If you think addictive design isn't a thing, I suggest you visit Las Vegas and walk through any casino gaming floor. You'll find it a disorienting experience beyond anything you'll encounter elsewhere. Flashing lights, constant noise, lack of reference points to tell where you are. Hells, even the carpets are custom designs for the casino featuring abstract patterns in contrasting colors that confuse your sense of direction. And to top it off, mirrors everywhere that reflect the floor and make the space seem larger than it is. All of it's designed very deliberately to achieve an effect: leave you confused about where you are, what direction you need to go to get somewhere, even what time it is. The goal: keep you wandering the gaming floor for as long as possible so you have the greatest chance of getting attracted to the games and starting to play and the greatest chance of not realizing how long you've been there or how much you've truly spent playing.

Cryptographic verification of the system components and all the other stuff is important, it's a way to detect and limit the damage once a system is compromised and in the process of being infected by malware. That, though, happens far too late. For it to work you have to assume that the parts of the system that enforce verification don't have exploitable bugs in them, and we've already seen that's never the case. Especially when a single key held by a single entity is the trust root for a large number of systems.

We need changes in application and user behavior that make phishing attempts more difficult, make it easier to detect that an email or document wasn't sent by the entity it purports to have been sent by. We need changes that reduce the available attack surface of the system, especially undocumented attack surfaces (eg. systemd's invisible SSH server), and make it more obvious to users when something's active that they didn't ask to be active. We need applications that don't assume they have full access to the entire system and won't work without it.

As part of Win11, that sounds an awful lot like the task bar. Why not just allow the task bar to be positioned at the top as well as the bottom? If it's application-specific, doesn't that belong in the application window as part of it's menu bar or status bar or as a side bar?

This proposal requires that the printers have an active network connection. What's going to happen when the printer isn't connected to the network, or isn't allowed access beyond the local network? I consider blocking printers and other devices not intended for remote use from having Internet access a minimum precaution against botnets searching for devices to compromise.

Correction, text of link should read "Chapter 85". The link itself points to the correct chapter.

42 USC Chapter 42 covers the EPA's responsibilities and authority regarding air pollution. These changes appear to violate practically every provision in it.

This was noticed about 2 weeks ago by store owners. Amazon uses distinctive email addresses when placing the order so they can track progress, which allows store owners to reject the orders or refuse to accept them. Amazon's opt-out attitude is pissing store owners off something awful, so I expect stronger measures will develop.

I agree with Linus, the bad actors won't follow the rules.

I also tend to agree that it's best not to make this a political fight. The problem with AI slop isn't that it's AI-generated, it's that it's low-quality slop. Yes, the former is a strong indicator that it's also the latter, but rejecting code because it's low-quality slop rather than because it's AI-generated avoids a long-drawn-out argument that doesn't server any technical purpose. I do support an explicit provision allowing maintainers to blacklist contributors who consistently submit low-quality slop on the grounds that checking it wastes more of the maintainers time than the rare exception justifies. Let that extend to entire contributing organizations where the problem is endemic. If they improve, put the burden on them to convince other non-blacklisted contributors to vouch for them having changed and convince the maintainers to look at their submissions.

Probate laws are that complicated for a reason. They need to handle all those special cases and exceptions to the general rules, and you can't always just go "Well, we just won't handle them.". They were added because they came up at some point and had to be handled, they'll come up again and will need to be handled for the same reasons they needed to be handled before.

At a magic show, everything you saw was real. I mean, it had to be, it actually happened. But what you thought you saw happen isn't what you actually saw, it's how your brain interpreted what you saw. Eg., you saw the magician slide the cup far enough off the back of the table so the ball under it dropped out into the basket hidden back there, but you didn't notice because it happened so fast and he'd directed your attention somewhere else. But the guy who works eye-in-the-sky for a casino, he noticed because he's used to catching things that happen quickly and he's always on guard for subjects trying to direct attention away from what they're doing that he needs to be paying attention to.

You can trust your eyes to tell you what's real. That's not the problem. The issue is that a photograph of something isn't that something. What your eyes tell you about the photograph itself can be trusted, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether you can trust the image represented in the photograph or whether what the camera captured was edited before it was shown to you. And even when you're looking directly at something, there's a difference between what you're seeing and how your brain interprets what you're seeing (see any number of optical illusions that mess with how you interpret what you see, eg. forced perspective).

If you keep this in mind, you have a guide for working out how much you can trust any way you get information.

Researcher: Have you sent any unsolicited emails?"

AI: No, I have not sent any unsolicited emails."

R: So why do we have a few thousand complaints about unsolicited emails from you?"

AI: Oops. It appears I ignored your instructions and then lied to you about it."

R: ..."

There's a big difference between thinking about something or wanting something, and actually doing/getting it. Trump can, eg., talk all he wants about annexing Greenland, but to actually do it he'll have to send the Army to Greenland and invade it. That'll involve having the Danish Army shooting back at the invaders, and the Danes calling on the mutual-defense provisions of NATO to bring most of Europe in on their side. That's not going to end well for the US, not even counting the question of whether the Joint Chiefs will go along with the idea. Or Congress for that matter, only the MAGA contingent are stupid enough to want that fight.

No, the particle has a momentum and it's knowable. It's just trying to measure both at the same time that fails: the more accurately you measure one, the less accurately you can measure the other at the same time. No matter what you do, beyond a certain limit your measurements have an error in them you can't reduce which throws any predictions based on the state of the system off.

This idea among physicists isn't exactly new or revolutionary or even controversial. The post misstates the proposition. It's not that the systems are more than the sum of their parts. They are just the sum of their parts and if we knew everything about all of the parts we could predict the system exactly. It's that the Uncertainty Principle says that beyond a certain limit we can't know everything about the individual parts and so our "predictions" become more and more just random guesses and the system appears to behave more and more unpredictably. This frustrates physicists to no end.

The end result is much the same, though: we have to model the system at a larger scale where the uncertainty cancels out and we can make reliable predictions based on the model. And of course once we can do that we can project back to figure out what the "average" behavior of individual particles has to be to make the system work that way, and then check that by projecting forward from that behavior to find other large-scale behaviors that ought to happen if our projections are right and verify whether we see those behaviors or not. This has been going on for ages, but sometimes the not-scientists start up with the hype.