* Posts by Filippo

1883 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Nov 2007

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

Filippo Silver badge

Re: maximising

>It's the language I object to. Clearly they are not maximising public safety and claiming so is disingenuous.

No, it's not. "Maximising" in no way implies the absence of any constraints, such as "being a rocket company", on the variable you are maximising. In fact, I can't think of any case where you maximise something without constraints. The language is perfectly accurate (whether they are actually maximising, of course, is harder to figure out).

Also, I reiterate that having a space program is good for public safety, because of weather forecasts if nothing else, and that has a hard requirement of launching rockets.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: maximising

Unless I'm missing something, following that line of reasoning, the implication is that we should not have a space program, because of public safety.

I invite you to consider the impact on public safety caused by e.g. not having modern weather forecasts, as a direct consequence of that.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

Filippo Silver badge

Did that actually work? I mean, was the crime rate lower?

Yeah, thought so.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

Filippo Silver badge

>It's time IT's own late fee model becomes late as in the late Arthur Dent.

Didn't Arthur Dent survive the destruction of Earth itself?

Font security 'still a Helvetica of a problem' says Australian graphics outfit Canva

Filippo Silver badge
Trollface

Re: KISS

Why stop there? Just handwrite! You can have as many fonts as you can learn to draw, and the only way to hack it is to kidnap and threaten you.

Trump supporters forge AI deepfakes to woo Black voters

Filippo Silver badge

No, this is not what's happening. The article is mentioning the parody account, but it is explicitly stating that it's just a parody. The accusations of using deepfakes for propaganda are leveled at an entirely different person, who is not a parody maker and who was doing exactly that.

Either you stopped reading after the first paragraph, or you're attempting another deception for propaganda purposes.

Filippo Silver badge

No. Read the article.

The article links to the parody account as examples of what you can do with image models, and explicitly states that it's a parody account.

The article then goes on to show that actual, real, non-parodic Trump supporters, such as a radio show host, have created and published fake images, only admitting they were fake after being called on it. These images are not linked, because The Register has ethics: unlike the parody images, they were actually created with deceitful intent, and linking to them would only spread them further. There is a second example of a Trump supporter employing fakes with deceitful intent on the linked BBC article.

TLDR: you are claiming that the article is railing against a parody account. The article does no such thing. A parody account is mentioned, but the accusation of using deepfake for propaganda is being leveled at someone who was doing exactly that.

Filippo Silver badge

The current main threat to democracy is neither fake news, nor "AI"-generated fake photos. Rather, it is the mindset that leads people to employ such tools. Even if we found a way to magically label deepfakes, that mindset would still be there, and it would still be a problem.

Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage

Filippo Silver badge

Re: It is not left wing extremists

You don't really need to have someone to blame immediately after the event. You can wait until at least some proper investigation is done. Even if it turns out to really be whoever the finger was first pointed at, just because you didn't point the finger too right away doesn't make you complicit or anything.

EU-turn! Now Apple says it won't banish Home Screen web apps in Europe

Filippo Silver badge

Or they could just allow Home Screen apps with any underlying browser engine.

Meta's pay-or-consent model hides 'massive illegal data processing ops': lawsuit

Filippo Silver badge

Well, I can phrase it more accurately, but those are all separate things, despite what Meta would have you believe.

Having account functionality, so that you can store user preferences and subscriptions and whatnot is one thing. The user explicitly puts data in their account, by logging in and then toggling settings and subscribing to threads and whatnot. That is how you provide the service, it is expected functionality, and it is not a problem. If done right, you wouldn't even need a cookie consent banner.

Tracking, where you record all user interactions and build a profile, is a different thing. The user is giving you data, but they are doing it without informed consent, often without even awareness. That is not required to provide your service, it is not necessarily expected functionality, and it is a problem. It is arguably required to fund the service, but nobody has a right to a business model that breaks the law. Meta could make this above board by obtaining the relevant consent, but so far they have done everything they can to avoid it.

Tracking on third party websites, and tracking of users that don't even have a logged-in account, which is also something that Meta does, is a slightly different thing too, and it's a bigger problem. I don't think that there is any way this is legal, but enforcing this would hurt Meta immensely, and they know it.

Serving ads is not a problem. You can fund a website this way. You probably won't become the richest person in the world, but it's been done.

Serving targeted ads is only a problem because in order to target ads, you need to track. But it's not really a problem in itself. Because of this, asking money in return for not showing ads and/or not targeting ads doesn't solve anything, if you keep tracking. Meta could get explicit informed consent, track what happens on their websites alone and only to logged users, and then use that tracking data to target ads, and this could be made to work. But they don't want to, and they'll fight tooth and nail to avoid it, because it would be far less profitable.

Selling a service for money is also, obviously, not a problem. Again, you probably won't become the richest person in the world.

Meta is trying to convince everyone that user accounts are the same thing as tracking, that ads cannot exist without tracking, and that websites cannot be funded without ads. None of this is true.

Filippo Silver badge

The problem isn't targeting; it's tracking. Tracking is the thing that provides the data you use for targeting. If you track, it's a problem, regardless of whether you then target or not.

If this all sounds like stuff that would apply to an enemy combatant, rather than a user of a service you're offering, that is not a coincidence.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: basically proposing you pay it in order to enjoy your fundamental rights under EU law

It doesn't, obviously. You can pay in money, or you can pay by viewing ads. The GDPR is no obstacle to this.

It's a significant obstacle to paying with your personal data, especially without informed consent. Meta is not offering any option that doesn't involve this. Hence the problem.

Filippo Silver badge

Tracking != advertising

There's a fundamental misunderstanding here. One that Meta is doing their very best to exploit.

Tracking is not advertising.

The GDPR is about tracking, not ads. You can serve ads on a web page without tracking, it's how it was done in the 90s. If you do, GDPR won't stop you in the least.

If Meta wants to offer a paid service with no ads, good for them, but that's irrelevant. If they want to be compliant that way, they need to offer a paid service with no tracking. But they don't want to do that, because tracking is where they make their real money.

After all, it takes a global-scale service like Meta or Google to make tracking really useful... but anyone can serve untracked ads with equal effectiveness. If it got established that you can't track users without informed consent, and you can't leverage refusal of service to gain consent, and this was actually enforced, then the advertising monopoly would dissolve overnight. Even the argument that tracking is useful for users in the form of better search result is hollow in the face of how web search results on major sites are steadily getting worse.

So they're trying to muddle the issue by saying "oh, but we offer an ad-less service, so that's fine!" - no, it's not fine, we're talking about tracking, not ads. Even offering a service where the ads don't target me is irrelevant, as long as you keep tracking me.

Conflating tracking and advertising, believing that they are one and the same, that you can't advertise without tracking and that therefore the only way to fund a website is either through payment or through tracking, is IMHO a big part of how we got into this mess, and furthering this confusion is outright deceptive on Meta's part.

There's also the not-insignificant problem that, at this point, even if Meta offered a paid track-less service, nobody in their right mind would trust them to actually not take your money and then track you anyway.

OpenAI sued, again, for scraping and replicating news stories

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Embrace the verbatim

>Spotify for news

Nice concept. I'd pay for that.

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

Filippo Silver badge

Wait, do people buy Toyota because of engine power?

Are you ready to back up your AI chatbot's promises? You'd better be

Filippo Silver badge

>A real-live Air Canada rep confirmed he could get the bereavement discount.

I think this bit deserves more attention. It's not just the chatbot.

>"The chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions."

I'm really glad to hear that the court did not fall for this. Claiming that a chatbot is a separate legal entity is insane, but sometimes you hear about judges misunderstanding stupid things.

Google Maps leads German tourists to week-long survival saga in Australian swamp

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Unless I'm mistaken...

That detour is in the right spot, but it isn't anywhere near 60 km long, and the satellite photo suggests a fairly reasonable dirt road. It still doesn't really make sense for Google to suggest that instead of the main road, but it doesn't look outright suicidal. Either Google fixed something recently, or the couple did something worse than just follow Maps. Both sound plausible to me.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Game Theoretic Analysis

There's the problem that while nobody likes being nuked, the value of history is subjective, and can potentially go all the way down to zero for a sufficiently ruthless leader. If the enemy can predict your analysis, and does not care about going down in history as the baddie, then you are giving them a strong incentive for them to execute a first-strike.

The best overall result is actually achieved by maximizing the chance of a successful strike for both sides. If both sides have a 100% success chance, then a first-strike is guaranteed not to yield any advantage, regardless of how you feel about history. Therefore nobody initiates a first-strike, and the world is saved.

Mad, I know!

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

Filippo Silver badge

Okay, but then you can just shut it down like any other computer program. You don't need a fancy hardware killswitch.

Unless the scenario is the sci-fi, rebel-AI, can't-be-shut-down-and-has-independent-power-supply-and-killer-robots-guarding-the-facility-oh-and-anti-aircraft-batteries-too one, which is not really worth serious discussion, let alone large-scale screwing around with hardware design.

Filippo Silver badge

I'm not entirely clear on what the purpose of this kill switch would be.

Is it to prevent criminals from using a public AI? In that case, a phone call to the AI provider should be more than enough.

Is it to prevent criminals from running their own AI? But didn't we just say that AI training facilities are easy to find, and difficult to move? Just send the police!

Is it to prevent a foreign state from running its own AI? They'll just buy chips from anyone who doesn't put kill switches in them and/or is an ally.

Is it to prevent some kind of runaway hyperintelligence scenario? First of all, that's sci-fi, and overdone at that. Secondly, it's just network - the hypothetical Skynet-wannabe can probably firewall your kill switch out. Secondly, again, the data center is easy to find and can't move. Cut the power, lob a missile at it, whatever.

Is the kill switch on by default, requiring someone to explicitly approve construction of a datacenter? Don't we already have permits to build stuff? How is this different? Are there lots of secret facilities that draw megawatts and yet somehow nobody knows about? Besides governments' secret crap, I mean?

Is the kill switch on by default, requiring someone to explicitly approve all AI training? That would require you to know in advance whether a model-in-training is dangerous. That's unfeasible. We can't even know whether a model we have right there is dangerous.

I'm really not getting what the scenario is here.

Also, again with the parallels between "AI" and nuclear weapons? The comparison is stupid. Just about the only thing in common is "dangerous". And maybe "scary", which I guess is the point. Go any deeper than that, and there's nothing.

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

>Even though France and the EU keep wibbling about our responsibility to police their borders between NI and Eire. Politics is weird like this.

I don't think it's that weird. France doesn't have very much reason to deal with this problem. Nations don't really do favors to other nations, nor do they feel gratitude, or shame over hypocrisy. They just don't work that way.

That's why we have formal international agreements. Well, used to, anyway. You can no longer complain to the European Council, nor can you threaten to veto EU initiatives that benefit France, nor can you elect EU parliament members that could mess with France's agenda. You'll have to find some other lever.

Filippo Silver badge

I have a poor opinion of Brexit, but you seem to have actually thought about the issue, and having an articulated stance that involves the difference between EU and ECHR gains you a lot of respect from me. However, I have to note that using terms like "EUssr" kinda undermines the objective of "discussing like adults".

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Well good thing the UK had Brexit

Just in case...

The ECHR is a part of the Council of Europe.

The CoE is not the EU. They are two unrelated things, and they do very different things.

The UK withdrew from the EU, but is still within the CoE.

So the UK is still, in theory, bound by ECHR decisions.

Yes, there are a whole lot of supernational institutions in this continent, they each have their own partially overlapping set of adhering countries, and their nomenclature is extremely confusing.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Filippo Silver badge

Re: "poses no danger to Earth"

500 years until leaving Venus, 10000 before possibly threatening Earth.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/524522_Zoozve which has a note with the actual academic source.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: "poses no danger to Earth"

Meh. Sims suggest no danger for 10000 years. In 10000 years, either we have the ability to deflect asteroids, or we're long extinct for whatever reason. I don't think there are realistically any other options; I could come up with steady state scenarios for mankind for 10000 years, but I think they'd have to be extremely contrived.

AI won't take our jobs and it might even save the middle class

Filippo Silver badge

Sooo, the idea would be that someone who's not a doctor could make doctor-level decisions, provided they have a LLM helping them?

Sure. Go ahead. Give it a try. Seriously.

There's so much hype around "AI" that I doubt we could persuade the people who came up with this that it's a bad idea. So, run a trial or three, see it fail spectacularly, and then maybe we can move on.

Just, please, during the trials, have a real doctor double-check everything before doing anything on the patients.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Filippo Silver badge

>This is the existential crisis facing the software industry today, and it has no good answers. But there may be some out there, which is what we will look at next.

I'm looking forward to it. I agree wholeheartedly with the issues described, but so far I can't see any way out.

I find myself guilty of many of the sins described, simply because if I always followed the very best practices in every single row of code, I would be quickly undercut by competitors who don't do that, get to a deliverable much faster as a result, and still produce code that works, even if it won't be maintainable 20 years from now. I follow decent practices most of the time, but every single time you skip doing a unit test, or hardwire something, or call directly into something that ought to be a couple layers removed, even if it's just once in a while, the cruft piles up and it never goes away.

BOFH: Hearken! The Shiny Button software speaks of Strategic Realignment

Filippo Silver badge

Re: "Oh, it's ah ... Neo ... um, Enterprise ... uh ... Executive ... uhm ..."

One of my clients got a consultant to make them a dashboard. They asked me to export some production data.

I gave them a big CSV where each row was a production batch, with start and end timestamps and quantity.

They said that they needed the total hours and quantity by day.

I pointed out to the customer that they have the start/end timestamps and quantity per operation. Turning that into totals by day was just arithmetics. Some tricky bits if an operation is active at midnight, okay, but still nothing that doesn't get routinely taught to teens.

I could change the exporter in the production software, of course, but surely the dashboard software, whose entire reason of being is to visualize data, would already be set up to do something like that?

Some time passed, and then they confirmed that they wanted me to export total quantities per day.

So I did that, and the CSV now had a row per day, with the total.

Some time passed, and then they asked me to add a column with the quantity-per-hour.

I pointed out that this is literally just a division.

I'll do it, of course, for free even, but a question comes to mind. This dashboard software. It's just a thing that makes a time series plot out of a CSV, isn't it? Like, literally three mouse clicks on Excel? How much are you paying for it?

Still have to get an answer.

Sorry, scammers: The FCC says AI robocalls are definitely illegal

Filippo Silver badge

Okay, I realize that when I said "force carriers" it could sound like the kind of thing that comes with missiles. I'd be happy with just authenticated caller ID, though.

Filippo Silver badge

In order to stop spam calls, the legislation needs to be something enforceable. Right now, we're barely one step beyond saying "please don't do it". Not even a big step.

Force carriers to deploy technical solutions. It's the only way.

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Once upon a time....

>Imagine having yet another, completely unnecessary thing to do in your day, to add to the pile of things you have to do.

It takes at least 5 minutes to fill an ICE tank (between stopping, fueling, paying and leaving), possibly more depending on circumstances. It takes about 5 seconds to plug an EV at home (you do it as part of parking, so there is no putting shoes on involved), and there is no variance to that. Unless you're filling up less often than once every two months, which seems unlikely, the EV is actually saving you time.

>it's something you have to have on your mind.

No, it isn't, because, usually, you don't have to decide if and when and how to plug in. You do it as part of parking at home. There is zero mental effort involved. Fueling up, on the other hand, requires a conscious decision to look for a gas station and then interrupt your driving.

>and in case you forget, the consequences may be catastrophic

Sure, but this is exactly the same thing as forgetting to refuel an ICE. If you're a person who's prone to doing that sort of thing, the car being stuck is going to happen regardless of what kind of car it is.

You're not comparing EVs to ICEs, you're comparing EVs to... the Ford Nucleon, I guess?

Filippo Silver badge

Sounds like a PHEV? I have a PHEV too (by Hyundai, but still) and i'm really happy with it. It's a weird concept, but I find it's actually a pretty good compromise. You can drive around the city without using any gas (or maybe a little bit for heating if it's winter), and just use it as a regular car for longer trips.

OpenAI latest to add 'Made by AI' metadata to model work

Filippo Silver badge

Better than nothing?

Are we sure it's better than nothing? In the field of security and trust, a solution that doesn't really work (such as this one) could lead user into a false sense of security, or, at the other opposite, erode trust in trustworthy sources. Both results are arguably worse than nothing.

AI models just love escalating conflict to all-out nuclear war

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Unsurprising....

I wish I could upvote this more than once. I suspect that the impact of how much more focus we give on negative or destructive news and events, and how this shapes our perception of global reality, is wildly underestimated. Nobody reports when things are going well, and yet it takes effort to make things go well.

Survey: Over half of undergrads in UK are using AI in university assignments

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

>You do a test. If they fail to paint your house well, they won't get paid (or get a mark if you will)

Sure, I can stretch the definition of "test" that way. However, it's still a bad simile, because then I'm not testing their ability to use a brush, but their ability to paint my house. Not the same thing. The first strictly requires them to use a brush, the second doesn't.

>It soon may be though. But let's teach people legacy stuff.

Right now, it isn't. "Soon may be" is not a strong enough base to decide to stop teaching a critically important skill.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

I'm not clear on your point here. You seem to be flipping between describing scenarios where someone is learning, scenarios where someone is being tested, and scenarios where someone is working professionally.

The applicability of automation is extremely different between these scenarios.

If the decorator is coming to paint my house because I need my house painted, they should use whatever tool gets the job done most efficiently. I am not here to test them, I just want my house painted.

If the decorator is learning how to use a brush, or being tested on their ability to use a brush, then they should use a brush.

If the decorator is learning how to use the fancy tool, or being tested on their ability to use the fancy tool, then they should use the fancy tool.

I don't feel that distinction to be a difficult one to make. A professional and a student are doing two very different things. Someone doing their job is a poor simile for a student learning how to do it.

Re the punch card example, it seems like another bad simile. Punch cards are obsolete. Writing isn't. Unless you're trying to say that writing is obsolete? Because of LLMs? That seems frankly untenable.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

But when you are learning how to do basic arithmetic, and your progress gets tested, the teacher doesn't let you use a calculator. Despite having computers, we still teach kids how to make sums with pen and paper. Students are allowed to use calculators only in contexts where basic arithmetic is not the thing being tested.

Similarly, if the thing being tested is your ability to write an essay, then you should not be using a LLM to do it. You can use a LLM if and when your ability to generate quality text is not the thing being tested.

This isn't old people screaming at the new thing; it's how the fundamental concept of "testing" works. The tools you're allowed to use isn't a problem of what's new versus what's old; it's a problem of what is being tested versus what is not being tested. You can't use a tool that automates the test's target objective.

Also, note that delegating writing to LLMs is a lot more problematic than delegating calculation to computers. There are several good reasons for that, not the least of which is that while a calculator is extremely reliable in its outputs, LLMs are anything but. You need to learn how to write, even if you're going to use a LLM to do it for you, because you'll need to be good enough to be able to verify the LLM's output. I may trust an engineer who can't do long division and just uses a calculator, depending on his/her other skills, but I can't trust a lawyer who can't write and just uses a LLM.

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Here we go again...

>Because I really don't want the government telling me what I can use electricity to do.

I get your position. I really do. I don't like the idea of being told what I can use power for by a committee of people who, even if they were well-intentioned, would be several layers removed from me and can't possibly understand the reasons for the specific usage patterns of every single person. And I don't like the idea of creating that ability and then potentially having it in the hands of a committee of people who are not well-intentioned.

However.

1) Load-shedding is already a thing. It has been a thing since forever. Similarly, differences between pricing for consumer and industrial usage have been a thing since forever. None of this has been really abused by governments, as far as I know. Would you be uncomfortable with legislation that simply makes sure that crypto mining gets considered as industrial usage, with the attendant priority and tariffs? Physical mining can and does get cut off by "the government" (regulator agencies, actually, but nevermind), or taxed differently from tea kettles, and as far as I know nobody has ever considered this an attack on civil liberties.

I mean, if running electrical smelters at home ever became a widespread hobby, I really wouldn't mind attempts to figure out if it can be brought into the same rules as running electrical smelters in a factory. It's still smelting.

2) Crypto mining is not just any hobby. Cryptocurrency has few legitimate uses, and is widely used in support of illegal activity. It's interesting that you bring up Vegas and casinos, because those are exactly the examples I would have made. Gambling is something that you can do as a harmless, fun hobby - but it causes far more harm than good. Because of this, they are activities that are extremely heavily regulated and taxed. This, too, is mostly not considered an attack on civil liberties.

So, the existance of Vegas and casinos actually support the argument that crypto doesn't need to be considered the same thing as Netflix.

3) The idea that, once I pay the tariff, the power is mine to do as I wish, is a typical free-market ethical position - I pay for the thing, the thing is mine, all constraints compensated for. I get it. I have objections to it, but they don't matter right now. What matters is that electricity is not a free market, has never been one, doesn't even vaguely look like one, can't be made to work like one, not even in theory (because of natural monopolies and massive externalities).

IOW, that tariff you pay is the number it is because it has a lot of hidden strings, and assumptions about what you're doing with it. Otherwise, domestic usage would be a horrible mess. It looks like you are free to do whatever with the power you buy only because domestic usage is very predictable, and regulation can handle it by mere statistical means. But if a significant chunk of domestic usage deviates from the means, regulation can, and will, and ethically has to change to handle the new pattern. Again, this is mostly not considered an attack on civil liberties (if only because of the effective illusion of free market we are accustomed to).

The FCC wants to criminalize AI robocall spam

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Fix Caller ID!

This, a thousand times this. DNC lists are unenforceable. Spammers just pop up and vanish too quickly for enforcement agencies to be effective, or they just operate from abroad.

What would really kill the problem is requiring phone service providers to authenticate Caller ID. Legislation on service providers can actually be enforced comparatively easily. Force them to make it so that users' displays get either an authenticated ID, or a marker that tells them it's unauthenticated (e.g. because it's from a foreign country that doesn't enforce this).

Having done that, building and maintaining a spammer blacklist becomes vastly easier, and you can just auto-block all unauthenticated calls.

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

Filippo Silver badge

For maximum clarity:

I strongly agree that we should be doing these things despite ROI.

I weakly agree that Voyager, specifically, is unlikely to have a positive ROI - if we look at easily-quantifiable money value alone.

I strongly disagree, and this is the point I'm trying to make, that just because something "goes on for 10-20 years" or even more, that implies a poor ROI. It implies that the return is a long way off, and highly uncertain, but neither of those adjectives means "low".

Filippo Silver badge

Re: " We do want our society to still be around in a thousand years' time, don't we?"

Correct, but there's a lot of difference between "we can't make a reliable estimate on this" and "we don't care about this". Sure, it does mean that our very-long-term investments can't be very reliable, but smart investors have had the solution to that problem since stock market existed, and it's not "only invest in things you can easily predict". Just diversify. Fund all kinds of different projects. Some will pay off, and cover the rest.

Filippo Silver badge

Re: " We do want our society to still be around in a thousand years' time, don't we?"

>So far as the historical record can show, no society has lasted anything like a thousand years so far.

It depends on what you mean by "society". It's a fuzzy term. These days, I feel I can safely say that it goes beyond "nation". I'm not sure myself of what exactly I meant by it, but the concept I wanted to express was: we seem to focus a lot on GDP, yet all of our GDP plots seem to have "who gives a shit" as value for all points beyond the 50-years marker or so. But, actually, there will still be people well beyond that marker, yes? People who presumably will be better off, possibly a lot better off, if we make wise very-long-term investments right now?

Do we just not give a crap, because they're not us? Makes some selfish sense. But it hardly seems like an optimal strategy for a large group that spans many generations.

>which society out of the many current ones is the preferred one for survival?

I'm... not sure what you mean here. Ideally, I would like all of them to survive, and possibly new ones to emerge. I don't like the idea of societies being in a zero-sum competition. I've no idea why I would give any other impression, was it the "we" and "our"? Honestly, I was basically thinking "the human society".

Filippo Silver badge

>"can we really afford to do all these things that go on for 10 – 20 years? [...]"

Can we afford not to?

Investiments in pure science are things that can pay, and pay big, bigger than anything, but often only decades in the future. Possibly centuries. Electricity has been a useless toy for a very long time.

Such dividends don't happen on the time scale of a human's life, and therefore we ignore them. But they do happen on the time scale of a nation's life. Even more on the time scale of humanity itself.

We keep considering 5-10 years as the longest "long term", and pass on any investment beyond that... that strategy makes sense for people, but isn't it harming the nation's history-scale economic outlook? We do want our society to still be around in a thousand years' time, don't we? 'cause if we do, getting to work now on something that may result in workable asteroid mining, space solar or moon economy a hundred years from now suddenly makes quite a lot of economic sense.

OpenAI's GPT-4 finally meets its match: Scots Gaelic smashes safety guardrails

Filippo Silver badge

The hard truth is that guardrails can only work statistically, that there is no way to make any deterministic guarantees on LLM output like for traditional algorithms, and that it seems unlikely that this will change any time soon (as LLM architecture is fundamentally statistical). People who are trying to shoehorn LLMs into everything would do well to be aware of that.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

Filippo Silver badge

Re: Improvement?

It looks like all of that falls within the "Windows 11 is still supported, and 3.11 is not" case.

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

Filippo Silver badge

Sure, but my impression was that the point of the article is that standardized nuclear could be the answer to the "too expensive" problem, that everything else is just politics, and the author felt optimistic about that. To which I was pointing out that politics is not at all an easy or minor problem, and I feel pessimistic about that.

It's true that the permanently rabid are not very large groups, but it's also unfortunately true that it's easy to get poorly-informed moderates temporarily rabid on this topic. Just spread FUD about the risk and/or costs, or outright lie if you have to, and you can get moderate voters pissed at their parties, maybe nab a bunch of them, even. On the other hand, there's exactly zero a moderate party can do to get any of the extremists on board with this plan. So there's little incentive to get cross-party cooperation.

Filippo Silver badge

>It's the kind of low-risk, low-cost, environmentally positive move that governments can get behind

No, they can't. Not in the current political climate. The environmentalists are mostly anti-nuke to the point where it overrides any other environmental concern, and the populists are mostly pro-fossils and never gave a crap about environmental concerns to begin with. These factions will bleed votes off the opposition moderates if they support you on this, and the opposition moderates know it, so they won't support you either - this is true regardless of whether you're left or right. And you can't do anything with just half the moderates and nobody else.

I'm not saying this dynamic is everywhere, but it's in a lot of countries right now. Enough that I doubt an international consensus can be easily reached. And, of course, if anything at all goes even slightly bad, then anyone whose name is on this is never getting elected to anything ever again, and not even saving the world from carbon will save them.

It might work, but, politically, it's very far from low-risk.

Wait, security courses aren't a requirement to graduate with a computer science degree?

Filippo Silver badge

>"To date, companies have not expressed that security is one of the key factors they evaluate when hiring software developers,"

This is the alpha and omega of the problem.

We don't teach everyone computer security because we, as a society, are still not taking computer security seriously.

I mean, to date, the vast majority of my clients explicitly require my product not to ask for a password. This is industrial automation. The software can direct heavy machinery in physical reality. Let me reiterate: they aren't simply not asking for a password protection feature; they are explicitly asking for such a feature to be disabled, so that anyone in front of the computer - indeed, anyone in front of any of a number of clients around the site, or anyone with access to the local network and some intent - can give commands to the system. Because entering a password is too much of a hassle.

Teaching me how to properly encrypt the passwords that nobody uses is not going to fix the problem.

You know what we really need? Make bedtime stories about cybersecurity. It worked to teach people not to go alone into the woods for millennia, it can work for this.

Top-tier IT talent doesn't stick around in 'mid-market' organizations

Filippo Silver badge

>Astonishingly, two percent of respondents admitted to having no security posture at all.

Only two percent? I find that hard to believe.