In principle, it should be possible to develop a vaccine for certain forms of mental illness. Regrettably, no such thing currently exists and antivaxers are probably too far gone.

Yes, sadly, they do not cure mental illness.

The fact that you had to point this out is in itself very telling: it shows that the issue isn't simply the extent of corruption, but also the overwhelming success with mass disinformation and censorship.

I know the term is overused, but Americans really are being gaslit into believing that these brazenly criminal acts are things that previous administrations have always done, or that the current administration deserves to do it because they have secured the power to do so. And neither of these are even remotely true.

There's this insidious mass delusion facilitated by the oligarchy and mainstream media. Their fascist playbook is:

1. Commit as many crimes as possible, as quickly as possible, so that people don't have time to react or investigate. This is Steve Bannon's "muzzle velocity" strategy.

2. Control media messaging and suppress honest journalism by taking ownership of media corporations and threatening those who refuse to be silenced.

3. Delay or bury investigations through misuse of government resources and agencies. Ignore court rulings.

4. With cooperation of tech companies, set up mass surveillance to make people afraid to oppose them.

5. Instill hopelessness in the public by showing that they are still getting away with these crimes.

Truth Social I'm sure. As hard as it is to believe, there are still people who think Trump is a genius, and still want to "own the Libs".

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location's atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon's gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

It obviously gives us guarantees in terms of what the source will do and what the compiled code should need.

These do not provide memory safety, so memory bugs would not be solved by these. They will find unexpected behavioural issues, though.

The precondition and postcondition statements are not cunningly-disguised assert statements because they're not asserted at runtime. They're enforced at static check and/or compile time.

The policy hints mean that if the kernel is doing something you're not expecting, you find this when testing the code. Equally, though, it means that users cannot cause the software to venture into realms unknown through many of the usual attack vectors because those will require permissions that aren't there.

How are these people not in prison?

Their actions aren't really about reputation, whether their own or the company they represent. It's all about ego and control for these people. It's about demonstrating power and influence, to show that they belong to a privileged class for whom certain consequences do not apply.

When we think of it in that way, we can explain so much of the behaviors we have recently witnessed (and continue to witness). These are people who believe they can act with impunity because they have not been held accountable in any meaningful way. And for the most part, that belief has proven to be correct, which is why we repeatedly see corrupt acts go unpunished.

It isn't really about the corruption per se. That's just the cherry on top. In fact, the real purpose is to demonstrate and signal to others that they CAN and DO get away with it, with no or minimal consequences. And the reason they want to demonstrate this is because it creates a feedback loop of more corruption and identifies those who will suck up to them versus thsoe who have ethical standards. How else do you know who to trust if you yourself are not trustworthy? Who do you know to target if you are a psychopath? Signaling that you can get away with murder is the key.

And I would argue that, in this case, the punishment was far too lenient, because if you think of the crime in this context, it really says that these people DID get away with it. They got a slap on the wrist. The company paid the bulk of the damages. And so, this settlement again signals that, yes, the privileged class is above the law, because even when the law finds them culpable, the penalty is nominal for them. It's a cost of doing business.

So let me see if I understand your argument, which is that because surveillance is already pervasive and ubiquitous, we should allow the use of even more of these devices in a non-public space (which, owing to conference registration and admission terms, DEF CON qualifies as such)? Devices that make it even easier to record others without their consent, including bathrooms where there is a clear expectation of privacy, becuase by their very design, are intended to be worn at all times because of their functional relationship to vision correction?

Okay. If the surveillance state is already a problem, why are you defending the idea of making it easier? I'd say that's the oddest hill to stand on. Just because people already use their phones to record others without consent in public does not mean we should let that practice expand to eyewear.

I mostly do heavy multi-disciplinary engineering problems (these I also use for checking an AI, as they're typically not good at these sorts of problems), complex coding, OS analysis, stuff like that. However, sometimes I do throw the occasional odd-ball - I've used ChatGPT to propose a workable quantum mechanics that will cope with Doctor Who canon, for example, and to produce an outline for a story in which symphonic metal appears in 1964 that is compliant with current sociological and psychological models of behaviour.

Claude Opus 4.6 was coping surprisingly well with just about everything I threw at it (but ran out of credits fast), but Opus 5 is churning out incoherent babblings to the point I'm worried I may have accidentally summoned Cthulhu.

But Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek got hopelessly confused on just about everything past a very low level of complexity. They can handle large problems, yes - Gemini has a huge context window - but complex interactions baffle them.

ChatGPT is able to identify issues correctly, but can only outline solutions, it's just not good at depth. 5.6 is a lot better, but still not good at deep answers. ChatGPT is also prone to agreeing for the sake of it, which makes me nervous about trustworthiness.