5
points
lulzury
Joined 204 karma
- > He was seen as a power broker who moved in elite circles and whose legal work often pushed ethical boundaries
I have always wondered what drives someone to enable elites who tend to so destructively prop themselves in society at the expense of others. Surely it can’t be only money or power? So is it influence alone?
- If you mean "Who is the earliest known recorded individual in human history?" wikipedia says "The name "Kushim" is found on several Uruk period (c. 3400–3000 BC) clay tablets used to record transactions of barley." [0]
- I looked into creating a simple Firefox extension for ChatGPT which would let me branch a conversation off into a new chat so as not to "pollute" or interfere with the existing chat.
I had success extracting the existing conversation and adding it to a new window, but gave up after trying to modify the ChatGPT UI (i.e. to format what I'd just pasted in so it'd look like the conversation left off where I branched). The UI just kept re-rendering/re-painting itself non-stop, overriding what I changed. I didn't try to push past that. I'm sure I could use JS or something else to massage the UI further, but it didn't seem like a non-trivial task. Maybe something to look into some weekend.
- If you're someone like Musk, then attention is one of the most valuable assets you can get. If you can capture someone's attention, you can influence their thoughts. You can shape their perceptions. Even if what you share is outright false, once an idea is planted it becomes part of someone's mental landscape and with enough effort even their reality. Musk's acquisition of Xitter, supposedly in the name of free speech, and its degradation into a cesspool of violent, right-wing extremist, and downright pornographic posts gives a hint of just how Elon wants everyone to think of the world (even when it's not like that).
After blocking like 1000 accounts and adding tons of words to my mute list, and seeing the same crappy timeline, I finally just deleted my account and joined Bluesky. Browsing Bluesky honestly feels like a breath of fresh air.
- 47 points
- This is such a powerful paper! I made some notes of the first 11 pages when I read it if someone wants a summary:
Complexity (Section 2): Complexity is the root cause of most problems with software. The danger of complexity comes from its impact on our attempts to understand a system. Being able to think and reason about our systems is of crucial importance. Simplicity is hard.
Approaches to Understanding (Section 3): Testing and Informal Reasoning are two common mechanisms used to try to understand systems. Improvements in informal reasoning can lead to less errors being created, while improvements in testing can lead to more errors being detected. Testing alone is inadequate because while it can be used to show presence of bugs it can never show their absence. When considered next to testing and reasoning, simplicity is more important.
Causes of Complexity (Section 4)
State: Complexity arises from the presence of many possible states of a system. It is difficult to conceive, describe, and test large number of different states of a system. Informal reasoning relies on case-by-case mental simulation of behavior, which buckles as the number of scenarios grows. For every bit of state we add, we double the total number of possible states. The more we can do to limit and manage state, the better
Control: Control is concerned with the order in which things happen. Control is almost always an implicit part of the language and forces the programmer to specify control. Subtle and hard-to-find bugs can happen when reader assumes specified ordering is significant when it is really not.
Concurrency: Concurrency results in adding further to the number of scenarios that must be mentally considered. We can no longer be assured of result consistency in the presence of concurrency, even with known initial states.
Code Volume: Code volume is the easiest form of complexity to measure. In most current systems complexity exhibits nonlinear increase with size of code.
Other: Complexity breeds complexity - complexity is introduced as a result of not being able to clearly understand a system. Simplicity is Hard. In the absence of language-enforced guarantees, mistakes (and abuses) will happen. The more powerful the language the harder it is to understand systems constructed in it.
- Thank you for sharing this and recommending XSalsa20+Poly1305. I have always been interested in cryptography, so learning about the many ways why one shouldn't roll their own crypto AND protocol is very cool.
Out of curiosity, is the primary reason you don't recommend fixing the nonce issue in this specific case due primarily to the pitfalls in doing so or is it more nuanced and related to the general issues mentioned in the articles above?
A naive perspective could be that one uses AES-GCM because it is used in so many places, such as TLS or SRTP, and someone who is not very well versed in cryptography assumes it can be the way to go.
- This really doesn't say much though. What specific measures are in place to ensure user privacy and data protection?
Does personal information get sent to OpenAI or Claude as part of the functionality? Can users request deletion of their data, and if so, what is the process? Are there specific protocols in place to ensure security? (i.e. Do you use encryption at rest?).
- There's a similar ongoing lawsuit by Texas against Google
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/texas-fights-goo...
- > while many of my colleagues are at the top of the world
The grass is always greener on the other side. I promise you the work at these "high-quality" places is no more glamorous than that being done at other places.
Maybe the position at the other firm, although smaller, might end up being a different, maybe even better experience?
- 10 points
- If you want a non-simulated memoir of someone's PhD, I highly recommend reading "The PhD Grind" by Philip Guo.. [0]
I read it in my last year of college. It was a page turner, and helped me think about whether I wanted to do a PhD.
[0] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/g8mc1lniyf26opxtrqgna/pguo-Ph...
- If you have a small site or just don't want any requests to Google for privacy reasons, consider just straight-up downloading the video and embedding it in a video tag. There are yt_dlp wrappers for most popular languages (even js).
I'm pretty sure even embedding their poster thumbnail results in them getting your IP and other information so consider downloading that as well (from https://img.youtube.com/vi/[TAG]/hqdefault.jpg).
- Thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for. I hope these become part of the web platform APIs! With Google pushing this effort, it might be highly likely.
I hope Apple will follow suit with some of their small models (https://huggingface.co/apple/OpenELM).
And then maybe even Firefox will join them...
- 4 points
- “Modularity based on abstraction is the way things get done” --Barbara Liskov
Something as big and complex as the internet, which covers technologies from email to fiber, is held together by layered abstractions.
Also, software has gotten incredibly better since the 70s. We've built so much better tooling (and I believe tooling can help close the gap on growing complexity). When I was learning how to program, I had to double check I had every semicolon in the right place before hitting compile. I simply don't have to do that anymore. I can even get an entire API auto-completed using something like copilot on VSCode.
Nonetheless, a very thought-provoking article. Thank you for sharing!
- What you stated makes intuitive sense, but it does make me wonder why the RFC states the following in the security considerations:
> Implementations SHOULD NOT assume that UUIDs are hard to guess. For example, they MUST NOT be used as security capabilities (identifiers whose mere possession grants access). Discovery of predictability in a random number source will result in a vulnerability.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9562#name-security-...
![https://img.youtube.com/vi/[TAG]/hqdefault.jpg](https://img.youtube.com/vi/[TAG]/hqdefault.jpg){kind=link}
"Good intentions" can easily pave the road to hell. I think a book that quickly illustrates this is Animal Farm.