Son of Galileo

So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.

But there is no way 'through' ASI. Not for humanity. Either stop it, or go extinct. Any fatalistic cope saying 'Stopping is impossible' boils down to saying 'Extinction is unavoidable'. I'm not willing to accept that. Not for me, not for my kids.

I am like totally sympathetic to all complaints about rapid technological change and by temperament I’m basically a Luddite who thinks almost all of this stuff is bad for us. But I also think there’s just literally nothing reasonable or legitimate to be done about it. You can’t stop people from solving problems. You can’t stop people from inventing things. You wouldn’t want to live in a world where we did that. There’s no way but through.

The genie is out of the bottle. Adapt or die. There’s really just nothing more to it than that.

Can we create human-level intelligence without understanding it? The question remains open.

Alright, real talk, what's happening with our students?

This is a slide from Terence Tao's 'Math 2.0' public lecture yesterday evening at Caltech. I am highly confident that, if the cure actually worked, almost any Stage 4 cancer patient would tell you that human comprehension of its mechanism is completely irrelevant to them.

The Texas experience is like 'Solar? Sounds gay. Of course you can build a bunch of them. Texas is a free country!'

Humans are pretty obviously not conscious though, and it's worth being clear about that (and why) Human brains are mathematically equivalent to a book. This is literally true: Human brain = f(w, s, t) -> o (w: neurons, s: cortical structures, t: morphemes + sensory input, o: output speech) Human beings are *pure* functions (no side effect) Thus they exist in the class of f(ℕ) -> ℕ Since t and o are fixed size, any such function may be rewritten as an *explicit lookup table* (ie, literally printed into a book that maps from input args to output) Thus, human brains are mathematically equivalent to a book. You do not think books are conscious. QED.

my favorite thing right now is i ask ai to generate reading material for me in the form of a relatable book with my exact preferences on how i want to consume information (graphics, voice, tone, etc). on virtually any topic i am interested in. i sometimes ask it to make it sarcastic & funny, even serious things. why buy books? just generate them!