I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.
Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.
There could also be some degree of "(5) bandwagon effect" players, who pump money into an outcome specifically to get people talking about its possibility, thereby increasing its probability of coming into fruition.
> but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts
Haven't we hit that point already with bad faith (and potentially government-run) coordinated editing and voting campaigns, as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out for a while now?
I feel like the section on primality testing with Fermat's test should at least make a shout out to Carmichael numbers and that for some inputs the probability you get a false positive result is 1.
This is so tangentially related to the P vs NP problem that the title is basically pure clickbait. Remove every sentence relating to polynomial anything and the information content of the write-up doesn't change at all.
What's a concrete threat model here? If you're sending data to an ssh server, you already need to trust that it's handling your input responsibly. What's the scenario where it's fine that the client doesn't know if the server is using pastebin for backing up session dumps, but it's problematic that the server tells the client that it's not accepting a certain timing obfuscation technique?
Capping margins at a percentage also directly breeds inefficiencies. If you could spend $10M to fix a problem that costs you $4M/yr, you're effectively paying $10M now to lose $400k in annual profit potential.
It depends on their test dataset. If the test set was written 80% by AI and 20% by humans, a tool that labels every essay as AI-written would have a reported accuracy of 80%. That's why other metrics such as specificity and sensitivity (among many others) are commonly reported as well.
Just speaking in general here -- I don't know what specific phrasing TurnItIn uses.
Only finitely many values of BB can be mathematically determined. Once your Turing Machines become expressive enough to encode your (presumably consistent) proof system, they can begin encoding nonsense of the form "I will halt only after I manage to derive a proof that I won't ever halt", which means that their halting status (and the corresponding Busy Beaver value) fundamentally cannot be proven.
My understanding is that Amazon is not the one printing these cards. Unless they go out of their way to scratch the card off themselves and then cover it back up or create a knockoff, the pack of activation cards they receive are all effectively indistinguishable from Amazon's point of view. They could track which of the various indistinguishable cards was shipped where, but that doesn't help towards determining who was shipped any given code.
The above attack might be a possibility if you're already being actively tracked by the NSA, but at the very least this approach gets you some degree of forward privacy in case the NSA only starts hardcore snooping after the card was already delivered to your door. Whether or not it is a useful degree of privacy is out of my area of expertise.