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Comment Well... (Score 1) 18

It sure is a good thing that 'AI' companies are notoriously discerning and selective about their training inputs and not doing something risky like battering on anything with an IP address and an ability to emit text in the desperate search for more; so this should be a purely theoretical concern.

Snark aside, I'd be very curious how viable this would be as an anti-scraper payload. Unlikely to be impossible to counter; but if the objective is mostly to increase their cost and risk when they trespass outside the bounds of robots.txt something that will just look a trifle nonsensical in places to a human but could cause real trouble if folded into a training set seems like it could be quite useful.

Comment Re:This was always the plan (Score 1) 98

It can certainly be done otherwise; but it's not exactly unrelated when, in practice, a TPM is the industry standard mechanism for making a PC or PC-like system capable of cryptographically secure remote attestation; and when TPMs quite specifically mandate the features you need to do remote attestation rather than just the ones you would need to seal locally created secrets to a particular expected boot state. They are certainly can do that, and it's presently the most common use case; but locking down remote attestation was not some sort of accidental side effect of the design.

Comment Re:Irreversibly? (Score 1) 58

I'd guess it'll last as long as the cover does?

Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer from Burkina Faso was known as "the man who beat the desert" for single-handedly transforming 75 acres of barren land into a garden by planting trees.

AFAIK eventually the government was so impressed, they seized the land from him and parceled it out for sale to bidders who more or less ruined it.

Comment Re:This was always the plan (Score 2) 98

The place where TPMs potentially get toothy is remote attestation. As a purely local matter having your boot path determined to be what you think it is/should be is very useful; but, by design, you can also request that from a remote host. Again, super useful if you are dealing with a nasty secure orchestration problem(Google has a neat writeup of how they use it); but also the sort of thing that is potentially tempting for a relying party to use as part of authentication decisions.

We've seen hints at related issues on the Android side; where hardware attestation API or 'Play Integrity' API demands are made by some applications that block 3rd party ROMs, even if the boot sequence is entirely as expected(and even if the 3rd party ROM is almost certainly in much better shape than the first party one; eg. Graphene vs. some out-of-support entry level Samsung); which has chilled 3rd party ROMs considerably.

If relying parties who are important(ISPs, banks, etc.) do start demanding attestation the situation in practice becomes a great deal more restrictive.

Comment Re:Fewer than two? (Score 2) 60

The employees from that 35% went to the other 65% that had two employees and turned it into three. Problem... Solved? :D

That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).

Comment Re:Rookie numbers (Score 2) 60

35% is a good start

The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option, often quite happily (there is no additional pay or other concrete benefit to being a manager vs being an IC (individual contributor)). This partitioning of people who were in mixed roles into roles that were either managerial or technical provided most of the reduction in line and middle management.

Comment Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score 1) 47

I mean, do you expect them to come out and publicly say something like, "We're giving the government all your emails and data to calculate a social credit score"?

Do you expect this government won't ask for that?

Do you expect Alphabet to decline?

Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.

Comment Re:Fundamentally, why so expensive? (Score 1) 86

I suspect that the answer involves a hard look at where the wealth ends up, which is likely why there's limited appetite for tugging at that thread; but what I don't grasp about the Baumel explanation is why the cost goes up relative to the typical ability to pay; rather than mostly staying level.

The fact that productivity largely hasn't budged is certainly an explanation of why professors or nurses haven't followed the cost of transistors or TVs; but if something like education's cost increases are being driven by what they need to pay people who could work in a different industry; why do people who do work in that different industry not see the cost as more or less constant in relative terms, rather than steadily creeping up over time?

Comment Fundamentally, why so expensive? (Score 2) 86

What baffles me about these stories of financial unsustainability in higher education is just where exactly all the cost comes from. I realize that thereâ(TM)s the opportunity cost of ~4 years of not working/part timing around classes; and that there are some particular subjects that need a large hadron collider or some cryogenic longwave IR space telescopes or a BSL4 virus lab; but I just donâ(TM)t understand how âoetake professor who is tenured but earns more or less fuck-all for someone of their experience and qualifications, or adjunct who isnâ(TM)t tenured and earns even less, provide whiteboardâ has somehow become a crushing financial burden for what are supposed to be wealthy, developed world, societies.

Same general confusion with parts of medicine; obviously Iâ(TM)m not expecting novel monoclonal antibodies or cutting edge oncology for $3.50; but why does it cost so much to speak to a GP for 30 minutes and get some 40 year old generic; or get a nasty cut checked for foreign objects and stitched up at the ER?

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