rook

Thanks. Not as many interesting details as I’d hoped. The comments are great though… today I learned that the 2008 crash was entirely the fault of the government who engineered it to steal everyone’s money, and the poor banks were unfairly maligned because some of them had Jewish names, but the same crash definitely couldn’t happen today because the stifling regulatory framework stops it? And bubbles don’t exist anymore? I guess I just don’t have the brains (or wsj subscription) for high finance.

Might be something interesting here, assuming you can get past th paywall (which I currently can’t): https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/abs-crashed-the-economy-in-2008-now-theyre-back-and-bigger-than-ever-973d5d24

Today’s magic economy-ending words are “data centre asset-backed securities” :

Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better...Data-center bonds are backed by lease payments from companies that rent out computing capacity

I always liked “bleat” myself, with its slightly mocking overtones, but it never took off.

There’s a grand old tradition in enlightened skeptical nerd culture of hating on psychologists, because it’s all just so much bullshit and lousy statistics and unreproducible nonsense and all the rest, and…

If you train the Al to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it's got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil.

…was it all just projection? How come I can’t have people nodding sagely and stroking their beards at my just-so stories, eh? How come it’s just shitty second rate sci-fi when I say it? Hmm? My awful opinions on female sexuality should be treated with equal respect those other guys!

I wouldn’t say that modern computer programming is that hot either. On the other hand, I can absolutely see “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” being enthusiastically applied to genetic engineering products. Silicon Valley brought us “move fast and break things”, and now you can apply it to your children, too!

He’s right that current quantum computers are physics experiments, not actual computers, and that people concentrate too much on exotic threats, but he goes a bit off the rails after that.

Current post quantum crypto work is a hedge, because no-one who might face actual physical or financial or military risks is prepared to say that there will be no device in 10-20 years time that can crack eg. an ECDH key exchange in the blink of an eye. You’ve got to start work on PQC now, because you want to be able subject it to a lot of classical cryptanalysis work because quantum-resistant is no good by itself (see also, SIKE which turned out to be trivially crackable).

The attempt to project factorising capabilities of future quantum computers is pretty stupid because there’s too little data to work with, so the capabilities and limitations of future devices can’t usefully be guessed at yet. Personally, I’d expect them to remain physics experiments for at least another 5-10 years, but once a bunch of current issues are resolved you’ll see rapid growth in practical devices by which time it is a bit late to start casting around for replacement crypto systems.

The thing that currently cannot be worked around is the “play integrity api”, but relatively few applications make use of it yet.

It is a terrible security measure (because it give the impression to app developers that a 5+ year old android installation that’s never had a patch is more secure than an up-to-date graphene install) so there’s a chance that it might be improved in future, but it is currently a looming problem.

Graphene is very nice, but you should be aware that:

• the only supported hardware at present are pixel phones by google who are not the world’s most ethical company
• google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working

which can be used in many very useful ways, including saving life and reducing the work needed to fulfill the needs of a population

Uh huh. “Can” needs an asterisk and some disclaimers there. And probably “useful”, too.

Encouraging news: Thompson Reuters has won a copyright case against defunct AI firm Ross Intelligence, with the judge ruling that training your ai on copyrighted works is not fair use. I’m interested to see where this goes next.

https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/

An entertaining bit of pushback against the various bathroom bills being pushed at the moment. Bonus points for linking it with ai training. I feel like this is an idea that’s very adaptable…

https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/113983951020093710

Signs which have been adhered to bathroom stall interiors at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.

SECURITY NOTICE Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (Al) in lieu of traditional genital inspections. At this time, images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process. Your participation in this program is voluntary. You have the right to request removal of your data by calling the EGV program office at (512) 463-0001 during normal operating hours (Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM). STE OP CRATMENT OA Pusi DFW DALLAS FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

The contact number appears to be for Dan Patrick, the lt. governor of Texas.

In a hilarious turn of events that no one could have foreseen, Anthropic is having problems with people sending llm generated job applications, and is asking potential candidates to please not use ai.

While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree.

https://www.404media.co/anthropic-claude-job-application-ai-assistants/