Posts by Michael Wojcik

Re: often ?

It was only observed once per site, per OP's description. To observe it often, you have to find a number of sites where it hasn't happened yet, and wait.

Re: ‘Antimatter’ is just matter with opposite spin.

In general, using any term in the general sense generally leads to general misunderstanding.

Re: Now what am I going to do with it?

Time for an update to the Reg Standards Soviet.

True, because three is a number. The advantages that iFixit cite are:

1. It's lighter. Maybe this translates to an overall savings on air freight as someone claimed in an earlier thread, but since it adds to manufacturing cost and that savings could easily be absorbed in the price of this Veblen good I find that a bit dubious. And I don't believe that it makes much difference to anyone's purchasing decision either, because I strongly suspect smartphone buyers are primarily motivated by OS loyalty and other subjective factors.

2. It's harder. Very useful for people who accidentally put their phone in a drill press. Upside down.

3. It has a lower moment of inertia. The iFixit page gets this from someone named Drang and calls it an "interesting theory". I call it true but irrelevant. Again, I don't see any way a small change in moment of inertia, of all things, is going to have any significant effect on sales. "Well, I was going to buy a Samsung, but twisting this iPhone around is much easier on my wrist!"

In short: bullshit. The titanium case is a marketing gimmick.

Have you met iPhone fans?

Re: While I'm all for it

I'd love to see the downvoter explain their reaction to this. Project 2025 is a published proposal from the Heritage Foundation, and a long list of the usual suspects have signed onto it. It explicitly calls for a massive increase in the President's power under the unitary executive theory¹ and for replacing a vast number of key positions in the executive branch with gutless cronies. (I don't think the report actually uses the phrase "gutless cronies", but it's like a thousand pages of dreadful prose and I'm not going to wade through all of it.)

It is explicitly a plan to institute an authoritarian Federal government, from a major conservative think tank. OP's description is factually correct.

A number of conservative commentators have criticized P2025 on various grounds, but not as many as have endorsed it.

¹And, yes, I'm well aware that Obama was also a fan of the UET. It's equal-opportunity authoritarianism.

Well, where "the same issues" means "timing side channels". Kario's blog post and related materials are worth reading in full, if you're interested in cryptography, and his point that we need to pay more attention to timing side-channel attacks in general, and not just for RSA, is well taken. But at the moment there's no published timing-channel attack similar to Marvin against other asymmetric-key ciphers, or even (IIRC) against RSA with OAEP.

Another key takeaway from Marvin, by the way, is this sentence from Kario's FAQ: "In other words, we got results because we were thorough, not because we used novel techniques." In particular, his team tested across the entire TLS handshake, and they gathered a lot of data, and they used better statistical tests that did not rely on assumptions which are invalid in practice in this case. (More details available on Kario's page and in the paper.)

Re: Add random delay to error responses ?

What's the antecedent of "this"? RSA with PKCS#1 v1.5 padding?

I know some people who are not in the industry who care what browser they're running. Or is "ordinary user" helpfully defined as anyone who meets your criterion of not caring?

Chrome? Firefox? Are you both mad? [a fight breaks out]

(I'm using Pale Moon where possible, Vivaldi where I have to have a Chromium browser, and Edge for a couple of extra-terrible work things that don't even work under Vivaldi.)

Someone call Pike and Weinberger.

Re: Deja vu, all over again...

Better yet, the intersection of the set of standards supported by fairly-modern browsers with the set of ones you have a real, demonstrable need for.

The vast majority of websites don't even need scripting. They might use scripting to offer additional features or "improve user experience", but they ought to degrade gracefully in the absence of scripting. It's Not That Hard. (I wrote my first website in 1993, and I've taught web application design. I can quote C&V for HTTP, HTML, CSS, and ECMAScript standards from HTTP 0.9 through HTTP/2, and HTML up through HTML 5 circa 2017, when I stopped following web standards so closely. I am not in any way convinced by arguments about how "modern" websites have to use every damn tool in the box.)

SPAs/RIAs are a different story, but there are very few websites that need to be or should be implemented as SPAs. And while there are certainly advantages to using the browser as a rendering engine, the craze for making every application an SPA (due in part to revenge effects from policies set by smartphone OS vendors) has gone much too far. Electron-hosted monstrosities like MS Teams are a case in point.

Re: LLM/ML processes

These arguments would be a lot more persuasive if they rested on anything stronger than "I don't know what intelligence is, but I know what I like".

Show me that your "reasoning" is something qualitatively different from "statistics".

It's possible to make actual arguments. Turing, Searle, and Penrose all have, arriving at different conclusions (which isn't surprising, since they were working in different philosophical frameworks). Turing's is pragmatic; Searle's is essentially plain-language; Penrose's is ... well, Penrose (and, to my thinking, the weakest of the three, as it's ultimately grounded in a very dubious thesis).

But just throwing out a bunch of terms (in scare quotes, no less) without defining them, much less explaining why they're necessary conditions for cognition (or whatever you're trying to pose as the barrier to "intelligence") and how they're not satisfied by a particular system, is not an argument.

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

Language - words - is/are the means by which we apply symbolic labels to the real world in order to build and manipulate ideas about them. They are not intrinsic to an internal model of the external world. But words are al LLMs have. They do not have the physicality to react with the physical world.

This might be a more persuasive argument if it didn't depend on a host of problems that are still extensively debated by philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.

For one thing, it's by no means certain that our type of cognition necessarily depends on our (heavily mediated) interaction with the physical world.

I agree that the popular claims being made about the current crop of LLMs are greatly exaggerated, and my personal P(GAI) for the near future is pretty damn low. But assuming there is a fundamental barrier to the current approach achieving GAI is a very risky bet, founded on the shakiest of assumptions.

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

what the LLM models are trying to do, all be it in a limited and one dimensional way

For most of the popular LLMs, it's not even one-dimensional – more like 0.5-dimensional, since they're unidirectional (autoregressive) transformers. The BERT family are bidirectional.

Phenomenology suggests that human cognition is heavily bidirectional, where the future states are either known (because attention is focused on a past state) or hypothesized (because our cognition seems to make extensive use of imagining possible futures and counterfactuals). That said, I wouldn't care to guess with any significant confidence whether bidirectionality is necessary or just useful for human-type cognition, or whether it's necessary for something that might be labeled sapient by consensus among most expert observers.

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

As such the algorithms have no 'world model'

That's a dubious conclusion. There's good reason to support the thesis that a sufficiently-complex natural-language model forms an inherent world model by proxy, through the relationships among the signifiers.

Human ideation has no direct connection to the material world either; it's all mediated by senses and cognition. I've yet to see any convincing (or even reasonably well-supported) argument for a qualitative difference between human mental models and sufficiently-large ANN stacks. ANN stacks are quantitatively smaller and much, much less efficient; but that doesn't prove they can't, at the limit, perform the same operations that the human CNS does.

Re: tendency to generate false information – a phenomenon known as "hallucination."

They also know which is which.

I'd just like to point out that a great many people dispense incorrect information with no idea that it's incorrect.

This is not intended as a defense of LLMs. Machine-generated rubbish is not an improvement on human-generated rubbish.

Re: "Who's responsible for the hallucinations?"

If a company builds a false-facts-spewing tool and makes it available, the company is responsible for the fallout.

It's a nice idea, but the law, alas, takes little notice of nice ideas. Things are likely to get much more complicated under litigation.

Re: Just a nice site to browse...

Checking that site is one of the highlights of my day, to be perfectly honest. Not the only highlight, but whenever I see Molly's posted a new piece or two it brings a smile to my face.

I feel a bit guilty about not being sadder about the tremendous waste of resources – energy, capital, inventiveness – being wasted on cryptocurrency and DeFi and the like, and about how it's used to enable criminal proceeds and bring hard currency to North Korea and so forth. But I can't help chuckling at Every. Damn. Story.

(It's much the same with cryptocurrency research. I think blockchain is a Merkle Tree for babies, and cryptocurrency is an abysmal idea. But I've read a bunch of really fascinating papers about this area. Stupid in practice, intriguing in theory. It's the theology of computer science.)

Re: a revolutionary new model for ownership

It's a weird concept of "revolutionary", since getting people to pay for nothing is hardly new.

Of course there were a number of savvy folks who hot-potatoed them and sold them on as soon as the price went up (or perhaps even, as you suggest, sold them at a nominal loss to launder ill-gotten gains, though I'd be shocked – shocked – to hear such a thing was done by any member of the upstanding Trump family).

And there were a whole bunch more people who took the expedient route of stealing NFTs from poorly-secured wallets and immediately selling them on, then tumbling the cryptocurrency proceeds, and cashing out as much as they could. That's, like, one out of three stories on Web 3 is Going Just Great. So it's not like NFTs don't have any uses.

Re: “Now”?

At least Beanie Babies you could throw at people. Hell, with enough of 'em, you could make a bean-bag chair. Can't do that with BAYCs.

Re: Shocked

"I've been disappointed in get-rich-quick schemes before, but here's a scheme that will get me rich, and quickly!"

Re: 95% of NFTs now totally worthless

The same way other collectibles with little or no use-value get elevated exchange-value. The information on baseball cards, for example, is readily available elsewhere; it's hard to see what use-value they have, unless you use one as a coaster or to make a sound effect for your bicycle. Their value is all in exchange.

Same thing with, say, collecting stamps (particularly canceled ones, or others that couldn't be used for postage).

That doesn't make NFTs not stupid, of course. At least with baseball cards and stamps there used to be, and presumably still is, a pretty large community of collectors, and there were social events like sales and swap meets organized around collecting; and they're physical objects so you can perform physical activities with them such as putting them into albums. NFTs lack even those virtues.

Re: So the Decision makers get the shaft

Karma is a bitch !!!!!!

Counterpoint: Karma is my boyfriend [Swift 2022].

Re: PART 1625—AGE DISCRIMINATION IN EMPLOYMENT ACT

Fortunately, Kevin Underhill has written a classic article which explains everything you need to know about the difference between civil- and common-law systems, "Way Less Than You Need to Know About the Civil- and Common-Law Systems".

At least regarding bee swarms.

Re: It's time to help IBM

Some people associate IBM with, y'know, mainframe systems in the S/360 lineage. That is still very much an IBM business. Kind of odd for a Reg reader to forget that one.

They also have this goofy OS called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" that I gather some folks use.

Well, yes, that's essentially what the doctor wrote in the post you're responding to.

Of course, even if fines were levied against the C-suite-sitters personally, they're likely indemnified by the corporation, and it probably backs that with an insurance policy. At least in the US. (We sometimes see that in academia when, for example, a dean is a defendant in an employment-rights case and loses; the school, or its insurer, ends up picking up the tab.) So the court would have to order that contractual provision vacated, and that would get appealed and quite possibly overturned – and perhaps the entire lower-court decision, or at least penalty phase, with it.

In America executives of major corporations have a lot of power and freedom to abuse it. Sometimes they overstep – Elizabeth Holmes, Ken Lay, Bernard Ebbers are examples. But most of them get by unscathed.

Or, if they've proven themselves really incompetent, into corporate-officer sinecures like board seats and fluff positions in industry lobbying groups. Look at where Apotheker is today.

Re: HR...

get rid of the old iron and nobody is writing new code for it

Oh, they most certainly are writing new code for z systems. Supporting that effort is a substantial chunk of our mainframe-offload business.

Re: That's Phillips screwed then.....

That would be nice.

I'm not particularly fond of USB-C – mechanically it's not much more robust than earlier USB variants, particularly not compared to e.g. dead-simple barrel connector, and bad parts are a concern. (Knowledgeable consumers may make an effort to avoid those, but if we have to rely on knowledgeable consumers, we might as well give up now.) But at least if everyone's using it for everything, that makes charging much easier for consumers.