Even if quantum computing turns out to actually be infeasible and classical cryptography is secure for the next millennia, it’s still a good feature to have a third independent encryption layer in the protocol. It makes it that much less likely reliant on the other two being bulletproof.

I believe that supposed to be whether you can get to their website to download clients / register / etc through TOR. Not that the VPN can access the TOR network.

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-we-should-improve-society-somewhat-comic-the-popular-panel-explained

Some very few do, not sure if they’re in China though.

“Windfarms hurt birds” is 90+% fossil fuel propaganda though. Yes birds run into windmills, they also run into skyscrapers and houses and antennas and planes.

We should of course look for ways to mitigate that. We should not just pretend smokestacks do no harm and not develop renewable energy projects.

Dogs are significantly more subjective. And there’s a noticeable correlation with dogs trying to please their handler by indicating someone the handler is suspicious of.

Nothing is foolproof and its good to have more tools in the kit.

This kind of fundamental university based research is about to get a whole lot rarer in the US and that’s not great.

2 factor authentication via app/texting I’d imagine.

An authenticator app is better than basically anything but a physical token / key generator, but the apps are more universally supported. No one is probably going to spoof your phone number to get into your accounts… But doesn’t hurt to me more secure about it anyway.

Yes, but littering used to be a legitimately big problem to. Like the hole in the ozone, now that it’s “solved”/ the norm for it to be getting better the focus should shift to other things.

Google Glass purposefully made it obvious what they were. The newer glasses without cameras from Meta et al basically look like regular glasses if you can’t see the waveguide in the lenses.

German copyright laws?

I find it so incredibly frustrating that we’ve gotten to the point where the “marketing guys” are not only in charge, but are believed without question, that what they say is true until proven otherwise.

“AI” becoming the colloquial term for LLMs and them being treated as a flawed intelligence instead of interesting generative constructs is purely in service of people selling them as such. And it’s maddening. Because they’re worthless for that purpose.

Lifeguards take breaks every ~20 minutes, not just to look down or zone out, to get up and move around. And again, are in an extremely controlled environment looking for a very small number of specific problems.

Elon is making programmers sleep at their desks.

Lifeguards have very short periods of diligence before they take mandatory breaks in an extremely controlled environment. Train conductors operate on grade separated infrastructure. Security Guards do not have to take split second action or die.

Putting a warm body in a mind-numbing situation and requiring split second response to a life or death situation at a random time is a recipe for failure.

Expecting people to be able to behave like machines is generally the attitude that leads to crash investigations.

I’m sure that there are examples of actually wasted money, but just putting it out there that planning is fucking important. There have been several high profile projects, like Texas high speed rail, where planning was the hard part and the project got canceled as they were ready to break ground because “there was no progress”. Cue* Republicans “the government does nothing” after they stopped anything from happening. Infrastructure cannot operate on election cycle timelines.

Digging in the ground and integrating with existing infrastructure isn’t just a plug and play operation. Leases and liens need to be sorted out. Estimates of current and future demand needs to be sorted out so you don’t install useless networks. Fiber isn’t that heavy, but “can the existing conduits under bridges/roads/etc support it and/or do they have room to without a complete replacement” isn’t a trivial question for backbone lines.

Winging it just causes more problems as you find things you didn’t anticipate and cause delays while having to continue paying contracts so work can resume once the delay is cleared. If you don’t, the contractor is on to their next job and unavailable for an effectively random amount of time. While everyone is mad at you that “no work is being done”.

It could be done faster, but it would cost more. Because planning is really important to keep multi-million/billion dollar projects accountable and on track.

Sure. But in the first Fast and Furious movie they’re not driving syncro-less transmission semis. They’re driving tricked out sports cars in a straight line and somehow having about 14 gear changes in a 6 speed manual.

And what I mean is that prior to the mid 1900s the etymology didn’t exist to cause that confusion of terms. Neither Babbage’s machines nor prior adding engines were called computers or calculators. They were ‘machines’ or ‘engines’.

Babbage’s machines were novel in that they could do multiple types of operations, but ‘mechanical calculators’ and counting machines were ~200 years old. Other mathematical tools like the abacus are obviously far older. They were not novel enough to cause confusion in anyone with even passing interest.

But there will always be people who just assume ‘magic’, and/or “it works like I want it to”.

“Computer” meaning a mechanical/electro-mechanical/electrical machine wasn’t used until around after WWII.

Babbag’s difference/analytical engines weren’t confusing because people called them a computer, they didn’t.

“On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

• Charles Babbage

If you give any computer, human or machine, random numbers, it will not give you “correct answers”.

It’s possible Babbage lacked the social skills to detect sarcasm. We also have several high profile cases of people just trusting LLMs to file legal briefs and official government ‘studies’ because the LLM “said it was real”.

I think because it’s language.

There’s a famous quote from Charles Babbage when he presented his difference engine (gear based calculator) and someone asking “if you put in the wrong figures, will the correct ones be output” and Babbage not understanding how someone can so thoroughly misunderstand that the machine is, just a machine.

People are people, the main thing that’s changed since the Cuneiform copper customer complaint is our materials science and networking ability. Most things that people interact with every day, most people just assume work like it appears to on the surface.

And nothing other than a person can do math problems or talk back to you. So people assume that means intelligence.

That’s what config files are for. It would be a nightmare to hardcode weight and balance and have to recompile the HUD every time you change the loadout or refuel the plane.

Most code, algorithms, etc are not any more sensitive than the concept of desks and file cabinets. No, guidance programs for missiles probably shouldn’t be put on GitHub, but there’s a reason RSA and other encryption algorithms were open sourced. It’s better to have more eyes looking for inefficiencies, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities than to just assume it’s good because no-one on the team responsible is smart/engaged enough to find them.

A lot of functionality can be decoupled from anything that needs to be classified. A HUD is a HUD and no one should be hard coding in performance characteristics of the F-35 into it. I’ve also worked on government projects and holy crap does the code quality vary wildly, even before you get into “it’s still working so deal with the problems, it doesn’t have the budget for updates”.

Using ‘off the shelf’ parts/code can save significant time and money. There’s a reason subs use xbox controllers. Government websites and data interfaces at the very least should have the audit-ability that open source provides.