Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment ah yes... secure software development... (Score 1) 43

It's hard enough to get actual developers to properly consider security. Not surprised at all that vibe coders don't.

Plus, of course, most of the training data is insecure to begin with.

But let them learn by fire that there's a reason actual programmers take time to ship a product, and it's not that the AI can type faster.

Comment ah, the old consciousness thing... (Score 2) 384

Problem is: We don't even know what consciousness is.

So the best we can say is if something creates the impression of having one, based on whom we attribute consciousness to, i.e. other humans. Well, big surprise that a model explicitly trained on human language and texts creates that impression. It does show just how good the models are. At pretending to be human because they have a shitload of examples on what humans would say.

For all we know, the gas clouds on Jupiter could be conscious, just in a way that is completely baffling to us. We can't rule it out because we don't know what consciousness is, so we can't test for it.

Comment If only it were _for_ the neighborhood (Score 1) 161

If the data center is primarily intended for use by (exclusively or nearly exclusively) the people in the neighborhood, sure, it could make sense. I know this is quaint and out-of-date but one can imagine a neighborhood squid cache, NNTP server, modern Netflix cache, etc for the neighborhood. Have it be connectable by a high-speed neighborhood LAN, to share the 'hood's WAN.

Just a classic neighborhood network coop, but with some added caching services, which is what would cause it to be called a "datacenter" instead of a "router." ;-)

As if that would really happen. And that's sure not what this is.

Comment Re:I'd love to trash Edge, but... (Score 1) 107

If an attacker has enough control of your machine to dump the password database, they have enough control to get it to retrieve the plaintext passwords

Not true.

An attacker may have a limited window. He might exploit some other vulnerability to do some operation with privileged access rights, but not have an admin shell.

Comment The usual question: what did they do? (Score 1) 45

Once again, I'm not shocked by the percentage laid off, but I'm shocked by the number of individuals. If 700 people was 14% of their workforce, then this company had about a hundred times as many employees as I would have guessed. Not that my guesses are particularly well-informed, but when I look at what this company's product appears to be and compare it to my own experiences, I can't help but make guesses that are apparently 99% off! (I'm that dumb!?)

What do employees at these large companies do all day? Why were they hired in the first place, or why weren't they laid off many years ago? I just don't get it.

I don't mean it as a put-down of their products, but on the surface it just doesn't look like their thousands of employees do anything bigger or more complicated than my dozen-developers-sized team (which is, itself, much larger than the teams I've been on in previous decades). Is everyone's productivity just .. eaten up by labor-not-scaling problems? Do I need to really read the Mythical Man Month instead of treating it as distant folklore that I'll some day get to?

Or is the answer in some other direction? Part of me thinks I should just drop it, and accept that I really don't know jack shit about the profession I've had for the last 40 years.

Comment Before I condemn it... (Score 1) 184

I can't really say it's bad for it to be doing these seemingly-bad things, until I know the answer to this: what is the app's intended purpose? Why would/should a person use it?

If it's intended to inconvenience/expose/punish users for trying to find out things about the White House, then maybe the application is doing the right thing.

Comment Good start (Score 2) 166

Even if this crazy minimum-age shit weren't happening, it's generally a good idea to give incorrect information. Have one birthday for site x and a different birthday for site y. Use one of your parent's birthdays here, and a celebrity's birthday there. Pollute the public data and cause confusion.

If minimum age laws help to encourage data public data pollution (all of which arguably shouldn't be public at all anyway), then at least one good thing will have come out of it.

Let's get it up to 84% of parents helping their kids bypass age checks.

Comment Re:questionable (Score 1) 112

Tell you what, you "prove" that the religion of your choice is a "real" religion

Oh, that's trivial: a) it's made-up nonsense, b) it tells people how to live their lives and c) it's been around for so long that people forgot that it's made-up nonsense.

None of that or the rest of your answer has anything to do with the point I was making: That "accepted as a religion in the USA" isn't much of an argument. If people can get Jedi accepted as a religion, it just proves how meaningless all of that is. Other countries have correctly identified Scientology as a pyramid scheme and a scam.

The fact that other religions would qualify for that as well doesn't make it any less true.

Slashdot Top Deals

It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. - W. K. Clifford, British philosopher, circa 1876

Working...