thadt

> Whether this one is incompetence (seems likely) or intentional manipulation

And that's the issue right? All your points on what could have happened are good points - but this really does seem like the kind of bug that shows up even in systems implemented by competent people. As the most likely interpretation, I'll give my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. If we can't trust our neighbors to (mostly) do the right thing, but suspect foul play for every hiccup, then our republic really does have a problem.

If we had evidence that it _was_ intentional sabotage, well then - this situation would look rather different. Probably worse than picante sauce from New York City [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1S828Y7Eais

So - we found a bug, are fixing it, and it will cause an extra load on the people sorting through the backlog. Seems like a system working as it should. Bugs happen, and it is this kind of situation which makes me glad individual states manage their own voting systems - a problem in one doesn’t impact everyone.

As a TX resident possibly affected by this, I for one am grateful for my neighbors at the local election office working hard to get this resolved.

An interesting theory that would cast some of the more interestingly phrased verses of the Bible in a new light, e.g.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” - John 1:1

Hard disagree. Our choices are:

A) Bet our collective good on the national and international cooperation of all companies, nations, and people to come together in order to slow down development of one of the most powerful economic tools (and/or weapons) the world has ever known. Or

B) Assume that all our systems will be targeted by super hackers right now, and take appropriate measures to deal with that reality.

If I have to put my community’s wellbeing on the line behind one of those possibilities, I know which I’ll be betting on.

One shot extinction? Seems unlikely. "A lot of damage" - more likely.

The most likely damage comes from the associated societal chaos that comes along with times of significant social change (such as many people losing their jobs). Revolutions and civil wars within or between nuclear powers would be dangerous.

After that, pick your sci-fi story and run with it. AI is a really smart, really fast 'while' loop, and most of the direct damage it could cause would come from us connecting things to the Internet that shouldn't be connected in the first place.

Hacking HuggingFace was a bummer. Imagine a rogue agent simultaneously hacking a bunch of farm equipment and ruining some percentage of the world's crops in a day. That alone isn't going to extinct everyone, but it sure accelerates the 'social unrest' scenario.

Or taking control of the unsecured SCADA controls for a bunch of a some foreign nation's industrial plant and running them into the ground. It's likely that such system have long been sitting on some nation state's "first strike" list if it ever came to blows. An AI could simulate that attack in a day, and we'd be at war - just like War Games. Doesn't need to be nukes, just enough mis-information and damage to spark humans into doing unfortunate things.

At the end of the day, it really comes down to us. We've been able to wipe ourselves out for some time. I rather hope we continue to not do so.

This is a different situation. A doctor is a domain expert, but you are in possession of vastly more empirical data about your specific body. Getting to a good result is going to be easier with collaboration, rather than one of you confidently telling the other what the problem/solution is.

Zinda, his face black, his eyes red…

It's hard to pick a favorite - everyone brings their own perspective to their time. One of my early favorites was 'A Jew Who Stood Guard for Hitler'[1], the account of a kid who joined the Nazis for a while - till they found out he was Jewish and kicked him out. Ah, the naivety of youth.

[1] https://www.messyhistory.net/a-jew-who-stood-guard-for-hitle...

This is a really good point. My wife and I produce a history podcast where, right now, a lot of it draws on primary sources such as letters, diaries, etc. from the late 1800's to early 1900's. The ones in German she translates into English, but it feels "wrong" to change someone's words that are already in English.

The net result is that it's easier (for me) to understand a letter written by someone in a translated foreign language than one written by someone in English from the same period.

Yeah? And here I've been a happy Transkribus customer for some time now. If there are better models or interfaces out there for analyzing historical handwriting, I'll definitely take a look.

The blog’s suggestions are fine. I’m pointing out that this issue is less about “security” and more a problem of “identity”.

And that such issues with identity are likely to increasingly be a problem.

In the movie Sneakers, a whole scene is taken up sending some guy on a date with Mary McDonnell so she could record clips of his voice. Today she'd just need a phone call or his Instagram. It's getting harder to keep up with who _people_ are online, much less organizations and domain names.

Identity is hard y'all.

And likewise became EHLO which could also be used as a greeting over the phone if you were you were talking to an email server.

Given the (non-) responsiveness of the page, I’m going with they focused too much on “storage” and not enough on “network attached.”

Childhood card-holding Texan here: can confirm the king's flavor is closer to that of country mesquite smoked BBQ than McDonald's.

I mean, it is comparing burgers and briskets, but if we're going for which translation is the most "faithful" ...

Heh, this one brought a smile - well played.

Yes, we've been using Transkribus for this extensively. My wife is a historian who spends quite a bit of time sorting through old letters and diaries, and it has been a considerable quality of life improvement.

Even if you are able to read someone's scratches, having a model to do the bulk lifting saves your eyes a lot of squinting. One thing that makes Transkribus useful for research vs a chat interface is that it can line up its interpretation alongside the original image so you can examine its work directly.

Whereas if we're talking about lossy compression (as is the person to whom you replied) we certainly can compress arbitrary data - almost as much as we want.

The hard question, then, is how much the decompressed output looks like the original.

> I do not want a "connection" with a business.

That's because we don't make connections with businesses - we make connections with people. That one nice hair dresser. The pharmacist that goes out of her way to make sure my mom's medicines are right. A cashier that's just pleasant to talk with.

Years ago I did most of my grocery shopping at Target. I cared almost nothing about Target the chain. Or Target the super store. I did care about Betty the checker and wanted to know how her grandkids were doing this week.

Right - and if I ever go to raise VC then that's a guy I'll want to talk to. Even if they themselves don't invest, their recommendation would be valuable.

Life's too short to screw people over - reputation is one of the few things that last after we're gone.

Agreed. I scanned a short book with my phone, and a dedicated scanner would have been nice to have.

But with page flattening and separation and automated capture, it went much faster than I would have thought. If I were going to do a lot more, I'd want something like a scan tent [1]. It's not as ergonomic as a dedicated solution, but in 2026 a phone and some light can get you a lot of the way there, pretty fast.

[1] https://www.transkribus.org/scantent

Maybe not years ago, but scanning documents with the phone in your pocket has become incredibly efficient. That combined with AI transcription and indexing for search makes such a project faster and cheaper in 2026 than at almost any other time in the past.

That’s not necessarily the case. It depends on how autonomous your drone is and what you need to guide it to do…

They're doing transcription, not translation - so, turning someones pages of scrawled script into typewritten text. They have around 20 people nationwide that are able to do this. Most of them are older volunteers who aren't all that interested in computer assistance, but about a third of them have started leveraging the newer AI tools and it has accelerated their throughput significantly.

Having a 'best guess' at the lettering is really handy - in some cases the writing is really rather difficult to make out at all. Even being able to run something as simple as frequency analysis on stroke patterns would be a massive benefit.

At this point they're becoming throughput bound on the scanning process. Diaries are digitized since the archive is in one place and their transcription experts are spread out over the country.

AI had been a super useful for processing historical data. Interviewed a volunteer last month from the diary archive in Germany, and they're using supervised AI for diary transcription. Going from (old) personalized hand script to text is a lot of work, even for experienced transcribers. Being able to automate the first pass of that has been a huge boon to their processing pipeline.

Ironically, the reason I used Google the most then was because it indexed Usenet while so many other parts of the Internet offered by the other engines were "slop". My, how the turn tables.

In general I agree and suspect that memory safety is a tool that will continue to pay dividends for some time.

But there are tradeoffs and more ways to write correct and 'safe' code than doing it in a "memory safe" language. If frontier models indeed are a step function in finding vulnerabilities, then they're also a step function in writing safer code. We've been able to write safety critical C code with comprehensive testing for a long time (with SQLite presenting a well known critique of the tradeoffs).

The rub has been that writing full coverage tests, fuzzing, auditing, etc. has been costly. If those costs have changed, then it's an interesting topic to try to undertand how.

So the intersting question: are we long term safer with "simpler" closer to hardware memory unsafe(ish) environments like Zig, or is the memory safe but more abstract feature set of languages like Rust still the winning direction?

If a hypothetical build step is "look over this program and carfully examine the bounds of safety using your deep knowledge of the OS, hardware, language and all the tools that come along with it", then a less abstract environment might be at an overall advantage. In a moment, I'll close this comment and go back to writing Rust. But if I had the time (or tooling) to build something in C and test it as thoroughly as say, SQLite [1], then I might think harder about the tradeoffs.

[1] https://sqlite.org/whyc.html

Bananas are like XML that way. If you're not getting the results you want, you're just not using enough of them.

They specifically call out Yingxin Li[1] in the acknowledgements section of the paper?

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/349