You could chalk it up as a shared cultural reference instead of an actual joke

Master Control Program, as played by the most excellent Ed Dillinger

A classic heist trick too, nobody checks the plumber's toolbags (in the movies). Worked for Ocean's Eleven and The A-Team.

Americans are fed propaganda all their lives, so they go a little nutso when their own lying eyes disagree with Big Brother. One coping mechanism is to be an absolute zealot to the cause so that your social groups still respect you as a True Patriot.

Sad that this guy has shitty friends, and sad that he feels the need to put on a little performance in order to feel accepted by them.

RTFS "along with power inverters"

Have we learned nothing from 80's movies? WarGames, Superman III, Jumpin' Jack Flash, The Manhattan Project, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Prime Risk, Hide and Seek, Revenge of the Nerds, and more showed us what happens when a business or government leaves computer connected and always on.

I would recommend we not plug everything into the Internet. Or at least use two layers of authentication, one for the VPN, and one for the devices themselves on the private network. With no NAT while in the private network.

But for industries that buy off-the-shelf monitoring systems, that's not how they actually work. They are really just the equivalent of an wireless router running embedded Linux, glorifies OpenWRT to hook a site's LoRa/Zigbee/802.15.4 sensor network to a gateway to store and forward monitoring data. Ideally not doing controls, but honestly if you unplug the safety monitoring then you have to shut the whole system down. So even a sensor systems is a viable target if the goal is a simple DoS attack.

Or looking for a fundamental problem with the assumptions used to build the more complex version. Breaking a premise can call into question the rest of the logic it is based on. In this case, nothing serious for AES. But potentially invalidates some of the grander claims of the future HAWK algorithm.

The AI side of the story is more interesting. It took an LLM a week of munching through tokens at a furious rate to find what little it did. As the price per token falls and the performance increases due to improvements in model efficiency and in hardware, we'll probably see some logarithmic version of Moore's law take place in the field. Where over some period it takes half as long, and the next period where it is halved is also halved. (I'm not optimistic enough to think we'll see exponential growth out of AI - so take that into consideration with the P/E of investments)

I redefined myself to be Usain Bolt, so now at least half of you are faster than Usain Bolt.

If the premise that the strong version is based on is found faulty when building a weaker version on the same premise, then that's a weakness.

There is a risk of a reductionist fallacy. For example, the Markov assumption is that you can analyze a cryptographic algorithm one round at a time independently. Because the previous round, if ideal, acts as a completely random input into the next round. In reality if Round 1 introduces some bias, that gets passed onto following rounds. There is also a risk of local versus global optima. You can analyze every S-box and mixing formula completely independently, and even build a formal proof that such a step is optimally secure in isolation. But that can fall apart because it does guarantee that the combined algorithms is simply a sum of its parts. A flaw in the interaction between stages can subtly create vulnerabilities that the original components do not posses.

Gender is a social construct, so studying it is equivalent to studying something imaginary? Is that the gist of your argument?

A hot take, but not entirely wrong.

And if I read that as a requirement, would do so as:

As noted in the assignment requirements, Madegascar requires six red jelly beans in the dressing room.

Or at least I would be one of the 2 students that contested my grade.

Thankfully journalists, opinion commentators, and political pundits stick to fact-based reporting; and would never spin an issue with serious global consequences into another ideological identity as part of a false left-right political dichotomy.

Yes. Have you ever seen stores where everything is perpetually 30 to 50% off? Notice how furniture stores are always having a "liquidation sale" ?

What's wrong with passwords. I can type mine in while I'm driving. I sure as hell can't scan the phone 2 orbits around my head under ideal light conditions in order to satisfy the face/selfie unlock crap.

But honestly, why do we have accounts at all? 99% of the crap we do on our phone doesn't actually need it. Forcing people to log into web sites in order to post seems like a good idea, but really it's still full of bots and sock puppets. Tear off the bandaid and lets all just go fully anonymous. If I don't need to receive phone calls or emails on my smartphone, then let's not even bother with logins.

If companies are going to insist on tracking all my activity, I feel like we're pretty close to running AI agents sufficient to bullshit their way through registration pages, captchas, throw away SMS sites, throw away email sites, etc. How much effort remains to make an Android fork that is just a platform for anonymous browsers and apps, where I don't need to login, and if the border agent goes through it, it's just whatever trash is still in RAM since I last booted it. Hell, if someone steals it I'll have to buy a new phone, that's fine the screen on mine is cracked.

(I know, it's a fantasy. human beings want to hand all their personal information over to tech companies. It's like an addiction for most people)

A good 2/3rd of the Slack apps at my job are in-house ones. And I wrote a few for Discord for my own personal use, I have make 6 hours invested into that project. And that was without any AI. With something like Claude or Copilot, it's a 30 minute job.

Slack is going to die pretty quickly. I don't see how it will survive. I say this even though the Fortune 500 I work for uses it for everything and have almost entirely abandoned email. It's just too easy to replace now, even with our technical debt. Because again, I can just say "port this to that" and in a day the stupid plugins and bots I have that only act as glue to the actual back-end run on a new system that isn't Slack.

Not really. It's not like Company X running Service X for me is going to get a better rate for hosting than my own company can get. Why pay a third party to run software on another third party's computers? I can cut out at least one layer of middle-man and pay the CSP to host and I'll just point Ansible at it. And let AI update the playbooks.

Desktop apps. You mean where half my corporate apps are Electron and JavaScript ? Well maybe not Microsoft, but we just ditched Outlook this year. So even the MBAs are going to be using the same weird stuff that HW and SW engineering teams here.

I no longer believe that anyone has to do those things. Or rather, substantially fewer people are needed in order to do those things.