Imaginary_Knowledge
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User ID: 1255
Imaginary_Knowledge
13hr ago
Agreed. I'm not convinced the space of exploits reachable via ASI is meaningfully bigger than the space already reachable by fuzzers, code analysis, and blackhat brains. ASI hacking is a fantasy.
That said, AI tools have, are, and will "democratize" access to exploits we already have. A lot of incompetent enterprise IT deployment people are going to have to get fired and replaced with people or agents that can keep up with patches.
Imaginary_Knowledge
13hr ago
"Tech talent" isn't just one thing. There's the ability to glue together lego blocks on one hand, and there's the ability to make new blocks on the other. West coast tech has tipped decisively to the former.
Over the past 15 years in the bay area tech universe, we've seen a hollowing out of hard technical skill. The slop-shipping proudly-know-nothing React SaaS archetype has become predominant.
Even at the frontier labs, the talent pool is such that Chinese model architectural improvements often arrive as surprises and force rapid catch-up. The labs aren't interested in actual innovation: when they're not up their asses in "AI safety" power fantasies or practically orgasming on Slack about how they will allocate scarcity in the coming AI command economy, frontier lab people are mostly just scaling up what they know works and putting down weird ideas that they claim won't scale.
This is the part of the country that spawned Esalan. The grift has always been strong here. But lately, it's become next level and eroded meaningful expertise. When some TypeScript weenie who has no idea for a CPU cache works overrules the guy who does on the basis of some quoted Twitter pablum about software engineering being obsolete in six months, the industry is in trouble.
Imaginary_Knowledge
8d ago
God damned it. Something about this forum curses me with typos.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9d ago
I wonder what fraction of The Motte is software people.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9d ago
Java does have a trust-me-bro mode. See https://developer.android.com/reference/sun/misc/Unsafe
That's Android documentation, but regular Java has the same facility.
Granted, Unsafe is being deprecated, but we'll have equivalently powerful FFI stuff.
Imaginary_Knowledge
9d ago
Obsolete take.
Have you looked at a modern GC like ZGC? We're talking sub-millisecond pause times now. GC performance isn't a practical problem anymore. You're repeating obsolete 20 year old memes.
Ever use an Android phone? Plenty fast UI. Android is built on Java, and it has a GC. Works fine, even at pretty low levels of the framework stack.
I'm convinced we could push a modern GC to the kernel and it would work fine there too. (RCU is already a beast of complexity and nondeterministic timing and nobody complains about that.)
Please update your prejudices to reject the current state of technology.
Imaginary_Knowledge
27d ago
Uh, yeah? Have you benchmarked?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1mo ago
To be honest, most times I contemplate making a top level post, I just contemplate getting modded for it and go do something else. We don't need to tolerate end to end bare links, but we'd benefit from somewhat reducing the minimum conversion activation energy.
Imaginary_Knowledge
1mo ago
Nonsense. There's nothing inherent in languages with automatic memory management that makes then unsuitable for performance sensitive applications. If the Android framework can be written in Java and be fast, the start menu can be implemented in JavaScript and be fast. They screwed it up for other reasons, sure, but there's no foundational reason you can't get good performance out of high level languages and many do.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
Thanks. Could be worse: you could be South Korean government IT.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Thanks, I think.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
A Google L8 can pull down 1.5M per year in liquid comp. Would it be so crazy to pay politicians similarly to reduce any temptation they might have towards corruption?
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
When gradual, principled change becomes impossible, only blunt instruments remain. The last dutifully considered major policy the US was able to enact was the ACA 15 years ago. Governance since then has consisted of rule by fiat: sometimes the executive; sometimes the court. Doesn't matter. We're burning hard won norms for temporary positional advantage. Nobody really believes in the system anymore.
In this environment, a genteel and thoughtful reform of the H-1B program is impossible. It's as if Trump were some Ringworld Pak protector trying to stabilize a long-neglected world and, finding all the usual maintenance and repair mechanisms broken and almost all the stationkeeping thrusters stripped for frivolous reasons like ago by reckless people who didn't know the damage they were doing to their home, has to use the crudest and bluntest instrument imaginable just to stop the immediate problem.
What you're describing is acceptable collateral damage we have to incur to make the immediate crisis stop.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Even if it gets reversed, the beneficial uncertainty it's introduced will remain and chill immigration a bit. It's still a good thing. The revolt of the public continues apace.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
It imposes real costs on them. Their power depends on propagating their memes. Now there's more friction to their doing so.
Okay. I'll grant it's cancel culture. So what? Cancel culture is a weapon invented by my enemy. This is war. We did not ask for this war. We did not instigate it. For fifteen years, they have been bombarding us with a terrible new weapon against which we have little defense. Cancel culture has in large part forced us underground. We won recent political and cultural victories only with great sacrifice, and then only barely.
Now my side has seized an enemy battery of this weapon and have figured out how to wheel it around 180 degrees and fire. Our shots seem to be hitting their marks. Should we stop? Why? Would our refusing as a matter of ethics to fire our commandeered battery against the enemy prompt them to have any mercy in January 2029 if they win? Why would we think they would? Why, after all this time?
This war, while memetic not kinetic, is nevertheless total, absolute, and existential. The people being targeted now are enemy combatants. They (often literally) wear and uniform and wave a flag. We can rebuild polite norms after we win.
And you know what? That's a shame. It's a shame we have to rebuild anything. War is always messy. But like I said, my side didn't choose this.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
It took 200 years of misbehavior from both the Protestant and Catholic camps to convince everyone to stop the pointless destruction and establish the norms we call freedom of religion and the Peace of Westphalia. Imagine one side or the other stopping early and not fighting back after wringing their hands over abstract principles! The abstract principles come out of peace negotiations. First, you have to either win or fight to a stalemate. We're not even out of the opening phases of what will be a long, brutal war.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Sanctionproofing is impossible for such a small country.
Does the normal calculus apply to Israel? Yes, it's a small country both geographically and population-wise, but it's behaving like one with a deep arsenal. Does Israeli leadership perceive the US as a backstop, allowing them to take military risks no country its size ought to be able to take? I am uncomfortable about the degree to which US politicians praise Israel (see https://instagram.com/reel/DKjnZmtPcGE/), and it seems like Israel has every reason to believe that when push came to shove, they can use the US military to win.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Half the Internet is glowing today. Practically every commentator is just barely stopping himself writing an explicit call to put all the leftists against a wall. The "glowing" bit is really part of my point: embedded in the term is a blanket and universal taboo on political violence, and it's not obvious to me that there ought to be such a taboo.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
It's said over and over that violence doesn't help, is always wrong, and is "almost never productive". I sense orthodoxy doth protest too much. Violence, especially tit for tat reciprocal violence, is probably more effective than commonly admitted: there's just this tacit understanding that if you admit it, you open the gates of hell.
Well, we're already in hell. Now what?
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Okay. So the question stands: at what point can one segment of society justify a war against another? The answer clearly isn't "never". It's also pretty clearly not "defend against individuals on a case by case basis and reserve violence for imminent personal threats"
At some point, the totality of circumstances justify, even demand, a war, yes?
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
In a war, do you need to show that each and every soldier you neutralize presented an imminent danger to you personally? Is there a legitimate concept of a movement or an ideology as a whole presenting a grave danger and justifying violence against any of its adherents as self defense?
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Serious question: at what point is political violence justified? At what point is it defensible to take up arms in defense of one's community? I know we're all ostensibly against violent remedies, but at some point, practical and moral concerns ought to overtake an abstract commitment to the rule of law, yes?
Look at the Catholic just war doctrine, kind of a checklist of criteria violent action must satisfy to be right in the eyes of God: is there a competent authority organizing the armed action? A realistic possibility of success? A just cause for which you're fighting? And is it your last resort?
If so, then one is justified in extraordinary and violent action. The left seems to believe the situation is sufficiently dire as to justify violence. Is there sufficient cause for resisting them on their own terms?
If not, why? So as to not to break the state's monopoly on violence? To reap the civilizational benefits of settling disputes with words not weapons? After exactly how many presses of the "defect" button do you, too, press "defect"?
And after what point does insisting that people who've experienced "defect" after "defect" continue to play "cooperate" become itself a form of evil, of gaslighting, of denying people their fundamental dignity?
I'm not sure about the answers to any of these questions, but as I see parts of the Internet seething and roiling, and as I see other parts of the Internet gloating, and as I see it all spill over to real life --- the DNA lounge in San Francisco has a "neck shot" special tonight --- I have to wonder whether we're at one of those points in history at which it is less moral to follow man's law than to uphold God's law.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
very deep breath
Adopting an exasperated, superior attitude when trying to address pointed and persistent historical inconsistencies isn't doing orthodox historiography any favors.
- But I said it once and I'll say it thrice: why the fuck would you care? "Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face
Some people care about the truth for its own sake. Insisting that people accept untruths unquestionably offends them even when these untruths are directionally correct. Civilization depends on these people.
Suppose one of these people believes you when you say Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews. He investigates the matter just as he would, say, 19th century British rolling stock or Pokemon exegesis. He discovers something that appears inconsistent. He asks about it. And then, unlike in his entire previous experience, he finds his questions generate neither indifference nor answers, but hostility and outright censorship. He comes to understand this subject is a third rail.
What you don't appreciate is that this person doesn't then back down and go back to obsessing over trains. He seeks understand why this subject is a third rail. He finds Irving. He finds internet witch dens. And he comes to understand, rightly or wrongly, that the entire narrative is bullshit.
Is that the outcome you want? Shutting down investigations into "well, how many actually died in the gas chambers?" out of a paranoid sense of a need to exert narrative control makes the whole narrative unravel.
That's where we are now. A lot of people doubt not only the six million figure and the gas chambers but the whole fucking story, and it's the fault of people who used every dirty wordcel trick in the book to prevent truth seekers doing their thing.
And you know what? That's a damn shame in the case the holocaust narrative is mostly correct, because it plays directly into the hands of its perpetrators. Good job.
There is a perfect defense. We're just not yet willing to pay for it.
You can write probably correct programs. Properly structure them and incorporate all the necessary invariants into their proofs, and you're immune to "cyber" attacks from humans, ASI, and God himself.
The "just ship B2B SaaS lol" crowd doesn't understand math, much less proofs. You need a combination of economic and legal incentives to see shift software methodology away from React slop and towards rigorous, robust, engineering that comes with proofs of security properties you want to enforce. It won't be easy, but it can be done.
Or you can just throw your hands up in the air and claim the problem can't be solved.
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