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bgwalteron “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

Professors elsewhere can verify the proof, but not how it was obtained. My assumption was that the focus here is on how "AI" obtains the proof and not on whether it is correct. There is no way to reproduce this experiment in an unbiased, non-corporate, academic setting.

bgwalteron Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

The FSF also ignored the SaaS revolution. They put out the AGPL but did not really market it or convert FSF projects to it.

bgwalteron Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team

DDT has been banned, cigarettes are all but banned, leaded fuel has been banned. Nuclear energy has been banned in Germany.

The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect copyright. You can do all sorts of things.

Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military applications that can still be allowed or should be regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).

bgwalteron Sergey Brin's Unretirement

It is everywhere now. Musk censors his X responses, Grok defends billionaires, the all-in podcast has only positive comments in suspiciously perfect English since a month or so. Previously they allowed criticism.

(And hardly anyone mentions Greenland on X.)

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

Modern cryptography should also not allow users to activate a sketchy linked device feature by scanning a QR code:

"Because linking an additional device typically requires scanning a quick-response (QR) code, threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim's account to an actor-controlled Signal instance."

This is a complete failure of the cryptosystem, worse than the issue of responding in plaintext. You can at least design an email client that simply refuses to send plaintext messages because PGP is modular.

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

Accidentally replying in plaintext is a user error, scanning a QR code is a user error.

Yet one system is declared secure (Signal), the other is declared insecure. Despite the fact that the QR code issue happened in a war zone, whereas I have not heard of a similar PGP fail in the real world.

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

People who do not wish to get killed may care.

bgwalteron Web development is fun again

How can I express in a non cynical way that I think LLMs are theft? Even if courts decide in the future that they think it is not, it is still a protected opinion in the same manner that some people do not recognize the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

Yes, it is odd that this criticism is only allowed for gpg while worse Signal issues are not publicized here:

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus...

Some Ukrainians may regret that the followed the Signal marketing. I have never heard of a real world exploit that has actually been used like that against gpg.

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

I no longer respond if you use Simple Sabotage Field Manual tactics.

EDIT: The submission was flagged from the front page seconds after this reference.

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

Of course you omit the QR code issue in your response, just like tptacek tried to deflect in the other subthread after his Cryptocat objection was refuted.

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

The tangent explicitly talks about generic messaging services. Whatsapp and Signal have more money than gpg. Thinking about it more, it is not even a tangent, because TFA says:

"Use Signal. Or Wire, or WhatsApp, or some other Signal-protocol-based secure messenger."

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocat#Reception_and_usage

"In June 2013, Cryptocat was used by journalist Glenn Greenwald while in Hong Kong to meet NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the first time, after other encryption software failed to work."

So it was used when Snowden was already on the run, other software failed and the communication did not have to be confidential for the long term.

It would also be an indictment of messaging services as opposed to gpg. gpg has the advantage that there is no money in it, so there are unlikely to be industry or deep state shills.

bgwalteron The PGP problem (2019)

How does this help people who are not following this issue regularly? gpg protected Snowden, and this article promotes tools by one of the cryptographers who promoted non-hybrid encryption:

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#agreement

So what to do? PGP by the way never claimed to prevent traffic analysis, mixmaster was the layer that somehow got dropped, unlike Tor.

bgwalteron Heap Overflow in FFmpeg EXIF

Google gives a pittance even for full ossfuzz integration. Which is why many projects just have the bare minimum fuzz tests. My original point was that even with these bare minimum tests ossfuzz has found way more than "AI" has.

bgwalteron Heap Overflow in FFmpeg EXIF

It does not matter what purported categories buffer overflows are in when manual fuzzing finds 100 and "AI" finds 5.

If Google gave open source projects $100,000 per year for a competent QA person, it would cost less than this "AI" money straw fire and produce better results. Maybe the QA person would also find the 5 "AI" detected bugs.

bgwalteron Heap Overflow in FFmpeg EXIF

Maybe they should hire Mario Nawfal for their announcements:

""" BREAKING: AI FOUND VULNERABILITY IN FFMPEG!

After decades of human struggle, humans no longer call the shots.

Pwno decided to take the leap. They did not just find a vulnerability---they found a BOMBSHELL! What took developers weeks to write, AI analyzed in SECONDS! """

bgwalteron Heap Overflow in FFmpeg EXIF

This is another drawback of security research, but one that had already existed before "AI" with ossfuzz.

You basically cannot commit in public to the main branch and audit and test everything 3 months before a release, because any error can be picked up, will be publicized and go into the official statistics.

bgwalteron Heap Overflow in FFmpeg EXIF

The list is pretty short though for 8 months. ossfuzz has found a lot more even with the fuzzers often not covering a lot of the code base.

Manually paying people to write fuzzers by hand would yield a lot more and be less expensive than data centers and burning money, but who wants to pay people in 2026?

bgwalteron 2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

It is clear that Nadella has no clue what he is doing in 2025 and just wants to make another big splash with "AI".

If you force employees to dedicate 100% of their thinking power to agents, prompts, "AI" meetings, working on their necessarily fake "AI" success stories and "impacts", no one has time to do real work. Or have any real new ideas about anything else.

But Nadella doubles down and goes into "startup mode":

https://www.ft.com/content/255dbecc-5c57-4928-824f-b3f2d764f...

Not only Windows 11 got worse, Github got worse, too. So did the free Copilot.

bgwalteron The rise of industrial software

Another AI entrepreneur who writes a long article about inevitability, lists some downsides in order to remain credible but all in all just uses neurolinguistic programming on the reader so that the reader, too, will think the the "AI" revolution is inevitable.

bgwalteron LLVM AI tool policy: human in the loop

It is insane how pro-industry people argue with corpspeak and LLMspeak and are still getting serious responses. This is where open source discussions have arrived now, and no one dares to tell them to STFU because of their corporate sponsors:

"To critique the fortress is not enough. We must offer a blueprint for a better structure: a harbor. A harbor, unlike a fortress, does not have a simple binary function of letting things in or keeping them out. It is an active, intelligent system with channels, docks, workshops, and expert pilots, all designed to guide valuable cargo safely to shore, no matter the state of the vessel that carries it. This is the model we must adopt for open source in a post-AI world. The anxiety over “extractive” contributions is real, but the solution is not a higher wall; it is a smarter intake process."

bgwalteron AI is forcing us to write good code

Someone is downvoting everything again. It seems to be a cronjob, always around the same time.

bgwalteron Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

He was "AI" director at Tesla from 2017:

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-ai-director-hiring-autopilot...

He gave a glowing recommendation for camera-only FSD in 2021:

https://thenextweb.com/news/tesla-ai-chief-explains-self-dri...

Then he left Tesla in 2022. So yes, you could argue that it was all Elon's fault and he just followed for 5 years. We won't know with 100% certainty, I'd find it odd to stay 5 years if you think it doesn't work.

bgwalteron Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

Then replace "finished" with "production software".

bgwalteron Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

This is from the man who has no finished open source projects and who recommended camera-only FSD to Tesla, which he also did not finish.

The actually productive programmers, who wrote the stack that powers the economy before and after 2023 need not listen to these cheap commercials.

bgwalteron AI is forcing us to write good code

https://logic.inc/

"Ship AI features and tools in minutes, not weeks. Give Logic a spec, get a production API—typed, tested, versioned, and ready to deploy."

bgwalteron Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%

Tesla has the government and a vast propaganda apparatus behind it:

https://fortune.com/2025/03/20/howard-lutnick-pumps-tesla-st...

“If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla,” Lutnick told Fox News host Jesse Watters.

In this economy we have a billionaire clan selling hot air and backing each other up. The main "achievements" of this administration are in pumping Bitcoin, "AI", cannabis sales and and online gambling.

bgwalteron Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.

The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.

The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).