The claim that you need to disable JavaScript to be secure is bullshit anyway, otherwise disabling JavaScript would be standard practice in any security-critical environment such as high-level government offices, which it most certainly isn’t.

You’re asking why people are being “dramatic” about an automated system that can do what highly specialized experts get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do?

It’s just fascinating to see how AI’s accomplishments are being systematically downplayed. I guess when an AI proves that P!=NP, I’m going to read on this forum “so what, mathematicians prove conjectures all the time, and also, we pretty much always knew this was true anyway”.

I am sceptical because AI companies, and anthropic in particular, like to overplay their achievements and build undeserved hype. I also don't understand all the caveats (maybe official announcement is more clear what this really means).

But yeah, if their model can reliably write an exploit for novel bugs (starting from a crash, not a vulnerable line of code) then it's very significant. I guess we'll see, right?

edit: Actually the original post IS dramatic: "Has Mythos just broken the deal that kept the internet safe? For nearly 20 years the deal has been simple: you click a link, arbitrary code runs on your device, and a stack of sandboxes keeps that code from doing anything nasty". Browser exploits have existed before, and this capability helps defenders as much as it helps attackers, it's not like JS is going anywhere.

The interesting thing is that within a year we will know whether it is vapid hype or a momentous change.

Scepticism means staying wary and keeping one's mind open, and not closing your eyes to a new reality.

It would be warranted if Mythos could jailbreak an up-to-date iPhone. (Maybe it can?) That would actually also be nice, “please rewrite without Liquid Glass”.

> I guess when an AI proves that P!=NP,

What would be the practical impacts of this discovery?

(Assuming you mean P==NP)

Would it become crackable, or just theoretically crackable?

E.g. it's one thing to show it's possible to fly to Mars, it's another thing to actually do it.

Not really:

* It's possible - very likely even - that even if somehow P=NP, the fastest algorithm for any NP problem turns out to be something like n^1000, which is technically P, but not practical in any way.

* The proof may not be constructive, so we may just know that P=NP but it won't help us actually create an algorithm in P (nitpick: technically if P=NP there's a construction to create an algorithm that solves any NP problem in P time, but it's extremely slow - for example it involves iterating over all possible programs).

I think you read it backwards - that's a possible consequence of P==NP, not P!=NP.

Yes, I meant the equality.

We already operate on the assumption that P ≠ NP, so little would change if that were proved.

Isn’t it the opposite?

About 15 years ago, I saw on the news in Europe that 8 students had been shot at some random high school in a random US state.

Having been conditioned by my environment to perceive such events as important, I turned to my friend and said “Man, 8 students were shot at a high school in the States!”

He asked me “What am I supposed to do with that information?” That response changed my life.

How did it change your life?

It made me realize that “important events” are meaningless empathy theater, with the goal of desensitizing people until they care more about random folks dying on the other side of the planet than about the person sitting next to them on the bench.

So, of course, after that "realization", now you do care about the person sitting next to you on the bench?

It’s almost theater to care… the car accident rate is mass slaughter on a scale that dwarfs every school shooting on the planet yet nobody gives two shits. A lot of it is posing.

>“What am I supposed to do with that information?”

...Feel some sorrow? Think a bit about what could cause such a thing? Because one day, it may happen at your kid's school... And it may be your own kid.

An absence of both empathy and curiosity aren't exactly a response to be proud of. An unconscious life. The kind that leads to, one day, spouting the standard response: "I never imagined it could happen to me".

Sorrow for people you don’t know? That’s a category error, and soundbites like that are a big part of the reason why many people now find it difficult to feel genuine sorrow.

Sorrow for your human brethren isn't a category error or a soundbite. It is basic decency. Or do you care only about your tribe?

You can even feel something for animals.

But thank you for another confirmation that the prevailing mindset in America today isn't the Western tradition of Humanism, but a regression towards raw egoism and naked psychopathy. Elon "Empathy is a weakness" Musk, Kristi "I shot my misbehaving puppy" Noem, Trump...

Stop posing and pretending you care. You don't have the basic decency to care yourself. Don't go accusing others.

Is that true? If so, that’s not a good sign. I remember how impressed I was by ZoneAlarm in the early 2000s asking permission for itself to connect to the Internet, using the exact same dialogue it presented for any other program, with no dark patterns suggesting that the user should give preferential treatment to it.

Doesn't seem to be, I can see LittleSnitch itself connecting to yoyo.org and obdev.at. GP may be referencing a past bug, either in LittleSnitch or macOS.

If it connects to yoyo.org, you have subscribed to Peter Lowe's blocklist and Little Snitch is trying to update the list from there.

I have, yes. Didn't bother to check the domains, just wanted to say they were visible.

It’s unfortunate that brutalism has become synonymous with “crumbling concrete”. That was certainly not the intention of the brutalist architects, but rather a side effect of the poor quality of the (sometimes experimental) concrete mixtures. 21st century (neo-)brutalist buildings won’t suffer from this.

Ukraine is a pre-existing ally of Europe and the US. Why are you making this about "the right kind of people".

I was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.

Google was apparently in the running for acquiring Red Hat. I still wonder what Red Hat would be today if Google had acquired instead.

much, much worse

Yes I agree, given the direction G has been going. I was disappointed at the time, but it was probably a blessing in disguise

honestly I think it's a net positive (for me at least) because it ensures Fedora has great POWER support (I'll never be able to afford a POWER machine at this rate, but the architecture is an absolute pleasure to work with whenever I have to)

Strange that SpaceX doesn’t seem to be suffering from that limitation. Could it be that the real problem is pork barrel spending and government wastefulness?

Which mission went to the moon?

Why would they go to the moon? They’re far too busy doing things that actually matter, such as slashing launch costs by 80% or more, while achieving the highest reliability of any launch system ever.

So a bunch of things every other space program does.

What are you talking about? SLS is on the way to the Moon now. Starship is still in development. SpaceX only exists because of massive NASA subsidy. Any success from SpaceX is thanks to NASA.

NASA provided SpaceX some money as a startup to bet they could just start commercial space, and they won to the tune of saving millions of dollars. There was never massive subsidies and there isn’t any subsidies at all today.

This is a lie. SpaceX has received at least 3.5 billion dollars from NASA for contracts. You can claim these aren’t subsidies but they are direct funding that allowed SpaceX to build up revenue streams like Starlink using the launch vehicles paid for by NASA. It’s the exact same funding model that Boeing takes advantage of. SpaceX would not exist without NASA. They’re collaborators, not competitors.