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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • We rarely prove something correct. In mathematics, logical proofs are a thing, but in astronomy and physics it is moreso the case that we usually have a model that is accurate enough for our predictions, until we find evidence to the contrary, like here, and have an opportunity to learn and improve.

    You really can’t ever prove a lot of things to be correct: you would have to show that no more cases exist that are not covered. But even despite the lack of proven correctness for all cases, these models are useful and provide correct predictions (most of the time), science is constantly on the lookout for cases where the model is wrong or incorrect.


  • Wouldn’t the algorithm that creates these models in the first place fit the bill? Given that it takes a bunch of text data, and manages to organize this in such a fashion that the resulting model can combine knowledge from pieces of text, I would argue so.

    What is understanding knowledge anyways? Wouldn’t humans not fit the bill either, given that for most of our knowledge we do not know why it is the way it is, or even had rules that were - in hindsight - incorrect?

    If a model is more capable of solving a problem than an average human being, isn’t it, in its own way, some form of intelligent? And, to take things to the utter extreme, wouldn’t evolution itself be intelligent, given that it causes intelligent behavior to emerge, for example, viruses adapting to external threats? What about an (iterative) optimization algorithm that finds solutions that no human would be able to find?

    Intellegence has a very clear definition.

    I would disagree, it is probably one of the most hard to define things out there, which has changed greatly with time, and is core to the study of philosophy. Every time a being or thing fits a definition of intelligent, the definition often altered to exclude, as has been done many times.


  • The flute doesn’t make for a good example, as the end user can take it and modify it as they wish, including third party parts.

    If we force it: It would be if the manufacturer made it such that all (even third party) parts for These flutes can only be distributed through their store, and they use this restriction to force any third party to comply with additional requirements.

    The key problem is isn’t including third party parts, it is actively blocking the usage of third party parts, forcing additional rules (which affect existing markets, like payment processors) upon them, making use of control and market dominance to accomplish this.

    The Microsoft case was, in my view, weaker than this case against Apple, but their significant market dominance in the desktop OS market made it such that it was deemed anti-competitive anyways. It probably did not help that web standards suffered greatly when MS was at the helm, and making a competitive compatible browser was nigh impossible: most websites were designed for IE, using IE specific tech, effectively locking users into using IE. Because all users were using IE, developing a website using different tech was effectively useless, as users would, for other websites, end up using IE anyways. As IE was effectively the Windows browser (ignoring the brief period for IE for Mac…), this effectively ensured the Windows dominance too. Note that, without market dominance, websites would not pander specifically to IE, and this specific tie-in would be much less problematic.

    In the end, Google ended IE’s reign by using Google Chrome, advertising it using the Google search engine’s reach. But if Microsoft had locked down the OS, like Apple does, and required everything to go through their ‘app store’. I don’t doubt we would have ended up with a similar browser engine restriction that Apple has, with all browsers being effectively a wrapper around the exact same underlying browser.



  • Yes, true, but that is assuming:

    1. Any potential future improvement solely comes from ingesting more useful data.
    2. That the amount of data produced is not ever increasing (even excluding AI slop).
    3. No (new) techniques that makes it more efficient in terms of data required to train are published or engineered.
    4. No (new) techniques that improve reliability are used, e.g. by specializing it for code auditing specifically.

    What the author of the blogpost has shown is that it can find useful issues even now. If you apply this to a codebase, have a human categorize issues by real / fake, and train the thing to make it more likely to generate real issues and less likely to generate false positives, it could still be improved specifically for this application. That does not require nearly as much data as general improvements.

    While I agree that improvements are not a given, I wouldn’t assume that it could never happen anymore. Despite these companies effectively exhausting all of the text on the internet, currently improvements are still being made left-right-and-center. If the many billions they are spending improve these models such that we have a fancy new tool for ensuring our software is more safe and secure: great! If it ends up being an endless money pit, and nothing ever comes from it, oh well. I’ll just wait-and-see which of the two will be the case.


  • Not quite, though. In the blogpost the pentester notes that it found a similar issue (that he overlooked) that occurred elsewhere, in the logoff handler, which the pentester noted and verified when spitting through a number of the reports it generated. Additionally, the pentester noted that the fix it supplied accounted for (and documented) a issue that it accounted for, that his own suggested fix for the issue was (still) susceptible to. This shows that it could be(come) a new tool that allows us to identify issues that are not found with techniques like fuzzing and can even be overlooked by a pentester actively searching for them, never mind a kernel programmer.

    Now, these models generate a ton of false positives, which make the signal-to-noise ratio still much higher than what would be preferred. But the fact that a language model can locate and identify these issues at all, even if sporadically, is already orders of magnitude more than what I would have expected initially. I would have expected it to only hallucinate issues, not finding anything that is remotely like an actual security issue. Much like the spam the curl project is experiencing.



  • Generally, faster moving traffic necessitates more space between vehicles for a safe stopping distance. Often this distance is specified in seconds as to account for this speed. Road capacity is hence barely affected by changes in speed, only your travel time, if you can get on the road, is. [1]

    Moreover, in a city with many intersections, the bottleneck is usually the intersections themselves, not the roads. Higher speeds just causes you to get to the next intersection faster, but may not improve the capacity of an intersection, reducing the travel time gains of a higher speed limit. [2]

    To the contrary, the potential increase in travel time for cars could make alternatives to driving more attractive, reducing congestion instead. Furthermore, accidents tend to block roads, also causing congestion. Fewer accidents means less congestion.


  • Polars has essentially replaced Pandas for me. It is MUCH faster (in part due to lazy queries) and uses much less RAM, especially if the query can be streamed. While syntax takes a bit of getting used to at first, it allows me to specify a lot more without having to resort to apply with custom Python functions.

    My biggest gripe is that the error messages are significantly less readable due to the high amount of noise: the stacktrace into the query executor does not help with locating my logic error, stringified query does not tell me where in the query things went wrong…


  • The key point that is being made is that it you are doing de facto copyright infringement of plagiarism by creating a copy, it shouldn’t matter whether that copy was made though copy paste, re-compressing the same image, or by using AI model. The product being the copy paste operation, the image editor or the AI model here, not the (copyrighted) image itself. You can still sell computers with copy paste (despite some attempts from large copyright holders with DRM), and you can still sell image editors.

    However, unlike copy paste and the image editor, the AI model could memorize and emit training data, without the input data implying the copyrighted work. (exclude the case where the image was provided itself, or a highly detailed description describing the work was provided, as in this case it would clearly be the user that is at fault, and intending for this to happen)

    At the same time, it should be noted that exact replication of training data isn’t exactly desirable in any case, and online services for image generation could include a image similarity check against training data, and many probably do this already.


  • Republicans however also: deport people with a legal right to be in the country, including citizens, without due process. Want to destroy all progress made on issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community. Wish to reduce women’s rights, some including voting rights. Want to abolish the separation between church and state.

    Even if there is a close resemblance between the two parties on Gaza, but there are plenty of other issues where they are still incomparable, and ignoring these differences and calling both parties equally bad does not help.