Identifying backdoors in an office package is relatively easy, since it has no business communicating over the network in most cases and it certainly has no business opening server-sockers, ever. For the general case, things are more complex.

Trump's stupid illegal war is on track to start causing food shortages. This is Putin getting out ahead of that. No matter how much you oppress people if they're starving to death they will act against you. You can cut them down with machine guns but you run the risk of the rest of the world using that as an excuse to turn against you. At a certain point no matter how much dirt Putin has on Trump he won't be able to keep letting him bypass sanctions then.

There is a reason for that. And it is most likely that they are rapidly freeing up Capital so they can try their hand at AI bullshit along with everybody else.

You don't just cut 20% of your staff like it's nothing. Companies are firing employees left and right to free up capital. This is actually by design it's what high interest rates are designed to do.

If inflation was under control a lot of these layoffs wouldn't be happening because companies would just borrow at low interest rates.

I spend my time reading /. where we run stories such as that estimations of microplastics may be incorrectly overreported. Maybe the problem isn't the media but rather what you choose to commit to memory from it?

Yeah but The Guardian is alarmist trash right? They wouldn't ever run stories like this that say science is overreporting something https://www.theguardian.com/en... No sirree.

I'm just talking about statistical patterns. I know little about Microsoft patches. I abandoned Windows in 2001, right around the time XP was released, and have never looked back.

Not remotely similar to my experience. Granted I'm writing Rust, and the Rust compiler is *really* picky, so by the time the agent gets something that compiles it's a lot closer to correct than in other languages. Particularly if you know how to use the type system to enforce correctness.

Yes, you have to know how to write tests. A few decades of experience helps a lot. I find I actually spend a lot more time focused on the details of APIs and data structures than the details of tests, though. Getting APIs or data structures wrong will cost you down the road.

Also, I suppose it helps a bit that my work is in cryptography (protocols, not algorithms). The great thing about crypto code is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all. If you screw up the business logic just a little bit, you get completely wrong answers. The terrible thing is that if you get a single bit wrong, it doesn't work at all and gives you no clue where your problem might be.

Of course that's just functional correctness. With cryptography, the really hard part is making sure that the implementation is actually secure. The AI can't help much with that. That requires lots of knowledge and lots of experience.

Deep experience is absolutely required. My antennas are quite good after 40 years.

You really have to know what questions to ask, and what answers not to accept. It also helps to know what kinds of errors the LLM makes. It never outright lies, but it will guess rather than look, so you have to know when and how to push it, and how to manage its context window. When stuff starts falling out of the context window the machine starts guessing, approximating, justifying. Sometimes this means you need to make it spawn a bunch of focused subagents each responsible for a small piece of the problem. There are a lot of techniques to learn to maximize the benefit and minimize the errors.

Yeah, I am definitely not doing UI work.

Speak for yourself. I wrote Android's Keymaster implementation in less than a month, and it was about that size, and then re-wrote most of it in a week when it turned out I'd made some core assumptions that Qualcomm couldn't match in their implementation. It was relatively bug-free for a decade -- even when a third-party security research lab spent a month scrutinizing it. They found a handful of things, but nothing serious. I was amazed, especially since I'd seen the reports they turned in on some other code.

That's just one example. In my nearly 40-year career I've had a half dozen crazy-productive weeks like that, and usually when working on particularly-complex bits. If you haven't had that experience, that's unfortunate. It's not something I could do frequently (or would want to), but it's a glorious feeling when you're that deep in the zone.

So I was using telling Trump kind of broadly. What they would actually be doing is calling the senators they own and telling them to sit down with Trump and explain that if he doesn't back the fuck down he's going to lose his War Powers. And if he keeps up at it they will have the senators they own impeach him and remove him from office after the midterms.

Remember the Trump isn't actually in charge the billionaires are. So if this is happening it's because the billionaires want it to.

I'm sure that the various other AI companies will respect the copyrights involved and not steal all the useful information and ideas and algorithms. If it's one group of people who are always very respectful of copyright it's AI companies.

The trouble is the only place to dump it that much money involved is into your 401k. So it's only a matter of time.

There will be an initial gold rush by Insiders. And then the regulations will quietly be altered. Just in time to let them screw us all over and make out with all our money.

Did you get paid to post that? If not then you should be.

We stopped and forcing antitrust law in the '80s. If you try to make a serious go at competing with any major company then they will come in and if you are extremely lucky off of the buy you out but these days they just come in and copy your product and do it cheaper by leveraging other businesses they own and run you out of business.

As a employee you're also fucked because we also stopped and forcing labor protection laws. So companies can collude to lower wages while getting tax breaks for offshoring your job.

The game is rigged against you. But that's a really hard thing for people to accept.

Is so good for the billionaires that they don't care that America is rapidly getting shut out of the rest of the world because we are a national security risk...

Ordinarily what would be happening right now is billionaires would be telling Trump to knock it the fuck off with the crazy foreign policy because of the risk of us companies being frozen out of European markets. But nope. Everybody is just full steam ahead on the Trump train.

It's another example of how every single system designed to protect you has broken down.

Of bad stock into your 401k. The YouTuber Patrick Boyle has a detailed video on the subject.

Basically SpaceX is going to be valued at 1.5 trillion. However it is impossible for it to reach that valuation in the real world.

SpaceX already has all the launch customers that can possibly get even under the best case scenario. And in unfavorable administration would almost certainly start looking for alternatives because Elon meddled in a war.

So the only possible growth sector for SpaceX is launching its own satellites, specifically the ones for internet.

But that's a dead end too because there aren't enough customers who can afford high-speed internet and also do not have access to some form of landline based internet like cable or DSL

the only other growth sector would be AI bullshit but Elon has lost most of his engineers to other companies. SpaceX got this huge boost because Elon had a mystique and he was talking about going to Mars so a shitload of rocket engineers took lower pay than they could get in any other job and work longer hours to work for spacex. That isn't happening with elon's AI companies. So he can't compete and the stuff he's building is barely better than what you could build yourself and run off your own GPU.

Everybody knows this, at least everybody who is investing that kind of money, so in order to get the kind of money he wants he's doing a weird stock scheme that limits access to the stock in order to drive up the price. Basically a few insiders will get all the profit and it's going to leave a huge amount of worthless stock that needs to be sent somewhere.

Normally it would be dumped into public pensions but those have been maxed out with bad stock already. So we are 401K is going to get hammered.

This is just the largest of many scams that are going to loot your retirement and there's basically nothing you can do about it except vote for pro-consumer politicians who want to regulate Wall Street but that's going to be annoying people like Elizabeth Warren and AOC and Bernie Sanders and frankly people don't like them... And in politics likeability is basically everything now.

What I'm saying is that if you are retiring or even if you're just retired you're a fucked. You have money and somebody wants it and they're going to get it

In this case it would be easy enough to calculate how much anything would be off and then use the existing data.

Remember we're not talking about science here we're talking about public policy. So yeah the scientists can go ahead and redo all the experiments just to confirm the numbers and that's something scientists will want to do.

But we're not going to find all of a sudden that micro plastics are good for you. Neither are we going to find that they are in such low quantities that they aren't harmful. At best this is going to slightly skew the results.

But this isn't like radiometric dating where there are are all sorts of caveats because of how that science works. At the end of the day you've still got a brain full of plastic it's just potentially slightly less plastic.

But as usual just like when cigarettes were discovered to be killing people the plastic industry is going to hammer us with stories about this and slow down and the attempt at reform for at least another 50 years. And just like the cigarette industry, assuming our civilization survives what's happening right now that is, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back at this time and say what the fuck was wrong with those people?