lambdaone

"Slowing innovation across the frontend ecosystem" sounds like a really good idea to me. Frontend innovation is largely vanity churn at this point, and means that any web frontend project left fallow for more than six months is effectively dead, since you need to constantly update for security reasons, and the API and the dependencies are constantly changing, you are doomed to rewrite your application forever. The only sensible motivation I can see for this is the desire to create jobs for life for frontend devs.

Compare this with things like X11 or Win32, where 20 year old programs will still work, or even more so systems like OS/360 and its successors, where 50 year old programs will still work.

I'm not a fan of React - to put it mildly - but something mediocre, but stable, is vastly preferable to the rapidly mutating hellscape of constantly rewritten frameworks driven by innovation for innovation's sake.

Recent versions of the widely-installed ngx-bootstrap Angular module appear to contain a serious malware payload.

Discussion here suggests this may be limited to only a few recent versions, but this is still a nasty exploit:

https://github.com/valor-software/ngx-bootstrap/issues/6776

If this was real, it would be a big, big deal, but I can't so far see anyone else in the security space picking this up as a story. Note also the GitHub history of the source.

Is this a hoax? I note that the article text has several of the hallmarks of LLM-generated text; em-dashes, not-just-this-but-that, short bullet point lists, random text bolding...

> If an election were called tomorrow your next government would be Reform with a massive majority of 339 seats. It is the most popular party in the country by far. It would collect 33% of the vote vs Labour's 18% and the Conservatives would get only 17%, translating to their near-total destruction (only 35 seats).

If. But since the Labour government has a massive Labour majority that doesn't have to hold another election until 2029, that's not going to happen any time soon. Four years is a long time in politics.

For non-European readers, Reform are the equivalent of Germany's AfD or France's RN - or America's MAGA. It's a populist culture war party.

In response, far from doubling down, Labour has swung dramatically to the political right (by UK standards) of their normal political position in terms of the culture war issues like immigration and transgender rights that have been driving support for Reform.

We're having bad times in the UK, and no-one likes the incumbent government during bad times. (Never mind that the bad times are largely due to factors beyond their control, as is generally the case until a party has been in power for long enough to start turning the ship.)

Reform, meanwhile, are currently playing on easy mode; voters can say anything they like at the moment, and Reform are picking up the fantasy-football protest vote based on making wild promises they are unlikely to be able to fulfil.

None of this is to say Reform are not a serious threat. But the concept that their victory is inevitable is part their schtick, and should be resisted.

This is essentially useless without the training set or the weights. It's open-source theatre.

Age verification at the content end has always been a silly idea. Eyeball networks can, and do, implement such filtering already - for example, UK mobile networks block porn by default, but allow any adult account holder to connect to unfiltered service.

Providing a BGP feed of such provider network subnets to content providers would then allow them to happily serve content to those subnets without any further checks, safe in the knowledge that they will only be providing service to endpoints controlled by adults.

Details of how this can be done for other services including home broadband omitted - suffice it to say your router would have both adult and child-friendly SSIDs.

This seems both simple and obvious, and protects children without encumbering adults, risking privacy, or forcing a mass censorship regime on everyone.

What I find most amusing in this article is that its author states with great confidence that electronic systems designers don't use anything like rule checkers or typing, when the EDA industry is well-known for its extensive use of validation tools, and the design of large-scale complex modern electronic systems is almost impossible without it.

This exists already in the form of "ready meals" a.k.a. TV dinners. Fast food shops are already substantially mechanised; huge effots have been made to robotize cooking, but people are still cheaper to hire. It's still nowhere near the quality of home-cooked food.

Buckets of bacterial muck sound a lot more efficient and environmentally friendly than expensive high-tech devices that need to be powered and maintained. And buckets are unlikely to blind anyone if their safety system fails.

I built my own LLM-based interactive text adventure system last year, but in addition to LLMs, it used an auxiliary database to keep track of where everything was, what state it was in, and so on.

The LLM thus did two things: first, it used a combination of the prompt, the user input, and the recent history of the chat and relevant extracts from the database state, to update the database with a new state; then after updating the database, it used all of the above to synthesize the output response.

A major component of the system was that, in addition to the usual blocks-world subject-property-object representation of the game state, the system also used the database to store textual fragments that encoded things like thoughts, plans, moods and plot points.

Adding programmatic constraints to the database and its updates made a vast difference to the quality of the output by preventing logical absurdity of the sort that has been described above - attempts by the LLM to do absurd things were simply rejected.

Finally, there was a hierarchical element to the story-telling, not just simulation. There is much more to storytelling than simulation, and experimenting with this became the most interesting thing about the whole enterprise; there is plenty of space for future research in this.

The downside was that all this complexity meant it was _extremely_ compute-intensive, and thus very slow as a result. But the gameplay was fascinating. We will no doubt see more things like this in future as LLMs get faster; it's an obvious application for open source software.

Not all solutions are going with just 64 bits worth of seconds, although 64 bit time_t will certainly sort out the Epochalypse.

ext4 moved some time ago to 30 bits of fractional resolution (on the order of nanoseconds) and 34 bits of seconds resolution. It punts the problem 400 years or so into the future. I'm sure we will eventually settle on 128-bit timestamps with 64 bits of seconds and 64 bits of fractional resolution, and that should sort things for forseeable human history.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has played both a linear isomorphic keyboard like this, and two-dimensional isomorphic keyboards e.g. the Lumatone keyboards

It doesn't have to be true of everyone to be an entirely plausible hypothesis for why highly-processed mock-meat alternatives are struggling.

Delicious vegetarian food is already a thing, and doesn't require new technology, and it's not necessary to completely eliminate meat-eating to significantly reduce your ethical-harm footprint. It's a matter of changing food culture. Once you adapt to an omnivore diet that contains tasty meals from both meat and non-meat cuisine, it's actually quite easy to reduce your meat intake further.

Purely symbolic AI has been tried and found wanting. Decades of research by hundreds of extremely bright people explored a large number of promising-looking approaches to no avail. Intuition tells us thinking is symbolic; the failure of symbolic systems tells us intution is most likely wrong.

What is interesting about current LLM-based systems is that they follow exactly the model suggested by this paper, by bolting together neural systems with symbol manipulation systems - to quote the paper "connectionism can be seen as a complementary component in a hybrid nonsymbolic/symbolic model of the mind, rather than a rival to purely symbolic modeling."

They are clearly also kludges. As you say, they are built on shaky foundations. But the success - at least compared to anything that has gone before - of kludged-together neural/symbolic systems suggests that the approach is more fertile than any that has gone before. They are also still far, far away from the AGI that has been predicted by their most enthusistic proponents.

My best guess is that future successful hard-problem-solving systems will combine neurosymbolic processing with formal theorem provers, where the neurosymbolic layer constructs proposals with candidate proofs, to submit to symbolic provers to test for success.

You still have to rely on other drivers not being actually suicidal. Just to give one terrifying example scenario: you will pass hundreds, if not thousands of other drivers driving in the opposite direction in the course of a long journey. Any motorist driving in the opposing lane has the ability to engage other drivers in a head-on collision at any time by making a relatively trivial maneuver. Given human reaction times, and the very high closing velocity of such a collision, you ability to avoid this would seem to be non-existent. You certainly couldn't "just stop" to prevent it.

Our capacity for psychological projection of our unconscious desires onto inanimate objects is quite amazing. Given what is possible in terms of projection onto things as random as Ouija boards, tealeaves or Tarot cards, I'm surprised this sort of thing isn't more common with LLMs that sound just like conscious beings.

The (final version of the) physical Phoenix computer still exists, but the disks are missing - see https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/fixed_pages/IBM3084.html

A backup was taken before shutdown: https://web.archive.org/web/20041115131602/http://www.cam.ac...

I would be surprised if someone, somewhere, didn't still have a copy of what would nowadays be considered to be an absurdly small amount of data. If they do, I wouldn't be surprised if they read HN.

BCPL was great. Cambridge Lisp was written in BCPL, and I found BCPL really pleasant to work in.

I think you might find that the Teletubbies have already solved this problem, in a variety of different configurations, including the rigid and curly antenna you mention above. The benefits of the circular and triangular configurations are as yet unclear to me, but I'm sure the Voice Trumpets and Sun Baby know what they're doing.

There would probably be a Universal Common Embedding used as an intermediate representation between people's individual private neural representations. Likely the distant descendant of our open-source neural models.

And machines would of course also use the Universal Common Embedding to communicate, as man and machine meld into a seamless distributed whole.

It all seems a little bit too inevitable for my liking at this point.

Or they are a hive mind, like Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiners.

I find this simultaneously fascinating and disturbing; once you have someone using this, they become a hitherto-impossible human-AI hybrid, where their mind is now a fusion between the two, completely unnoticed to the user.

I think the Internet warriors are trying to build their own entirely self-sufficient network independent of the state or commercial worlds, which is, as you say, tricky to do only with resources legally available to the general public. Armed forces have had these things nailed down pretty much since the invention of radio.

You could just about squeeze voice down LoRa with a really low-bandwidth codec, as really aggressive codecs can manage < 0.5 kbps. If you want to sacrifice voice quality but use standard codecs, the military MELPe codec has 600 bits/s as one of its standard modes.

The ISPs also have a system that runs without power so long as their batteries (and gensets) last. Typically 1 or 2 days without refuelling.

The real "resilience teams" are going to be at the telcos/ISPs, and they will have dark fibre between their networks and autonomous backup power in their data centres. They will be able to do IRC, VoIP telephony, email, etc. between their networks over statically routed point-to-point IP between their local networks even if BGP and the transit networks go down so they can "black start" the Internet. (Back in my ISP days, I remember reading about there being a private telephone network just for AS operators' NOCs to talk to one another quite independenty of the PSTN.)

For anything that takes even those out (eg. a "Big One" quake in California), you fall back to radio hams and autonomous radio links for the disaster services.

I didn't know about the chip having separate TX and RX pins. There must be a gap in the market for rooftop-to-rooftop LoRa transceivers that don't cost a fortune. Even using something like a 24 dB gain antenna would push range up by a factor of 10 relative to a simple 4 dB antenna, or get a substantial improvement in bandwidth/reliability at the same range. For an even simpler design, you could just put a 20 dB attenuator between the transmit port and the antenna, reducing the effective forward gain of 4 dB, while getting the full 24 dB in the opposite direction. Proper RF engineering details an exercise for the student etc.

I've just realised I've talked my way into the idea of creating per-city club-operated backbone networks based on something like 100 Mbit point-to-point Ethernet-over-microwave links. With tall buildings as hubs, you might actually be able to build a decent mesh, with WiFi, LoRa or both acting as access networks. You'd definitely want to throttle per-client bandwidth to prevent people from abusing your very limited long-range mesh bandwidth. None of this would be cheap; decent microwave links cost thousands, and you'd need backup solar and battery power for every part of the network.

I'd also consider thinking about using the "big ears, small mouth" technique to push up bandwidth; if a fixed link using a technology such as LoRa could transmit at a legal EIRP level, but coupled this with a really high gain parabolic dish (I'm thinking re-purposed satellite dishes) and low-noise amplifier at each end on the receive side, you could get substantially higher end-to-end Eb/No, and thus much higher bandwidth and range than would otherwise be legally possible. At first glance, the necessary hardware to do this looks quite doable, either by active RF switching between antennae, or the use of a hybrid/circulator to do the necessary duplexing. I'd be interested to see if anyone has already built, or even manufactures, something like this, and what the practical and regulatory barriers are to implementation.