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Comment Re:Same as it ever was (Score 1) 75

This sounds like he's unwilling to do a little extra work to determine if the student actually understands their submitted work.

That's what the in-class exams and quizzes are for.

If that's true now, it was true 40 years ago, when the student could have turned in paperwork that some other student actually did.

The in-class exams and quizzes solved that problem too.

Comment Re:This will certainly be great discussion (Score 3, Insightful) 21

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.

Comment Re:Proprietary software needs to be abandoned. (Score 1) 51

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.

Comment Re:How Hard Can The Decision Be? (Score 4, Insightful) 18

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.

Comment Re:Additional Question (Score 1) 149

if both Anthropic + OpenAI close shop tomorrow

That is extremely unlikely, but if it happens, people will switch to other AI engines.

I use Cursor for coding, which SpaceX now owns.

SpaceX (which may merge with Tesla soon) has deep pockets and an in-house need for AI, so it is even less likely to "close shop".

Even if Anthropic and OpenAI get in deep financial doo-doo, they won't close entirely. They might stop updating their models, but the existing models in static mode would be fine for coding. More likely, they would be acquired in a consolidation.

There are currently dozens of AI companies. I predict there will be fewer than five in a few years.

Comment what flock could do (Score 2) 26

This is mostly the fault of the police department, not Flock, but one thing that Flock could easily do that would reduce this kind of abuse is to make all accounts expire after a certain period, say six months. It would not be a large burden for police departments to reauthorize the accounts of personnel who need access from time to time.

Comment Am I missing something? (Score 1) 3

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.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 14

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:Urgency? (Score 2) 83

wait as long as possible to choose between SpaceX and Blew Origin?

So far neither one has built a lunar lander yet, so, indeed, it's a good idea to wait before making a choice.

Beautiful pictures are fine and inspiring, but it's prudent to actually see some real hardware before committing.

Comment Re:If only.... (Score 2) 95

An upstart company would make a "dumb TV"

There are dumb TVs still being made.

That you don't even know that shows you are not a serious customer for such a product.

I also won't buy any audio or video gear that requires a network connection

You can just click "Skip" when it asks you to connect to the Internet.

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