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Virtually all lands on planet earth were stolen with violence, most of them many times over.

We want to delete the fallback code paths... You'll just get failures from bitlocker instead of install failures, or windows hello failures, or ...


Hardware key storage is a low level security primitive. Both Android and iOS have mandated it for far longer. It's a low level security primitive that enables a lot of scenarios, not just DRM.

For example - it's not possible to protect SSH keys from malware that achieves root without hardware storage. Only hardware storage can offer the "Unplug It" guarantee - that unplugging a compromised machine ends the compromise.


9front with factotum tells a different story.


If you want to protect keys you get a yubikey or something like that.


And if you want to play sound, you buy a sound card. Computers integrate components that approximately everybody needs. Hardware storage for keys is just the latest example


The main component of a yubikey is that it requires a human presence to hit the button and access the secret.

Do new computers have such a button? I've failed to locate it.


Touch is one way of demonstrating proof of presence. Biometric is another. Pin is a third. Yubikeys typically support touch or pin. Windows Hello (which is TPM based) supports bio or pin.

Ah yes Android and iOS, they have truly become bastions of user freedom since mandating secure enclaves. That really puts my worries to rest. /s


User freedom is not the only axis by which we judge operating systems.


It is not, but to me personally it is a very important one and it is not one I will give up without a fight.


Developing new technologies has risks. In the absence of anything really bad actually happening, I think we can solve the problem by adding new requirements to Waymo's operating license (and all self driving cars) rather than kneecapping the technology.


It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist.

When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared with unstable and violent people, which while possibly "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real differentiating advantage.


“10-15 minute walk”

A quaintly American complaint. A 10 minute walk being an issue is very a learned helplessness my fellow Americans suffer from.

But unfortunately the 10-15 min walk is only possible in a couple cities. most Americans day to day experience of public transit is spaced out buses that don’t work well for single family sprawl and strip malls parking lots where walking is treated as undesirable. Car oriented rather than people oriented urban planning (or lack thereof) is the original cause.


It could be 10-15min where I am blasted by -10c wind in Boston or Miami torrential rains

Door to door shelter and climate control >>>>>>>>>>>


As someone who lives (and doesn't own a car!) in the Boston area, coats do wonders :)

I even got a heated jacket this year! Talk about climate control.


Because the weather in walking cities is perfect?


violent unstable people aren't inherent to cities.. they're inherent to places that refuse to spend any money on social work/housing/and enjoy punishing people


I would rather pick to not be subjected to them than to be subjected to them. NYC spends over 40k/homeless person and I still have to be subjected to them, even though I paid enough taxes to wash my hands of the issue morally


All public transit is at least an order of magnitude safer than driving a car. 10-15 minutes of walking is called being an inactive human. I promise it won't hurt you (unless you get hit by a car).


Doesn't satisfy the ADA. Department of Education would sue such a college for failing to accommodate disabled students. An accomodation that is available to everyone isn't an accomodation.


Not anymore, they laid off all the lawyers who would do that.


Doesn't satisfy the ADA. Department of Ed will sue and say that an accomodation given to everybody is no accomodation at all.


So it's not really an accommodation that's required by the ADA, but an advantage over the baseline?


Are you implying that if someone walks up a wheelchair ramp, then the building is violating the ADA?


No, of course not, that'd be ridiculous. Where did you see that in my post?

To explain in more detail. The ADA says that an accommodation is when an entity (business, employer, school) makes a change of behavior. Installing a wheelchair ramp in an older inaccessible building is an accomodation. Granting extra time is an accomodation. Simply having accessible buildings or excessive time is not an accomodation.

But why the lawyers treat it differently. Business feel comfortable, when they have a ramp, arguing that no accommodation is necessary for the wheelchair bound. The standards of accessible physical design are clear. Schools do not feel comfortable saying that no accommodation is necessary for mental health issues, ever. Their lawyers advise them that it's much better to give some sort of accomodation and argue in court about sufficient accomodations vs giving no accomodation at all.


> if you presume they are honest, they tend to be honest. The students loved it, I loved it. If anyone cheated, the students would turn him in. Nobody ever bragged about cheating, 'cuz they would have been ostracized.

I think if you look at the 2012 Harvard cheating scandal, it's clear that this isn't true. There, the professor presumed honest students, hundreds cheated, and no student reported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal


It doesn't always work, that's for sure. I suspect one of the things the admissions committee did was try to filter out the cheaters. Explaining how the honor system worked was part of the freshman orientation camp (held on Catalina Island).

One reason it did work is the students liked being trusted, and they did not like anyone that would threaten the system, and would turn them in.

BTW, that was 50 years ago. I have no information on how the honor system is fairing today.


> While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill

If you believe this, you must also believe that global warming is unstoppable. OpenAI's energy costs are large compared to the current electricity market, but not so large compared to the current energy market. Environmentalists usually suggest that electrification - converting non-electrical energy to electrical energy - and then making that electrical energy clean - is the solution to global warming. OpenAI's energy needs are something like 10% of the current worldwide electricity market but less than 1% of the current worldwide energy market.


Google recently announced to double AI data center capacity every 6 month. While both unfortunately deal with exponential growth, we are talking about 1% growth CO2 which is bad enough vs 300% effectively per year according to Google


Constraints breed innovation. Humans will continue to innovate and demand for resources will grow. it is fairly well baked into most of civilization. Will that change in the future? Perhaps but it’s not changing now.


Imagine how big pile of trash as the current generation of graphics cards used for LLM training will get outdated. It will crash the hardware market (which is a good news for gamers)


A100’s are not suitable for gaming.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw699ZbUKqg

Looks very playable to me.

It's just an expensive card, but if the market is flooded with them, they can be used in gaming AND in local LLMs.

So it can push the fall of server-side AI even further.

These cards are 400 USD for reference, so if more and more are sold, we can imagine them getting down to 100 USD or so.

(and then similar for A100, H100, etc)

My main concern is the noise because I have seen datacenter hardware and it is crazy. Of course it's not ideal but there is something to do with it.


Is this AI paper written by a reputable subject matter expert? It seems to be written by a physicist and also be the only academic work by this author in English


So you are dismissing it because of that? Certainly read the paper first and attack the arguments, not the author. It even has 10 pages of citations.

I have read it. It is nothing new on the subject, but it was just the recent paper I saw on HN and the person was asking for the link.

The crux is an LLM is and can never be intelligent in the sense of an AGI. It is easier to think of it as a way to store and retrieve knowledge.


How many articles on this topic do we imagine there are? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? It is hopeless to read every one by any author, no matter how unrelated to the domain, and judge them individually on their merits. Being a subject domain expert is not a perfect measure of paper quality but it's the only feasible way to make a first pass at filtering.

Even if I did read it, I have no hope of understanding if it has made a fundamental mistake because I don't have the subject matter expertise either.

(I imagine it has made a fundamental mistake anyway: for LLMs to be useful progress toward AGI they don't have to be a feasible way to create AGI by themselves. Innovation very often involves stepping through technologies that end up only being a component of the final solution, or inspiration for the final solution. This was always going to be an issue with trying to prove a negative.)


> It is hopeless to read every one by any author,

It was a paper posted on HN a few days ago and someone asked for the evidence of my statement. I supplied it.

Now if they actually read it and disagreed with what it was saying, I'd be more than happy to continue the conversation.

Dismissing it just because you don't understand is a terrible thing to do to yourself. It's basically sabotaging your intelligence.

Sometimes papers are garbage, but you can only make that statement after you have read/understood it.

Use an LLM if you want.


I was really just asking, not trying to be dismissive. Expertise is an important context to evaluate a piece of writing.


Absolutely. If it is not written by someone who has real world experience and deep knowledge it has no more value than a HN comment.


It's a good read and good citations.

The core piece as quoted from the abstract: "AGI predictions fail not from insufficient compute, but from fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence demands structurally."

Then goes in detail as to what that is and why LLMs don't fit that. There are plenty other similar papers out there.


It was more of a general principle than about specific paper that I mentioned that :)


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