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Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 57

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 1) 34

I can't say for PHP itself, but I've been worried about PHP security for years. A BBS I installed using PHP wanted it installed as root. Total f*ck no. I've seen other apps running with elevated priveledges when they weren't needed. So many red flags I didn't use PHP because of the language itself, but because people that used it had zero worries about security.

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:Could this have been used in Venezuela? (Score 1) 139

No idea but the Russians have been using their microwave weapons against American diplomatic personnel for the last 10 years with devastating effectiveness. Seems that they have been targeting personnel and their families who served in the Ukraine stations.

Also Canadian diplomatic personnel have been targeted too by the Russians.

Comment Havana syndrome (Score 5, Informative) 139

Ironic they are developing this weapon while at the same time denying that Havana syndrome is real and accusing the victims in the diplomatic core of mass hysteria. Not that long ago they bought a weapon on the black market from the Russians. I'm sure they have been testing it extensively while they make their own version of it.

Comment This has been around a while (Score 4, Interesting) 139

The DOD/DOW have been working on this for a while. They discovered, early on, that the device had a propensity to cause permanent nerve damage.

It's very unlikely the US have fixed that, as they'd largely sidelined the work as a failure. However, at 36%, Trump needs something he can call a win, no matter what the long-term consequences.

Comment According to the notes, it isn't in the wild (Score 2) 60

The patch notes say both vulnerabilities will be fixed on Oct 26 unless it's seen in the wild before that.

I've had trust issues with PHP using software since one piece I installed wanted to run web files root. Just no. Web server files are owned by the web user and can't touch anything else on the Raspberry Pi it runs on. That is not PHP though, just developers that don't think of security first using PHP.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 23

I note that even a hybrid kernel would require a compatibility layer to provide all the userspace stuff including the the display environment, access to the Unix file system, etc.

As far as compatibility layers go, years ago there was one called Merge which supported win32 on Unix. It was a commercial offering. I actually used a derivative of this back in the windows 95 days to run Windows 95 apps on Linux. Sadly they never made the transition to supporting modern windows NT apps.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 23

Hint: You cannot run win32 apps on a unix kernel without a compatibility layer of some kind! (Which is what WINE *is*.) There's no way around this to get seamless win32 binary support. You either need to have WINE integrated into the OS and desktop environment, or some other implementation of win32 in the OS that translates win32 calls into kernel calls and unix libraries for I/O, screen display, etc. Or some kind of hybrid kernel.

All of this is true whether you're running windows apps on *nix or wanting to run Linux apps on FreeBSD, or Linux apps on Windows. What do you think WSL is?

Tight integration between WINE and the OS and desktop environment is certainly possible. If Wine were actually "finished" then I'm sure distros would be doing this. Meanwhile only MS could produce a true 100% win32 compatibility layer for Unix OS's.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 23

Right. You mean with a compatibility layer like WINE. And that's literally what WINE is. An implementation of the win32 platform for the Linux (and now BSD) kernel.

Comment Re:Rust good match for AI code generation (Score 2) 17

Obviously. But the agents will suggest an appropriate language if asked. I suspect Rust is being recommended more and more.
And agents regularly do make arbitrary decisions if you don't explicitly tell them what to do. For example I know someone working on a large project and the agent chose python and some Tk-based UI library without being asked.

And like I said, it doesn't matter if I know Rust or not anymore. I can simply choose it (because it's popular, or because it is "safe") and the agent will go to work.

Comment Rust good match for AI code generation (Score 5, Interesting) 17

With more and more software development being turned over to AI coding agents, in many respects the language itself no longer matters. However I'm not surprised Rust is growing in popularity, driven by AI code generation. And it's a good match for that. While a lot of human developers find Rust difficult to learn and work with, AI agents have no such difficulties and the Rust compiler guarantees help mitigate some of the problems from mediocre, generated code.

I've seen quite a few projects introduced lately that all use AI code generation and Rust. And frankly that's probably the only way I'm going to use Rust myself.

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