mrweasel

You can replace the PLC. It's not like a modern PLC couldn't be made to control a 1990s fridge. The question is "Who will pay for the upgrade". DanFoss sure as hell won't. The stores won't, because they've already paid for the fridge.

Honestly I feel like this should fall under a support contract. The pricing structure could be similar to that of Microsoft. Support is fairly cheap, X number of years included in the purchase price, once the product reaches EOL the price goes up dramatically each year.

There's a massive problem in how we think about these products collectively. They are inherently insecure, they will be attacked and preventing it is expensive. You could build a safer alternative, but you'd be priced out of the market instantly by less safe, but more convenient alternatives.

No, I have no wish to use LLMs to generate text for me. I would however be happy if those who do, would use models that generate more readable text.

The tell tell sign for me is that it's still incredibly hard to read. AI tend to write in a style that I'm unable to easily read (humans does that as well sometimes). I constantly have to go back and re-read the previous sentence, because the text simply doesn't register.

A next step I'd suggest is asking the LLM to use shorter words when available.

A "fun" observation I've had is that politicians and police tells us that they are focusing on crimes that increases the perception of safety. Then for some reason they spend time on petty drug deals, gangs that mostly fight internally and other crimes that the average person would never experience.

If they wanted to do something to increase feeling of safety, and justice, they'd crack down on bike theft.

To some extend I'd argue that even true crime shows are complicit. Hour long "documentaries" about obscure murders 40 years in a place you're not entirely sure exists. The streaming services just keeps digging deeper and deeper for anything that could lure in viewers, covering crimes that you wouldn't have known of 20 years ago.

I believe that's for soldiers on the ground. One soldier can defend against ~10 attackers. For missiles, and drones, you can overwhelm air defence pretty cheaply, because the defence missiles cost more than the attack ones, as they need to be more precise.

Just to be clear, they don't have access to the "full package", only the cameras on their property, right? Or is it cross referenced with vehicles flagged by others?

Like they deliberately want a system that can be abused, or that they actually know that it can and will be abused, but not voting for it would make them appear soft on crime?

Honestly I think the majority aren't smart enough to do the cost benefit analysis of these system, so they just ignore the warning.

Every time law enforcement is given surveillance tools the same thing happens, the people with legal and approved access will abuse it.

Politicians are completely naive in their understand how people works, if it's abused, the system isn't locked down enough or that one person circumvented the procedure. They completely fail to understand that there exists people to whom you cannot grant access and screening people in advance probably impossible. Some cop checks all the boxes, gets access to databases, then their partner leaves them and they are now no longer safe to grant access.

I don't understand why it's hard to grasp that surveillance tools are dangerous and rather using them to protect others, law enforcement will use these tools to do bad things. It's as if that we assume that cops are better people and follow rules better. Even in countries that actually train their police force this isn't remotely true.

The US might be different, I doubt it, but society is getting increasingly SAFE, there is less and less need for these tools.

Thanks :-)

It's is wild to see investors go crazy and hype the value of the AI labs when ever they talk about rogue agents. They completely ignore the possibility that these people don't know what they're doing operationally.

As long as technology keeps being visible I don't think society will be improved by it. The development in the past few years have let me to the conclusion that having technology insisting on being in your face, it will not benefit society. It has to blend into the background and be something you pull out when you need it. Almost anything "big tech" has produced in the past 25 year have pushed technology into the foreground.

> It seems like people are increasingly exhausted and disillusioned with life.

The interesting part is what causes what. Are people exhausted and disillusioned because they aren't experience life the same way as previously, or aren't they having these experiences because they are exhausted and disillusioned.

Media in general is probably the real answer. We lack boredom at home. Earlier you were bored, so you signed up for sports, went on cheap trips, camping, pretty much anything to get out. Talking to older people 60 - 70+, some of them spent three or four days at the clubhouse of their chosen sport, they where constantly out of the house, because that's were you weren't bored.

Depends on the city. Here you can have a really nice time out for two people for $250.

"In every partnership, there is a person who stacks the dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and a person who stacks the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth." - Someone online.

At home I'm the architect, my wife's the raccoon. I don't actually believe that you can stack the dishwasher wrong as such, but you can make it hard for yourself to unload, if you don't sort the items correctly.

There's already a 2CV electric conversion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lE7rcN4EnE

The concept art looks wonderfully playful, but it won't ever ship like that. Take the seats for example, they have no headrest. Safety standard will not allow the car to ship like that. I don't suggest that this is a bad thing, but the "correct" solution would be to design custom seat that fit the style, but that's not a financially sane solution. So the 2CV will, if it's build, have standard Citroen seats, losing fun and appealing bench seat in the front.

So this is how it was done 25 years ago: Only the used ports (ethernet jacks) on a network is activate, disconnecting a device and the port closes. That strictly speaking doesn't mean that there aren't way to get devices on the network, but it does make it a lot harder. You're absolutely correct about these networks being in hostile environments, but why then do we pretend that they are not? Fridges like these have never not been in a hostile environment, so why aren't basic security measures taken to secure the physical side of things?

In my world the central server can be hack in two ways, that is by a malicious operator or via some scheme like the US/Israeli attack on Irans uranium centrifuges. The central server also have no business being online, that to is on a closed network, running the whitelisted applications from the manufacturer.

Leased lines, MPLS, custom routing setups, hell just a VPN that fails closed. There are so many options for doing this, all more secure that just slapping a device online behind whatever router the cheapest ISP gave you.

The problem is that many of these setups are put behind essentially consumer connections, but with a better support contract or simply fitted with a 5G modem and a SIM card from the cell provider with the cheapest plan.

Building a WAN isn't magic, but it does require working with (competent) ISPs and paying the higher cost.

This still shouldn't be online. They can be networked, if you need remote monitoring, but that's different from being online (at least in my definition).

Obviously it's a question of cost and convenience, and just dumping your appliance on the internet and make it phone home is going to be the cheaper option. If you want security those appliances goes on a separate network, which cannot reach the internet.

My eyes aren't particularly bad, not at the point where I need glasses to read books, program or anything, but I'm at 160-170% zoom before it's comfortable to read. HN is the same... so it might just be me.

That's probably not the point the author is trying to make. In the book humans are trying to make sense of the artefacts lefts by the aliens, but are only able to do so slowly. The gap between human understanding and the aliens who built the artefacts are just to large.

The book never tells us that this is actual trash, it's just a theory. If the theory is true however, the aliens might also not understand the damage they've done, it's just a bit of littering to them. Or they don't care, they just destroyed an ant hill, so what.

The author of the article might have a bit more faith in the current generation of AI than I do, I don't believe that LLMs are really capable of creating that big a gap. The discoveries they make are all based on human knowledge and understanding, so we can comprehend the foundations on which they are built. Now if models can train and iterate on their own, to a much greater extend, then maybe, some day, in the far future their discoveries could leap frog humans to the same degree as the aliens in "A Roadside Picnic" and not understand that their output is damaging to us. That's just not going to happen with our current LLMs, they aren't going to scale up to that extend. There are already articles suggesting that we're almost at the peak of what they can do, with the resources we allocate.

Strange, because I have the same issue on two different machines. It doesn't happen all the time, but frequently enough that I assumed that Finder does some re-scan every now and then (or when you open a new Finder window).

It was a legal problem, and an interesting story: https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

It already feels a bit like it's two separate operating systems on one machine. It's still usable, but I am starting to notice odd behaviours. Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI, there seems to be no notification from the filesystem to Finder, informing it that the terminal has created a file.

Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. More and more I see colleague either switching to Linux, or have a mac laptop for administrative tasks and then a Linux workstation, or VMs, where they do their actual work.

The "fun" part is that it was only caught because the bill for the lookups was higher than expected. Had the attackers done a lookup every now and then, nobody would have noticed.

Apparently no one cares, until it becomes a financial issue. IT professionels have pointed out that the system is deeply flawed for 15 - 20 years, at least, but every issue has been papered over with more IT, tweaks to software and websites. The fundamental issues have never been addressed.

The average Dane doesn't even care. They'll just complain that they need to scan their health card, rather than shouting their CPR number across the pharmacy. Thousands of people have access to the system every day, abuse happens daily, but no one seems to care, because there hasn't been an actual costs associated with that abuse.

Not really sure what to do with the information, but I love the UI.

I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.

I just feel incredibly uncomfortable with something as complex as modern software controlling something as basic as physical security. Now modern locks aren't exactly create, but adding on a layer of software just provides you with an additional layer that can fail.

For a home, I'd argue that you should fail open, for safety. So now I'm sleeping or out of the country and the software fails and the doors unlock.

Then there's the quality of the software. Home Assistance is probably fairly good, but the software in the devices probably isn't. All the demonstrations I've seen of home automation, regardless of supposed quality and interoperability has been, in my mind, yanking as all hell. If an IoT sensor reports nothing, is that because there's nothing to report, or has it lost connection, or is the configuration broken? I'd be constantly nervous about the later two. A practical example is tire pressure sensors, I despise them. They are more often than not misreporting, so you learn to ignore them.

And as you say: "any experienced HA automation geek knows", yeah, but I don't want to be a home automation geek, I just want the stuff to work. I don't want to be bothered by setup and configuration, I don't want to think about it, ever.