What would I admit to? I've been saying this the entire time. The only dissenting opinion I've ever had about this is referring to it as a siege or an insurrection, I've always referred to it as a riot based on stupid conspiracy theories.

I don't get it. Are we only allowed to denounce one of them?

A lot of the 'headline' announcements, pro and con, are basically useless; but this sort of thing does seem like a useful cautionary tale in the current environment where we've got hype-driven ramming of largely unspecialized LLMs as 'AI features' into basically everything with a sales team; along with a steady drumbeat of reports of things like legal filings with hallucinated references; despite a post-processing layer that just slams your references into a conventional legal search engine to see if they return a result seeming like a pretty trivial step to either automate or make the intern do.

Having a computer system that can do an at least mediocre job, a decent percentage of the time, when you throw whatever unhelpfully structured inputs at it is something of an interesting departure from what most classically designed systems can do; but for an actually useful implementation one of the vital elements is ensuring that the right tool is actually being used for the job(which, at least in principle, you can often do since you have full control of which system will process the inputs; and, if you are building the system for a specific purpose, often at least some control over the inputs).

Even if LLMs were good at chess they'd be stupid expensive compared to ordinary chess engines. I'm sure that someone is interested in making LLMs good at chess to vindicate some 'AGI' benchmark; but, from an actual system implementation perspective, this is the situation where the preferred behavior would be 'Oh, you're trying to play chess; would you like me to set "uci_elo" or just have Stockfish kick your ass?" followed by a handoff to the tool that's actually good at the job.

Why do we even consider it a story when there are a couple of CEO quotes to mash together?

Even leaving aside the notrivial odds that what a CEO says is flat out wrong and the near certainty that what the CEO says is less well informed than what someone at least a layer or two closer to the technology or the product rather than to vague, abstract, 'management'; unless a C-level is being cleverly ambushed when away from their PR handlers with a few drinks in them or actively going off script in the throes of some personal upset, why would you expect their pronouncements to be anything but their company's perceived interests restated as personal insights?

Surprise, surprise, the AI-company guy is here to tell us that the very large, high barrier to entry, models are like spooky scary and revolutionary real soon now; even if you wouldn't know it from the quality of the product they can actually offer at the present time; while the AI-hardware guy is here to tell you that AI is friendly and doesn't bite but everyone needs even more than they thought they did, ideally deployed yesterday; because the AI-company people need to hype up the future value of throwing more cash and more patience at money-losing LLMs; and the AI-hardware people need to juice the total addressable market by any means necessary.

This seems like it radically increases the (historically quite low) risk of steroid abuse within network engineering. We don't ask how "Tank Coreswitch" is preparing for the move from 100Kg/E to 400Kg/E; but apparently it involves more endocrinology and dodgy sports medicine than most other networking standards.

That's probably because you didn't bring your collie fursuit this time because you wanted to show him that you're a rebel.

You mean like a barter economy? Those have never existed in any meaningful scale or duration. You'll see them briefly, like when a central bank becomes insolvent, or on the occasional one-off transaction, but that's about it. The scenario you're contriving here would also mean the US dollar becomes worthless, and for the exact same reason.

All fiat currencies are only worth whatever you think they're worth.

They wouldn't even run on it.

An IT department shouldn't be using passkey anyways, in fact they shouldn't even allow it. They should be using FIDO2, which works anywhere that passkeys work, except apple. But "except apple" is how most standards work. Among other things, FIDO2 keys are basically unphishable. They're useless if stolen when the attacker doesn't have the PIN. And if they are stolen or otherwise lost, the user will be acutely aware of it when they can't login, where the IT team can revoke it when issuing a new key and optionally reprovision it if it's found again.

If you're worried about lock in, that fear is misplaced as all three of my keys are from different vendors. If you're going to use TOTP you may as well use passkeys. Passkeys completely outclass TOTP in every way you can imagine.

Mind you I don't use hardware keys for everything, just for the really important stuff, like my proton account. Everything else is passkey if the application supports it. GitHub, Amazon, Google, etc. Not as foolproof as FIDO2, but definitely good enough for cases where if the account is taken over, I'd be a bit annoyed but mostly just shrug it off. I'd use regular passwords for those, but they force you to use email/sms/totp otherwise, and I'd rather not have to type in or copy/paste codes, all of those are far less convenient than passkey, and far less secure.

Is the status quo even adequate? Not only are we in a position where basically two companies get to tell you whether you can accept payments at all if they determine that your business isn't socially acceptable, but they also gouge you pretty good just because they can.

This is a problem that is definitely in want of a solution. Cryptocurrency does seem like a viable solution. We've seen a few hiccups with it over the years, but I don't know of any technology that hasn't gone through such a period.

And I get that progressives love the idea of controlling everything they don't like by social media shaming visa, mastercard, et al into preventing onlyfans porn actors from getting paid because porn objectifies women and the women who do it aren't allowed to like it, or shaming gofundme until they prevented Kyle Rittenhouse from funding his criminal defense because only people they like are entitled to a fair trial. So let's just forget about them for now until the roles are inevitably reversed.

I suspect that finding out the hard way would suck; but I'd honestly be a little curious what the breakdown would be between "it's been decades since we sold this stuff with the expectation of more than toy use; it's bad for margins to have more than bare minimum service techs and spares" where you'd basically be screwed; and "we jerk you around because we can; but if you just conscripted our contractors and Defense Production Act-ed our production priorities it would actually work fine".

If the problem is basically just 'because we can' contract fuckery a real war would probably sort it out; because the DoD can also 'because we can' in a pinch. It's if the system looks rotten because, deep down, it's been at least two generations of people selling cool toys that we all know are just going to be used against pitifully inferior non-state or pariah-state actors to people buying cool toys who know how to talk about 'peer adversaries' but can't forget that their entire career has been more or less discretionary and recreational uses of force that we barely bother to call wars.

There are definitely upsides to not having spent prolonged periods of time in hot wars with existential threats recently; but I suspect that it's hard to keep deep cynicism from creeping into the supply chain when it's so hard to pretend that you aren't just going through the motions.

"They 'trust' me. Dumb fucks."

There's an important thing to keep in mind about 'cultural diversity' in this context.

Under typical circumstances valuing cultural diversity gets to be more than enthusiasm for novelty because it's also a desire to protect (at least some, you don't have to deem them all equally desirable) people from being leaned on more or less aggressively to stop doing what they are doing. That changes if you get too close to the line of advocating more hosts be thrown at the problem in order to keep the show going so it remains available. Goes from being a matter of treating people as ends to treating them as means fairly sharply.

From the moment Apple heard of them, they made the possibility of them being stolen a hard requirement. If they can't be stored on icloud, then your iTurd can't use them. Period.