To be precise, it turned Senate elections into a different kind of popularity contest. Previously they were a popularity contest within the state legislatures, whereas the 17A made them a popularity contest within the states. Well, in some states. 29 of the 45 states used some sort of direct election of senators by the time the 17A was proposed.

An interesting (to me) footnote to the 17A is that my state, Utah, was the only one to reject it. Six states ignored it, all in the Southeast. It was ratified in barely over a year, the seventh-quickest ratification thus far.

True... but only up to a point.

Each of the "automatic" background tasks you're performing does consume a bit of your overall capacity. Professions that have to deal with this explicitly because failing to manage it is dangerous call it "task loading". Take two examples: basic, automatic skills of divers and pilots.

Managing buoyancy is a skill that requires considerable practice for most novice divers. You have to regulate your breathing to maintain an average lung volume that keeps you at neutral buoyancy, not rising or falling (much) in the water column, but your breathing also has to be sufficient to supply your body's needs, and you also have to notice when your situation is changing so that you can't regulate with lung volume alone and then adjust the amount of air in your buoyancy compensation device (BCD).

New divers often find buoyancy difficult even with full attention. But with practice it becomes first easy, and then fully automatic, even when in the middle of the water column with no ready reference points. I have ~400 logged dives and I no longer even notice it, my perception is that I just "naturally" stay neutral except when I wish to rise or descend, and then it just happens. I find my hands occasionally reaching to adjust my BCD, but I don't think about it.

Pilots similarly have to learn to maintain level flight, using both direct observation out the window and instruments. It's hard and requires full attention for quite a while, but then becomes natural and automatic.

Once these skills are developed, they feel completely automatic, but they're really not, which becomes very apparent when you start piling up multiple "automatic" tasks, and possibly add a non-automatic task on top of them. As you add more "automatic" tasks, their quality degrades, and when you throw in a non-automatic task you find that both the automatic tasks are executed poorly and the non-automatic task is more difficult.

For divers, this becomes really apparent when, having mastered buoyancy, they begin trying to do other things like executing search patterns, or building or welding something, etc. Even something as simple as looking at a compass to determine heading while navigating can result in divers suddenly discovering that their "automatic" buoyancy control has disappeared and they are rising or sinking (usually rising). To some degree this can be mitigated with more practice/experience of the "automatic" skills, but it never goes away. One solution when performance of a complex skill is required (e.g. welding) is to eliminate buoyancy control as a requirement, for example by going to the bottom and adjusting the BCD so the diver is strongly negative and can't float up even with lungs filled to maximum.

Pilots address the problem by defining a strict hierarchy to three important automatic or semi-automatic skills. The phrase is "aviate, navigate, communicate", and the idea is that when task loading begins to overwhelm the pilot they focus entirely on flying the plane first, and only when they are confident they have that fully under control do they pay attention to course and heading, and only when that is fully under control do they pay attention to the radio. Of course, when not overloaded they do all three things at once, all the time, and don't really think about any of them, free to watch the scenery or whatever. But the automatic skills break under load, and when they break the pilot has to consciously "take over", and to prioritize conscious focus on the right tasks first.

Driving is another good example. It feels completely automatic... but I know firsthand that it's not. One way I know this is by what happens when I listen to audiobooks. I cannot listen to a book unless I'm doing something else. The stream of information isn't sufficiently dense to occupy my mind, so my mind wanders and then I suddenly realize that I haven't heard the last five minutes. But when I'm driving, that doesn't happen. It's clear that although driving feels automatic it does consume enough of my attention that I no longer have enough excess capacity to begin daydreaming. Driving + (good) book is close to my limit. I also find that doing non-word puzzles (e.g. Sudoku) is enough to keep my mind from wandering away from a book. Word puzzles don't work because I can't do two language-oriented tasks at the same time (some people can).

Anyway, the point is that (a) I hope there's more to this research than appears in the summary because it really does seem like it's well-understood and (b) background tasks feel completely automatic, but they're not. They still consume attention, just less, and subconciously.

Thanks! That makes sense. So seven-round AES is now 8 bits more broken than it already was, which is interesting but doesn't erode the safety margin.

Fascinating. I'll have to read more about the railroad bonds. That notion that the bonds could only be issued up to market cap, which could be expanded by issuing stock to the very people being paid by the bond sale proceeds, and the bonds in question all being government-backed, makes the current AI circular investment situation look downright ordinary.

That would be nice, but no, at least not unless NSA or similar has some non-public knowledge that enables them to model the confusion and diffusion precisely enough to estimate bounds. That's not impossible, but it doesn't seem very likely.

According to NIST and the AES designers, the round count was selected by breaking reduced-round variants and then choosing a high enough round count to provide a "safety margin". How much safety margin was needed was a subject of much debate, and there was some criticism that AES's margin wasn't large enough. AES-128's 10 rounds give about a 30% safety margin, and AES-256's 14 rounds give about a 40% margin. The article doesn't say what the "weakened" variant here was, so we don't know if those margins have been eroded.

Yeah, I think what we're seeing here is that attackers are resource-constrained, and that the hard part of creating an exploit isn't finding the vulns (there are tons of them), but figuring out how to turn the vulns into a working exploit chain. Merely having more fodder for crafting exploit chains doesn't necessarily make them easier to build... and keep in mind that the vast majority of attackers are glorified script kiddies. So the small number of really capable black hats may not have seen much benefit from AI yet. Probably not none but not enough to make a measurable difference.

If this theory is correct, when AI gets good at piecing together robust exploit chains, then we'll see the explosion in attacks, because all those glorified script kiddies will be able to get high-quality exploit chains cheaply and easily.

Note that none of this is applicable to nation-state attackers. They have plenty of smart, capable people, and plenty of money to buy chains. They weren't resource constrained before AI, and aren't now either. But they don't generally engage in mass attacks, so they don't register in the statistics.

Interesting! I've never read about that. I know a lot of the value was tied up in the adjacent land grants which represented incredible value eventually, but was nearly worthless in the short term.

What kinds of government shenanigans?

No, they didn't. You're judging based on a successful recovery they made in the subsequent 30 years. They really missed the boat, and lost the lock they once had on computing in general. Those who didn't live through it don't realize how Windows was synonymous with "computing". MS had the only real consumer computing platform (Apple existed but it was noise, relegated to a particular niche and lots of people with Macs had to have a PC, also). The web fundamentally changed that.

Abi Platock is in NYC. Your point about healthcare coverage makes logical sense, but I'm not sure it holds, statistically. Some of it may be that most influencers are very young, and you can stay on your parents' insurance until you're 26 (Platock is 25... so check to see if she's still doing this next year, and the year after).

This whole article is based on the suppositions that (a) the AI bubble is going to burst and (b) it's going to take down Apple's competitors. I don't think that's a likely sequence of events.

I do think we're in something of an AI bubble, and that it will burst... but it won't burst in the sense of "All this AI stuff will go away and no one will need data centers", it will burst in the same sense that the dotcom bubble burst, or the railroad bubble burst. What happened in those cases wasn't anything remotely like "and the hyped technology became unimportant".

I think the railroad analogy is the most interesting because while a lot of railroads went under and a lot of railroad investors lost their shirts, it wasn't because railroads -- especially trans-continental railroads -- were just as huge a game-changer as everyone thought they were, it was just because the capital investment required was massive and the payback didn't come as fast as the financial structures built to fund the construction required. What happened was that those with the money snapped up the failing railroad assets and made a lot of money as the massive economic growth unleashed by the railroads was realized, over the course of a few decades.

Similarly, the dotcom bust famously left a lot of "dark fiber" laying around... but all of that fiber got lit up within a handful of years, plus we've added a ton more.

AI is looking like it will follow a similar path. It absolutely is a revolutionary technology, it will upend the structure of our economy -- even more than railroads did -- and there is a lot of money to be made. And even if AI gets much more efficient and doesn't need all of those data centers, they're still going to get used. The problem is just that some of the early investors pushed so hard trying to out-grow the competition that they've built some unsustainable financial structures, and there's a good chance that AI won't generate payback fast enough to keep those cards from tumbling down.

This probably won't be because AI doesn't advance fast enough, but because it takes time to figure out how to integrate any new technology, to make the business and even social adaptations to make use of it. I suspect those things will happen far faster then they ever have for such a large shift, because AI will actually help to accelerate them, but they still probably won't happen fast enough.

OpenAI has the most exposure. Anthropic has done a better job of figuring out how to monetize AI and is a little less exposed, though still quite exposed. I don't think Google, Amazon or Microsoft have significant exposure, mostly because they all have very large non-AI revenue streams and large piles of cash, both of which can help them survive heavy investment. For example, although Google did post its first quarterly net loss in forever, thanks to heavy data center investment, it was only a $6B loss, and for a company that would otherwise be generating $80B per quarter in net profits and has a $130B cash warchest, that's nothing.

As for Apple? Well, Apple might be able to sit cagily on the sidelines, waiting for the crash so it can use its pile of cash to snap up the assets and buy in. But it's also very possible that they're going to miss the boat. Not completely, of course, but somewhat like Microsoft missed the boat on the Internet. I do agree that really making something like the Vision Pro work really well would be huge.

I dunno. Given all the non-nerd news that shows up here, it's refreshing to see something more deeply technical, even if most of use who don't spend a lot of time thinking about VMs in Linux aren't directly affected.

I'd be fine with a bit more coverage of possibly-interesting kernel changes. I mean, /. shouldn't cover all of them; we have LWN for that. But picking the occasional random change of significance to highlight is worthwhile. Maybe one per week or something.

Typical roads are not effective firebreaks in dense, tall forests. The general rule is that you need 1.5X (minimum) to 3X the height of the surrounding vegetation. In a forest with 100-foot trees that means you need firebreaks 300 feet wide. In areas that are sloped or often windy, the width needs to be increased.

Hire that one. Proofreading AI output is quickly becoming the core skill a college grad requires.

This is mostly just civil slander lawsuits ramping up. People are getting way to comfortable stepping on other peoples rights and slandering in what is basically a public forum.