They had to say it that way, because the more accurate statement is that the dealership law unfairly advantages existing automakers. It's not about the dealerships being good or bad, it's about the fact that setting up a dealership network takes a lot of time and money and requiring it is a good way to keep new competition out.

The correct term is "regulatory capture". Private businesses use the power of the state to protect, subsidize or otherwise benefit them and harm competitors and potential competitors. It's extremely common and the more pervasive the regulation is, the more common it is. Red tape and government procedures benefit entrenched players who have built the institutional structures and knowledge to deal with them.

This isn't to say that all regulation is bad... but a lot of it is. There was never any consumer benefit to banning direct sales. All regulations should be thoroughly scrutinized for their effects on the market, direct and indirect.

I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

I thought exactly the opposite. I think Rocky is far too "human". I didn't mind it, though, because a lot of the humor would be lost if Rocky was properly alien.

I think that's necessary. Providing explanations of depth comparable to the book would require a 10-hour movie. Squeezing the story down to feature length requires cutting a lot of exposition. In many books there's a lot of description that can be replaced with visuals, but it's pretty hard to do that with a lot of the science.

I'm sure you'd have said the same about Y2K. It's a good thing that some people have more foresight.

I think you're describing the models from a year ago. Most of the improvements in capability since then (and the improvements have been really large) are directly due to changes that have the AI model talk to itself to better reason out its response before providing it, and one of the results of that is that most of the time they absolutely can explain why they did what they did. There are exceptions, but they are the exception, not the rule.

It's interesting to compare this with humans. Humans generally can give you an explanation for why they did what they did, but research has demonstrated pretty conclusively that a large majority of the time those explanations are made up after the fact, they're actually post-hoc justifications for decisions that were made in some subconscious process. Researchers have demonstrated that people are just as good at coming up with explanations for decisions they didn't make as for decisions they did! The bottom line is that people can't really provide useful insights on why they did what they did, they're just really good at inventing post-hoc rationales.

If you're asserting that Greg Kroah-Hartman can't code worth a damn, you might want to find out who he is and think again.

And the law of large numbers. Statistically, there will but patch clusters, the same way there are clusters of every other random-ish event. The fact that one happens to occur right after Microsoft promises a commitment to predictable patch schedules means not just nothing the but opposite. Any commitment to doing better means that they recognize they haven't been doing well enough, and obviously it's not possible to do significantly better immediately; changing processes takes time, and observing the effects of those changes takes even longer.

So, no, this cluster of patches doesn't tell us anything in particular beyond what we already knew: That emergency patches are relatively common.

Yes, but... I think you're confusing some things. We're talking about AES, which is a symmetric encryption algorithm, not asymmetric.

Of course, no cryptographic construction has been "proven" secure, in the sense that mathematicians use the word "prove", not symmetric or asymmetric. Asymmetric schemes have an additional challenge, though, which is they have to have some sort of "trapdoor function" that mathematically relates a public key and a private key, and the public key has to be published to the attacker. Classical asymmetric cryptography is built by finding a hard math problem and building a scheme around it -- which means that a solution to the math problem breaks the algorithm.

Symmetric systems have it a bit easier, because the attacker doesn't get to see any part of the key or anything related to the key other than plaintext and corresponding ciphertext (though the standard bar is to assume the attacker has an oracle that allows them to get plaintext of arbitrary ciphertexts, i.e. the Adaptive Chosen Ciphertext attack, IND-CCA2). And the structure of symmetric ciphers isn't usually built around a specific math problem. Instead, they tend to just mangle the input in extremely complex ways. It's hard to model these mathematically, which makes attacking them with math hard.

In both cases, we are unable to prove that they're secure. When I started working on cryptography, the only basis for trust in algorithms was that they'd stood up to scrutiny for a long period of time. That was it. Over the last 20 years or so, we've gotten more rigorous, and "security proofs" are basically required for anyone to take your algorithm seriously today... but they aren't quite like "proofs" in the usual sense. They're more precisely called "reductions". They're mathematically-rigorous proofs that the security of the algorithm (or protocol) is reducible to a small set of assumptions -- but we have to assume those, because we can't prove them.

For most asymmetric schemes, the primary underlying assumption is that the mathematical problem at the heart of the scheme is "hard". Interestingly, there is one family of asymmetric signature schemes for which this is not true. SLH-DSA, one of the post-quantum algorithms recently standardized by NIST, provably reduces to one assumption: That the hash algorithm used is secure, meaning that it has both second pre-image resistance plus a more advanced form of second pre-image resistance. Collision resistance isn't even required! This is striking because we actually have quite a lot of confidence in our secure hash algorithms. Secure hash algorithms are among the easiest to create because all you need is a one-way function with some additional properties. And we've been studying hash functions very hard, for quite a long time, and understand them pretty well.

This means that one of our "new" post-quantum asymmetric algorithms is probably the very strongest we have, not only less likely to be broken than our other asymmetric algorithms, but less likely to be broken than our symmetric algorithms. If it were broken, it would be because someone broke SHA-256 (which, BTW, would break enormous swaths of modern cryptography; it's extremely hard to find a cryptographic security protocol that doesn't use SHA-256 somewhere), and unless that same research result somehow broke all secure hash functions, we could trivially repair SLH-DSA simply by swapping out the broken hash function for a secure one.

This is an entirely different model from the way we looked at cryptography early in my career. SLH-DSA doesn't have decades of use and attack research behind it. Oh, the basic concept of hash-based signatures dates back to the late 70s, but the crucial innovations that make SPHINCS and its descendants workable are barely a decade old! BUT we have a rigorous and carefully peer-reviewed security proof that demonstrates with absolute mathematical rigor that SLH-DSA is secure iff the hash function used in it is secure.

So... a relative newcomer is more trustworthy than the algorithms we've used for decades, precisely because we no longer rely on "hasn't been broken so far" as our only evidence of security.

As for AES, the subject of the discussion above, there is no security proof for AES. There's nothing to reduce it to. There are proofs that it is secure against specific attack techniques (linear cryptanalysis and differential cryptanalysis) that were able to defeat other block ciphers, but those proofs only prove security against those specific attacks, not other attacks that are not yet known. So for AES we really do rely on the fact that it has withstood 20+ years of focused cryptanalysis, and that no one has managed to find an attack that significantly weakens it. That could change at any time, with or without quantum computers.

SLH-DSA, however, is one that very well may be secure forever, against both classical and quantum attacks. The security proof doesn't even care about classical vs quantum, it just proves that any successful attack, no matter how it's performed, provides a way to break the underlying hash function. Therefore, if the hash function is secure, SLH-DSA is secure. It's an incredibly powerful proof, like many proofs by contradiction.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.

Based on the cost of products from China vs the price of products made in China but sold by non-Chinese companies, I'd say the price well more than covers the cost of everything for practically any product where they also choose to display ads.

They just want more, more, always more.

If Putin had been around, he'd have been in the Epstein files, too. It's vanishingly-unlikely that any strongman like that wouldn't also be a sexual abuser. It's all part of the same disrespect for others.

Linux has a large number of highly-paid developers. If you look at the kernel, specifically, there are basically no unpaid volunteers contributing significantly to it, and there haven't been for a long time. The right way to understand kernel development is as a collaboration between a large number of corporations, each of whom contributes the paid work of skilled engineers and most of which also contribute cash to a foundation that employs the highly-paid engineers who coordinate all of the work (notably Linus, who makes a seven figure salary -- honestly, ought to be eight figures, but he's certainly not hurting).

If you look beyond the kernel to the other tools and desktop environments, the volunteer participation rises significantly, but there's also a lot of paid work.