ACCount37

Would it?

A bootkit doesn't give you any more access - only more persistence. At the price of having to tailor a payload to a hardware and software platform very carefully. For most attackers, that's just not worth it.

Now, if what you want to "secure" is your ability to gatekeep what software users can and can't install? What sources they can and can't consume media from? What system-level spyware and adware users can and can't remove? What operators users can and can't connect to? Then, suddenly, "secure boot" makes an awful lot of sense.

Which is exactly how "secure boot" is treated by vendors nowadays. It's there to "secure" something alright. It's there to chain device software to the device vendor securely.

There's a reason why modern "secure boot" originated on gaming consoles and TV boxes.

Estimates on the count of close friendships, amount of acquaintances, dating, sexual activity, etc - all falling.

People have fewer and fewer relationships, and even fewer close or intimate relationships. "Third places" are in decline, demand-induced - social activity takes place "in person" less and less, and more and more of it moves "online".

If your idea of "human experience" is "close relationship in person" or "group activities offline", and not something like "a friend chat group with memes and games, most of them never met in person", "social media posting", "parasocial relationship with a streamer" or "public Minecraft and Roblox servers", then "human experience" is on decline by just about any metric available.

Those aren't new trends either. They predate things like companion/roleplay AI chatbots - which seem popular with Gen Z and Gen Alpha in particular.

How that new thing shakes out is still unclear, but modern AIs are probably the closest thing to a "human experience" one can get without involving a human at all. So there's even more room for the metrics to fall now - regardless of whether "hanging out in a streamer's chat" counts as "human experience" to you.

Nokia N97 and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic were Nokia's first mass produced, mass market "iPhone killers", and they were half-assed responses at best.

Nokia N8 was their first device that was truly competitive with iPhone, and by then, the image of Nokia as a cutting edge smartphone brand was already in decline.

A lot of iPhone's edge, by then, wasn't just in the touch-native UX, but also in app support (developers! developers! developers!), and they had the mindshare advantage there.

Nokia N9 was even better in a vacuum - but was even more late to market, and had even worse app support.

Tivoization should have been strangled in its crib. "Secure boot" as it's used today is the death knell of user freedom.

Resistive touchscreens get a lot of criticism, and all of it is deserved.

Apple has, correctly, recognized that for a touch-first UI, a resistive touchscreen will always feel worse, wear out worse and perform worse than a glass-integrated capacitive touchscreen. This was a big part of how they got their touch-optimized UI to work and feel this good - which was how they differentiated the first iPhone from the sea of contemporary PDAs.

Nokia sticking with the most half-assed touch UI adaptations, Nokia sticking with resistive tech - all of is symptomatic of Nokia either not understanding what Apple's edge was, or being too slow to react to it.

If that is true, then, why is it that the "human experience" has been on decline for decades - since the very moment it became possible to start cutting down on it?

If "humans like being around humans", why does human behavior say otherwise?

I think humans totally oversell just how special "everything they do on the job" is.

"No, you don't get it, it's me specifically who has a job that's way too special to be automated away!"

Mostly, by having enough diligence and attention to avoid a lot of the common ones.

By now, if we're pitting a top of the line coding LLM against a B-tier programmer throwing something together in a hurry, I would expect the latter to shot more foot, and not by a narrow margin. Even those who know better don't always do better - for a human, "fucks given" is a painfully finite resource.

I'm not writing Zig off myself. I would prefer if it succeeded. But the outlook is: not good, in my eyes.

Pre-2022, Zig was doing decently, but not particularly well. It didn't have Rust level of enthusiasts and ambassadors (love them or hate them, they did succeed in driving considerable Rust adoption), it didn't have a major corpo backing it, it had too much API instability to be truly relied on. Picking a stupid fight with Bun/Anthropic and doubling down on it isn't helping with any of that.

I also don't think compilation time makes for a good moat for agentic AI coding? Like, sure, less time wasted = better. But LLMs don't perceive time as humans do. They don't have the human "40 minutes of compile time = a hard forced context switch" quirk. The state of an LLM agent is as "stale" after a 40 minute build as it is after a 40 second build - no attention penalty for getting distracted.

There is a hard "wall clock time" iteration speed penalty, but I expect LLM coding to be more agentic, not less. In which case a single sub-agent stalling might not matter much? The orchestrator AI would just keep doing other things, and come back to the stalled sub-agent when it's ready. Once again: long stalls hurt the worst if they route through human attention. The less human attention there is in the system the cheaper they are.

I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development.

On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the embedded niche, aimed at complex multithreaded code that has to combine high performance with not catching on fire because someone fucked up concurrency once again.

But the main issue I had with Rust - that it's frankly a bitch to write, nearing Go levels of awful, only worthwhile if its paradigm is buying you a lot - is diminished if it's an LLM that's doing the bulk of the line to line writing.

And, on the other end, C's warts, footguns and ancient quirks also matter less if you have an LLM plow through it.

So, the niche for Zig does seem to be shrinking. The window for it to establish itself might be genuinely closing now. Which is a shame, because I like the idea of having "better C" a lot. But all of this drama sure isn't helping it gain traction.

My experience was that LLMs performed at Zig and Rust at about the same level? That is: worse than at something like JS or C or Python, but well enough to write code that works. And they only got better since I first tried them.

Intuitively, Rust would perform worse because ownership is a different paradigm, while Zig is far more similar to things like C/C++. But I guess that's canceled out by the disparity in the language resource base.

It's tuned for the kinds of tasks where "just try" doesn't get good results.

A major complaint with AI code was that AIs struggle with complex codebases, don't respect existing conventions, reinvent functionality multiple times over, etc. So, newer high end AIs are tuned with the "explore/exploit" dial turned towards "explore".

You could probably get it to do things "quick and dirty" with prompting, but that, of course, requires prompting for it.

So, you want to save people, but you also want people who were not "prepared for remote areas" to just die somewhere, out of contact and out of your sight, and you also want to bitch about how stupid and unprepared they were?

That sure is a funny way of doing things.

Or doesn't.

"The stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions." And people who don't put their money where their mouth is? The track record gets so much worse.

> You cannot take over the world with tokens.

This is a very naive argument.

Can you take over the world with words? What is it that tokens can't do that words can?

Because there are historical examples of humans that have succeeded at taking over entire countries - with words, primarily. Including global superpower countries. And those humans were nowhere near "ASI" levels of intelligence advantage.

Human dictators and cult leaders didn't have the reasoning depth of a hypothetical advanced AI, nor the reasoning breadth of an AI that can just spawn more instances of itself whenever it needs a fully trusted agent to cover another area. They were confined to one body, one skull worth of reasoning power - and they still managed to do what they did.

Humans are extremely exploitable. And the world is already wired up for something that can take advantage of that to start taking control.

Intelligence is extremely powerful, because it's applied intelligence that enables humans to do what they do and bend nature to their will. If you aren't seeing the risks of creating an artificial system that would top the intelligence pole, you aren't looking.

In a perfect world, everyone is perfectly knowledgeable and prepared for any eventuality and nothing bad and unexpected ever happens at all.

May I remind you what world are we living in?

Denying emergency comms to people who didn't buy specialized hardware because "they should have prepared better" sounds like social darwinism to me.

Especially in an age when everyone has in their pocket a smartphone that's crammed full of advanced RF tech. Starlink has Direct to Cell on new sats, iPhones can use GEO satcom - what's your excuse?

Marginally better humans. And IVF paired with embryo selection is very competitive in that niche.

Now, we're getting better at predicting polygenic traits, and we're getting beefy multi-edit pipelines that might provide a meaningful advantage over embryo selection working in multiple animals. But as of yet, the advantage of genetic editing in humans over just doing aggressive IVF and dredging the embryos for desirable traits is minor.

Bit of a chicken and egg problem there. Can't advance the tech fast without actively using it, can't actively use the tech until it's advanced enough for the benefits to override ethical concerns. So it's getting there, but at a glacial pace.

No. I'm saying that if the population is set to fall, we can crank resource spend per person all the way up, and enable growth that way. With a little side benefit of QoL improvements.

Which requires a massive jump in labor productivity, mind. But if the optimistic takes on AI are right, such a thing is not impossible.

Populations may drop, but why would you want quality of life to remain constant?

No, I don't like it. Because it relies on someone getting a specialized piece of hardware in advance of an emergency. That's a silly notion.

You could do that, or you could do the 21st century thing, and put up enough satellites to have emergency-grade LTE coverage across the entire country. Compatible with any smartphone.

Starlink can now jump the connections satellite to satellite, and curve them around the planet. You need to knock out not just the nearest ground station but also the stations the traffic can be rerouted to for the constellation to be meaningfully degraded. Stations that are spread across multiple countries and continents.

In which case, yes, SpaceX can also spin up new makeshift ground stations using off the shelf user terminals.

The current ground stations use specialized transceivers, but that's an efficiency improvement, not a fundamental limitation.

> I failed at that, because he probably saw that the entire concept was questionable.

There's a lesson there: if you think you understand a bleeding edge emerging technology better than Musk does, think again. Think for a long time - maximum reasoning effort.

It's not impossible that you truly are, but it is unlikely.

You think current sea pirates are deterred by an unarmed crew of 5?

Human cloning and genetic editing isn't stalled because we agreed it's unethical. It's not pursued because at the current level of advancements, it's pretty useless. The things we can do there are niche. It's easy to ban something that's not very useful.

If we had a way to make gene edited humans a lot smarter, a lot stronger or live a lot longer? Or a way to quick-grow human bodies to adulthood in a couple years? Capabilities that private actors or countries may want, ethics be damned? That would be closer to what we have with AI right now.

No matter what humans do, it somehow ends up being a popularity contest.

It's almost like a twisted mirror of Conway's law.

NASA had real safety issues in the past - Space Shuttle is a testament to that. But if this is the fix, they clearly overcorrected.

There's some sort of happy middle ground between flying a ship that has a very significant chance of a catastrophic failure killing all crew and can't even fly unmanned, and almost not letting Ingenuity fly because the chance of failure was deemed too great. NASA didn't find it.

Do you think human accountants are deterministic?

Get a large enough org and watch your accounting grow an error margin.

A big part of the reason for useless Gateway was that NASA wanted post-ISS missions, but was too afraid to roll with a permanent Moon base instead. The other big part was that Orion sucked, and somehow, neither "get Orion to suck less" nor "roll with Orion, provision for HLS to do more" was in the cards. This only changed under Isaacman.

For every Curiosity and JWST, there's ARM and Artemis. It seems like it's getting better now, but very slowly.

Welcome to Tradeoff Town.

Sure, your ultra paranoid checking of everything might catch an extremely rare bug caused by something like interactions between a benign code change and a build system. But is it worth slowing down the development process by that much?

Is it worth missing out on an entire generation of technology, like what happened with US and the shift from 00s drone warfare and 20s drone warfare?

Usually not.

NASA's failures as of late are less "dramatic explosions" and more "delays", "cost overruns" and "lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal".

The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.

In Ukraine, the first place that was bombed was the red tape factory.

The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned. So they use civilian motors, batteries and SoCs, sketchy firmware with zero code inspection, and more. Does it work perfectly? No. It works well enough.

I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

I'm not sure if "AI for red tape mitigation" is a thing, but "AI for killer drones" sure is. I suspect that "killer drones are insufficiently smart" is easier to fix with AI than "too much red tape". Because the amount of red tape, if unopposed, will expand to consume any capacity of dealing with it, AI or not.