I didn't mean to imply that it is a single monolithic application, it does consist of several, but the relations must be pretty tight for there to be an article not even about language-independence; but about support for a single additional language, one often targeted by "C but cleaned up" efforts,

I was honestly surprised to see this myself. Regardless of its reputation for being more monolithic than classic init systems it still is, and has to be, capable of interacting with basically any flavor of service you'd want a service manager to manage; and I would assume that it doesn't include a d-bus implementation in order to not be capable of abstracted inter-process communication.

No doubt there are considerations at work here that I'm not smart enough to grasp; if you aren't having a bad time handling x.509 certificates you probably aren't doing it carefully enough; but I would not have expected it to be remarkable at all for a certificate-wrangling component to be implemented in a different language than some of the other components.

I assume that this is more pragmatic than just waiting for Sam to finish lying about transcendent AGI; but it feels a little dissonant to have the botmongers going back and forth between praising the glorious natural-language suitability of their progeny and putting together an entire platform, with more apparent effort than they have dedicated to human UI/UX considerations since sometime in win7(excluding dark pattern R&D) to aid you in discovering your sins against bot comprehensibility and fixing them.

sorry bro, anyone with a functioning brain stem stopped reading the second you started whining about DEI

I'm not really qualified to deliver a good holy war; but it does seem like there may be something to the criticism that monolithic integration has gone a bit far if supporting one utility being written in a different language is a special feature rather than a matter of the rest of the system not knowing or caring what is on the opposite side of an interface so long as it can act as expected.

You can't really beat the fundamental economics of software development: expensive to do right but cheap to copy means that you really, really, want to share a problem with as many other people as possible(unless your whole business is being uniquely good at solving whatever the problem is; but that typically isn't the case for this sort of software). Applies to both proprietary and FOSS: relatively mass-market software is often pretty cheap for what you get; really oddball niche stuff is frequently both pricey and terrible; while your life is going to get steadily more miserable if you are personally responsible for handling backports and fixes for some internal fork of a long-EOL version of an OSS package.

The big difference, at least potentially, is that, while it tends not to be economic to DIY, licenses that give you the right to DIY also give you the right to pay someone else to do it for you; or to form a coalition of people with similar problems and have everyone pitch in to pay someone to do it for you. You still need to either eat the cost of maintaining an internal fork or putting together some sort of coalition of people with similar problems to be the openJDK 8 forever pals and share the cost of maintenance; but the vendor can't just stop selling you licenses if they want you to move to their cloud offering or whatnot.

More people do office work than ever before.

This story is so old it was the reason for Unix. Once the platform controls the essential business process, it owns the business. You work for them now, and all your aspirations are moot.

Random intermediate CA. They got a couple of commonly used root CAs to sign for them; and everything just works from there.

That's the problem. It's relatively easy to fire a certificate issuer; but it can get surprisingly fiddly surprisingly fast to ensure that all your stuff actually distrusts one(unless you are responsible for basically nothing but a a handful of in-support major browsers and are OK with the choices their vendors make, in which case it will be handled for you relatively quickly; and was in this case). Basically any network connected widget is going to have at least one trusted root store embedded in it somewhere, possibly not updated anymore; and a number of software packages either bring their own or only partially track the OS-provided one.

You also have very little control over what other people do; both what CAs they chose to get certs from and what...questionable...partnership decisions the root CAs you do chose to trust. It's not technically secret; but unless you are practically a full-time PKI nerd you probably didn't know until after the fact that Comodo, now Sectigo, had quietly trusted eMudhra for you.

I fully admit that this might be a 'me' problem, not a them problem; but I just don't understand why this agent monitoring setup was so vulnerable and is being treated as so novel.

Sure, the monitoring of whatever goes on inside the LLM is comparatively new and exotic; but when you set it loose on the internet it's going out through one or more of your WAN links, presumably with your router and firewall and so on in the way, and is mostly doing HTTP(s) stuff. Keeping an eye on what an internal host is doing when you can insert whatever trusted roots you want for TLS MiTM and you 100% own the pipe that it is using to communicate is not necessarily a desperately enjoyable task; but it would have been a relatively banal requirement a quarter century ago.

I'd also think that, when you are spending $$$$$ on the exercise in Nvidia compute gear, and it's a test of a 'frontier model' whose behavior and capabilities you are trying to better characterize and refine, allocating the handful of terabytes necessary to just store a full packet capture of the session in case it is relevant would be a no-brainer item.

Is there something I'm missing that makes this case more complex? I'm not talking about the 'grubbing around in the LLM's vectors and such' side; just the "a host is doing HTTP stuff through a WAN link we control, can we observe what it is doing?" aspect.

Honestly, the employers were the first to start racing for the bottom there. For years they have relied on employees having an outdated sense of loyalty to the company that hasn't reciprocated in decades.

Much of the criticism of GenZ in the workplace is really just them giving to the employer what the employer offers them. Perhaps it's time for government to re-take its essential role in leveling the playing field so new players can enter the market and push the dinosaurs into their richly deserved tar pits.

Id doesn't NECESSARILY debase the social fabric. But if it does things like buying crooked inspectors to overlook sub-standard materials, buying off a zoning board to basically take over a residential area (*cough* datacenters *cough*), pays sub-standard wages under the table to people who 'need' to keep a low profile, and then when something goes wrong, scampers off leaving an impoverished shell behind to go bankrupt so the public has to pay for the clean-up, yes it debases the social fabric.

Only because legal enforcement of corporate charters seems to be dead.

There's lots of VERY profitable drug cartels as well, but I don't think we should celebrate them.

By separating the decision making from the execution, the corporation is the perfect psychopath. The structure not only allows all parties to rationalize their own guilt away, it also protects those who make unconscionable decisions from the legal consequences of their actions. That combination can only ever produce a monster. The LAST thing we need running them is someone educated to break the rules (law) when 'necessary'.

Even from the very beginnings of Capitalism, Smith admonished that corporate charters must be handed out exceedingly sparingly and they must be held strictly to their charters. Also note that all corporate charters are in legal theory supposed to be for the public good. Not just as a nice idea but as one of the mandates. A company acting against the public interest is supposed to be dissolved for violating it's charter. Clearly we have failed in that. Let's not double down on the failure by educating people in the image of the incorporated monster and putting them in charge.

There may be some use to something like the LLC, but there seems to be little economic use for corporate personhood. The only public value of a corporation (if/when it has any) is economic.

Rubbish. Most of them have a ratty couch with the least stained side of the cushions turned up (if they can decide which is least stained).