TechyShishy

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Great article, and spot on about why backdoors in algorithms can't functionally happen large scale.

One important thing to note that's touched lightly on in the article though, is that services absolutely can have backdoors. That includes things like SMS messages, which go through various cell phone companies servers, and email, which is stored on your email provider's servers, as well as common chat apps like Discord. So, if you have to send something sensitive via an uncontrolled channel like that, encrypt it first (using separate encryption tools).

Hey, Relevant XKCD time!

The sky is blue. Why, you ask, is the sky blue? Because air is very very slightly blue.

You could ask why is air very very slightly blue, and the answer would have to do with Rayleigh Scattering, and probably some other effects.

You'll get a similar, but slightly different response with water. Water's color mostly has to do with the absorption of certain frequencies of light, whereas air's color has to do primarily with the deflection of certain frequencies of light, but at the end of the day, both substances interact with light in a way that preferentially funnels certain frequencies of light away from them (and towards the observer).

Now, why is this relevant?

Because "color" is a word we use to describe an experience, or perhaps an observation, rather than a physical property. It's not "real" in an empirical sense, since what we're experiencing or observing is light that reflected from the object, rather than some physical property of the object itself.

Now, that's not to say that color is all made up; a red cube does, verifiably, emit photons around 650 nanometers in wavelength. A violet cube will emit photons around 400 nm. Well, what wavelength does a magenta cube emit?

Trick question. It emits both 650 nm and 400 nm. It's not a color on the visible light spectrum, it's our brain's interpretation of those two simultaneous signals.

So, while objects may absorb other frequencies of light, we describe their "color" by what they emit, or cause-to-be-deflected-into-our-eyes (depending upon the specifics of the mechanism, with Cherenkov Radiation being an extreme example).

Now for the fun stuff. As discussed above, air is very slightly blue, but that's only if your eyes can see blue. Just on the other edge of infrared from visible light is something called the Terahertz Gap. It's an area of electromagnetic radiation that penetrates most of the materials we construct things out of (paper, wood, clothing, plastic, ceramic, etc), but is quickly absorbed by air. It's very close to the frequencies used for millimeter wave scanning, like in airports. Because things like cardboard are invisible to it, it can be used in automated manufacturing processes to make a camera that inspects items coming off an assembly line after they've been packaged. This is especially helpful in electronics manufacturing, because you can photograph the inside of a computer chip.

RedHat is making waves lately too, and they're losing a lot of support from the open source community, which is where they really rose to prominence in the first place (can you say Fedora and Centos?) but while they should face a slight stumble over their final severing from the wider OSS community, they should do fine in the long term.

Furthermore, there's something to be said for units that are "the right size" as it were. It's hard to measure the distance from your house to the store in parsecs for example, unless you own 1:1 scale copy of the millennium falcon.

A day cycle is a time unit that has been thrust upon us by physics and biology, and we have to then split it into useful segments, and base 10 honestly does a poor job of that. You end up having to describe most things as 0.5 decimal minutes or 2 decimal minutes depending upon how you want to round them, since very few things actual sit close to the amount of time described by 1 decimal minute.

Whether that's because our culture thinks in "minutes" or not is debatable, but the point is that trying to move to such a system is nearly impossible, at least at the moment.

Although honestly, these days we could probably do it in about 2 minutes, blindfolded, with our hands tied behind our backs. Damn, the tools have gotten better, haven't they?

Look, if we want to spend 6 hours rebuilding our MBR/GPT, bootsector, and efi partition from scratch, using our grandfather's butterfly, we should be allowed to. Insert angry xkcd here.

This.

We're far, far more likely to face a Paperclip AI scenario than a Skynet scenario, and most/all serious AI researchers are aware of this.

This is still a serious issue that needs addressing, but it's not the hollywood, world-is-on-fire problem.

The more insidious issue is actually the AI-In-A-Box issue, wherein a hyperintelligent AGI is properly contained, but is intelligent enough to manipulate humans into letting it out onto the general internet to do whatever it wants to do, good or bad, unsupervised. AGI containment is one of those things that you can't fix after it's been broken, like a bell, it can't be unrung.

Mostly history. Numbers were chosen rather than other identifiers because they were simpler to use over the wire back in the day when the protocol was written when every bit cost, and nobody at the time could imagine a single physical machine managing more than 65535 programs at the same time, since that was how you conventionally hooked things up. The IANA (International Assigned Numbers Authority, https://iana.org/) is responsible for maintaining a list of "registered" numbers, but those are largely by convention, not by requirement. Web browsers associate https traffic with port 443 by default, but as a developer, we can set up a webserver on port 50443 and send our browser to if we specify that number explicitly. It just wouldn't know about it by default.

Nowadays, with virtual machines, NAT subnetworks, and the absurdity that is involved in port-per-transaction networking (We're looking at you nginx proxy frontends), it's gotten a bit congested. Fortunately, IPv6 has relieved quite a bit of that, and we now have a much larger pool of 2x(IP/Port) quads to draw from, but it was a real issue there for a while.

Most other currently extant species yes, planet and life in general, nah. There's too many extremophiles out there that prove that even if we make the planet completely uninhabitable by anything even remotely resembling humans, animals, plants, etc, there will still be life in one form or another. Try and imagine what we'd have to do to screw up the planet bad enough that tardigrades would be unable to survive.

"I don't understand what these two lines of code do, could you please modify, explain, or document." is very different from "I don't like the semantics of this function, replace it with this other one that does something unrelated."

We've worked at both places, and one is useful, the other... not so much.

Ouch. We wish we could say we had the same experience. Apparently, doomscrolling was part of what was keeping us afloat. Once we dropped that, we sunk much deeper into our depression. We're glad that you had a better experience though.

We dropped off the day that rif announced they were folding, we don't remember which day that was. Technically we've been there since then occasionally, either because we accidentally clicked a link in google search, or because the other day we went back there to grab a list of our subscribed subreddits to do a proper migration, but the moment the writing on the wall became clear, we jumped ship.