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Comment Re:This. (Score 1) 86

I had one breakthrough DMT experience where I saw 'the machine elves' (I just saw what I describe as fast-moving fractals that I 'felt' were beckoning to me); but, we have matching experiences w/the other primary psychedelics: I only had relatively minor on-top visual distortions with even the largest doses of LSD (1500+ mcg) or mushrooms.

That said, everyone is different. I know that some of my friends absolutely lost their fucking minds on a few tabs of LSD and, purportedly, experienced wild hallucinations that I have to trust were real to them but haven't ever experienced myself.

Comment Re:Can someone help explain "perfect" randomness? (Score 1) 140

You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Comment Not True (Score 2) 140

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

Comment Re:How about? (Score 3) 95

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

Comment Re:Outsourcing (Score 2) 38

Yes. lf they need to do is hire a team of crack programmers and system architects and have them start work on replacing the systems. Keep them hired as a key department of the post office and they will maintain the system. If it's good they could even license it out to others.

I've seen this happen in other contexts. E.G. in a semiconductor firm, they designed their own tools. Then they made that a whole department and spun it out as one of the chip design tool vendors which is still around today.

If you just outsource it, you will get a product that serves the needs of the vendor, not the customer.

Comment Paywall free link (Score 5, Informative) 151

https://archive.is/uyPhk

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Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.

The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs â" OpenAI, Google and xAI â" that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."

Comment They're Doomed (Score 1) 106

I've been using AI to write code recently. I figured I should give it a go.
Not reviewing and understanding and editing the output code is a recipe for disaster.

For example, in code for a cryptographic hash function there are padding rules to bring the data size to a multiple of the block size and add a length. So for example with SHA3, a minimum of 65 extra bits. If your data length mod the block size is 65 bits less than the block size, then add the pad bit, put the length at the end of the block and fill in between with zeroes.

If you are longer than that, then it all spills over into the next block and you add a block.

If your length exactly ends up fitting in the block size, then you add a whole extra block with just the padding bit and length and a bunch of zeroes.

The hash that claude spit out missed that last case, so creating a hard to find bug, where in one out of 512 bit sizes, the hash fails. If I had not spotted that by reviewing the code in detail, there would have been a catastrophic bug creating a security vulnerability and system failures in chips.

So read the code and fix it or be doomed.

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