LLMs certainly make it more feasible to rewrite a product in a memory-safe language, eliminating a whole class of bugs.
Flawless software is hard for an LLM to write, because all the programs they have been trained on are flawed as well.
As a fun exercise, you could give a coding agent a hunk of non-trivial software (such as the Linux kernel, or postgresql, or whatever), and tell it over and over again: find a flaw in this, fix it. I'm pretty sure it won't ever tell you "now it's perfect" (and do this reproducibly).
Have you ever met a security engineer? I’ve never met one who was also a good engineer (not saying they don’t exist, I just haven’t met one). Do they find vulnerabilities? Sure. Could they write the tools they use to find vulnerabilities, most probably not.
The CVEs here have their fair share of silly C problems, but also more rigid input validation and handling. These more rigid validations exclude stuff which may even be valid by the spec, but entirely problematic in practice.
As examples, take a look how many valid XML documents are practically considered unsafe and not parsed, for example due to recursive entity expansion. This renders the parsers not flawless and in fact not in spec.
Or, my favorite bait - there should be a maximum length limit on passwords. Why would you ever need a kilobyte sized password?
Just because something is good at finding bugs, it may not find all the bugs. Finding a bug only tells you there was one bug you found, it doesn't tell if the rest is solid.
It's possible, in the short term, but eventually the only oil flowing thru the Strait of Hormuz will be Iranian oil, and perhaps not even that. Give countries enough time and they'll rather invest in building a way around Iran than giving them money for passage thru international waters.
Well even today you have the UAE and Qatar warning them not to do this. It’s likely to me that the fighting won’t stop until the situation is different, even if the US were to pull out today.
Pretty much agree. Nature will fix the climate, after it eliminates (a large number of) the humans that are causing the problem. That's really the only way.
The defeatist mindsets expressed in these comments seem more like a way to shed any sort of personal accountability for participating in a solution that doesn't kill billions of people than a reflection of reality.
There are, but none that will be accepted. Will you give up your car, your air condititioning, your AI agents, your uber eats, your year-round fresh produce at the supermarket, meat as a regular part of your diet, all the imported stuff you are accustomed to having?
As a family:
- We don’t use Uber Eats
- We don’t fly
- We bike in the city (long tail bikes to carry the kids)
- We don’t use A/C (and resist so far installing it) and try to do some passive ventilation, shading to limit the house getting to hot in the summer (it’s gets sometimes around 42 C where we live)
- We try to eat local food
here's a thought experiment but it's really more of a personality test of fantasy vs reality
let's say they somehow make fusion happen next decade
so with "unlimited" "free" power do you think there will be
A - more peace
B - more war
To me it's pretty obvious.
When I was a teenager I hoped for a Star Trek future
But after the past decade especially, I realize that will never happen, that people will support suppressing and murdering thousands, millions of innocent people to feel a fake sense of satisfaction
The same reason that fake religion persists is the same reason why the human made part of climate change will never be solved
We will never, ever see a reduction in the amount of energy that humanity uses. The population might dip slightly from climate change (highly unlikely actually), but that won’t be what solves climate change. Clean energy is the solution, and it’s already happening.
This is a cold-hearted way to think about it. The countless people who will suffer are not the ones causing the problem. The problem is caused by the billionaires willing to sacrifice human life and the environment for profit. They actively sow climate skepticism and encourage defunding of climate research to protect their bottom line. When extreme weather events kill millions, those billionaires will be safe in their bunkers. We can’t just condemn millions or even billions to death without trying to do anything about it.
Kings have always sacrificed the common folk for their own benefit. This is also the way of human society. The experience of our own current lifetimes is quite the exception.
At least in the US, many people have to drive because US metropolitan areas are car-centric and lack public transit. This, in turn, is a direct result of lobbying by powerful companies like oil producers and automobile manufacturers.
As for your point about reducing consumption, there has been a deliberate effort by billionaire-controlled corporations to increase consumption. This has been done through a variety of methods, including limiting repairability, deliberate planned obsolescence through things like fast fashion and equipment designed to break down, and psychological manipulation to encourage consumption. Small ‘d’ democratic efforts to limit these techniques have been defeated by powerful lobbies backed by these billionaires.
Billionaires aren’t just responsible for consumption-driven climate change, they’re also responsible for subverting the democratic processes that could have reversed it at large scales.
The car-centrism of the USA is IMO because people like the convenience of being able to go where they want, when they want, and not waiting for a bus that will take an indirect route and twice the time. People also like living in their own house with a fenced back yard and not having neighbors on the other side of the wall/ceiling/floor. This means we're more spread out (we have lots of land) and mass transit is less practical.
In dense urban areas we do have good mass transit and it's relatively more common for people to not own a car.
At the end of the day it’s bullets fired from rifles, mortars, artillery shells, cruise ship missiles, etc. that are killing people in war.
If the executive branch of the government is commanding the military, and generals are commanding the military, they’re killing people with the help of tens of thousands of soldiers.
He just told you, he used cloudflare WARP. It's a "VPN" along the lines of NordVPN et al, but by cloudflare, so it gets special treatment by cloudflare's walled garden enforcement system.
I’m guessing it’s all the same effect as CGNAT exit IPs. You need to get big enough to be unblockable. That’s why everyone is trying to get in on the VPN game.
This new reCAPTCHA setup is probably a good indicator that big tech wants to shift to verified access only. Personally, I’m just going to quit spending money via the internet and go back to piracy + retail stores with a physical location.
It's not yet easy to buy BYD vehicles in Canada either. The first quota of 49,000 vehicles was only recently announced, and that's to be shared across all Chinese vendors.
Provided they are available in Canada. There’s only roughly 50k imports in the first year and that will be split across all Chinese manufactured EVs (not necessarily Chinese brands). I assume the majority will be Teslas from their Shanghai factory.
Those are impressive! It's worth noting that the photographic technology had advanced considerably between 1848 and 1906.
The exposure time of these kite photographs must have been quite short, given the obvious instability of the platform. They're very detailed, nonetheless.
imagine the President of the US and his "braintrust" accidentally making the world much more green and efficient by forcing a radical reduction in oil dependency
while they purposely end climate-change research including destroying billions in observation satellites by deorbiting them
the history written about this decade is going to be wild, if we survive it
EU severely reducing its fossil fuel imports from Russia in 2022 cut down natural gas usage by 17% and overall energy consumption by 3%. So yeah, increased price due to scarcity help a lot in shifting around the energy mix.
It's a bit shit that hits poorer people relatively more than richer people. Governments can reduce this impact by subsidizing sustainable alternatives (like heat pumps). It's still leading to inequality (unless you give more subsidy to the poor), but at least overall people will hopefully benefit.
why can't machine-learning write a product from scratch that is flawless?
reply