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Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 20

retains access to the AI startup's technology until 2032, including models that achieve AGI

Exactly how do they envision an autocomplete gaining sentience?

It hasn't been "autocomplete" in a long time. Sure, there's a training step based on a corpus of Human language, and the autoregressive process outputs a single token at a time, but reinforcement learning trains specific behaviors beyond merely completing a sentence.

Besides, the best way to write something indistinguishable from what a Human might write is to, well, "think" like a Human.

Comment Will we finally learn our lesson? (Score 1) 32

Are we, as a sapient species facing an uncertain prospect of continuence in a world full of rapidly-advancing bullshit going to learn from this catastrophic and absurdly predictable failure of information security, personal and professional ethics, civilian government, market economics, basic common sense, and consumer psychology?

Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".

What do you say, and why is it also "no"?

Comment Re:Modern security products seem to increase... (Score 2) 30

I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

The whole world has realized that they need to start air-gapping databases

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

Comment Is this a surprise? (Score 3, Insightful) 18

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Comment Musk should thank his lucky stars for this (Score 5, Interesting) 222

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

Comment Re:To be fooled again. (Score 5, Interesting) 400

Q: Who is susceptible to deception? A: Everyone.

Deceivers don't appeal to logic.

I've been using this site for over twenty years, and it's a been most of a decade since I've commented. This is the best thing I've seen on here since then. Whatever you do, keep drumming up the fight against ignorance and propaganda, and the people who've fallen victims of it. I don't want to get personal, but lets just say that I know from intimate experience what brainwashing does to a person, and the tremendous cost of clawing one's way out of it. Division in modern society is inevitable--and we must fight against those who seek to destroy rational thought!--but without empathy for those infected by bad ideas, shortchanged by their personal experiences, we'll end up punishing and alientating those victimized by bad actors exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities that every one of us has, we will push them out of sheer self-defense into voting in the people who will undo us.

Comment Duck Duck Go as Primary Browser, Vanadium otherwis (Score 1) 92

Duck Duck Go mobile app is my primary browser for mobile use. It is ideal for searching and links from feeds, bar code scans, email and other such things. Although it is fun to take a peek at the built-in privacy dashboard, I rarely use it. Most of the sites I visit do not even have a TOS;DR report, which takes some of the fun out of it. I have only ever used the flame button to "burn" all the cookies and other private data, a few times, but it is nice to know the fire button is there.

However, for sites like slashdot, where I want to hold onto session cookies for an extended period of time and expect a fresh tab to see them, I use Vanadium, which is the default browser on GrapheneOS. Vanadium is a security hardened version of Chromium, which, in turn, is the community edition of Google Chrome.

Vanadium is also slightly better for sharing links to email because it is smart enough to set the email subject to the page title as well as sharing the link in the email body. The DDG app does not do this.

Comment Re:Did he file a VFR flight plan? (Score 1) 111

Show me a single biological female who has ever been involved in jetpack development or flying.

Go ahead, move the goalposts. And obviously, who ever heard of Amelia Earhart?

Not the person you're responding to, but I'm pretty sure their less-than-polite phrasing meant "biological female who has ever been involved in jetpack development or *jetpack* flying".

Everyone knows Amelia Earhart was a big part of aviation history in that era, but I strongly suspect that she didn't moonlight as the Rocketeer.

Comment Re:Chinese fragility in full force. (Score 3, Informative) 72

Indeed, people should take in the full context here, not just platitudes. They should look at how China has interacted with Europe and the US in the context of world wars, trade wars, cultural exchange and economic interdependence. ...then they should call Xi on his tantrums and fragility. He chooses to be this way.

Comment Squeak - What's Old is New Again (Score 1) 57

The screen caps and videos looked awfully familiar to me. Scratch is just the Squeak scripting from from way back re-implemented in the browser, without a lot of the great benefits that Squeak OS brought to to the table.

Naturally, both Scratch and Squeak are built into the latest Rasbian image for Raspberry Pi fans.

Comment Re: app based solution - proprietary auth sucks (Score 4, Interesting) 76

I have agree that proprietary authenticator apps and OAuth based services are dubious at best. It's no surprise that banks don't trust them either.

It's too bad that OpenID started out half-baked, the implementations so inconsistent that sites stopped offering the opportunity to provide your own URL, and then the standards committee hijacked by industry representatives with vested interests that loaded it up with verify instead of fixing its security problems.

But, you might want to check out SQRL, which I mentioned in a reply to the parent post. It's an open standard with open source implementations and a two party security model that keeps those pesky snoops at bay.

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