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Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 107

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 146

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Comment Re: Who is eMudhra (Score 2) 19

They primarily manage company-internal CAs for big businesses, which they seem to do well. AFAICT, they noticed that their security infrastructure was compliant for managing a global CA, and thought they might as well also have that as a product. However, there are some operational differences between an enterprise CA and a public one, including that companies want to issue client certs to employees but nobody really does global client certs. That means that they had an intermediate CA for global client certs that they never used, but it was in the standard trust store, and nobody tested that it was handled right until Wayne just went through the standard trust store making sure a new certificate weakness detector didn't give false positives.

So eMudhra correctly handled all the certs they issued, and all the certs they used to sign them, but they got some extra CA certs trusted that they didn't really need, because it would make their side business more similar to their main business, and this caused a major problem.

Chances are that they actually got a real random number out of a HSM for the bad CA certs, but accidentally made the certs with the index of the random number instead of the actual number. (That is, they got the 4th random number and made a cert for 4 instead of the number.) I wouldn't be surprised if they stored the correct private key, which would have made leaf certs that didn't validate because the intermediate was wrong, but they never used it to find this problem.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 16

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Comment Re: Phishing Tests (Score 2) 82

The email wasn't even too good to be true. The nasty phishing emails are the ones where the recipient is supposed to get a real email on the topic, but it's because of a publicly known event and outsiders could easily make up the content, so they just need to find a bunch of likely recipients.

I think the "you've been assigned the mandatory phishing training" emails should come from an external sender and contain a link to get into the extended training, and you should only get the short refresher by finding it through verified sources. Not only would this be a good placement test, it would test that official communications are actually hard to fake and possible to verify using the process in the training.

"In response to the embarrassing data breach that hit the news recently, we've assigned every employee at the company an online training session about phishing at this link. By sure to take it immediately, because it's a legal requirement for our settlement and delays could affect your employment." --Russian Hackers

Comment No alternative (Score 2) 132

Finding a hotel that can accommodate a family of 4 is not that difficult. Finding one that can accommodate a family of 8 is a bit more challenging. Finding one which can accommodate 8 adult siblings, their children, spouses, etc... is nearly impossible. The short-term rental market is the only realistic option for those people who want to meet with the rest of their family for an extended weekend.

Hotels are set up for small gatherings (an individual room or two), large gatherings (hundreds to thousands in a conference room), but seldom in between.

The last time my in-laws got together, we numbered almost 40 people. Airbnb rentals provide accommodations which are much more practical for those people who want to spend a holiday together with their geographically distributed relatives. Yes, the cleaning can be substantial. But making guests both clean the place, and then pay an additional cleaning fee (in the hundreds to thousands of dollars) seems ridiculous.

Comment Re: Lazy owners. (Score 4, Informative) 132

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Comment Holy Shit! Really???? (Score 1) 89

This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.

Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.

Comment Re: Which is it? (Score 1) 128

I just wanted to let you know that you have successfully driven me off of /., after some 25 years.

Not just you, obviously, the site has been in steep decline for a long time, but you were such a huge asshole that you managed to be the last straw. So, congrats for that. I won't be back.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

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