Posts by unlocked 20 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Apr 2022
The AI obsession isn't rational from a broader perspective, but that doesn't mean it's part of some grand transhumanist cult. There are some people who believe in that stuff, and then there are a whole bunch of other people who see that every company that does AI stuff seems to be getting a gazillion dollars from investors and want in.
This article tries to mock Altman by replacing "AGI" with other problems like curing cancer and understanding dark matter, and pointing out that public opinion does not determine whether those problems are actually solved. But whereas those are real things, "AGI" is a poorly defined and fundamentally unscientific concept. There is no test you can perform to determine whether an AI system is "AGI." If people agree that a system is "AGI" then it is, by definition. If they don't then it's not, by definition.
A less dishonest way to mock Altman would be to point out that his idea on dedicating AI compute to "work super hard on AI research" so we can build "much better models" is entirely self-serving and has no end, especially if he thinks that people will always adjust their standards to exclude the state of the art from their personal definitions of AGI.
The Facebook app is listening on those ports. Websites not served on localhost are indeed allowed to talk to localhost, and as a developer I am very thankful for it. They are not allowed to read data from localhost without appropriate CORS headers being set, but stuff like a port scan is indeed possible, and poorly written applications hosted locally can be vulnerable to CSRF attacks.
This is not hard. Social media platforms have traditionally allowed you to say basically whatever you want so long as it's not detrimental to other people's ability to use the platform (e.g. spam) and doesn't break certain basic laws (e.g. no actual threats, no CP) or community standards (varies by platform). For example, YouTube and Reddit have a history of defending the speech of their users to a fault, even getting into trouble with governments (and broad swaths of the public) for it. If you want a specific example, you can see the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, a terrorist that YouTube resisted taking down videos of until significant pressure mounted from the US and UK governments in 2010. Twitter pre-Musk also resisted Turkish censorship (2010s), leading to the site getting blocked rather than cave to Erdogan's demands.
I'll admit that western social media is no longer quite as rosy on this point as it once was (for many reasons, some good and some bad), but they're certainly miles better than authoritarian governments.
> "Most people don't realize that a stolen cookie can be just as dangerous as a password, despite being so willing to accept cookies when visiting websites, just to get rid of the prompt at the bottom of the screen."
Not sure why this quote is in the article. The button to accept cookies isn't related to any technical restraint, it's just there for regulatory purposes. Malicious websites can do whatever they want with cookies without the user clicking "Allow All". Of course, none of that is related to cookie stealing anyways, which is typically where external malware running on your device grabs cookies either from memory or (more often) from disk, bypassing the same-origin security rules that browsers impose on websites.
If you don't want to pay then you can have a small reminder in the corner that someone made the software you're using and would like some of your money. Seems like a fair price to me.
Or you can draw a line in the sand and say that if someone else isn't willing to spend a significant amount of their own time and effort for your benefit without even asking for anything in return, you don't want to use their stuff.
Completely fine either way, but I suspect the one you'll be hurting most with that second option is yourself.
Even if it is not currently used as a surveillance tool, it's still probably a good idea for militaries and governments to not install smartphone apps from adversarial countries.
Except in the case of Belarus and Russia, where I personally think they should all install as many foreign apps as they can.
As bad as DEF CON's behavior seems to have been here, it's hard to feel too sympathetic to Entropic when they are quoted as saying
"The specifics of what [DEF CON] requested in January were extremely difficult / almost impossible"
and then decided to take the contract anyways.
I don't think the problem here is a lack of talented young people interested in open source, but rather a lack of being able to find them. A lot of young people hang out online, and interact with other young people who also hang out online. Rather than hoping new maintainers will randomly show up at conferences, the older generation needs to seek out the younger generation where they are. I'm sure there are a bunch of youngsters who would love to learn from older developers and take over big projects, but just have no idea that there's a need.
"and can be an important part of efforts to protect children online."
i.e. from porn, which for some reason they try to pretend minors never had access to before the internet and that any enforcement measures could actually stop minors from viewing it. "Adults only" should only ever be a content warning to push away viewers who don't want to see it.
There is also a `incomingPayment` property which acts as a receipt. Of course, an extension could spoof the response to fetching that, but an extension could also just modify the script in the first place. If your payment system relies on trusting the browser, people can bypass it.
They can afford it because it's being funded by companies who have separate products that will benefit from the open version of enterprise Linux.
There's a reason Microsoft hasn't killed .NET or TypeScript despite both being open source and having no direct revenue, and that reason isn't altruism.
Importantly, those people in California are not, by and large, working for the Chinese government. Highly skilled Chinese people running to the US and other western countries is a real issue China faces and will need to figure out (their insistence on absolute control probably won't help them here). It's certainly possible they'll surge ahead and so we absolutely can't rest on our laurels, but the Chinese government also has a history of getting in their own way when it comes to tech and that doesn't appear to have stopped yet.
They can't revoke licenses on existing code, but as the owners of the code, they are not bound by any licenses, and can freely ignore the copyleft part of AGPLv3 and distribute future code changes under a different, incompatible license. Licenses grant permission to use a creative work to people who wouldn't ordinarily have it; owners don't need any permission to use their own creative work.
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