559 karma · joined June 15, 2013
So what ? It's not possible to be reliable, open and have many features.
Why not ?
For example, in Italy the judiciary has a governing body of its own whose members are partially elected by the parliament, but also partially by the judges themselves. Lower judges are exclusively appointed by the judiciary governing body or through a civil service exam, and neither the government nor the parliament have any say on it.
No. You kept blabbering about "science" when most uses of knowledge are not about science. The original topic was also definitely not "science": it was about having a reasonable opinion about whether, empirically, the rate of discovery of vulnerabilities is increasing or not.
Pragmatically, correlation *is* evidence of causation in favour of the best explanation, until somebody finds a better explanation.
> It could equally be argued that the AI slop that's being produced makes for a lot more vulnerabilities being shipped.
This is also true, and does not exclude the other, because for the moment the vast majority of production software in the world (and therefore the bulk of enticing targets) was written before AI. If LLM software will become prevalent in commercial setups, then LLM-generated code will eventually become the majority of targets.
We know because we could see the effects of the average rate of vulnerabilities discovery and exploitation, and it's definitely going up very fast. Until recently, vulnerabilities were relatively hard to find, and finding them was done by a very restricted group of people world-wide, which made them quite valuable. Not any more.
* Appeal to authority, ad hominem: the conclusion might be true, you often have to judge a person's moral character and experience too.
* Appeal to tradition, wealth, poverty: sometimes the speaker has life experiences that justify the conclusion, but can't be explained in a brief conversation.
* Ad baculum: sometimes it's wise to stop engaging with the counterpart.
* Ad populum, to emotion: sometimes the argument is not really about the truth of a proposition(the existence of a problem, and gravity thereof), but about how politically feasible it is to do something about it.
* Correlation, not causation: correlation is evidence of causation in favour of the current best explanation. What that might be, is a matter for discussion. In day-to-day life we almost always lack the time for achieving 100% certainty.
More generally, very often people don't have time discuss a matter with treatise-level precision and diligence. We almost always have to rely on a judgement of the speaker or other circumstances, see also standards of proof in legal systems. Sometimes the true core of an argument is not really expressed overtly, whether consciously or not, and you have to figure out what the discussion is really about (very useful advice in a marriage or any close relationship).
In this case, I would definitely agree that people that act sloppily in one aspect of business will almost always do the same in other aspects. More generally, I'd say that most classical logical fallacies are actually useful rules of thumb.
You mean you've never had a conversation about it. You can't know if you've met somebody that has that concern unless you've broached the subject explicitly.