Computers as tools for humans are so useful exactly because they can’t think and do tedious work like calculations or information storage and retrieval for humans in a deterministic way.
It took like nearly 90 years of digital computers to make them powerful enough to run a wasteful algorithm that pretends to think (but doesn’t) and to deliver bullshit non-deterministic results while using absurd amounts of computational and environmental resources.
I think my next project along the lines of VGAPride might be writing programs to display a trans pride flag for as many platforms as possible.
Like, a simple c64 program, qbasic, win32, js, etc.
@richardloxley@brouhaha@BRicker I believe the OS just loads every program to a given memory segment and JMPs to it, right?
Since this file is zero bytes, it doesn't load to that buffer, but it still JMPs to it, and since the last loaded program is still there, it runs again without needing to load anything off a slow drive
My heart goes out to xz. A single maintainer, who was clearly in a rough place with mental health, screaming out to the world for some help and additional contributions, and somebody shows up wanting to help. Could you imagine how happy that maintainer was? They were no longer alone.
And it turns out the only reason somebody wanted to help them was nefarious. I can’t imagine how they feel right now as everyone is blaming them. I hope they’re ok.
There's a lot that's alarming in this article, but perhaps the most alarming part is the NYC spokesperson assering that the problem can be fixed via upgrades:
It seems to bear repeating: chatbots based on large language models are designed to make shit up. This isn't a fixable bug. It's a fundamental mismatch between tech and task.
Also, it's worth noting that RAG (retrieval augmented generation) doesn't fix the problem. See those nice links into NYC web pages? Not stopping the system from making shit up. (Second column is chatbot response, third is journalist's report on the actual facts.)
He inherited 400 million dollars and turned that into zero dollars.
He went bankrupt 7 times.
Some of those bankruptcies were casinos, literally a licence to print money which he couldn't manage.
He conned kids with cancer out of money once. That's why he can't run a charity anymore.
The following business ventures no longer exist or are insolvent:
a. Trump Steaks
b. Trump University
c. Trump Mortgage
d. Trump Vodka
e. Trump: The Game
f. Trump Ice
g. GoTrump.com
h. Trump Magazine
i. The New Jersey Generals
j. Trump Airlines
k. Trump Entertainment Resorts (filed for bankruptcy FOUR TIMES)
l. Trump Tower Tampa
m. Trump Taj Mahal
n. The Trump Plaza
o. Trump Castle
p. Plaza Hotel
q. Trump Media and Technology Group
r. Truth Social
s. Trump Shuttle, Inc
t. Trump Fire
u. Trump Power
v. Trump's American Pale Ale
w. Trump Marina
x. Trump Casino, Indiana
y. Trump Style
z. Trump World Magazine
aa. Trumpnet, LLC
ab. Trump Entrepreneur Initiative
ac. Trump Fragrances
ad. Empire by Trump
ae. Trump Mattress
af. Tour de Trump
ag. Trump Network
ah. Trumped!
ai. Trump Menswear
aj. Trump Home
ak. Success by Trump
al. Trump Hotel Bedding Line
am. Donald J. Trump Eyeglasses
an. Donald Trump Regency Lighting
ao. Select by Trump Coffee
Of the 16 companies that were manufacturing Trump-branded products in 2015, only 2 remain in business less than 10 years later. Neither of those companies are American. One is located in Panama and the other is located in Turkey.
Stop saying "successful businessman". My little company founded in 2014 has been in business longer, employs more people, and makes more income than 99% of his ventures. The difference between him and me is access to capital, which means he gets unlimited bites at the apple, and I get just this one if I'm lucky.
I'm hearing that Broadcom has quietly decided to stop renewing VMware employees' H-1B visas as a way to lay them off without having to pay severance, and, wow, what a shitty thing to do.
The worst part of this is insinuating that precautions against Covid are Not Normal. It’s been four years. Covid isn’t going away. Normalize the precautions already.
Big fat brand new piece FULL OF YELLS on Substack about our beloved "liberal media" slow-dancing us into a fascist nightmare for fun and profit, but sadly, mostly fun.
@shortridge While working tech support, I got a call on a Monday. Some VPNs which had been working on Friday were no longer working. After a little digging, we found the negotiation was failing due to a certificate validation failure.
The certificate validation failure was happening because the system couldn’t check the CRL.
The system couldn’t check the CRL because it was too big. The system doing the validation only allocated 512kB to store the CRL, and it was bigger than that. This is from a private certificate authority, though, and 512kB is a LOT of revoked certificates. Shouldn’t be possible for this environment to hit within a human lifespan.
Turns out the CRL was nearly a megabyte! What gives? We check the certificate authority, and it’s revoking and reissuing every single certificate it has signed once per second.
The revocations say all the certificates (including the certificate authority’s) are expired. We check the expiration date of the certificate authority, and it’s set to some time in 1910. What? It was around here I started to suspect what had happened.
The certificate authority isn’t valid before some time in 2037. It was waking up every second, seeing the current date was after the expiration date and reissuing everything. But time is linear, so it doesn’t make sense to reissue an expired certificate with an earlier not-valid-before date, so it reissued all the certs with the same dates and went to sleep. One second later, it woke up and did the whole process over again. But why the clearly invalid dates on the CA?
The CA operation log was packed with revocations and reissues, but I eventually found the reissues which changed the validity dates of the CA’s certificate. Sure enough, it reissued itself in 2037 and the expiration date was set to 2037 plus ten years, which fell victim to the 2038 limitation. But it’s not 2037, so why did the system think it was?
The OS running the CA was set to sync with NTP every 120 seconds, and it used a really bad NTP client which blindly set the time to whatever the NTP server gave it. No sanity checking, no drifting. Just get the time, set the time. OS logs showed most of the time, the clock adjustment was a fraction of a second. Then some time on Saturday, there was an adjustment of tens of thousands of seconds forward. The next adjustment was hundreds of thousands of seconds forward. Tens of millions of seconds forward. Eventually it hit billions of seconds backwards, taking the system clock back to 1904 or so. The NTP server was racing forward through the 32-bit timestamp space.
At some point, the NTP server handed out a date in 2037 which was after the CA’s expiration. It reissued itself as I described above, and a date math bug resulted in a cert which expired before it was valid. So now we have an explanation for the CRL being so huge. On to the NTP server!
Turns out they had an NTP “appliance” with a radio clock (i.e, a CDMA radio, GPS receiver, etc.). Whoever built it had done so in a really questionable way. It seems it had a faulty internal clock which was very fast. If it lost upstream time for a while, then reacquired it after the internal clock had accumulated a whole extra second, the server didn’t let itself step backwards or extend the duration of a second. The math it used to correct its internal clock somehow resulted in dramatically shortening the duration of a second until it wrapped in 2038 and eventually ended up at the correct time.
Ultimately found three issues:
• An OS with an overly-simplistic NTP client
• A certificate authority with a bad date math system
• An NTP server with design issues and bad hardware
I think this, a discussion of the parallels between "AI" and "crypto", is a good take. I want to dig into the bit on "AI" being different because it has practical use.
"AI" is a marketing term. There's the stuff that was mainly called "ML" up until 2021 or so, which definitely has practical uses. E.g., if you're running a social network and need to help humans find the toxic stuff, ML can help.
But in the last few years there's a wave of hype mainly around the large language models, LLMs, and the large text-to-image models. So things like ChatGPT and DALL-E. It's really not clear to me those have much more practical use than crypto. Certainly not over their costs. 1/
So in sum, I think the currently expected positive uses of "AI" are either things ML was already doing or possible minor improvements.
But a bunch of those improvements are on top of systems that should be rebuilt to be radically better, not just slapping another layer of shiny wallpaper on top. And a lot of what people are going to do with the ability to generate "content" is a net societal negative. Manipulation, disinformation, propaganda, and a general sea of bullshit that real humans will waste time reading.
Alas, as we've seen with the 10-year arc of "crypto", we appear to be willing to waste approximately infinite time and money as long as a) there's a hard-to-refute technoutopian gloss on top, and b) somebody somewhere is pocketing some of that money.
