it was probably a rote translation of the German word ‘sonst’
4,677 karma · joined July 14, 2009
online writing before 2022 is the low-background steel of the information age. now these models will all be training on their own output. what will the consequences be of this?
The classical approach was to understand how genes transcribe to mRNA, and how mRNA translates to polypeptides; how those are cleaved by the cell, and fold in 3D space; and how those 3D shapes results in actual biological function. It required real-world measurement, experiment, and modeling in silico using biophysical models. Those are all hard research efforts. And it seems like the mindset now is: we've done enough hard research, let's feed what we know into a model, hope we've chosen the right hyperparameters, and see what we get. Hidden in the weights and biases of the model will be that deeper map of the real world that we have not yet fully grasped through research.
But the AI cannot provide a 'why'. Its network of weights and biases are as unintelligible to us as the underlying scientific principles of the real world we gave up trying to understand along the way. When AI produces a result that is surprising, we still have to validate it in the real world, and work backwards through the hard research to understand why we are surprised.
If AI is just a tool for a shotgun approach to discovery, that may be fine. However, I fear it is sucking a lot of air out of the room from the classical approaches. When 'AI' produces incorrect, misleading, or underwhelming results? Well, throw more GPUs at it; more tokens; more joules; more parameters. We have blind faith it'll work itself out.
But because the AI can never provide a guarantee of correctness, it is only useful to those with the infrastructure to carry out those real-world validations on its output, so it's not really going to create a paradigm shift. It can provide only a marginal improvement at the top of the funnel for existing discovery pipelines. And because AI is very expensive and getting more so, there's a pretty hard cap on how valuable it would be to a drugmaker.
I know I'm not the only one worried about a bubble here.
Dare I ask why?
I’m loving all the feedback and wanted to address some things:
* Yes, nonce tracking is expensive. HTTP request signatures could be used instead of nonces—they’re just not fully fleshed out yet, from what I can tell. And a lot of other crypto systems we rely on in Web traffic today also assume proper nonce tracking. Fortunately you only need to track distinct nonces per established session, so you could wait to allocate storage for them until the client actually tries to set up a WebSession, and use a Bloom filter to save on storage at the risk of some false positives for nonce reuse (could be risky if you’re relying on that as tamper evidence, but you could tune your filters accordingly).
* The stuff about the ergonomics of cookies and banners and auto-log-out as they currently are is mostly incidental. I’m just trying to paint a picture of how tighter integration of the notion of a ‘session’ into the browser itself could improve the UX we currently have today.
* Many people have pointed out that this is not stateless. Indeed! This is supposed to be a more secure way of establishing a stateful connection over a stateless protocol, for which there is already a demand which we’re meeting with the least secure possible method (bearer tokens sent in plaintext over the channel). Issues with scalability need to be addressed on the implementation side, but I believe the protocol is still sound and not inherently unscalable (no more than TLS in its current form).
I am going to look for opportunities to fold these points into the document itself, and maybe rearrange some of it so that these points get covered earlier and more clearly.
Is it because the bland cars and houses and advertisements from back in the day weren't nice enough to get preserved into the historical record? Maybe the people who owned those things weren't rich enough to take and keep pictures or videos of them, or weren't considered important enough to have aspects of their existence celebrated in media, media that were saved for posterity?
SHA512 isn't a good choice for this, because it's optimized for fast low-memory computation. Why not use bcrypt or argon2, which are industry-accepted best practices for password hashing?
* They effectively entrust the keys to your entire digital life to (right now) either Google or Apple. Account compromise, or a ToS-related suspension, becomes catastrophic.
* Domain changes happen (acquisitions, rebrands, etc.), and there is no way to share or migrate passkeys between domains. Right now the best you can do is a highly manual process involving the user authenticating on the old domain, registering a new credential on the new domain, and somehow linking them. This process itself could be highly vulnerable to interception, since every site would likely have to build a bespoke way of doing it.
* There's no way to migrate your passkeys between ecosystems. So if you're an iPhone user, and all your logins are iCloud Passkeys, it becomes really hard to switch to Android.
* Password-sharing is regrettably used a lot right now, but it's the simplest thing that works. For example, I and my husband have a shared 1Password vault for things like utility and streaming account logins. Right now none of the Passkey syncing providers support anything like that (and I feel like they won't, because it'd be a huge vector for scams).
I think the password is going to stick around until these issues are addressed.
Is it possible the physical comorbidities could be related to the depression? I'd imagine if my body was breaking down in new ways that made my impending mortality palpable, I'd be pretty depressed too.