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Comment Re:Spreading misinformation (Score 0, Offtopic) 65

Removing misinformation is not illegal either. It's common sense.

Who decides it's misinformation?

Quite a few times things which were deemed misinformation back during the COVID times turned out to be different than official sources said (at first or later).

When such heavy hands occur, especially when the government is pushing it, it makes the act seem extra suspicious, or so I've heard for the last week along cries of fascism.

Comment Re:Do these links currently exist? (Score 1) 41

There are lots of domains were physical evidence is either missing or impossible, yet where many people feel the need to have certainty.

Actually, the space is even larger than that. Every area of expertise implies an area that is not being examined, since people have only finite intelligence and finite time to explore. So...I "believe" in the EWG multi-world interpretation of quantum physics (with a few modifications). This is a belief, because I'm nowhere near expert enough in the field to have detailed knowledge. I *do* acknowledge that there are other interpretations that fit the existing data equally well, but I find them...distasteful.

Also, I believe that my wife was a wonderful woman. This is not based on globally accessible knowledge, partially because "wonderful" is not well-defined.

Etc.

Comment Re:AI can't do anything 'new'. (Score 2) 29

You are wrong. AI has done mathematical proofs that were new. It *can* only be original by combining existing information into new patterns, but if the "rules of inference" are good, this can allow it to create something new and good.

OTOH, you are partially correct, in that it can't derive anything that wasn't already implicitly implied by the existing knowledge.,,because it can't currently run its own experiments.

N.B.: This is a comment about "AI" not about pure "LLM"s. Pure LLMs are a lot less reliable, because they've been designed to never admit that they are uncertain. And because they've been trained on the Internet.

Comment Re:hyperscalers... (Score 1) 42

During the early years the laser was called "a solution in search of a problem". Don't try to estimate what current AIs can do by the applications that they are currently shoe-horned into.

OTOH, every speculation as to how AI will develop further is *speculative*. That explicitly includes the speculation that it will not get any better or more efficient. (And I'd call the speculation that "we've reached top AI" at least as silly as "AGI will show up tomorrow and solve all our problems".

Comment Wine doesn't run drivers (Score 1) 156

Perhaps this is a golden opportunity for civic minded programmers to spend some time getting WINE to the point where most users can comfortably run WINE instead of Windows XX.

Wine runs in user space. I don't see how Wine could ever run drivers, such as peripheral drivers required by things like the iPhone sync functionality of iTunes or kernel-level anti-cheat required by major online games supporting pickup matches with strangers.

Comment Bootstrapping with stage0 and Mes (Score 1) 19

Start with stage0 (whose binary seed is about 1 KiB) and GNU Mes. Use mescc to build tinycc, then GCC 2.95, then GCC 4.7, then fairly modern GCC, and then use mrustc to build some version of Rust. The time-consuming part is that each version of the Rust toolchain uses fairly new features in the Rust language, so yes, you'll probably have to build the world a couple dozen times starting with the most recent version supported by mrustc.

Comment Kellogg v. Nabisco; Dastar v. TCF (Score 1) 92

So what's the basis of the lawsuit against Disney? There's no damages, so equitable relief? Of what?

You probably guessed correctly: equitable relief in the form of an injunction against Disney bringing a trademark lawsuit. I haven't read the complaint, but I'd be surprised if it didn't cite Kellogg and Dastar.

The Supreme Court of the United States has decided a few cases about the interaction between the Lanham Act, which inclues trademark law, and exclusive rights pursuant to the Copyright Clause. Key cases includes Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938), and Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., 539 U.S. 23 (2003). In both cases, the Court ruled that the Lanham Act cannot be used to extend the effective term of exclusive rights in an invention whose patent has expired or a work whose copyright has expired. Disney's legal counsel ought to be familiar with the latter case, seeing as it involved a company that is now a subsidiary of Disney.

Comment Trusting trust when bootstrapping a compiler (Score 1) 19

From the article:

The Go project recently arranged for Go itself to be completely reproducible given only the source code, meaning that although a build needs some computer running some operating system and some earlier Go toolchain, none of those choices matters."

[...]

The Multics review is famous for pointing out the possibility of adding a back door to a compiler to insert back doors in critical system programs during compilation [...]. Reading the report inspired Ken Thompson to implement exactly that attack on an early Unix system, probably in early 1975. He later explained the attack in his 1983 Turing Award lecture, published in Communications as "Reflections on Trusting Trust."

David A. Wheeler described a defense against a back door that propagates through the compiler in a 2009 PhD dissertation titled Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling . Diverse double-compiling (DDC) involves choosing two or more other independently developed compilers A and B for a language, bootstrapping compiler C from source code through each of them (building C with A or B and then building C with itself), and ensuring that the output is byte-identical. This relies on previous effort to make builds reproducible.

However, DDC also relies on having more than one implementation of a particular language. Go and Rust each have only one widely used implementation. This means someone trying to wrangle a supply chain has to do one of three things: trust a particular old version of a compiler not to have a back door, compile every version since the dawn of the language (such as when Rust was prototyped in OCaml), or implement a usable subset of the language in a more widely implemented language. This is why mrustc is so important, as it's a way to skip forward by several years' worth of versions when bootstrapping a Rust compiler.

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