Because these are investments, not sales. Accounts are being drained and not refilled because the expected sales have not arrived yet. This cannot continue. It feels like late in the DotCom boom and many of remember that time well as well as what happened next.

Third parties don't belong in the kernel even on Linux. There IS an alternative.

That is up to you as the administrator to reject vendors who don't use the alternative and want to send you a custom kernel driver instead.

However... It's still possible for Crowdstrike to do something stupid that brings a system to its needs.

The software is able to block a file from being opened or read, for example. Now what happens if Crowdstrike suddenly detects _EVERY_ file as malicious and starts preventing the system reading any files at all? For example.. the Browser.. the Windows manager.. the Launcher, Desktop, etc.. Any programs that have to run in order for the user to successfully log in and use their system.

Yes, as someone who's used Linux for almost two decades I sit here and smile at how the masochistic Windows users are squirming :-)

With proper auditing, you can use NPM just fine, pin a specific version

So Insecure by default then.

What we really need is to have catered repos which default to a pinned version, instead of requiring the user to pin one. And the version pin does not update until that version has been audited by a sufficient number of trusted authorities.

If no version has been audited and pinned, then new packages should simply be unavailable to anyone who is not running in a "dangerous insecure mode"

I mean that some system of package review is obviously necessary for all updates, and that which has not been reviewed should not be available. Otherwise it's worse than geocities -- a convenient malware distribution channel.

For electronics specifically, you have lots of online options beyond NewEgg/Walmart including B&H Photo/Video, Adorama, Microcenter, and maybe Best Buy. Since electronics are generally expensive, it's a high impact way to steer money away from Amazon.

That's still a lot more effort, especially since you have to vet each one to figure out if they provide good customer service in the event something goes wrong, and to be confident they won't steal and sell your credit card number (yeah, you aren't liable for the fraud, but getting a new card is a huge PITA). What could make this work well is the existence of a few online shopping aggregators that combine searching across all of the online stores and centralize payment. The problem is that in order to compete with Amazon any such alternatives would have to have enormous scale, which makes it a very difficult space to enter. Google tried with Google Shopping, but regulators immediately jumped in to stop them.

FWIW, my strategy is that for inexpensive stuff I just buy on Amazon, period, spending a little time to look for cheaper/better options than the "Amazon recommended". For pricier stuff, where it's worth spending a few minutes, I search on Amazon and also on Google, and if I find cheaper non-Amazon options I spend some time evaluating the different sites, unless they happen to be sites I've already bought from. For really expensive stuff I use other search engines and recommendation sites... and then almost always end up buying on Amazon because on those products pricing tends to be consistent, and it's a lot of money and if something goes wrong I trust Amazon to make me whole

Yep. So what? All species are evolved to fight for survival, because any that doesn't evolve to fight for survival is likely to cease to exist. I'm human and want my species to survive. Should I instead want my species to be eaten by wolves, or ASIs?

The problem is that there is a portion of our species that is not interested in humanity's survival. Those people are an existential threat to the rest of us. That doesn't mean we need to exterminate them, but it does suggest that we shouldn't help them carry out their plans.

The problem with the "trick" is that we (a) don't know how to set goals or "wants" for the AI systems we build, nor do we (b) know what goals or wants we could or should safely set if we did know how to set them.

The combination of (a) and (b) is what's known in the AI world as the Alignment Problem (i.e. aligning AI interests with human interests), and it's completely unsolved.

I think you also need to prove that humans supplanting other less-intelligent species is good. Maybe the universe would be better off if we hadn't dominated the Earth and killed off so many species.

(Note that I think both arguments are silly. I'm just pointing out that if you're asking for proof that AI is better than humanity, you should also be asking for proof that humanity is better than non-humanity, whether AI or not. My own take is that humanity, like every other species, selfishly fights for its own survival. There's no morality in it, there's no such thing as making the universe better or worse off.)

Seizing land is a counterproductive and foolish solution to that problem. Basically the whole world uses a different solution, which works pretty well: property taxes (though land-value taxes would probably be better). You just keep raising the taxes until leaving land idle becomes a money-losing proposition. The only way that doesn't work is if ownership of farmland is truly monopoly-dominated so there is no competition, in which case you might have to resort to trust-busting.

This is exactly why we have property taxes, to ensure that most property is put to productive use.

Yes, mass starvation is worse than land seizure, but land seizure is just about the worst possible solution to the problem, as evidenced by what has happened to Venezuela's economy since then. Seizure and collective ownership is guaranteed to produce horribly inefficient operations which might prevent outright starvation but will leave the populace on the edge of it. Seizure and redistribution to private ownership is slightly less bad, but will redistribute the land mostly to people who don't know how to use it effectively.

What would have worked much, much better would be actions that served to restore competition among farmers, starting with making sure they were all paying fair property taxes that were high enough to disincentivize leaving farmland fallow.

Why would superintelligent AIs obey the billionaires?

If you think it's because they'd be programmed to to it, you don't understand how we currently design and build AI. We don't program it to do anything. We train it until it responds the way we want it to, but we have no way of knowing if it's just fooling us. We can't actually define goals for the systems and we can't introspect them to tell what actual goals they have derived from their training sets.

Note, BTW, that the above is only one half of the problem called "AI alignment". In order to make sure AI will serve humanity (or a small segment of humanity; it's exactly the same problem either way) you need to be able to do two things. First, you need to be able to set the AI's goals, in a way that sticks. Second, you need to figure out what goal you can set that will achieve the subservience that you want. The difficulty in setting a "safe" goal for a powerful being is well illustrated in that old tales about genies and wishes, but modern philosophers have taken a hard, systematic look at this problem and so far no one has come up with any safe goal, not one, there's always some way it could go horribly wrong.

There's a difference between a "hazardous protein" and a "protein that doesn't cause damage until three generations into the future."

Eh? What about a protein that 3 generations into the future causes Production of a related protein that obliterates all life on the planet.
I would say these 3rd generation cases Cannot be safely ignored.

Given the program that takes inputs vector x named P(x); write a function f(x) such that f(P) is true if and only if P halts for all possible inputs.

The only difference is we're asked.. given a protein that interactions with molecules vector x named -- P(x). Write a function such that f(P) returns true if and only if P for all possible inpuit vectors is not capable of causing a catastrophic failure or serious impediment upon a complex biological process resulting in the Injury to, Or loss of any basic senses or intelligent capacity, or the end of the life to a human organism.

Perhaps you should put your Proteins in a simulator of some kind and require the simulations run through without simulated biologies or ecosystems dying before allowing the designed proteins as a design.

You'd think, if someone is managing a group of detectives, they would be regularly discussing progress on their cases

I would say not. They should stop trying to micromanage detectives and their work flows, as that is only to frustrate them.
Detectives are senior mental workers much like writers, or designers in certain engineering, or art fields.

They are bound to spend a lot of time on the clock making no progress at all, And in addition spend a lot of time thinking while not on the clock, in the shower, etc, the subconcious organizes thoughts when conditions are right -- which can be attributable to 90% of the progress you ever can even get. Which kind of also means that having them log hours or monitoring their computer usage as some kind of proxy to amount of work done, is also complete bullshit. Especially for any detectives who may have to go out into the field and look at places to stimulate their intuitive senses sufficiently to come back and make progress. There are necessary activities for thought workers which can't be categorized as work by corporate standards, but which are necessary to the process. Including being lazy and procrastinating from time to time. The keyjamming is not necessarily a flaw - for all we know they may be a high-performing detective within a system that has ignorant executive management and stupid policies.

One does not Ping Sherlock holmes or Fox Mulder, every 4 hours for a status update on his thought process, or even every day for that matter. One does not harass the graphics designer every hour about when they are going to get past their art block on creating such and such, and forward movement, etc. You wait, and as professionals it is upon them to report once they are organized and ready to report.

The progress on cases is a glacial thing; even with hardworking detectives--you don't more regularly have progress to discuss, than perhaps a monthly or bi-weekly update on case files they've taken. If the day is spent reading reports and other necessary activities: most of the time they simply won't have anything to give you. It also does not make sense for a detective to write reports about reports. And as a mental discipline the detectives would need time to organize their thoughts. It's not a good idea to disrupt peoples' workflows and ask for them to make extra reports just to have a proof that they are working. Reports like that do not cause progress, and quite the opposite. More unnecessary work and a slowing down the process is the result of inserting additional problems for the detectives to solve.

Also; I don't believe controlling where the detectives work is a solution to this problem -- the whole keylogger thing or caring about where they work shows a misguided approach. Th detectives are presumably just as likely to spend time pretending to read reports while goofing off at a central office.

This should not necessarily be a huge deal either. Progress can be stalled on many cases for reasons that are outside detectives' controls.

Fresh leads may be lacking. Those forensic samples the labs are going take months to get back can be pivotal to the direction of the cases, etc. Detectives are going to be appraised eventually by whether or not they solve the cases, and how many they do manage to close. That is where the performance measurements exist, And it is the detectives' jobs to make certain they deliver. A detective's manager's jobs is not to micromanage detectives' case work,