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rwmj

45,315 karma · joined August 31, 2009

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/
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rwmj··on DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16
It's a joke about human "safety drivers" acting as legal crumple zones for self-driving cars.
rwmj··on DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16
What The Terminator got wrong is each robot needs a human to take the legal blame when it goes wrong.
rwmj··on DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16
Later they'll replace them with minimum wage safety pilots.
rwmj··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
Sure, but we're not talking about people who have no savings. FIRE people have huge investment portfolios while being frugal with their spending, and understand the risk of keeping 5-10% of their total net worth in cash equivalents (not dissimilar to having insurance).
rwmj··on AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt
Which is why you keep 3-5 years of spending money in cash (or a bond ladder if you want to be fancy).
rwmj··on Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
That was awesome, but to be fair it was a carry-over from BBC BASIC.
rwmj··on Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.
rwmj··on 10 REM"_(C2SLFF4
Libvirt listens on ports 16509 and 16514 out of the box, in reference to ZX81 BASIC where the program starts at (address) 16509 and the first byte in a REM statement (commonly used to store machine code) is 16514.
rwmj··on 10 REM"_(C2SLFF4
I managed to get that easter egg into libvirt - it listens on ports 16509 and 16514 (https://libvirt.org/remote.html).
rwmj··on Oracle could face $7B collateral bill for Wisconsin data centre
I have to imagine that their legal team is a smooth, well oiled machine. The technical side on the other hand ...
rwmj··on Incremental – A library for incremental computations
That article was fascinating, thanks for sharing it. I wonder if all banks use the same "bank Python" or if they all forked it in different ways?
rwmj··on Airbus Takes Flight from AWS
And now if you try to get a bug fixed or a new feature in GMail, it simply can't be done at all. Problem solved!
rwmj··on Airport Simulator
Wikipedia search turns up this game from 1982: https://www.mobygames.com/game/52384/controller/ Quite graphically advanced for the time.
rwmj··on Airport Simulator
Heathrow ATC (for the ZX Spectrum) was one that I played extensively back in the day: https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/10530 I wonder if there are earlier examples of popular ATC games? They're simpler than flight simulators so you'd think there would be more of them.

Edit: playable version - https://archive.org/details/zx_Heathrow_International_Air_Tr...

rwmj··on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
I actually think the participate XOR vote behaviour of Slashdot was a great feature! It stops people pettily downvoting comments that don't agree with them on the same discussion.
rwmj··on How the Elite See Rome
As an aside I once went on a tour of the museums of Amsterdam with an expert guide (paid for by the company I was visiting). It was fantastic! A completely different experience from being a regular tourist. I learned far more about Amsterdam and the art than I could possibly have done on my own.
rwmj··on Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor
But prompting an AI adds nothing. Journalism is about research, interviewing the people involved, finding new facts, and then presenting that to your audience in a way they can understand. Getting an AI to write about something is just diluting the signal for future researchers.
rwmj··on Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor
You'd know that if you'd done any research at all.

Compare this to Jeff Guo (NPR) or Henry van Dyck (Veritasium) or my contact at the WSJ. They all investigated this story, interviewed key people (more people were interviewed for the Veritasium video than appeared), and fact-checked everything with subject matter experts. The NPR story took about 3 months of work and the Veritasium video took 5 months. I was interviewed in total for over 6 hours across all of them.

These are real journalists who worked on these stories and they produced novel work and new findings. I have huge respect for them, especially after being involved with it and seeing what work it took to add something new to the story. At the same time they managed to tell that story to a lay audience which is another skill in itself.

rwmj··on Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor
I read parts of it, being first hand involved in all this, and it seems like it was written by AI to me. If you used an AI to write it or help with it, why not just admit to it?
rwmj··on What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard
The number that stuck out was 200K lines of code. Can you expand on why so much code had to be written and which parts were the longest (time and/or code) and hardest bits?
rwmj··on How early SunOS did diskless workstations before NFS
Interesting! It uses (the Linux equivalent of) NBD. However as Chris says in the article that's not really an alternative to NFS since you can't share files meaningfully.
rwmj··on AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
But they're going to try anyway.
rwmj··on The Hunt for the Counterfeiter Trying to Make the Perfect Bill
https://archive.ph/UyksP
rwmj··on The AI Backlash Has Tech Executives Fearing for Their Lives
https://archive.ph/i9R37
rwmj··on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
Those techniques are implemented by default in Fedora & Debian. You have to opt out if for some reason you don't want to use them. So almost all C software compiled in these two major distros are using all of them. (Likely in other distros too, but I'm less familiar with how they configure their compilers).

Fedora will soon implement shadow stacks across the entire C codebase: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f45-change-proposal-e...

rwmj··on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
Major OS vendors have added loads of hardening to their C compilers. Not bounds checking specifically (because even if the overhead was only 20% that would be too high) but tons of other stuff such as: stack canaries, control flow integrity, hardened string functions, ASLR, zeroing uninitialized auto variables, forced warnings, linker hardening. These are added as standard in all decent Linux distros today. Probably Windows too, I've no idea. There's a good summary here: https://best.openssf.org/Compiler-Hardening-Guides/Compiler-...

There are also bounds checking options for major C compilers so if you want to use it, you can, eg. -fbounds-safety or the various sanitize options in Clang.

rwmj··on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
The alternative is you use a compiler that adds bounds checking. It's possible to do this with C, with fine object granularity (even separate stack objects), and even preserve compatibility with existing non-bounds checked library code / system calls. When I did it back in 1996 there was a large overhead to doing that, but compilers can do much better these days. And anyway you have to compare the overhead to the cost of designing and building your own small run CPU and eshewing mainstream processors, which is also huge.

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/BoundsChecking.html

rwmj··on The kids with phones are alright
If you walk through a town shouting racist stuff you'll get arrested too, and rightly so.
rwmj··on The kids with phones are alright
I'm trying to work out what this means. The "millions" employed at Meta?
rwmj··on RISC-V Is Inevitable: State of the Union Keynote Argues
However you can do what Airbus do and formally prove your C code and use a formally proven toolchain like compcert to compile it. Or you can take a performance hit and add bounds checking to the C code[1]. Aircraft systems are probably the best chance that CHERI has, and that's pretty niche, small runs and very expensive, and still better solved in software.

[1] I literally wrote the paper on this back in 1996: https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/BoundsChecking.html

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