeology shows that this won't work for all island-hopping or all river navigation.

For example, we have clear evidence of hominins not just living on islands across the Mediterranean when no ice was present (it was free-standing water) but commuting to and from shore. We also have evidence of technologies travelling upstream along river-based communities at speeds that cannot be accounted for by simply walking.

So we need a model in which they could actively navigate against the water flow AND across significant distances of open water.

Comment Re:Interesting and disappointing (Score 2) 19

We know that boats built 1.1 million years ago (so around the time of the split) were capable of going long distances up/down rivers between settlements, and across open waters beyond visual range to islands. This places certain language requirements on the hominins of the time, although we can't be sure hobbits had full access to all of those requirements. (There's not much evidence of boat building.)

However, they must have genetically had the capability, whether or not their brains were large enough to make any use of it.

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