TallGuyShort

vor 9 Tagendiscuss

Yes, and that's not what people are reporting flaws in. The reports are "this daemon accepts arbitrary code and then runs it!"

TallGuyShort

vor 13 Tagendiscuss

This is common in the hype era of AI models that can look for security bugs. An open-source project I used to work on that is basically "distributed code execution as a service" keeps getting reports that the job submission function is a vulnerability. The reporters don't even understand what the project does.

TallGuyShort

vor 14 Tagendiscuss

Okay but why did this chip have anything to do with that?

TallGuyShort

vor 15 Tagendiscuss

I really can't see where the 0.7nm is coming from. The white line looks like it's just an edge of a feature that is "15 rows of silicon atoms", which by some quick arithmetic on Wolfram Alpha has to be AT LEAST ~1.6nm, and the way the rows of atoms appear to be packed in that image and by the provided scale, it seems to be significantly more. Using the white line as a meaningful measurement seems to me to be more misleading than any other interpretation here.

TallGuyShort

vor 16 Tagendiscuss

1 picometer = 0.001 nanometers, 0.01 angstrom

1 angstrom = 0.1 nanometers, 100 picometers

1 nanometer = 10 angstroms, 1000 picometers

TallGuyShort

vor 16 Tagendiscuss

I always feel like I'm not quite getting quantum stuff no matter how much I read and learn: what does this advancement have to do with quantum computers?

TallGuyShort

vor 16 Tagendiscuss

I disagree - there's already a reproducibility crises in the literature of many fields. And medical adjacent-field like nutrition science are among the worst. I think the trends in our culture of people going against medical professionals and "doing their own research" (poorly, and from poor sources) is a net harm on society, and things like the reproducibility crisis and genuinely misleading studies described in the article only serve to harm and dilute the legitimate work done in the field and feed into that cycle. If even "research" by qualified professionals is actually allowed to be garbage by the responsible institutions, we truly are doomed.. It does no good to do discovery if you can't refine or even validate those discoveries.

TallGuyShort

vor 16 Tagendiscuss

I was having a conversation with someone about AI taking over medical jobs the other day, and one of the things that came out of my thoughts about it is related:

It obviously has flaws, and we should never stop trying to improve it, but I think AI can be a great way to help connect a bunch of information they have to a bunch of information they don't, or to help spot patterns and potential avenues that they happened to miss. And obviously you want to be careful about becoming over-reliant on it, or being too trusting when it can be wrong. But I think we've been at the point for a long time where a doctor using a search engine to find medical literature should be a very reasonable thing to do, and I think AI can at least be an incremental (but massive) improvement on that workflow.

But I hope the end result of that is that doctors can not only deliver better (and maybe better-informed and more open-minded) treatment, but can spend the time focusing on patient care, managing expectations / risk management around uncertainty, managing the emotions inherent in someone who may be losing their life or the lives of their loved ones. Those are things AI is definitely not well-equipped to do as you point out.

TallGuyShort

vor 29 Tagendiscuss

"Use your brain before you use mine"

TallGuyShort

letzten Monatdiscuss

    $ login -n root
    Login incorrect
    login: backdoor
    No home directory specified in password file!
    Logging in with home=/
    #

I don't agree with the interpretation that Sam tried and failed to login as root, and THEN tried to login as a different user, backdoor. Because if that's what happened, shouldn't there be another $ prompt before he types `backdoor` and gets the #? It seems to me that's an unobfuscated password field and `backdoor` is the password.

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I used FreeBSD on a laptop 2008-2010 and it was usable, other than needing a USB Wifi adapter. Definitely not as usable as Linux, but I was able to do 18 credit hours per semester. Quite a lot more than 10 minutes a day.

Notably, you and I aren't FreeBSD Foundation Executive Directors.

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County.

Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Sorry, what is AD in this context?

edit: oh, automatic differentiation?

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

The morality of it aside, Palantir is probably a much safer investment bet than most others in the AI space. They're older and more established than a new startup picking up the steepness of the hype curve with a half-baked idea, but they're also newer and more agile than an aging tech giant that suffers from the innovator's dilemma and a ton of bloat. They have a strong reputation among their target market and they've been building a sound business and a lot of tooling and infrastructure on Big Data and machine learning for well over a decade.

I would feel icky investing in them but any comparison to junk bonds would be the last of my concerns.

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Actually every time I've seen something like what I've described above it pre-dated that person's current employment.

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

> What I find strange about this is that in 2020 nobody would be this openly cynical and selfish about, say, good Python idioms, a useful emacs configuration, git shortcuts, etc.

I definitely saw people have concerns about vimrc files and their personal library of shell scripts well before 2020, and I've seen people early in their career get burned by sharing it too. They had a tool that made them productive, it got out of their hands, and suddenly they're getting negative feedback from someone who tried using it and it didn't meet their expectations, or it got checked into the repository and now the script they used at their last job too has their current job's copyright notice and license on it, and they're perceived as being petty for trying to claw back their own intellectual property because they didn't go to the trouble of slapping legalese all over their personal tools.

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I tend to agree with you - a rising tide lifts all boats and I want my team to be a rising tide. If I'm at a startup and I'm confident my tool is a good fit for what the rest of the team is doing and there's a genuine teamwork dynamic, oh absolutely I share things like this.

But when I've been stuck for a while in a dysfunctional team, I've definitely seen the flip side where other people will find ways to take a lot of credit for minor iterations on my work, where management will reward my productivity with high expectations and high pressure to continue the trajectory they perceive in a single idea, and when the tool becomes a support burden because too many people think it should solve all of their other problems too and I'm now perceived as being the owner of this thing they depend on.

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I used a state (Colorado) healthcare marketplace website when I was going to take a break between jobs for a couple of months, and I feel very violated by the whole process. I entered a bunch of information to the website, knowing that the data could be expected to be shared for quotes, but I got no quote. The information didn't just flow between systems, it was just sent directly to a bunch of individuals. Instead of getting anything useful from the website, I just got told that agents would contact me, and then literally hundreds of agents were calling and texting me at all hours of the day and night for weeks. I asked one of them how to get it to stop and they said it was impossible during the government shutdown.

TallGuyShort

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I can honestly say one of my most productive moments ever was when a design came to me in a dream... And who among us hasn't figured out a bug in the shower after taking a break? Getting good sleep is essential to actually being productive in many endeavors for a few reasons.

TallGuyShort

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Too many people think they know better. You're not allowed to think you know better unless you're able to put yourself in the position to be the one to write the directions.

You know how many conversations I have with people who are mad about a problem, and I tell them that's the reason we have a policy they didn't follow, and then they say they should tell people that that's the reason for the policy, and then I tell them they do explain it, right where the policy is written. Oh my God, you didn't read the policies before you did this, did you!? What else did you miss!?

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