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Comment Re:Just imagine (Score 5, Informative) 201

They all do this

NONE of them have done this, not in 250 years. Not until Trump. Presidents make a lot of money after they leave office, yes, especially in recent decades. They command incredible speaking fees (Obama famously got $400k for one speech), they write books that make millions, etc. There are lots of people who are willing to give them money to get close to them, get their advice, etc.

But until Trump, none of them has used the office of the president to make money. No one else has sold pardons. No one else has set up a public stock and a memecoin to facilitate billions of dollars in bribes. No one else has brazenly sold insider secrets to stock traders.

Trump's corruption isn't just new in scale, it's a completely new thing that the United States of America has never before seen. We've seen plenty of corruption elsewhere in government, at all levels, but never in the oval office.

Comment Re: Hold on to your papers... (Score 1) 147

> I wonder how many problems they tried before they solved one successfully.

Was gonna mod Insightful, but the replies aren't getting it.

"Solving this problem cost $2000."

That may be true.

"We tried to solve 50 problems at $2000 each and one was successfully solved."

This can also be true which means:

"We spent $100K and we solved one open problem."

which is fiscally, but not akshually, the same as:

"We spent $100K to solve one problem."

If Astra is "all that", OpenAI should have a pricing tier, "no charge unless the problem is solved."

Now *that* would be an impressive vote of confidence and everybody should be excited about it.

Comment Re: Let them choose (Score 5, Informative) 159

Why not let the people who were first on the land choose? Europeans decimated indigenous Americans with disease and war..

Right, the land rightfully belongs to whoever owned it second-to-last! Not to the people the second-to-last owners forcibly ejected from it, of course, and not to the people who own it now, only to the second-to-last.

</sarcasm>

I think we should have more respect than we do for the indigenous peoples, but pretending that there was no war and no forcible land grabs before the Europeans arrived is not just ahistorical but ignorant of human nature. Polynesian history, which includes the Hawaiians, is incredibly bloody. The Europeans dominated when they arrived not because they were more violent -- there's a good case to be made that they were less, though it's a question of degrees, not kind -- but because the Enlightenment gave them much better tools. And, of course, because centuries of city living had bred up a bunch of diseases, but that's part of the same story.

Did European arms and power make it "right" that the natives were conquered? No. But it wasn't "right" that the natives conquered each other, either. Humanity -- also as a result of the Enlightenment and the long, slow development of humanism -- has become more moral and less violent, and we now have more respect for other cultures and other peoples. And that's a good thing! But it doesn't make sense to project our own moral views back in time, and it definitely doesn't make sense to do so selectively, demonizing the winners and lionizing the losers.

The only thing that really makes sense is to apply our improved (though still very imperfect) morality to the situation we have now, messy, complicated and conflicted as it is. It's nice to give the native Hawaiian culture some respect, but it's wrong to give it more respect than that of Hawaii today.

Comment Automatic verification (Score 2) 147

Some important background for this is that, around 1900, mathematics got formalized to the point that there is a standard for whether a proof is valid or not that doesn't depend on humans thinking about it, just doing a bit calculation following an algorithm. However, it is such a large calculation that nobody wrote complete formal proofs or verified all of the steps (since they'd be spending huge amounts of time on obvious parts, and not the novel aspects). Then, in the past 20 years, people have made computer systems that work on complete formal proofs while showing you the interesting parts, with the rest in macros, and check these proofs automatically. This means that finding proofs has the form of things like what AlphaZero is good at: something to check if moves are legal and a win condition. However, only a relatively small portion of mathematical research has been put into Lean so far, and that doesn't include the sorts of obscure results that often turn out to be useful in other problems. So the current wave is using LLMs to find results in the literature that might be relevant and producing formal versions of them, game AI to put them together, and deterministic validation to check each of these as it goes along and then people can see at the end that the calculation shows the proof is valid. The only part requiring mathematicians is checking that what the proof proves is what they understood the open question to be.

Comment Re:Not going to change humans... (Score 1) 100

"We're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions," Langley said. "What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable...."

Wow he's right,

So maybe what we could do instead is to outlaw mass surveillance and warrantless surveillance, whether government-owned or corporate, across the country.

We could even have a constitutional amendment! Let's call it #4. The OLD 4th amendment doesn't seem to be doing anything; we can call this one '4th-Prime'.

To be clear, the language would have to change if you wanted it to outlaw corporate surveillance, because the existing one applies only to government. And I suppose the new one would also have to explain "corporate" and how that's different from other kinds of organizations or surveillance by individuals.

Comment bookworm in progress... (Score 1) 47

I see some of these CVE's are fixed in trixie but not bookworm 6.1.177-1 (yet).

Still other CVE's are fixed in bookworm but not yet in trixie. Seems like a few reboots are in the offing.

First time I've seen several fixes in oldstable before stable. It must be a wild week over there. n.b. fixed, not 'not vulnerable'.

Glad the oldstable crew is hard at work!

Comment Re:Stupid law (Score 1) 53

Is anybody aware of open source hardware/software to do the page turning and photograph/OCR the pages?

Google's rig used a puff of air, IIRC.

I asked somebody in the field and they said, "oh, you want a professional rig - those cost $10K and up.

I was like, "no, I have several rare books I'd like to index and this setup is far less complicated than my $249 3D printer." (I already have a good camera.)

I thought I'd find a hackaday or something but my cursory search wasn't fruitful.

Comment Re:Why so negative? (Score 1) 47

I don't think CIP is going to be successful at keeping 10 year-old kernel versions secure. If you need 10 years, you should either plan to do the work necessary to upgrade to new kernel versions periodically

The world is full of critical systems that are certified via an extensive (reads: expensive) process for a specific OS version which have an estimated useful life far longer than 10 years. One does not simply upgrade it, and typically the end user may not even be allowed to upgrade it.

Everyone has to make their own decisions. I would discourage people from believing that SLTS kernels will be anything like secure by the end of their lifecycle. If that doesn't matter for some application, then fine. If it does matter then arguing that the SLTS kernel must be secure because recertifying is expensive is... not really an argument.

FWIW, in my day job I'm making this same point to people building cars with an expected 20-year lifespan. I think the right conclusion is "Don't use Linux". If you need long-term assurance, use something smaller, simpler, with much less attack surface. And then buy an ironclad long-term support contract for that.

Comment Re:Seems like a job for the OS (Score 1) 31

But how long would it take to implement in every supported OS version and then get all the developers to declare a manifest and update their app?

A policy change can be enforced tomorrow (for better or for worse).

The AI bros might even get Samsung to change their mind. Apparently their 'subcontractors' use this technique to scrape all the content they use for training.

Would threatening to cancel a year's RAM order from the chip subsidiary cause a decision to change in the TV subsidiary? I have no idea how dispersed and decentralized Samsung is.

I'd bet it will stick, though, which is likely for the best. Odds are people aren't running Tor exits on their TV's. Maybe there are legitimate apps I'm not aware of.

Comment Re:Why so negative? (Score 1) 47

Backporting patches into LTS is pretty thankless but absolutely necessary.

It's thankless, yes. Necessary, or even a good idea? I think that's debatable. Actually LTS is probably a good idea... but I'm very skeptical of SLTS. I don't think CIP is going to be successful at keeping 10 year-old kernel versions secure. If you need 10 years, you should either plan to do the work necessary to upgrade to new kernel versions periodically or you should assume that it's just going to be insecure and isolate it or otherwise shield it from attack.

Comment Flying Saucers (Score 1) 56

People keep saying it's hard to get a non-blurry picture of them.

Some have suspected somebody has gravity bubble tech which would bend the light.

This thing just spins but isn't itself a disc, though on average it's s disc while in motion.

Post WWII-Germany/Paperclip there were more visible saucers seen over Washington and such but the Germans were developing solid discs. The blurry ones are more over the past few decades as drone tech has become common.

Curious.

Comment Re:PDF (Score 4, Interesting) 84

> I don't know why anyone would send one in any other format.

I'm told by attorneys that Office is nonnegotiable in Law.

Microsoft could probably raise the price to $500/mo and they'd get it.

Should a citizen be required to pay a creepy Redmond company to interact with the Courts?

It"s at least Unconstitutional in New Hampshire, likely other states as well.

Not that Courts themselves care about Unconstitutionality very often. Nor do they personally pay anything for Office. Empathy tends to be low.

But if one wants to make a decent argument that is a good one.

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