From /r/plex:

https://i.imgur.com/87huC1b.jpeg

They so, so badly want to criminalize local models.

edited:

> Interpretability isn’t reliable enough to fully understand model intentions: Being able to read and understand a model’s internal reasoning reduces our reliance on what the models explicitly tell us about why they behaved in a certain way. This could be a useful tool for understanding models’ “thought processes” when they take unintended actions. But interpretability methods are not yet dependable or broad enough to be relied on in this way. As a result, we may miss our assessment of high-risk behaviors, or be able to investigate flawed reasoning only after an incident has occurred.

Just say you have no idea how or why they do what they do. Just the other day I saw it make an obnoxious, huge, irrelevant comment in a block of code - many lines more than the code change (which by the way, I have tons of instructions and hooks intended to stop this, it's maybe 95% reliable at best) - and told it quite plainly, "remove that comment."

What it did instead was remove most of the comment except one line, which was also irrelevant. When I noticed, I asked it why it did that when I explicitly stated otherwise and if it misunderstood what I meant. It happily chimed "No, I did not misunderstand your intent, I just thought this was better."

I can't trust that was the real reason so clearly I can't trust that whatever training causes this behavior results in a reliable tool.

The stuff around SimCity in this article is poorly written. It seems the author has misunderstood it to have been a one-off special case. I looked back at Joel Spolsky's article, and he does make it quite clear that the SimCity example was just one of many: "it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95".

The article does later mention "Windows XP’s hidden database of app fixes" but doesn't appreciate that the concept really started with Windows 95, and in a big way, not "just to cover up one game’s bug".

After that I knew they were done. ME3 was the last good game they released, imo.

"The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

At one point permission pop-up fatigue sets in we start giving any permission as if it's normal. We also become desensitised to isntalling tools: brew, npm, it becomes second nature.

"Oh, those 367 tools installed by package X? Yeah yeah, must be normal, that's how all these work now".

"Brew shows 59 packages outdated?". "Must upgrade". "Yeah, done. Perfect".

And the advent of agents and harnesses. It's not a matter of whether, it's when! OSes need to do something about it. Help users have complete separate "program space" at ease with better, easier, and lighter VMs if nothing else. I know, I know - Unix and Linux solved all this even before Alexander III of Macedon started wearing his nappies. Of course.

Who cannot type "php --version" but can use skills?

That's why it's paramount that we as somewhat privileged, informed people now chose truly open and distributed platforms (mastodon, etc) instead of keep on posting x and other zucker-SM network links that keep users in their walled zoo.

Nor can you just keep it quiet and smuggle it out in a regular release as you suggest. For one thing, changes in important software are be linked to commits and have pull requests, reviews, etc. Changes without these will immediately raise suspicion, as either a malicious change snuck into a release, or as a "quiet" fix to a major vulnerability, completely undermining the purpose of keeping it quiet in the first place. Moreover, major vulnerability fixes cannot be "quiet", because the whole point is to get as many people as possible to upgrade as quickly as possible. If PHP (or whoever) push out a release containing a major security fix, but don't make this clear, then many people will be in no rush to upgrade, and will get pwned.

Their business model is selling AI danger and fixes for it.

I'd take their findings with a lot of salt.

Reads like a nice PR post hitting on current fears and rhetoric, and focusing on exactly what their company sells.

A dynamic language having access to all of the files it has access to is not unique to PHP. Vulnerabilities are not unique to PHP, and I doubt the Dutch National Cyber Security Center took their website offline because they lack user-specific roles in the database: https://www.ncsc.nl/index-en.html

So maybe save your elitism for a day when so many of us aren't already putting out fires? Congratulations on not being part of the 75% of the internet affected.

"I wonder what it would look like from the perspective of the figures"

People when playing game consoles:

"I wonder what it would look like from a distance"

He claims that most of these vulnerabilities are not an issue at all, or have been fixed earlier, etc. I can clearly see the improvement of the AI models, but based on this youtube video it's very plausible that these AI labs rush to announce a result without further understanding of the underlying problems. I wonder what's the quality here in this article.

My opinion is that the very first things people should do are:

1. Get a little bit informed. It doesn't require a PhD, it could be done instead of a fraction of the time they spend scrolling bullshit on their smartphone.

2. Accept the situation. Too many are in denial, with variants of "it's not that bad" or "it's because those in power are stupid, I would certainly fix the world" or "it's because of foreigners".

3. Vote accordingly.

It's too easy to say "we don't have any viable candidates" and "I don't understand why they haven't fixed the problem yet, they must be stupid (somehow implying that "in all likelihood I would have solved it by now")".

In relatively-functional democracies, the reason the people doesn't have viable candidates is because the people does not vote for competent people. Either because they vote for competent politicians (with modern politics being about getting elected, not exactly solving big problems) or because they proudly vote for extremists (which is of course even worse).

In a democracy, the people is the government. When the people says "the government is stupid", it reflects on the people. Maybe they're right: the government is stupid, because the people is stupid and elects stupid people, and that's why we're screwed.

Rust also builds a pretty small binary, which is cool. This isn't really meant to be a 'C# is better than Rust' post, but more pointing out that Blazor (which is the official MS implementation) builds huge binaries; often >10MB, which is a real problem. This fixes that.

> I once tried to come up with a single-word purpose for education, and I landed upon the word “resourceful” ...

As someone who's a little further ahead in this process, I realized the true raison d'etre for education might actually not be any of the reason discussed..

It's so you, the children's parents, can go about your business for the day and the kids can stay somewhere safe and where they can interact with their peers. If they happened to learn something, that's pure bonus.

Almost a decade ago now, I was a happy, high-functioning alcoholic. Winery tours, Scotch tastings, workplace drinks, etc.

It was all "fine" until I started struggling to get to sleep without a little "nudge"; then it was getting back to sleep in the wee hours; then it was every hour or two, 24x7.

Then I decided to go cold turkey while on vacation in Hawaii with my family, because who wants to be the drunk asshole in search of a cocktail while everyone else is having a good, sober time at the beach?

Boom: detox seizures, ER visit, and the ever-so-helpful prescription of Ativan so I wouldn't seize again. I was discharged with the instructions to "take as needed, up to every four hours." Since I was an addict in pain, I took that to mean, "take them every four hours, or maybe more often."

Cut forward 3-4 days, and the scrip ran out. Boom: more DTs, this time from the benzos.

It wasn't long after that when I went through my first inpatient psych visit b/c I was in no way equipped to handle withdrawals from two highly-addictive drugs at the same time.

Sadly it took another couple of years and another trip through the ER + inpatient care before I realized that doctors would and did prescribe me meds that were actively harmful in the interest of short-term comfort.

It's been six years since the last big episode and I'm genuinely grateful I only threatened myself with my shitty brain chemistry (however aggravated by poor medical intervention) rather than putting other people at risk. It could have been much worse if, say, I routinely drove people around or did any kind of safety-critical work.

Regardless: benzos are not "lightweight" drugs, and giving them to people with any kind of history of substance abuse disorders is a Bad Idea.

That really stuck with me. My internal thought was "it's easier to kick over a sand castle than to build one." It seems to ring true for infosec, societal structures, and kinetic cases. Is this just a base truth?

edit: I just checked and they are back to hammering my server at 105 requests per minute. These are the Meta-owned ranges I'm blocking now, in case it helps anyone: 57.141.0.0/16, 57.142.0.0/15, 57.144.0.0/14, 57.148.0.0/15

As someone who's contributed to Wikipedia and seen how the sausage is made: that's stupid. Even Wikipedia itself considers wikis (including itself) to lack sufficient authority to be cited as a source.

Such citations could be easily gamed (if you cite a particular change) or are useless (the content you cite may not be there in the future), and are obvious pathways to "citogenesis."

But we have plenty of observations to lead us to what dark might be and what it definitely isn't.

Any theory of dark matter needs to explain all of the following:

1. The Virial Theorem, galaxy clusters, and the speeds of galaxies in clusters. (both MOND and CDM both do a good job of explaining this)

2. Galactic rotation curves. (MOND and CDM both do a good job of explaining this)

3. Accoustic Baryon Oscillations. (ABO) Immediately after the big bang, everything was ludicrously hot. The most powerful force in the universe was the wash of gamma rays everywhere. These gamma rays carried electrons around. The electric fields of the electrons carried the protons around. (the light dominated phase) As the universe cooled, this flipped; the protons were carried around by momentum, which brought the electrons with them, which mediated the light. (the matter dominated phase, where we are today) During the light dominated phase, sound waves pulsed through the universe, causing dense regions and underdense regions. When the universe flipped from being light dominated to matter dominated, these regions were frozen in time, and we can see them directly in the CMB. (cosmic microwave background) We can analyze the properties of these pressure waves to determine what the properties of the matter and light in the universe were. These waves demand some sort of dark matter. CDM explains these observations, MOND does not.

4. The Bullet Cluster. The Bullet Cluster is a collision of two galaxy clusters. We can measure gravitation lensing and light to determine where the dark matter is and where the regular matter is. The bullet cluster demonstrates that these two properties are not the same. There is matter which has gravity and gravitational lensing, but that we can't see. CDM explains these observations, MOND does not.

5. Ultra diffuse galaxies with very little dark matter. Not all galaxies have galactic rotation curves which require some extra sauce to explain the movement of their stars. Some galaxies are explained perfectly by the matter that we can see in them. So we need dark matter for most galaxies, but some galaxies need to be dark matter free. These galaxies falsify MOND.

6. Leading spiral arms in barred spiral galaxies. The large majority of barred spiral galaxies have their arms trailing from their bars, but a very small number of them have arms which lead in front of the bars. Computer simulations show this happens naturally with CDM, but MOND or dark matter free spiral galaxies don't have a mechanism to cause this to happen.

7. Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. Most MOND formulations predict gravitational waves travel slower than c; all of those formulations are wrong.

There is a genuinely absurd amount of time, effort, and money that has gone into explaining dark matter. It is not a band aid, we haven't just added 1 to moved on. Everybody is pouring over every step of the algorithm trying to figure out why it's giving us the wrong answer. CDM is the leading hypothesis right now, because it explains all of the observations, and is not falsified by any of the observations. MACHO is/was another theory; it has gone out of fashion because it does not explain all of the observations and makes predictions we do not observe when we check for them. MOND is out of fashion because it is falsified by the data. MOND is still in fashion among a particular brand of people who just want to have their names in the history books; if someone did prove MOND, the history books would all have lists that go "Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, <your name here>."

But for Pete's sake it's not as if people have their fingers in their ears.

explanation of acronyms/terms:

1. Dark Matter. Dark Matter is the observation that the universe acts as if there's a lot more matter in it other than the stuff we can see. Basically no one says that Dark Matter isn't real; that would imply that the observations are wrong.

2. MOND. Modified Newtonian Gravity. MOND is a family of models which aim to explain the dark matter observation. Instead of using F=Gm1m2/r^2 to determine the force of gravity, we have better math, that gives a different equation, that accurately explains Dark Matter. When you say "physicists discover a much more logical explanation" that's what you're talking about.

3. CDM. Cold Dark Matter. CDM is a family of models which aim to explain the dark matter observation. CDM implies that Dark Matter is explained by particles. CDM implies there is some sort of particle of family of particles which interact with normal matter via gravity as normal, via the electromagnetic or strong nuclear force not at all, or via the weak nuclear force super weakly or not at all. CDM interacts with other CDM particles via gravity as normal, but only weakly via either the weak nuclear force or some other as-yet undiscovered force. People often use the terms Dark Matter (referring to the observation) and Cold Dark Matter interchangeably.

4. CMB. Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. After the Big Bang, the universe was opaque. Light would be absorbed by the stuff in the universe and then re-emitted. During recombination, the universe became transparent. The last moment of the various bits and parts of the universe switching from being opaque to transparent has the entire universe glowing in microwaves. This moment is captured in a snapshot, known as the cosmic microwave background. As we understand the CMB better, we learn a lot--a lot a lot--about the early universe.

The idea that a company could "own" a story and the characters within is recent. Very recent.

IMO, AO3 continues the human tradition of retelling stories, and we should celebrate that.