perlgeek

Yes, we should all have opinions on products that consume resources on a societal scale.

Opinions don't necessarily equate with a desire to remove them, there could also be (dis)-incentives like taxes, removal of subsidies etc.

Technically, this doesn't answer the question, which was about investment money, not about the investment firms.

It's certainly well spent if we eat the crops.

If it's fed to farm animals for meat, that reduces its efficiency by an order of magnitude. There's still plenty of discussion to be had if that is water well spent. It probably depends on a lot of factors.

Renting out compute is a viable business model. That's part of what the big and the small cloud providers do. It's just (on its own) not a "get rich quick" business model anymore.

Why would it be any different for inference? If we believe OP, it'll just become part of regular compute infra, and thus part of the renting-out-compute business model.

I think it's an open question if the current generation of inference investment will pan out, but in the long term, there'll be a balance between investment cost and margin, just as in every other industry.

> In real life, a human doesn't do classification tasks with the System One part of their brain, they use System Two.

I'd argue that most human classification is pre-conscious / System One. You see a table, you recognize it as a table without asking yourself "is this a table?"

I guess their marketing implies that it moves classification into system one response time.

Not very practical for a solution that requires a browser plugin. The browser is where most of my interesting data is.

> Problem is, Aella has made it her business to speak about it publicly

Why is that a problem? Just don't read her stuff if you're not interested.

There are lots of people talking all the time about stuff I'm not interested in.

I've tried to read this, but somehow the article doesn't really come to a point. Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life (and that it's somewhat non-standard)?

When I read the title, my mind immediately jumped to something else: negativity.

I've noticed that my own mind always searches for corner cases, error conditions and failure modes. This can be super helpful when planning new features (or explaining to stakeholders that certain conditions must be met first, when they want some new features), but when it extends to other things besides software, it can be psychologically unhealthy.

The wavelength of light is λ = c / f, where c is the speed of light and f is the frequency.

When c is approximately 10^7 times lower, so is the wavelength (if we keep the frequency the same), so now-visible light would have wavelengths far shorter than an atom or a molecule, and probably couldn't be easily detected by biological means.

You could say: sure, maybe we'll just see light at lower frequency. Maybe that's true, but the energy of a single photon is E = hf, where h is the Planck constant. So if we assume much lower-frequency photons, they have much lower energy, and thus become harder to detect.

Lots of other things could be different, like chemistry, heat conduction etc.

At a height of roughly 1.8, at c = 5km/h, light would take 0.1 seconds to travel from head to toe. Nerve signals are much slower than c, so human bodies likely wouldn't exist as we know them.

The list of potential implications to consider is fascinating, endless and maybe even a bit overwhelming :-)

Just came back from a vacation in Denmark and Norway, paid with debit card everywhere.

Heck, paying with card is the default, if you do pay cash, the cashier sometimes has to cancel the card payment before accepting the cash.

The GDPR is far from perfect, but it does cover this. It talks about acquiring and storing information that can be used to identify people. It doesn't specify what counts, so now that face recognition is pretty, it automatically applies to images.

It also talks about uses cases where such things are allowed to be recorded, and forbids all others.

> IMO it is much more practical to regulate and penalize the activity of using such a network than to preempt its creation.

Hard disagree. If such a network is created, foreign adversaries (or domestic ones that don't abide by the laws) can hack them. Has happened quite a number of times.

>There is not generally an expectation of privacy in public.

And that's the problem, because if there isn't an expectation of privacy, and we record everything that's "in public", we land in a dystopic hellscape.

The problem is really that "privacy" vs. "public" isn't a binary choice. Yes, I expect people to see me in public if they happen to walk by. That's quite different from every movement being recorded and made searchable. Most privacy laws don't really account for that being possible.

(not op)

If a security bug is exploited in the wild, it's an n-day if it's been first exploited n days after the publication of the bug, and a zero-day if it's been exploited before or on the day of the publication.

When a bug is not yet exploited in the wild, it's just a discovery of a bug, not a zero-day.

Let's see... first of all, 14 years ago was the discovery of the base mechanism, not of specific treatments. So specific treatments need to be developed, delivery systems need to be developed, side effects reduced. Then you need safety tests and efficacy tests.

> mRNA vaccines are also quite different. Do they modify the DNA? Of course not. So that's already very different.

And yet it took more than 30 years after the first mRNA experiments to develop a successful vaccine. Why it should be so much faster for CRISPR & Co?

CRISPR is foremost a research tool. Calling it "extremely overhyped" without restricting it medical treatment seems disingenuous.

The CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing tool was developed in 2012, so I don't find it surprising that merely 14 years later, there's only one approved treatment. From discovery to approval, drug development often takes 10-15 years, and often much longer for novel techniques. So I'd say it too early to call it overhyped for treatments.

Finally, I think we'll see a lot of treatments that don't use CRISPR-Cas9, but related gene editing techniques, but it'll take another 10 to 20 years.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#History for how long another novel technique has been in development before it became really widespread with the mrna-based covid-19 vaccines.

You can target an individual by injecting that very individual with something lethal.

If that's not what you want, you'd need something like a virus to spread it. But then you have to ask yourself: what if that virus mutates? The specialization to certain gene markers is an evolutionary disadvantage, so evolution will tend to make it lose that restriction. Ooops.

The article is pretty light on details, but

> Much like other CRISPR therapies, delivery is a critical challenge, i.e., getting the large genome-cutting enzyme to all the targeted cells efficiently.

makes me think this is in vitro so far. So, years to decades away from being available for actual treatment in humans. Still good news.

Apple tries to market its product as privacy-focused, yet the privacy of their new AI features is so bad they don't meet EU standards? Is that the message here?

"Castor" was the name of a storage system used for transporting nuclear waste in Germany. There were quite a few protests against shipping nuclear waste through the country.

Wouldn't have been my choice for a software project :-)

As a side note, I wonder when we'll hear the first reports about employees reselling (parts of) their token budget.

Probably not worth it risking your job for a 200$/month good, but at 5K, I'm sure some folks will be tempted. Especially if companies do stupid things like token usage leaderboards.

I'd say on a scale of bad 1-10, 9 and 10 are reserved for incidents that cause loss of human life. YMMV.

Even more than that, they still have to maintain the software to work on Linux, because they have a paid on Linux.

So if they have to keep maintaining it and offer the basic tier for free on Linux... just why? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Maybe they receive "too many" bug reports from Linux users?

> A Ferrari is about driving

Is it, though? Most Ferraris aren't driven much at all. In fact, most Ferraris are bought by collectors. If somebody has 10-20 Ferraris, do you think they drive them much? In Parallel?

Try to apply first principles to LLM coding:

* Chances are that fewer people (maybe even none) will look at the code when it's LLM-generated

* Amount of code being written isn't all that critical anymore

* Keeping patches small isn't that big of a deal anymore (because it's now the LLM's job to maintain it, not the human's)

All of this implies: boilerplate isn't a good reason to avoid a language anymore. (I hate this conclusion, because I hate boilerplate).

Then the question is: what kind of language can you use that buys safety with boilerplate? Probably a statically typed one, possibly with lots of asserts... Eiffel? I don't know if there's enough Eiffel code around the Internet to train LLMs, so maybe a more popular one would be better.

Maybe Java or C#? Haskell? OCaml?

The article suggests golang, and I think there are use cases where golang would be a good candidate.

It would be quite interesting to run an experiment: give separate instances of the same LLM coding agent the task to implement a specific application, and use different languages. Then compare quality, code size, runtime performance and token cost. Ideal would be a multi-stage development that better simulates a real development workflow (bug reports and new feature requests come in over time).

What kind of application are you developing?

> Software developers should shorten their patch cycles and make security fixes available as quickly as possible. [...]

> Network defenders should shorten their patch testing and deployment timelines.

Shortening patch cycles will only help so much. It's funny that whenever an NPM supply chain attack is published, people recommend a cooldown before installing new versions, and then when a vulnerability is discovered, everybody jumps to patch. Clearly these two strategies collide at some point.

> The critical controls laid out by organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre are now all the more important, since they improve security without depending on any single patch landing in time. These include steps like hardening networks’ default configurations, enforcing multi-factor authentication, and keeping comprehensive logs for detection and response.

Most of these proposed controls are not new at all, but they are often costly to implemented and harm velocity in other ways, which is why they aren't widely in place.

For example, a super effective control is filtering outgoing network traffic. Many exploits rely on loading second and maybe third stages from the Internet, and if you block outgoing requests by default, it won't work.

But, blocking outgoing requests by default is super hard, and you risk blocking security updates etc. It can kinda work for a deployed application, but for an employee workstation? Basically impossible.

I wonder if we're approaching an era where we have to go back to saying "you cannot do this, because security" much more often than we'd like.

> the top 1% of users capture 76.5% of profits

This seems to be similar to OnlyFans, and the economy at large...

I'd guess that most people who run Docker on linux install it through their distro's package manager, which has a dockerd running as root.

On Debian derivatives, you need some kind of extra privs to even talk to it (being a member of the "docker" group, iirc).

It matters in so far as the production rate for e.g. air defense interceptors is much lower than the rate at which they've been used in the Iran war. Which is probably one of the reasons the US was ready for a ceasefire.

They might have enough stockpiles to continue this war for a while, but it thins out the capabilities in other theaters, making the US generally more vulnerable.