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Comment It almost looks intentional (Score 4, Insightful) 100

If I was deliberately trying to cause a nation-wide backlash against data centers, I'm not sure what I'd be doing differently from what the AI companies are currently doing.

Has nobody told them that people don't like having their lives disrupted, particularly when they don't see any compensating benefit, or even a convincing reason for having any of it? If they were to ease off the gas pedal just a bit, they could probably do a boil-the-frog and get a larger number of smaller/less-obtrusive data centers built over a longer time period, and without the voter revolts and strict legislation that are likely to hobble them now.

Comment Re: Erm no (Score 2) 34

Ugh why the ObjC hate.

Objective C's syntax is objectively terrible; it mixes Smalltalk syntax with C syntax, confusing everyone. Its implicit heap usage makes it unusable for real-time programming (e.g. even Apple had to fall back to C to implement CoreAudio), and ARC is only a partial substitute for RAII.

Apple was right to switch over to Swift.

Comment Re:This is more than just a halt to pull requests. (Score 5, Insightful) 25

There is an answer to disingenuous pull requests. That is doing the work to review the code before it's implemented.

That's true, but when it takes Joe Random Hacker 10 seconds to generate a plausible-looking pull-request, which requires Joe Project Maintainer to spend 30 minutes reviewing the code-changes in that request, and Joe Project Maintainer isn't getting paid for his time spent doing the review, you've got all the ingredients for a distributed-denial-of-service attack on your project's maintainers. Perhaps AI code-reviewers can restore the balance, but I don't know how many project maintainers would trust their codebase's integrity to them (yet).

Submission + - Wi-Fi Routers Can Scan Your Body to Identify Exactly Who You Are (futurism.com) 1

JoeyRox writes: New research out of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology found that the types of Wi-Fi routers we all have in our homes come with a major privacy vulnerability that can be used to identify any human body that comes within their range.

The study, flagged by Gizmodo, used machine learning systems to identify individuals with an accuracy rate of 99.5 percent. To do so, the researchers exploited a vulnerability in a process known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), which was introduced to allow routers to focus Wi-Fi signals on connected devices, as opposed to the older approach, which is to blanket an entire area in coverage.

While BFI is great for network connectivity, it has a major downsides for privacy. For starters, devices connected to a router using beamforming need to send constant feedback in order to be found. As routers send out and receive network feedback, the signal is inevitably impacted by real world factors like pets, walls, and people.

Making matters worse is the fact that this data is basically wide open for anyone to grab — not only is that feedback data unencrypted, it can also be accessed without ever connecting directly to the router.

Comment Re:Maybe now we can finally get rid of COBOL? (Score 1) 28

It's certainly possible to translate COBOL source into another computer language of your choice, although I'm not sure LLMs are the best tool for that job. An LLM might be able to give you more readable post-translation source code, but traditional machine translation would give you post-translation source code that works correctly, which is probably more important.

Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House

As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.

What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.

Comment Re:I don't currently use Rust (Score 1) 171

This is why C code is bad, because C programmers never ask themselves, "How do I not leak memory?"

Another way to phrase that would be, "This is why C code is bad, because C programmers are expected to understand the rules about how to not leak memory, but there is no mechanism to enforce that requirement".

... and to their credit, eventually some of them do figure it out, and after that they (mostly) write good C code that doesn't leak. However, that doesn't change the fact that at any given moment there are millions of unseasoned C programmers out there who haven't reached that point yet, and who are nevertheless writing leaky code which gets put into production and causes trouble; and new C programmers appear every day. It's the Eternal September problem, applied to memory management.

So either (a) we ban C programmers from pushing to production until they've had at least 5 years of experience, or (b) we find some means to flag their errors at build-time, or (c) we live with the status quo messiness indefinitely. Linux is going with Rust as their mechanism for implementing plan (b).

Comment Re:What's the benefit of Rust here though? (Score 1) 171

If you have access to a God-tier LLM that you can rely on to find every bug, I think that could work.

However, I don't think anyone in the Linux community is ready to trust LLMs to that extent just yet. Not only are they quite fallible, they are also non-deterministic -- so if you ask your favorite LLM to find the bugs in the code, and it doesn't find any, and then you feed it the exact same prompt again, it might find some on its second attempt. So how do you know when to stop re-asking?

LLMs are currently constituted are very useful for finding bugs, but not so useful for guaranteeing that no bugs remain.

Comment Re:They have to keep sending them up (Score 1) 129

Low latency AI edge computing. There's several military applications, such as directing drone swarms or even providing AI to individual drones.

Perhaps, but I suspect Starlink (etc) already fills most of that use-case, and for the rest, they'll want that compute to be physically located inside the drones themselves, because otherwise the drones will be susceptible to jamming or spoofing.

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