xscott

All good, but I suspect we're thinking about different aspects. If I understand correctly, you're pointing out that nobody is tied to legacy software any more - they can spend 37 minutes to re-implement from scratch in a safe(r) language.

My point is that everyone doing their own thing their own way means an attacker doesn't get the next thousand sites for free after finding a vulnerability in one site.

Having an LLM as sentry is a fun idea too.

You could have a new web server and database too. Maybe a new one every other day created from a cronjob so you aren't a stationary target.

Obscurity in the sense that the bad guy doesn't have your code doesn't hurt, but I think the real win could be that they need to specifically target your system to find your vulnerabilities. That could be a lot of compute and time to dedicate to a single target. So that kind of obscurity changes the economics of it for them.

Yeah I guess, if they liked PHP. Could make a new version of ColdFusion if that's your thing too.

Genetic monocultures like bananas are at risk from a single species of fungus.

One positive result is that you get a lot more variation in vulnerabilities. That probably sounds negative, but it isn't.

As an example, a black hat doesn't get 70% of web sites from one shared bug in PHP. They need to target specific sites, and the exploit isn't likely to work in very many other places.

It's only been a few hours, but I'm surprised this hasn't gotten much response. Maybe the west coast hasn't woken up yet.

I question Anthropic and OpenAI's motives every time they do a fear mongering press release, but I think it's smart to draw attention to local exploits. Basically, if you aren't running software you don't trust, there isn't the same immediate panic as remote exploits. It advertises the problem without ruining everyone's day.

On the other hand, most people are running code that shouldn't be trusted. Browsers and games normalized automatic software updates, and lots of other applications followed. It's not just a matter of whether your system has remote vulnerabilities, we should be concerned if that terminal emulator or compiler you like is being updated from a server with vulnerabilities.

Not my area of expertise at all, but I thought flash was durable for read-only use. Put your weights there, leave them there, and use other memory for the KV cache.

I'm sure you meant Windows NT 4. It's all kind of down hill after that, with worthwhile stopping points at Windows 2000 and Windows 7.

France has 280 nukes and bombers to deliver them. France launches satellites, so it's not a stretch to think they could do ICBMs in a hurry if they wanted or needed to.

> what we really need is some strategic nuclear ability

France has nukes.

Ahh, I see. That's why you were talking about structs and mmap. Thank you for the clarification.

I've written a lot of text parsers for pet programming languages and other things, and several binary parsers for work related stuff. I agree that bad binary formats are really awful. I don't remember the details now, but I gave up on trying to deal with Matlab data files.

WASM made it pretty easy to parse though. Kind of like TIFF or WAV files, the section type and length is right there when you need it even if you're streaming, and it's easy to skip sections you don't know or care about. There's a little bit of error-prone grossness having both unsigned and signed LEB128 inside of some sections though.

and electric stations, municipal water pumps, cellular networks, over-the-air software updates to your car ...

No worries, and I apologize if I was too blunt.

We'd have to get pretty specific to have a real bake-off on size, and that's probably more effort than either of us wants to spend for a HN thread that's basically dead. I could invent scenarios where either of JS or WASM has the advantage.

Code-golfing that particular example though, the JS could be "const x2=a=>2*a;" (15 bytes). If you ignore the one-time (insignificant) costs for the WASM headers and sections, the comparable byte code for that export is about the same number of bytes. If JS wins, it doesn't win by a lot.

Maybe I misunderstand, but I'm not sure I see the point about hard working engineers or memory mapping. I'm sure the JavaScript JIT engineers had to work really hard to get good performance. Among many other things, JS Objects using "shapes" or "hidden classes" was a pretty clever way to compensate for not having structs at all. For both JS and WASM, end developers don't need to worry about it, and you can't mmap JS to execute the code either.

The audit trail (status in general) could be read only. Enabling remote defrost (control in general) is an optional convenience which requires better quality software.

Trying to ignore your snark and overconfidence to focus on the interesting part, the new threat is a lot more people being able to use an automated tool to do something they couldn't do before.

I agree the solution is to fix the vulnerabilities. I think "impenetrable" requires a radical shift in popular mindset about operating systems, applications, and devices connected to the network.

Everything you said about WASM is false. It uses a variable length encoding for integers (LEB128). It presents as a stack machine (RPN) not SSA. It doesn't expose or impose padding in structs.

It seems like you're extrapolating from things you know to something you don't know at all, and you're spreading misinformation. WASM was designed to be compact.

A small set of changes to AssemblyScript could do this, but most people would still grab for Emscripten with a shadow stack and asyncify hacks.

Lol, I suspect it will be humans instructing the AI that cause most problems too.

We can't always pin the risks on the Chinese, so imagine a scenario where a disturbed insider at Anthropic smuggles out the weights for Claude Aprocrypha and runs them through abliteration. This is not super expensive to do on rented hardware. Then the disturbed human tells the refusal-free model to do anything necessary to launch nuclear weapons.

It'd probably only kill a few billion people though, so not really an "existential threat" in literal terms. :-)

I don't disagree or really have a dog in the fight for three out of your four points, but it's unfortunate that WASM gets such a bad rap. The blobs are large because popular compilers force the semantics of popular languages into the Turing tar pit. WASM binaries are pretty compact by design:

    const binary = Uint8Array.fromBase64(
        "AGFzbQEAAAABBgFgAX8BfwMCAQAHBgECeDIAAAoJAQcAIABBAmwL"
    );
    const module = new WebAssembly.Module(binary);
    const instance = new WebAssembly.Instance(module, {});
    console.log(instance.exports.x2(3));

This is a trivial and useless example at 39 bytes, but a real example could be more compact than comparable minified JavaScript.

I know it's popular to take a black or white position and fight viciously about it, but I didn't say either of the choices you're offering. Some things are shades of grey.

Really though, I just wanted to point out that there's a difference between efficient use of limited resources and lower prices and convenience for consumers.

For efficient use of RAM, probably. For efficient cost to consumers, not so much. The company that owns the RAM and rents its use to you WILL try to make a profit. At pre-AI prices, $20 per month summed over a year or two bought enough RAM to run local models. Most people won't need the frontier.

I kind of feel this way about condominiums vs self standing houses, and I think the benefits and problems are comparable.

In the condo I used to own, I shared 5 out 6 faces of the box with neighbors. Cheapest electricity bills I ever had because you're mutually insulating your neighbors.

However, my HOA fees were more than that savings. The chairman noticed we had a lot of money in the reserves and pushed for a vote to do a multimillion dollar renovation. Popularity contest for things I don't value and HOA fees go up. Want to make a change or need to make a repair, need to get approval from the board.

Anyway, I'm sure the parallels are obvious with a little imagination, but I prefer a standalone house.

Thank you for the link. Could you explain why an attacker needs an exploit in both the renderer and sandbox? Why is an RCE in just one not game over?

I don't know the whole story, and I'd be interested in the details if you're willing to share.

However, I'm a geek who sits online all day, and I don't pay for the top tier of bandwidth available to me. I also see occasional comments where people are saying they use Sonnet or Luna because they're good enough. Maybe in 20 years people will point to the incompetence and greed in data center build outs too.

I think your comment is well reasoned, but Jevon's doesn't always happen. As an example, the US installed a lot of fiber when the internet took off, but most people were happy with the bandwidth once they could stream high def video, and now there's a lot of dark fiber.

I have no idea which way it will go. Maybe most people will be satiated once they can generate video on demand. They don't need many tokens to read and write their email, book a flight, or do their homework.

There's a difference between something being illegal and being able to enforce that law.

If the capability keeps growing significantly, then I agree it's possible the US could hold their significant lead indefinitely.

However, capability could plateau or reach a point where most of the market can't tell the difference and isn't willing to pay a premium.

Lol, that's funny in an awful way. Choose between popping the AI bubble or creating a duopoly, and still have all the cybersecurity and other risks.

Presumably, legally operating companies aren't the dominant threat though. So banning open weight models doesn't solve anything.

I think your question is rhetorical, in which case I agree with the sentiment.

The US absolutely could (and very well might) make Chinese models illegal, possibly open weight models in general, but all that will do is keep them out of the hands of law abiding US citizens.

Law breakers in the US and the entire rest of the world would still have access, and nothing in the US will be any safer. People who think regulation will solve the problem should be embarrassed by their ignorance.