They never really talk about any of them except for the educational discount, to my knowledge? But for as long as I can remember, Apple also offered military discounts:

https://www.apple.com/shop/bro...

They also run government employee discounts, typically by way of special online stores you have to shop in. For example, Washington DC government workers can go here: https://dchr.dc.gov/page/apple...

As I understand it Mythos’ “big leap” is not in finding specific flaws it is in chaining them together into a “bigger” flaw. So finding a minor issue in curl that lets you put a file where you shouldn’t, plus a flaw in something that assumes some file location is “safe” and it doesn’t have to parse things with an advassery in mind, plus a flaw in something that relies on that thing, and so on.

When doing that kind of security work you don’t need to find a bunch of significant flaws in each tool, just a minor flaw in places that turn out to be useful when combined with say up to 9 other minor flaws. So from the viewpoint of cUrl which doesn’t rely on a lot of other tools to provide its services nothing has changed. The pain is experienced on a wider scale like over a whole OS where there are a lot of tools any of which might contribute a minor flaw so Mythos can find way to gain “the prize” (maybe remote execution, or a privilege escalation, or both).

Maybe a better way to think about Mythos is it doesn’t have to hyper focus on one tool like “can I break into the system using cUrl?” (and is not actually any better at that question then prior AI), but it does a far far better job at answering the question “can I break into the system using up to a dozen or so flaws together out of this pool of 1000+ tools?”. I assume it may be a bit better at finding flaws in single tool if the flaws require putting more bugs together or more steps to reach the state where an existing flaw shows up, but again that isn’t the big deal. The big deal is at a system level it puts multiple sub-critical flaws together to combine into a critical flaw. (queue transformers joke here)

Is Cuda a lock in because there is a critical mass of solutions written in Cuda and people that think about problems in terms of Cuda already so nothing is really going to unseat it that isn’t a close clone of Cuda and making one of this is for some reason impossible, or is the problem that you can make something else that lets you be expressive in the imprint ways Cuda is while giving the backend the same kind of flexibility to schedule operations, but nobody else has made one that isn’t “too buggy” to use on real world problems?

In the distant past very few C/C++ complies existed, they were “too complex” for small companies to make, and now we have very few commercial compilers and a billion open source projects that are all forks of gcc or llvm (or a fork of a fork of the llvm derived clang). We don’t have a billion non-C derived programming environments though (we have a few, JavaScript is popular, and I’ll argue Java is C-derived, although removing pointers form C doesn’t leave a lot, so I’ll also accept it as a distinct environment, but if so, so is Swift, and Rust also counts as distinct...still that is only handful). It doesn’t prove a lot, but I would say even the moat of a programming language and environment only lasts so long.

Do you actually believe that? I mean, yeah sure “we asked them what was up and they gave a flimsy excuse” doesn’t mean you have to believe it!

The only thing that points towards them maybe telling the truth is it might be obvious if the data center were operating and you don’t want to get caught in a provable lie. However it is also possible the data center is partly operating while construction continues and they figure “hey there aren’t people coming and going, who will know if the data center is operating as opposed to testing equipment if we get caught!”.

The most concerning part should be that the utility isn't auditing it's service. The most basic check is to compare water pumped or otherwise brought into the system against water usage billed to customers. Those two numbers should be equal, any discrepancy indicates leaks or other unaccounted-for draws. Any discrepancy should also be relatively stable, with any large variations correlated to known main breaks. You especially audit things immediately after a major change like bringing smart meters on-line to catch problems like this.

I'd agree, except it really depends what you want to do in life. Where AI really does more damage than good is in the Fine Arts. So far, AI has "empowered" the stealing of original creative work by cartoonists, painters and paid photographers, to regurgitate it into "mash-ups" it pretends it came up with organically in response to requests to "draw me a ". It's, similarly, encouraged producing musical jingles and pieces that devalue real, human musicians as part of the process. (If you're a small business looking for a catchy jingle or theme to put in all your radio commercials today? Chances are you opt to save a little money by AI generating something up via a service like Suno, instead of hiring a professional musicians who writes them. That results in AI "synth singers" that all start to sound alike as you hear enough of the content, and to at least some extent? Music that sounds generic and canned, too, due to a limited number of drum riffs and fills, guitar licks and other details the AI uses repeatedly when instructed to play in specific genres.

Even if you believe this is just part of the transition of AI into something far better than it is today? You're just cheering on a world where it will become a special treat to pay premiums for a "real, human-crafted work", while the masses only consume AI art. That doesn't bode well for society in the future, if you ask me.

The sticky note under the keyboard or in a desk drawer is actually pretty secure. Most attacks are remote, they've no way to read that note. The social-engineering attacks don't target people who'd go to your desk either, they either target you directly (you already know your password) or support people who don't need to know your password to give them access.

I have to ask, are these platforms even trying to secure their systems anymore? Because I keep seeing of more and more of these breaches, involving more and more platforms, and the attacks are less and less sophisticated. I hear companies talk and talk about security, yet their day-to-day practices require their employees and contractors to violate practically every good security practice and treat the red flags of an attack as normal company practice instead.

Occam's Razor no longer applies, because at this level malice and incompetence are indistinguishable.

I mean, most everyone's mad at Trump over implementing these tariffs (and rightfully so, IMO, if only because of how haphazardly it was implemented). But now, you've got companies demanding a refund when it was mostly the consumer who really paid them. (I didn't see many places eating the cost of the tariffs and holding prices where they were? If that had happened, the typical consumer wouldn't have cared so much about them.)

Knowing these companies have no plans to cut prices, it makes it sort of accurate for Trump to praise the ones who won't try to claw back the money. At least as additional revenue to the U.S. government, it technically goes towards servicing the national debt as opposed to tax increases.

Agree with you completely. To me, the real conversation here is probably about whether or not AI has gotten far enough to do a viable simulation of consciousness.
I would be a little disturbed if Dawkins concluded Claude AI is truly "alive" from a few days of interacting with it ... but not sure that's what he's said?

At what point could an AI be treated like a "friend" despite it just being computer software? And by treating an AI as conscious, perhaps it's only a suggestion that interactions with it stay parallel with the ones we'd have with humans. (If nothing else, an AI that adapts and learns partially based on what's typed to it in conversations would suffer from "garbage in, garbage out" if people kept telling it ridiculous things they'd never say to other people.)

We use Notepad++ in my workplace. (At least, some of our software devs do. I maintain it as one of the apps they can install via "Company Portal" in Windows from InTune.)

I had no issues with the software, but I agree it seems pretty similar to other options out there like BBEdit. When I saw the news of a Mac version, I thought, "That's good... more choices for people. I'd never use it, but ..." And now, all this drama because it was released by someone other than the original author.

It sounds like it'll get sorted out, even if Andrey Letov is only grudgingly renaming the app. Honestly? Best answer here would have been Don Ho doing a Mac port of Notepad++ himself. I mean, why not? It can't be that huge a project, considering it's not an app using 3D accelerated graphics or any of that. Just make an official Mac version and expand your user base.

This isn't really a new result, nor tied to genAI. Machine-learning models have a long track record of being able to identify medical problems better than humans based on records. Not really a surprise, the problem is essentially one of pattern matching and machine learning is _really_ good at extracting patterns from large volumes of data and then matching new data against those patterns. I wouldn't apply genAI to the problem, though, the established ML systems do a better job using fewer resources.

I remember the one thing that really made me rebel against the school system, growing up, was all the homework. I was a smart kid/teen but I also knew what areas I wanted to spend my mental energy on. I always leaned more towards writing, spelling, literature and creative things. I was never wired to be very good at math.

I struggled through the math courses (although oddly did reasonably well at geometry because I wasn't so adverse to doing all the "proofs").

But yeah - any teacher who flat out told me they expected us to do "about an hour a night" of homework just for their one class? I was ready to check out and ignore the work because that led to my whole evening being tied up with it, by the time I got through the homework assignments from all my classes.

There's got to be a reasonable middle ground, IMO. It's fine to send something home each night to make sure a kid is practicing what was learned. But it's also the job of the school to ensure they learn the stuff fully in class. Always thought it was a BS cop-out to suggest "tutoring" as soon as a kid gets a little behind. That just shunts the teacher's job off to a third party because they're trying to cover too much, too quickly, in class.

One big problem I see with wind turbines though? The maintenance has fairly steep requirements. You can't just hire some handyman or general electrician to climb one of those towers and repair a short circuit or whatnot. There's a whole new job created for trained specialists in working on wind turbines, and as one might imagine? They're not cheap to hire.

Solar panels are mundane by contrast. No specially made turbine blades (out of mostly non-recyclable materials) to need replacing. No need to have workers climb tall towers to do maintenance. And any electrician worth a darn can troubleshoot a solar panel array or diagnose a failing inverter. And certainly no helicopters required.

I dunno, I felt like the IIe was peak Apple 2.