Homomorphic encryption is well-documented, it's just incredibly slow with conventional technology.

You can do any binary process on encrypted data using homomorphic encryption - it will modify the encrypted data in-situ without ever needing or knowing what the unencrypted data is. It literally doesn't care, and can't tell.

Think of it like running, say, "AND" or "OR" Boolean commands on specially-encrypted data. You design it in such a way that the "AND"/"OR" processes manipulate the encrypted data. Which, itself, manipulates the data that's encrypted to perform AND and OR operations on it.

You still don't know what the decrypted data says, but you were able to perform an AND operation on it.

Now you know that by combining many simple Boolean operations, you can basically manipulate that data however you like... WITHOUT ever decrypting it.

It takes, no exaggeration, something like hundreds of millions of times more base mathematical operations to perform a simple AND in this scenario but it does so preserving the encryption without ever revealing the data.

You can literally work on encrypted data that you NEVER HAD THE KEY FOR. So you can have a customer database that you host, and you can do things on that data (e.g. compress it, retire old entries, etc.) without ever having any access to the raw data.

It's a literal entire area of computer science and cryptography that's only been possible for the last couple of decades (through sheer processing power alone) but been theorised, described and proven for decades more.

Intel hasn't made anything up. Microsoft have homomorphic systems too. And IBM. Just nothing commercial, because the hardware required is STUPENDOUS or very slow.

And the operations you perform on the encrypted data literally never know the decrypted key. The "input" is encrypted. You perform operations. And the OUTPUT is ALSO encrypted. But you were able to do the operations without ever knowing what the data actually represented.

It's going to be enormous when it becomes viable. Microsoft can host your SQL database, maintain it for you, even remove old database entries before a certain age, etc. without ever having known the original unencrypted data or your encryption keys. It's the future of things like VMs and cloud-hosting, but still decades away.

Rather than yell and bawl... go look it up. But if you want to really satisfy yourself, you might want a grounding of at least a few years post-grad maths and cryptography.

From what I know, Fascism's core is the idea that the individual's existence is for the collective. So "collective first" is Fascism, whereas "individual first" is the core of Liberalism. I'm guessing modern leftism would be "oppressed first", but that's a different discussion altogether.

The dictionary definition seems pretty similar to what I just said.

Thing is, both definitions seem to capture communism too.

Look, if we don't start hyping QC, then we're just going to be stuck in his AI-slop-fad for another year.

I'd far rather we were wasting on money on physics than enriching companies that literally cannot make a profit when they have trillions of dollars in their bank accounts.

I just....

used git.

For what it's supposed to be used for.

LLAMA was [illegally] released into the public three years ago (to the day - March 3, 2023), and it's estimated that ten years of AI improvements happened in the subsequent 6 months. People were doing all sorts of things with LLMs that meta hadn't thought of, or didn't have time to develop. Such as text-to-audio, local LLM use, and automated manuscript generation.

All these attempts at monetizing the LLMs are, at the same time, holding back the progress of AI development. If OpenAI wants to leap ahead of the competition, they should put their language model online and see what the community comes up with.

I get it - training a LLM takes roughly $100 million for the initial dataset, and companies need to recoup this expense.

Still, I'm saddened that I can only use the system for purposes that the company approves of, and in ways that they have already thought of.

There's a lot of potential there, and we're not making good use of that.

"Apple's privacy standards"

Literally the only company I've ever dealt with professionally that utterly refuses to publish or provide a GDPR compliance statement.

Honestly, are people still buying this bullshit?

Yes, I'd like the "I" in "AI" to mean "Intelligence".

So where you do brute-force pattern matching, AI is useful.

Where it needs to think, it's worthless.

Gotcha.

If only we'd known this before...

Yes, because those are totally a real thing.

My ZX Spectrum booted in the time it took to flash the screen (less than 1 second I'd say).

If you had the Interface 2 it could boot directly into a game (via ROM chips that overrode the memory bus to present their data), so even faster.

Framework laptop.

Not long at all.

The restart/reboot is ridiculously fast.

Resume from suspend/hibernate is ridiculously fast.

The BIOS transferring to the bootloader? Seconds.

Honestly, it's like being in the year 2000 again. And my computer does what I say. Mostly because it's Linux.

I can say without fear of ambiguity or modesty that I am very much after reinventing the wheel. In fact, I've lost count over the number of wheels I've reinvented thus far, and I don't think I'm done yet.

I have a personal project where I'm building clones of 8 bit computers (Apple II, Commodore 64 and such. There's even a YouTube channel). It's an FPGA the gets loaded with a core containing a RiscV CPU (running a custom multitasking OS) and an 8 bit CPU running whatever the original computer did.

It takes about 40ms for the core to get loaded into the FPGA. From that point, it takes about 6ms until everything is initialized, the 32 bit OS gets loaded into memory, and the 8 bit computer gets put out of reset and begins its boot. The Apple II needs about 300ms to complete its startup routine, the vast majority of which is taken by issuing the "beep" it does when turned on.

The output is to an HDMI monitor. That takes around 3 seconds to sync on the image, which means that by the time any picture appears on screen, the computer has long finished boot. I'm seriously considering manually postponing the 8-bit startup just so the user has a chance to catch it happening.

As I said before elsewhere:

How are you going to detect anything but, say, a handful of well-known STLs? And then draw attention to those by banning them?

How are you then going to stop people doing the inevitable thing: Printing innocent-looking prints that can be broken down into useful parts for "banned" items?

People will literally take the latter as a challenge, and build weapons, etc. that use nothing more than standard replacement parts from other devices so you can say "Oh, that's just an X part from an innocent Y item", but when you combine them you make something banned.

How are they ever going to detect that? They're not.

It's going to be one of those laws they pin on you AFTER the police raid your illicit gun workshop to pin extra charges on you, and will require INTENTION rather than just the action itself.

But what will actually happen is this will quietly die a death somewhere because everyone realises that it's basically unenforceable.

You are not telling the whole story here.

I'm currently in the middle of a $15,000 purchase dispute with a Chinese vendor (for a CNC system). The device arrived non-functional, the merchant's customer service is wildly non-useful and time consuming, and after 3 months of dikking around I've decided to send it back.

I have clear E-mail evidence from the merchant acknowledging the problem, the CC company yanked back the payment and is forcing the merchant to issue an RMA for the device.

The credit card company isn't on my side, nor are they on the side of the merchant - they are on the side of honest transactions, and they police those transactions for me.

Twice I've had my CC info stolen at a restaurant(*), the CC company detected fradulent purchases, and issued me a new card. A couple of times they incorrectly detected fraud, and a quick phone call sorted that out.

All of this is value added to using a credit card.

It's not *just* rent seeking on transactions, it's also providing a service: "peace of mind" in your purchases.

If anyone is interested, ask ChatGPT about the Fair Credit Reporting Act as regards to dispute resolution. If you receive a defective product, you have 60 days from the statement (not the purchase, but the statement) to initiate a dispute, and there are several "states" the dispute can be in, such as "vendor is working with the customer to resolve the issue".

It's not just rent seeking, the extra 5% CC fee for the purchase is for "peace of mind".

(*) Don't let the CC out of your sight. If the waitress takes the CC away from your table, she can easily write down the number and security code before bringing it back.