Once again you are talking about programmers in general and not security researchers.

Really, have a look at what it requires to write binary code, let alone reverse engineering complicated code, that somebody else wrote.

I have had a look. I’ve also done some solving of simple crackmes and such. I’m definitely not competent, but to find a security backdoor well-hidden you’ll have to examine behavior, which requires certain skills, and then you’ll have to look at the executable code, and then, of course, having the source is good, but less so if it’s deliberately made look like normal.

I agree with Linus’ statement though:

I think I’m mistaken on that attribution, OpenBSD’s Theo de Raadt is more likely to be the author.

I stand by my opinion that it’s a bad look for a privacy- and security-oriented piece of software, to restrict non-“experts” from inspecting that, which should ensure that.

Yes, I agree that it’s better when the source is present. But if you overvalue the effect, then it might be worse. Say, again, with Linux - plenty of people are using thousands of pieces of FOSS software, trusting that resulting thing far more than Windows. If we knew that the level of trust is absolutely the same, then one could say Linux is safer. But we know that people sometimes do with Linux all kinds of things they wouldn’t do with Windows, because they overvalue the effect of it being FOSS. It’s FOSS, but you still better not store 10 years of home video unencrypted on the laptop you are carrying around, things like that.

If open-source, a lot more eyes could be on it

On the source code. Absolutely the same amount of eyes on the binary.

Anyway, there’s a joke (by Linus Torvalds, I think, but maybe I am wrong) that most of the eyes that could look at the code are attached to hands typing the thing about “more eyes”.

and therefore the chances of intentionally implemented vulnerabilities

Source code being available is obviously beneficial for learning how a program works as a whole, or participating in its development, obviously, but for finding things hidden I’m not sure.

Well, again, taking an unpopular but valid point of view - how good it really is to have the source code for finding vulnerabilities? Is it really harder to hide an intentional backdoor in the source code in plain sight than it is in something that’s only distributed in binaries? I have no relevant experience, but I’ve listened to a lecture by someone from Kaspersky lab saying that.

Having commonly available source code is good for development and learning of functionality of something, but security flaws have that subgroup of backdoors.

What if it has happened in my imagination?

Yes, and also - if something was normal in 80s, it won’t stop being possible in 2030s. In some sense our civilization now is just reveling in the sea of computational power used wastefully.

There was a moment when I moved from an old PC with 512 MB RAM which seemed nice, but was becoming a bit weak for games and all, to a newer C2D PC with 2 GB RAM. I felt it can do anything I’ll ever need. And web aside, it still can do most.

And that old PC, if we compare it to a machine good for year 1999, was very powerful. And 1999 is around Matrix and Phantom Menace, and the X-Wing: Alliance game, and ICQ popularity growing.

More and more resources spent for the same or less social satisfaction. People like talking in money and graphs and industry slang, but honestly social satisfaction is a far better optimized mechanism than these.

Adopting a kitten seems still more satisfying than computing, but the gap in year 1999 was subjectively less than now.

If building from wood is not antiquated, then surely local hardware isn’t.

But their power is built on function fulfilled, and unless there is an alternative, they are the future.

With Moore’s law

It’s not really a law and it’s not true anymore.

there is absolutely no reason why centralizing computers should make sense

There is, and it’s not too different from central heating.

You could live 20 years with the same dumb terminal, while on the remote side you could rent better and better hardware.

I like p2p networks and think socially it’s better to have a decentralized way of providing such resources and paying for them.

But the benefit of renting computing resources is obvious. Except I like the idea of having a local system, and offloading some tasks to remote performers, not renting a remote system.

I mean, of course they want the world working their way and that’s what they are offering. If those thinking differently can’t compete, then that’s how it happens.

That idea is very old. There was such a company as Sun Microsystems.

Well, if we relax and look at this from a different angle, for much of humanity’s history advantageous knowledge was hidden or limited from competition, and in many things it still is.

Except advantageous knowledge of chemistry for early cannons, for example, could be confirmed. Better gunpowder.

This - can’t.

That’s called thinking

I’ve recently assembled in my head one story, that went on for 13 years, that is, roughly speaking, connected to antisemitism (also cowardice).

I won’t go into details, but honestly Mossad and the state of Israel have a reason of existence bigger than my mood swings and feelings on the scale of this decade or that, and I can understand the ethical logic that, if there’s going to be plenty of bloodshed anyway, then rather it’d be their way.

I might have said very rough things about the state of Israel many times, but with all its crimes its existence means that some Jewish people don’t have to live at someone’s mercy saying “thank you daddy” every day. I’d drink to that if it weren’t work time.

Not really, more like “if I can find a key to the door, I can open it, so engraving a fixed combination for the door lock on the same key doesn’t change much”.

Poisoned data is fundamentally valid data. Concepts of logical connectivity and statements being true or false are something needed to use it.

I’m not talking about LLMs. I’m talking about future developments learning on LLMs, eventually there will be some resolutions of conflicting knowledge and logical connections, otherwise they won’t become remotely as useful as advertised.

I said, in other words, that it doesn’t matter what they do until this problem is solved. So if this is described as some sort of rebellion against AI (or “AI”), then no. At the point where it becomes dangerous technology in itself and not just for economy, it won’t be.

If, suppose, I were optimistic over this technology, but pessimistic over its current stage of development, I’d expect this to be a cure. It’s a problem they’ll have to solve. A test they’ll have to pass.

If somewhere inside those things someone makes a mechanism building a graph of syllogisms, no kind of poisoned input data will be able to hurt them.

So - this is a good thing, but when people say it’s a rebellion, it’s not.

This and other such news read as if those people were, in their own sense, similar to LLMs. Doing something on this buzzword or that.

What do they mean by quantum technology? There is already quantum technology all around us, it’s laser sights, optical media, lidars, optical cables and what not. There are also nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

They mean post-quantum cryptography? Well, very nice, but of what I’ve read, it’s a ready solution for a problem that might be 50 years away, despite promises of quantum computers to break encryption the very next year being common.

And then - what can they do to help anything vital, what the hell does a senator know about industry needs?

You should consider effects of scale.

With the size of China it’s simply easier to do “targeted investments”.

They are almost big enough for autarky with modern technologies and conveniences.

Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to … and evade sanctions?

So, if you are born with an unfortunate citizenship and location, you do need these things exactly. Bitcoin is one tech-bro thing I worship. It fulfills a purpose. The world would be worse without it.

I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.

That’s because you live in a first world country and think, apparently, that everyone does or that those who don’t have only themselves to blame.

Yes. This is also similar to Strugatsky brothers’ fiction where people of the future seem like a society of scientific workers.

Same, except mid-00s.