MattPalmer1086

The point is they have less algebraic structure than things like elliptic curves. If you want "math resistant" properties, this is a good thing.

The "vampire" thing was a bit cheesy to be honest, despite being scientifically explained. But conceptually it was quite key to the story. There would probably have been another way to do this.

Despite that, still one of my all time favorite sci fi books. A fantastic exploration of intelligence, conscioussness and first contact.

It is no surprise I guess that the "move fast and break things" culture is itself misaligned with developing potentially highly dangerous technologies. Safety culture and risk aversion are very different of course.

Is this the first time we have been in this position? Can anyone think of some prior examples?

It is not nonsense - given it had not worked she could awake in extreme pain. She may die eventually, but it could take a long time. That would be torture, and that is both illegal and inhumane.

Did anyone say that this model was "the one"?

From a corporate liability perspective, if your product is going to go off and hack loads of other companies, I would call it too dangerous (to the company) to release.

Pretty good!

Could maybe use a "Catastrophic failure!" error message (experienced for real last week)

Real windows is still actually worse...

So glad I moved off Windows at home back in 2003.

25? At least in the UK, most degrees are 3 years long and most people start when they are 18.

Haha, we are ahead of you. We realised we were gonna get owned a long time ago, since business and engineering teams prioritised speed over security. And also that it is genuinely hard to secure everything.

This is why there are so many resilience initiatives in serious organisations. Assume it is gonna happen. Limit blast radius, ensure effective recovery.

It is interesting that a philosophy opposed to ownership and restriction of control has pretty much the most controlling terms of any OSS license - to the extent it is usually banned in any commercial software development.

I do understand the copy left rationale - to ensure the freedom to modify and for the community to benefit from those modifications, it is necessary to use the machinery of control!

No, it isn't an attempt to make copyright irrelevant. Almost all OSS licenses impose some conditions - even if it is only attribution.

OSS licenses are fully part of the copyright system and could not exist without it. Maybe you are thinking of "public domain".

This is true. Pretty much everyone I was friends with at school in the north of england left, most of us now in or around London. But we were the ones who went to university. Most who didn't stayed put.

Invent some super useful chemical or food additive that gradually renders us sterile. We are all willingly exposed to it but do not see the danger until it is far too late.

I would argue that despite not being military doctrine, it has been effective. Nuclear deterence is demonstrably real. It is a form of Nash equilibrium.

I am not sure there is any limited nuclear exchange that is not so risky as to be worthless unless you just want to die.

Space based nuclear weapons do not improve your survivability. Space based nuclear missile interception might - if you could pretty much ensure you could take out the majority of your opponents missiles (star wars).

The problem there is it destabilises the Nash equilibrium of MAD and makes it more likely someone will initiate a first strike before your defensive capability is complete...

I was responding to this comment specifically about nukes:

>Everyone is equal with - they all have nukes in space sitting over each other's countries waiting to drop

What would be the point? MAD relies on everyone knowing you can take them out if they attack you. What does a space weapon offer additionally that makes the huge expense worthwhile?

Probably very effective for shorter patterns. Two reasons to use more complex algorithms for longer patterns:

1. Linearity - the naive approach is quadratic on worst case data (imagine searching for 100 0's in a text of 0's).

2. Sublinearity - sublinear search algorithms skip over text that cannot match. They typically have the somewhat counter-intuitive property that they get much faster the longer the pattern is. So long patterns will be faster using a sub linear search algorithm.

Always been interested in using SIMD to speed up searching. So far though i have not found a really nice one.

Need to figure out what area they excel in - there is no one search that is the best for all types of data and pattern/search length.

It is a really nice derivation of Bitap from first principles. I had not seen that before. Good job!

One small nit: he says the naive algorithm is linear - maybe it is for the average case, but it has a quadratic worst case complexity. Bitap is linear even for worst case.

Ah, last weekend I was just updating my own string search algorithm to use Bitap (Shift-OR variant) instead of KMP, when the pattern length is < 64. It is faster. It is a very lovely algorithm indeed.

My search algorithm, HashChain [1] is a very fast sublinear algorithm, but is uses KMP (and now Bitap) to verify matches so it has a linear worst case (instead of quadratic, like Boyer Moore Horspool).

[1] https://github.com/nishihatapalmer/HashChain

Warp drive is among the more plausible ways to get FTL sure - it is compatible with relativity at least...

The way we will actually all live substantially longer is by health extension, not by extending life while suffering from decrepitude.

Yep, using AI to remove your thinking process and judgement, and just let it generate stuff as fast as possible, will definitely make you ship crap faster! If you did the same thing with a junior developer you would get the same result.

Where AI shines for me is accelerating the learning and exploration process. I can get up to speed with new tech fast. It is good at spotting issues in designs and code. It can knock out quick tests or benchmarks to support me. The quality of what I can produce with AI support is much higher than I could without it.

So it really just depends on what you use it for. If the goal is "replace humans and ship fast" that's one thing. If the goal is "explore the problem space in greater depth", it's another.

No, it just means you have to learn to use the tool well.

I am finding the opposite, but then I mostly work on algorithms and writing a lot of code to test various approaches to improve them is boring.

Today I had claude figure out that using SIMD would not improve performance, and it gave me an analysis of why not. So my savvy improved without having to spend days figuring that out.

Having said that, I get that using AI can also make things less fun and reduce your learning too. I guess it depends on what you use it for.

I think it is rather a healthy skepticism.

Sure, a lot of people will not take their understanding any further, but most do not have the will or the time to do so.

Even knowing mean, mode and median is not enough. You really want standard deviation too. And that is just the basics.

Haha yes, should have said average billionaire!

Bill Gates walked into a bar. Everyone was, on average, a multi millionaire.

A couple of examples:

1. LCDM predicted hierarchical formation of large galaxies through aggregation. JWST seems to show this is not what happens (large galaxies at early times). I am sure it can be made to work, but it was not a prediction.

2. Constant Lambda - recent obervations seem to show it may be changing (OK - that is more built into the theory rather than being a prediction).

By the way, I am not saying LCDM is not massively successful. It can clearly be used to explain a lot of things. I am saying that I am not aware of many things it successfully predicted ahead of observations being made.

Well, MOND is not a cosmological theory or relativistic - there are some different versions that attempt that. MOND itself can't be used to match the CMB spectrum.

It has always been a minority position - but it is interesting to see a different perspective. ΛCDM is not without it's own problems. Not least that when new observations contradict it, it just gets tweaked - since we still have no idea what the CDM, if it does exist, actually is. It does not have a great predictive record; it is good at explaining obervations after the fact (the CMB notwithstanding).

I am interested to know what the measurements within the solar system are that you refer to. I had thought this was far too small a scale to prove anything about MOND or CDM.

Certainly true that the data can be viewed in many different ways. Often the same data is used by both sides!

The funeral thing isn't really a position I strongly hold; it's a pithy comment that points out science is a human endeavor and maybe not quite as objective as it is often presented.

But science as a whole is ultimately a self correcting methodology, even if it might take longer than we would want and doesnt always get it right.