• 2 Posts
  • 68 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle




  • I’m in the US, and I can assure you the amount of effort that would go into breaking that system would be 1000+ fold.

    Here’s the thing… your computer/phone, just to run programs, is sitting on somewhere around 40-50 million lines of code in the operating system. It’s got another 20-30 million for all the supporting user space libraries. People want to vote from any device, and operating systems have become walled gardens. Now we need to interact with browsers. That’s another 30 million lines. You know how many bugs I need to find to compromise a system? 1. It’s not necessarily a skill issue. It’s an attack surface issue.

    And this is assuming the bug was an accident. There are much more insidious vulnerabilities out there (see the recent exploit found in xz). Along that same vein, there could be exploit generators in the compilers (that’s 15 million lines) that build all these systems.

    We won’t have online voting until we fundamentally change how we compute. I don’t see that happening any time in the near future. None of these corporations are going to be breaking down their walls anytime soon.








  • 100% this. The base algorithms used in LLMs have been around for at least 15 years. What we have now is only slightly different than it was then. The latest advancement was training a model on stupid amounts of scraped data off the Internet. And it took all that data to make something that gave you half decent results. There isn’t much juice left to squeeze here, but so many people are assuming exponential growth and “just wait until the AI trains other AI.”

    It’s really like 10% new tech and 90% hype/marketing. The worst is that it’s got so many people fooled you hear many of these dumb takes from respectable journalists interviewing “tech” journalists. It’s just perpetuating the hype. Now your boss/manager is buying in =]



  • jas0n@lemmy.worldtoAtheist Memes@lemmy.worldBased
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    17 days ago

    It reminded me of this quote from Max Planck (emphasis mine):

    As I began my university studies I asked my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly for advice regarding the conditions and prospects of my chosen field of study. He described physics to me as a highly developed, nearly fully matured science, that through the crowning achievement of the discovery of the principle of conservation of energy it will arguably soon take its final stable form. It may yet keep going in one corner or another, scrutinizing or putting in order a jot here and a tittle there, but the system as a whole is secured, and theoretical physics is noticeably approaching its completion to the same degree as geometry did centuries ago. That was the view fifty years ago of a respected physicist at the time.

    Basically, there isn’t much left to be discovered in physics, so don’t bother. (Good thing he didn’t follow that advice.) Then, Einstein comes along and is like… you know Newton’s “laws” of motion? I broke 'em. He also broke the aforementioned “law” of conservation of energy.

    So, while we actually do understand the physics of the Big Bang until about the first few milliseconds (not much left to be discovered), we don’t know what we don’t know.




  • While I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, I refuse to believe in anything without empirical evidence of such. These are gaps in our current understanding of our reality. History has shown, there is a logical explanation for just about everything. Nothing… ever… literally… EVER… has pointed toward the existence of such a god…ever.


  • Tiny gaps are subjective. Sure.

    god has been attributed to everything that science had no explanation for at the time. Earthquakes, weather events, cosmological events, etc. Now… the general theory has been relegated to one of the very few things that we don’t understand with near certainty. While I agree it’s not exactly a small gap, but I would argue, in the scale of all of science, microscopic is being generous.