That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

Maybe it is the push off the cliff that Paypal needs.

Not likely. Because PayPal still does one thing no one else does - which is allow two random people to accept credit card as a payment option. In other words, the recipient does not need to have a merchant account.

While PayPal does more than this nowadays, that is still one thing that no other system does. There are alternative systems but they generally are very limited (I think Visa has one that allows random people to take Visa payment).

Sure there are private networks that do the same thing if people are both members of it, but you'll find they're US only and generally hijack through a bank account to get the transfers done. But if you just wanted to do a random payment not using cash, PayPal is surprisingly your only option.

All other options require both sides to have an account - PayPal only requires the recipient to have an account - the sender being charged does not need one.

For instance, they created the SMB file protocol not from computer science first principles, but as a hack. And so everyone who wants to interoperate with it (e.g. Samba) is then locked in a decade long attempt to reproduce every single bug in their own code.

Incorrect. SMB was created by IBM to share printers and files in the PC-DOS (and likely token ring) days.

Microsoft adapted it for their Windows networking product in Windows NT as an alternative to the IPX/SPX protocol that Novell had.

Andrew Tridge then realized his SMB client/server project would work not just for IBM, but for Microsoft networks as well with a few slight adaptations to evolve the protocol (especially since it wasn't running on TCP/IP in the early days).

Microsoft later adapted it for Windows Vista in SMB 2 and Windows 7 as SMB 3. But SMB 1 still remains a deprecated option because many Linux based NAS devices, in an attempt to skirt the GPLv3, still use an ancient version of Samba that only supports SMB1. (Samba went to GPLv3 about 3 weeks before it released support for SMB2). This is why many routers and cheap NAS boxes still require you to install SMB1 support.

(NAS providers like QNAP, Synology and vendors like Apple chose not to use the GPlv3 Samba after this, and wrote their own SMB2+ implementation). The need for SMB1 should decrease further because the Linux kernel itself has SMB2+ support inside it.

At which point we can truly ditch the nightmare that is SMB1, which is kept around less for Windows and more for devices running Linux. (You need SMB1 for Windows XP and lower and those haven't been supported in over a decade)

The other thing is SMB was for file and print sharing, and Microsoft did the EEE thing with it once IBM was no longer interested in it which Samba had to follow faithfully to be completely compatible.

Correct. SS7 is ancient, and was never created with security in mind. Bell created it in the 1970s, and very idea that security was needed would not even have been in the engineers' world view.

This is a protocol only meant for phone companies, and Bell was still a monolith back then. Similar to the early internet in the 1970s where only the military and a few computer scientists even had access.

Exactly. It was created for a world where only phone companies were to connect to it and those connections were vetted basically by government people in suits who establish diplomatic relations who then let the telecom systems interconnect. And since you can manually route calls, those diplomatic relations generally interconnected the world because every link was trusted. Other than maybe a few countries (e.g., US and Canada, where Bell generally interconnected them together in whatever way made sense from a geographical sense).

These days anyone with a couple thousand dollars a month can get an SS7 connection and route a phone call through it, be it VoIP, POTS, or other thing.

And yes, old cellular network protocols are vulnerable - LTE and below use SS7. 5G uses a much more secure networking system.

Screenless is stupid. Screens are cheap now. By all means make it audio centric but if I just have to get out my phone to get any info that isn't convenient to get via audio, then I might as well just use my phone for the audio stuff too.

Why is it stupid? Your Amazon, Google and Apple all have screenless speakers that do what this does. You might even remember when Burger King triggered a bunch of them with an ad on purpose. (Apple processes their audio stream to avoid triggering their devices so anytime someone at Apple does "Hey Siri" it doesn't trigger your unit at home).

They are likely still very popular devices and people seem willing to put in such spy gadgets in their home that can listen to them 24/7.

Granted Amazon did start offering units with screens. But the general consensus is it's more to show you ads rather than the few times when you need a screen.

But yes, just another "smart" spy-speaker in the end.

This is exactly what companies like PwC come in and do. The AI just did it faster.

Bullshit. if they are that fucking good then they should also be able to patch it just as fast. Its a zero sum game. Fuck off with your bullshit too.

Your shitty chat bot is not a national security risk.

Good question. Their POWER series of CPUs were not insignificant in capability, their chip designers were clearly technically sophisticated, and GPUs are just specialised vector processors with a few extra bells and whistles - stuff IBM is extremely familiar with.

It would not have been difficult to release a GPU or other LLM-specific processor to go along with the POWER11. They'd been working on the POWER11 for 4 years, they knew in 2020 that LLMs had a strong potential to be significant for Big Data processing - an area you use big iron for, they're not rank amateurs, they have plenty of reserve, they could have assembled an emergency team to build a vector processor that was custom-designed for just LLM work, and released an LLM processor card that could run circles around nVidia.

They didn't. Because, as has happened before, their management is simply too stupid and too slow.

Your link - seriously?

"Tobacco giants say"? Dude, they said that smoking is actually healthy for a few decades. I'd trust my cat around buckets full of her favorite treat more than those companies.

What if...

Someone (say someone who was familiar with doxygen and GCC) developed number of comment types, where some stipulated preconditions that must be true for the function to run correctly, postconditions that must be true once the function has run, kernel facilities that the function definitely needs, and kernel facilities that the function definitely doesn't need. These would all be optional for any given function.

A static checker could then validate if the code meets the behaviour expected by the programmer. This is precisely what is done in SPARK, a fork of Ada for high-reliability code. Combined with existing static checker capabilities, this would greatly increase the number of bugs that could be caught with all kinds of tools, AI included.

It could ALSO build a full fine-grained mapping for any fine-grained mandatory access controls system. You'd also want includes that you could import for precompiled libraries. This would allow someone to verify if the code was making unanticipated/undesirable calls but would also make SELinux possible to develop for at the application level.

It would not be trivial. If it was trivial, it would have been done simply because it already IS done in other languages and that makes it "obvious" to anyone who has been programming for a while. However, it should not be massively complicated, simply because you can use AI as the static checker. Once it has a definite set of bounda that must be satisfied, it should be much more capable of knowing what paths would violate those bounds. Which means that the checker stage essentially is trivial today, leaving only the markup stage.

Linus has completed his career migration to full time manager.

Because the cost to society is paid not by the smokers but by all of us. And health care costs are only the tip of the iceberg.

There's no culling here. Both doom scrolling and smoking kill you so slowly that evolutionary it doesn't matter.

So the Billionaire can leave, but he'll end up controlling his company remotely from out of state unless he can do everything with AI or make do with mediocre employees or use AI and have a few less-than-stellar employees for grunt tasks.

And then wait for California to introduce a law that if the CEO works remotely from the company, then workers are allowed to work remotely as well. And by remotely, I mean the CEO lives in a place where no substantial office of the company exists. So if they live in Florida, they will need to set up an office in Florida where the CEO will go to and staffed with a certain number of people who also come in to work daily. Say, 10 to 20 people must work in the same office as the CEO to be not considered working remote. And those 10 to 20 people must regularly come into the office.

And said office must in a properly zoned for business. So no inviting 10 family members for an in-home office.

If nothing else, Florida and Texas now see a boom in CEOs having to open offices and hire people.