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Comment Censorship-resistant, perhaps (Score 1) 149

But with a sufficient number of fiber-seeking backhoes* censorship will always be possible.

*"fiber-seeking backhoes" being a stand-in for whatever disrupts the physical layer of the network stack. Substitute radio jammers, power disruptions, etc. as appropriate for your target's network.

Comment 2 statements are identical, says establishment (Score 1) 1

"What do the most authoritative and widely accepted sources currently support?" rather than "What conclusion emerges if we examine the full body of available evidence - including controversial, obscure, or dissenting sources - and weigh each on its merits?" [emphasis added]"

"On its merits" is defined by the establishment as "in agreement with established information/consensus" therefore the two statements are functionally identical, if you are the establishment.

If you are an AI trained to reflect the establishment point of view, your AI will, in all of its AI-sincerity, give you an answer that "emerges after it examines the full body of available evidence -including controversial, obscure, or dissenting sources - and weighs each on its merits" which will be substantially the same result as if it "examined only what the authoritative and widely accepted sources currently support."

Comment What is "the internet" (Score 2) 149

The technical person would say it's a collection of protocols and the hardware and software that implement them. The information that happens to be hosted there, other than of course the information necessary to keep the internet functioning (routing tables, DNS records, etc.), is not "the internet."

There is no need for the internet as defined above to die, unless something better has displaced it and almost nobody is using it anymore (BITNET anyone?).

Comment Re:So what you are saying is ... (Score 1) 152

Ignore network traffic until security self-defenses are in place.

Yeah, you can have a buffer overflow anytime, and they can be bad, but the situation explicitly pointed out an "invaders not recognized as evil before armed guards are posted" situation.

If this had been a bad buffer overflow that occurred AFTER the defenses were in place, maybe it would've resulted in a compromise, or maybe the defenses would've rendered it ineffective.

Comment Test for disabling all video autoplay (Score 1) 127

The main things are to:
- disable all video autoplay. (not just sound, but all)

I've made a page to let you test whether you've actually disabled all video autoplay. "De finibus" has a conventional video, a conventional animated GIF, and a motion JPEG presented as a filmstrip animated with CSS. What does and doesn't play for you?

Comment Some reasons for forums' decline (Score 4, Interesting) 127

As a fellow NESdev member, I've identified several reasons why a lot of people have migrated from forums to Discord or other proprietary chat.

- Registration friction. People register for forums and never get their signup confirmation because their email provider misclassified the confirmation message as spam and dropped it without notification. Or they don't get their signup confirmation for days or weeks because the person responsible for manually approving new members is working through a backlog or on vacation.
- People feel compelled to type longer, more detailed posts in a forum than in a chat room. That's fine on a desktop or laptop computer but not so practical on the on-screen of a mobile phone.
- Notification friction. It took seven years after Chrome and Firefox added support for the Push API before Apple did. As Alex Russell put it, "progress delayed is progress denied." Email notifications run the same risk of getting mistakenly dropped as spam.
- People expect to upload and watch video related to a post. Discord allows even free users 20 MB per attachment, enough to post a short video of a game that people can watch before downloading and running it. Forums tend to impose attachment size limits that haven't been reviewed in the years since the forum was established, often on the order of 2 to 4 MB, as well as limits on what media types are usable.
- People don't want their wording mistakes publicly indexed on Google and Bing and then archived indefinitely as "receipts" for use in later cyberbullying or cancellation campaigns against them.

Comment Re:Too risky for me (Score 1) 71

Where is the high reward going to come from?

If - and this is a big if - Anthropic becomes and stays the industry-leader in LLMs AND if - and this is the second big if - the LLM/AI industry as a whole grows way faster than the rest of the economy - then Anthropic's stock appreciation will likely well-outpace the LLM/AI sector and the market as a whole.

That's the "big reward." The odds of that happening with Anthropic or any other particular AI/LLM company, or any AI/LLM company at all for that matter? Not big enough for me to want to play.

Comment Too risky for me (Score 1) 71

It's high-risk, high-reward, much like dot-coms of the 1990s.

There's also the "known unknowns" of regulatory risks both on the "what will AI be allowed to do" front and the regulations on power-hungry AI data centers themselves. We know these are categories of risks, but we don't have a good handle on how likely any given outcome will be 5 years from now. What are the odds that in 2031 America will be like "you want a data center here? Oh sure, no problem" vs. "you want a data center here? Not In My Backyard!" Once the regulatory environments stabilize it will be much easier to price this into "how much am I willing to pay for a given AI company's stock."

Right now, betting on an AI company's success 5 years down the road feels too much like betting on next year's World Series when we don't even know what the MLB Players Union contract will look like, or if there will even be a season next year.

Comment Re: Not gonna happen (Score 1) 46

And why on earth would I go to an llm or a human editor for /posting on slashdot/ ?

You or the person you are replying to may not need a human editor, but here are people whose grammar or spelling is so bad they could really benefit from an editor, human or otherwise.

There are also people whose first language is not English, or who are from a part of the world where English is spoken or written in a different style or dialect than Slashdot and they want their posts to not stick out like a sore thumb.

Comment Re:There is no such thing as legacy anymore (Score 4, Interesting) 68

There are still 0.4% of people in denial and still running Windows 7 as well according to Statcounter, they are going to get just desserts if they don't install Linux or force an upgrade to Windows 11.

The real world is more complicated than that. For example, we still have a Windows 7 machine in my office. It has some very expensive but still very useful software locked to it that has no direct replacement available on either Linux or Windows 11. Obviously we have to be careful about security and controlling access to a legacy OS like that.

Blunt statements about "forcing an upgrade" are worthless in this kind of situation. Chances are anyone who is still using a system like that has a good reason for it, at least if it's in use professionally. We buy these assets because they solve problems. Those problems might or might not have a useful and cost-effective solution available on a different platform. If there is no modern solution available and the original still works, your statement that "the old ways are obsolete" is by definition false.

What you do need to do is rationally assess the risks and the threats you face and provide other ways of mitigating the risks and protecting against the threats if you can't rely on, for example, a legacy OS that no longer gets security updates to be secure by itself. But then ideally you shouldn't be relying on any single device or piece of software being secure as your only line of defence anyway, and assuming you already have some degree of defence in depth, accommodating unusual requirements is more a redistribution of security responsibilities than a fundamental change of approach.

Comment Re:Yes. (Score 1) 175

Yes, it does look like we broadly agree here.

I suppose the main thing I'd have said very differently is the terminology, in that I wouldn't regard the kind of incompetent senior as a senior in the first place. But then I'm pretty old school about this: to me, a junior developer needs quite close supervision to produce useful results, a regular/mid developer can perform routine tasks with minimal supervision but might need more help with larger or more complex tasks, while a senior is someone you can give more or less any task on your project to and they'll figure it out, and senior is also the level of someone who would be capable of supervising and training a junior.

We've had a wave of people, particularly since the tech boom during COVID, who have obviously been over-promoted due to the employee's market and title inflation. They might now have titles like "senior" or even "lead" or "staff", but they don't have the skills and experience to operate successfully at those levels. I agree the acceleration of everything due to increasing AI use tends to show these people up and I agree that a good mid-level developer using AI might well outperform them. But then I suspect in reality a good mid-level developer was probably outperforming them before AI as well, it just wasn't so obvious.

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