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simonh

33,693 karmajoined 16 лет назад
I.T. manager in London working in the finance industry. Husband, father, gamer and geek of the first order.

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1 points·by simonh·2 месяца назад·0 comments

comments

simonh
·3 дня назад·discuss
The whole point of gamepass is that you don't buy the games. If enough people are playing it through gamepass that shows it supports the value of gamepass, if not sure that's a problem.
simonh
·3 дня назад·discuss
They still get usage stats.
simonh
·7 дней назад·discuss
She says she can usefully steer LLMs, but how would she know? What knowledge of the research topic, methods and their applicability would she use to judge that, if all she’s doing is writing a prompt asking ChatGPT to write a summary of her research topic, methods and their applicability?

Supposing using LLMs as research tools is fine, the chalk talk is still necessary to test that the researcher has the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to discriminate usefully between alternative responses, and refine prompts and such. You can’t just get a response from an LLM and then refine it for your specific needs by saying “now refine that reply for my specific needs”. You need to know and understand what those are, and why.
simonh
·9 дней назад·discuss
That is irrelevant for the laptops Asahi currently support or are working on supporting.
simonh
·10 дней назад·discuss
It basically just has to look like macOS in some trivial sense, it doesn't have to be macOS, there are no obstacles. The system is designed specifically to enable booting custom compiled kernels and former members of the Apple team have said booting other OSes was intentionally left open. The company just doesn't make any guarantees about that.
simonh
·10 дней назад·discuss
iBoot firmware exists and is already in our hands.

Any manufacturer could put an eFuse in any of their hardware and lock it. No hardware can be proven not to have such exploits. That's the first point marcan makes in that post.
simonh
·10 дней назад·discuss
I suppose it's possible, after all if the thing can phone home and update itself, that could be spoofed so it updates itself with your code.

However if that phone home feature is read only, it could always just re-root itself.
simonh
·10 дней назад·discuss
>What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project?

How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical.

>Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use?

It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door.

>Wishful thinking if you ask me.

If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?
simonh
·10 дней назад·discuss
purchase /= run
simonh
·10 дней назад·discuss
marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585

For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.

>In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU.

Also these comments are worth considering.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377
simonh
·13 дней назад·discuss
The US navy escorted ships through the strait back in the Iran Iraq war, but the situation has changed. There are naval drones and aerial drones now, the Iranians have access to Russian satellite data, and the US doesn’t have the volume and mix of ship types it had back then. The US navy has been over optimised for deep water peer fleet conflict. Bear in mind, the Red Sea has been functionally closed by the Houthis for years now.
simonh
·13 дней назад·discuss
It would triggering an apocalyptic conflagration deter a bunch of religious fanatics that are actively trying to bring about a prophesied apocalyptic conflagration?
simonh
·13 дней назад·discuss
Bush was a paragon of informed, shrewd judgement compared to this clown show.
simonh
·13 дней назад·discuss
I don’t think that’s it. Iran has demonstrated an ability and willingness to strike the equivalent infra in the gulf states, including the very vulnerable gas liquefaction facilities in Qatar. If the US destroyed their oil infrastructure, all that infrastructure goes. Hormuz would be irrelevant, there’d be almost nothing to ship through it. Plus given the long term reductions in the gulf supply already from damage, the world now needs Iranian oil.

That’s why Trump has allowed Iranian oil already outside the gulf to be sold, was willing to drop oil sanctions on further Iranian shipments, and was so panicked when Israel hit an Iranian oil facility.
simonh
·14 дней назад·discuss
I’m familiar with 40K, I played Laserburn back in the 80s. I met Bryan Ansel before 40K existed.

The comment I replied to equivocated between absolute limits to comprehensibility to humans and sociologically constructed limits, implying that thinking there may be the former makes someone ‘fine with’ the latter. That’s nonsense.
simonh
·14 дней назад·discuss
It’s not a matter of what we want or don’t want, or are fine with. The universe doesn’t owe us explanations. Of course I’d prefer to understand everything, or as much as possible, but we don’t always get what we want.
simonh
·15 дней назад·discuss
He’ll never live it down.
simonh
·15 дней назад·discuss
I worked on Quartz at BAML for 4 years, it was great. I met Kirat Singh once when he visited the UK, he took the basic concept from Goldman to JPM, then to BAML.
simonh
·15 дней назад·discuss
Very much so, I worked on Quartz at BAML for a few years.

The whole idea was actually to use as much existing Open Source technology as possible. Hence Python and it's rich library ecosystem, instead of something home grown like SecDB/Slang. This was supplemented with proprietary infrastructure and libraries only where there was a clear need. For example a Directed Acyclic Graph library to ease migrations from the Excel sheets used by Quants. The distributed object store was pretty neat.

You could code up a basic web service with minimal functionality and have it running in nonprod in an afternoon, and then production the day after. All that boilerplate stuff was super low friction, so you could spend much more of your time on solving the actual problem.
simonh
·18 дней назад·discuss
That’s not how sticker shock works.