palordrolap

Whoops. It looks like I conflated it with the more recent 7zip vulnerability, which didn’t affect Linux much at all.

Just goes to show how often these things crop up though.

local administrator privileges

… are used by distro update mechanisms and very few people turn those off, even if they don’t use elevated privileges for anything else.

Admittedly, it’s unlikely that a distro’s repository will end up with a compromised microcode package, but it’s not impossible (Remember the 7zip debacle?). And if it happens, you can be sure that whoever designs the payload will use the temporary access to install something ugly that has more permanent access.

But as you say, AMD have issued a fix. And that’d be why.

Naturally. Advantage, privilege and money should only be in the hands of those who run large companies or better.

If that made you angry, bear in mind that’s what most top level company executives think. Well, actually they don’t think it, they know it unconsciously as the true order of the universe they inhabit and they get really uncomfortable should it even look vaguely like someone might be trying a competing philosophy to their own.

To be fair though, most people get really uncomfortable when something might undermine even part of the philosophy they live by.

Dukat would be proud that the humans in an alternate timeline, where he’s fictional, went and named something after him for all his great deeds.

And then he’d find out why we’re really naming it after him and he’d try every underhanded trick in the book and a handful of new ones in order to find a way into our universe to show us how great he really is.

Just because these AIs are trustworthy doesn’t mean that the next ones will be. It’s always nice to be sure that what is being said is what is claimed to be being said.

A similar situation is when governments not on friendly terms, who each have a different language, each bring their own bilingual translator to the negotiating table, for each to be sure the other translator isn’t hiding something, or misunderstanding something.

It’s unlikely that a single translator would be underhanded (or misunderstood) like that, but everyone feels happier knowing that it’s even less likely with the extra safeguard.

So we’re led to believe.

It would nice to be sure though, wouldn’t it?

The Fediverse is also a sewer of both overt and covert Antisemitism

Is this a problem unique to the Fediverse, or is this a case that it’s more rampant here? Or does it only seem like it?

My feeds are fairly well curated, or perhaps you might say “blinkered”, so I don’t see a lot of it. Or maybe I don’t see what’s right in front of me, which is why I ask, since you definitely see it better than I can.

(This is not an attempt at a bad faith argument; I’m firmly anti-anti-Semitism, and I’m not saying it’s not there. Frankly, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t any. Anywhere there’s people, their prejudices generally follow.)

I can see a lot of smaller companies (and maybe one or two reasonably big ones) opting for air-gapped networks of old operating systems and older versions of Office. A fool’s errand, sure, and for a number of reasons, but it’s cheap, and upper management likes cheap.

Just double-checked with the help manual of the one I use (PasswordSafe) and it looks like it can do it. Never actually tried it though, which is one of the reasons I didn’t mention it previously.

At the risk of sounding like an ad (I’m not affiliated, just a someone who found it in their Linux distro’s package manager), there are versions of it for pretty much any device. I definitely can’t vouch for the feature set(s) of the other versions, though.

You could probably convince a third-party password storage program to store and auto-type details like that. Preferably one that doesn’t need internet access to work.

There’s that bit in an episode of Red Dwarf, that may or may not have been a collective hallucinated memory of the crew, where they talk about a series of mechanoids (servant androids) that were “too human” looking and which unnerved customers.

The result of that was that they made their next series of mechanoids look like Kryten, with the low-poly heads on a similarly angular body.

Even if it was a false memory, the logic is absolutely sound. You want your 'bots to be at the other side of the uncanny valley, not at the bottom, creeping all horror-show-like up the side towards us.

You haven’t watched or read much dystopian fiction (or fact, as below), have you?

My mind always goes to that one scene in Roots where, below decks on the slaver ship, the captured slaves-to-be stage a revolt and resolve to swim to the bank of the river the ship is sailing on. They succeed in reaching the top deck, a masterpiece of planning, only to become dazed both by the daylight as well as the fact there was no riverbank in sight.

Those poor bastards were from inland, had probably never been more than a few miles from their villages. They literally couldn’t conceive of something as large as the Atlantic ocean.

Likewise you’re failing to conceive all the ways that your plans won’t work. You really think you’ll get to someone’s crotch or eyes? And if you do, that you’ll not be overcome and won’t get that opportunity next time?

The only hope is a whole heap of incompetence on behalf of the captor. And in that case you will still not win the fight. Run.

And hope there’s a riverbank nearby or else you’re cooked.

They put you somewhere that you have no communication with the outside world. Now what?

Maybe I should have said “White decides that the pawn retires rather than being promoted to anything.”

They tried to take their own queen. They’re probably going to try something else equally wacky.

Heck, maybe the (player decides that the) pawn stays on the back rank figuratively smashing its head into the wall until a black piece is forced to take it. An interesting, if otherwise illegal, way to gain tempo.

Maybe the (player decides that the) pawn promotes to “10 square radius regicide”. The rules are gone. Anything is possible. The people are free of both kings! Vive la révolution!

Pawns can be promoted to any piece.

I don’t know the exact wording of the rule, so it might be interesting to find loopholes in, but then pawns can’t take their own queen either so we’re not necessarily following the rules.

The pawn might decide to stay a pawn and retire.

not sure what they’re trying to do here

Maximise profits and minimise losses. My guess is that someone important at Microsoft thinks that this will do just that, and if not that, will make them, personally, a lot of money. That person has no-one who will dare challenge their authority and so we go down this road.

They (that individual or Microsoft as a whole) almost certainly have a stake in the companies that provide newer hardware, and if they didn’t before this decision, they will have by now.

It theoretically makes Micosoft’s job easier too. A huge chunk of backwards compatibility maintenance goes out of the window, if you’ll pardon the pun.

“Oh you have 5 year old hardware? We don’t support that.”

Sounds fairly similar to Apple’s business model if you think about it that way.

Current AIs often suffer from what’s sometimes called “the strawberry problem” and can be easily confused into doing mathematics incorrectly. There’s also the human element of “if it comes out of a computer it must be right”, forgetting the “garbage in = garbage out” principle.

The strawberry problem is a colourful name for the fact that LLMs turn sentences into something else internally and can’t then go back and re-examine the input to make checks and comparisons. Thus if you ask an LLM how many 'r’s are in the word “strawberry”, it often gives the wrong answer, unless it has been explicitly told what the right answer is. And now you have no idea what else it has and hasn’t been told is right and wrong.

As for mathematics, they have to be explicitly programmed to be able to use a proper calculator if they’re to do mathematics correctly. Otherwise you’ll get something that looks good enough to fool someone who doesn’t know any better.

LLMs are basically lossy compressions of knowledge. At a high level of abstraction, the creation of an LLM is fairly similar to how a raw image is turned into a JPEG*. There’s a necessary, deliberate bottleneck in the creation process that keeps the size down, and that’s going to show up in the output if you look closely.

Using the output of an LLM is a bit like editing the JPEG rather than the raw image. Some of the things you do will invariably enhance those artefacts.

For a JPEG that’ll do nothing worse than make an image “deep-fried” or otherwise ugly. Put an LLM in charge of people’s lives and it’ll do the same to them.

* JPEG has a lossless encoding variant, but that’s not the right analogy here.

I can imagine that works well. Once.

Typing in a box on a website provided by someone else can be done by practically anyone, even the boss themselves at a pinch. Heck, some of them love doing that.

Maintaining a server (or a service on a server) requires someone with more skills, which generally costs more money.

Yeah, but then they have to pay someone to maintain it. And low though that cost may be, it’s precisely the sort of thing that C-levels like to cut when they feel like pretending that they actually do something.

It’s a hard thing for a C-level’s ego to set something up that they know someone else is going to cut later, or worse that they might be the one to “have to” cut it.