And thanks to those who did mod that post up.

No points for me today, otherwise parent would get +1 Insightful!

This is fine if you are comfortable showing that SOME chip can be run in space at SOME cost, but it skips all the details that drive whether a data center in space is will work logistically and economically. There are many of these details, including but not limited to:
- Is it possible to use convective cooling in space? If so, how does one design it so that the convective fluid doesn't just dissipate? If not, can chips be designed that successfully evacuate heat radiatively or do the chips burn themselves up?
- What is the balance between collecting energy on the sun side of the system and protecting equipment from cold on the shaded side? Does the equipment have to survive large temperature cycles? If it can't does the data center have to use thrust to rotate itself to keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool? What would that mean for design cost, for refueling?
- How does all of this equipment (solar panels, batteries, GPUs, communication equipment, thrusters, control systems) deal with the high levels of ionizing radiation in space?
- The design and duty cycle of all these pieces of equipment implies various levels of refueling, repair, etc. Assuming all that can actually be done successfully at rocket's length, is the total cost within what the market will pay?
These details whether a data center can be made operational at all and if so whether their economics make them worth doing.

What Google is doing strikes me as a pretty sensible step - put a few chips in space and see what happens.

What Elon Musk does is claim that something will be solved next year and do some pump-and-dump crap around a company he claims will be doing that thing next year.
Where is "Full Self Driving", as in you can actually let the car drive and not monitor it? Where are the fleets of "Optimus" robots? Where is Tesla's super-awesome battery tech? And the Cybertruck that can float?
Oh right, they'll all be here at {year} + 1.

Sadly, it often is faster to do that than work within the old bureaucracy and its entrenched people, rules, and regulations.

This is pretty much a textbook case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

Notwithstanding Hegseth's absymal record prior to and within the Department of Defense/War/Being Tough, the war in Ukraine has showed how different war can be run than the way our military is currently organized.

Even if if you don't buy the army having "Transformers" type robots punching each other out (and I don't), it's clear that there is going to be a lot of "AI"-ish and highly automated stuff fighting wars. There needs to be a unit devoted to understanding FPV drones on land, sea, and air, plus all of the infrastructure for using them, defending against them, the communications to run them, training people to manage these kinds of weapons and units.

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

It does seem that enshittification is timeless, at least for time measured since the start of the Internet...

I've found that responding to political text message spam with "FUCK OFF!" will get "you have been removed from thiis list" response. And even if it doesn't work, it makes me feel better that I have expressed my opinion.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

Well, technically, we're letting Natalie do it, which is, of course, worse in every way imaginable, since she's immune to the sense of embarrassment that sometimes restrains him from acting on every little whim.

To be honest that was actually my first theory, since the bots didn't seem interested in exploring the rest of the domain. I suppose there's no way to know for certain. I concluded that it must be an imbecile's attempt at harvesting, though, because the queries weren't really exploring the string space in any useful way. Here's a sample:

"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&re&results_&results_pagenum=2980 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=5440&template=41&type HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=33500&templat HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=32640&templ HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&res&results_page&results_pagenum=39300 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_&results_pa&results_pagenum=12340 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_r&res&results_pagenum=6100 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=2920&te HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&nam&results_&results_pagenum=17940 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results&results_pag&results_pagenu&results_pagenum=37720 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=9360&template=41&type_r HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&r&results_pagenum=28040 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_&results_pag&results_pagenum=10400 HTTP/1.1"

The only thing this is fuzzing is the query string parser. It's not testing the limits of string buffers, it's not using interesting characters, it's just brain-damaged. The fact that it's also fetching different page numbers shows it's trying to follow page links and failing badly at doing so.

The site gets plenty of sniffing from garden-variety pests. e.g. this half-hearted attempt to find a framework or two that I don't have:

"POST /__rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/session HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth HTTP/1.1"
"POST /__nextjs_action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /.action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/callback HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_middleware HTTP/1.1"
"POST / HTTP/1.1"

(of course, none of these URLs exist other than /, and you definitely can't just POST to it)

All this said... I've seen that spammers regularly misconfigure their tools, they'll try to register accounts with names like #[X:\LISTS\NAMES.TXT] and it only makes sense that some other cybercriminals trying to get rich quick have a similar lack of interest in programming shit correctly. Generally people don't turn to script kiddie shit if they have a personality conducive to putting in an honest hard day's work perfecting their craft.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

-

This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

Here's the question. What is the difference in work between review and understanding the code versus writing the code in the first place?

I think the results vary a lot by scenario. In some cases, the business problem, the requirements, and the implementation are clearly separable, and exceptions can be clearly defined and partitioned a prior. These are amenable to automatic code generation and "higher level of abstraction".
In other cases, the business problem and requirements can only be untangled by asserting some sort processing logic, and then working from there. The more granular the logic that has to be specified, the closer you are to saving time by just writing the code yourself.

I suspect that the estimates of massive labor savings put almost all work into the first category. In reality, I believe quite a lot of work lands in the second category, and much of the work in the first has already been automated.

Case in point, TFA mentioned writing a calendar app for her family. There are a bajillion calendar apps for families, and nearly every piece of enterprise software now ships with calendaring and project management features of some sort.
So this was a hobby project, or her family has some extremely unique un-apped needs. Who knows, as an Amazon exec she may need to schedule their personal helicopter, private jet, and security detail and that probably is more complex than everyone else's soccer practices, doctor's appointments, and school forms. But I have a hard time seeing how there's a huge space of unmet demand for calendar apps. The biggest problem with calendar apps is all the stuff that is going on outside of them that people do not want to put in their calendar. AI does not change that.

That's YOUR characterization, not mine.