> What we actually need is for the WebAuthn spec to include a signal that tells credential managers "this passkey is load-bearing for encryption, not just auth" so they can surface appropriate warnings before deletion. Right now credential managers treat all passkeys identically.
This feels more like CYA/shifting the blame for me. If a service is designed so that I will lose all my data if I lose the passkey, then a "yo, don't lose that passkey, like, ever!" warning is the minimum, but doesn't solve the problem.
I found the initial suggestion "don't ever use passkeys for encryption of persistent data" more reasonable.
(Or what the sibling comment describes: Design the encryption in such a way there is an alternate key that could be used for decrypting)
> For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers.
OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it.
Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14 millennia ago.
But then you learn there are still 270 millennia of human history left that we know almost nothing of...
And the total human population in prehistory was tiny, likely under a million for much of that time, and possibly dropping to a few thousand at some point. The total human experience of those 250k years may not be much more than the last few thousand...
As a possible example of this, I was kind of baffled how quickly we're all now throwing the sophisticated AST/program analysis and refactoring methods over board we already had before AI. Just look at the refactoring methods of Eclipse or IntelliJ.
I think those should be very useful, especially with AI: Either as a tool for the agents themselves - why spend heaps of tokens completely rewriting a code file, if you could do most of it by calling some global refactoring operations on the IDE's AST/symbol database?
Or side-by-side with it, to give human users better insight what the AI did.
Instead it seems to be all VSCode (if at all) + grep + AI agents, and nothing else.
"Code Mode", where the AI writes a little program or script to do the AST/symbol transformations sounds like the win. As you point out, less tokens, and gives the humans insight.
> Self-attention is required. The model must contain at least one self-attention layer. This is the defining feature of a transformer — without it, you have an MLP or RNN, not a transformer.
I think it would be interesting to see challenges where two networks are trained and evaluated on the exact same datasets and the architecture is the same except for the presence of self-attention layers in one network.
So far it seems to me that self-attention really brought new capabilities to a network - essentially change the network's functionality in response to the input. It would be interesting to see if there are problems (i.e. datasets) that a "traditional" feedforward network fails to solve, but a transformer network of the same size can solve.
My guess would be: yes there are, and they are the kinds of "variable task" datasets that we see with LLMs, i.e. where part of the input indicates the task itself and part indicates the data for the task.
Computational power. Without self attention, you have a sloppy implementation of something called a PDA (push-down-automaton) -- like an old HP calculator. With it, you have an even sloppier implementation of a Turing machine.
So (modulo a _lot_ of details) it increases the power from that of a "calculator" to that of a "computer".
I see no "smoking gun" for this yet, but yeah, there are a lot of indicators, such as alarm calls by military observers being ignored beforehand, IDF units having been moved from the Gaza envelope to the West Bank before, etc.
Of course, Netanyahu could counter those rumors by establishing a state commission if inquiry, but instead he fights tooth and nail to prevent this from happening...
Also, the official explanation how October 7 could have happened honestly makes no sense to me. Somehow Hamas suddenly gained super powers on that day and could break through the "containment" that ostensibly had been perfectly adequate before. And because of their mysterious newfound strength, it was also imperative to bomb Gaza to bits and impossible to go back to the security situation as it was before...
The one I can't get over is that when Netanyahu was speaking at the UN, he claimed they have hacked mobile phones in Gaza to force broadcast the speech.
Yet months of co-ordination and training between various disconnected groups / gangs / militias, was completely undetectable.
> And essentially none of us will know the truth, even the reasons.
Maybe not in the details, but the general geopolitical "axes" (USA/the "West" vs China/Russia/BRICS/"Global South"/etc) have become increasingly obvious in the last years. And so far, most of the recent conflicts fit pretty neatly into that pattern.
Of course there are more things running in parallel, like the general shift to the right, Trump in the US, the specific situation with Israel/Palestine, the emergence of AI, etc.
But I don't see why any of this needs any other "grand secret cause" to explain the current conflicts.
BRICS is Russia wishing that China (much less Brazil, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates) were aligned to its interests.
A more accurate description of the way the world is trending:
US / UK / Europe / Japan / South Korea (still tied by defense, if push really comes to shove) vs Russia vs China vs Non-Aligned Nations (India, Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, etc.)
And historically (1960s), in a multi-polar world, middle powers are best served by being ambiguously aligned to force advantageous courting by major powers.
If this spreads into a broader conflict, it remains to be seen whether Europe sticks tightly with that block. They certainly won’t align with Russia, but they may be tied so closely to China economically that they can’t afford to be dragged into a direct conflict with them. I could see a situation where they try to remain non—aligned.
Given that we now that to deploy troops to prevent the US from invading Greenland.
I'd agree, it's not a given that the US can count on Europe in a conflict with China.
But probably Europe wouldn't be trading with China or anything.
It's just given the treatment of the US administration, the US probably can't build a volunteer coalition like I Iraq - unless there is an attack on US mainland.
Well, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea seem to have a (fairly loose) "alliance of convenience" at the moment. "The enemy of my enemy", more or less.
Bartering some e-scooters for oil is hardly an alliance. Other than China, you just have a list of outcast countries on America, Europe, or the Middle East's sh*t list.
Then have a look who is supporting whom with weapons, which militaries are running maneuvers together, who is cooperating - or not cooperating - economically, who is visiting each others' summits, etc.
It's true that many countries are trying to have relationship with both sides or are trying to keep all options open - which is the most reasonable strategy, I think - but there are still two power centers emerging between which those countries are aligning themselves.
Yes. There is US and Israel in one side, and countries trying to maintain relationships with everybody on the other.
The most ridiculous thing about people claiming that BRICS is a military pole is that it has both India and China right there in the name. I don't know if you noticed, but those two almost got in an open war just in the last 6 months.
It's the West vs China with Russia as an also-ran with nukes now unfortunately.
Otherwise you've got some regional issues which is where Iran falls. None of the major players in the region like them, even if they would prefer not to have a conflict they'd be pretty stoked if the volatile regime was gone.
Most of those non-aligned nations are pretty much aligned with the west. Indonesia is absolutely aligned with the USA and the USA it. They are the "Indo" in Indo-Pacific Strategy!
Western liberal democracies and those closely aligned with them is colloquially "the west" now when talking geopolitics.
Obviously it's not geographic as Australia and New Zealand are in the Eastern Hemisphere but would always be assumed to be part of the "west" when discussing geopolitics.
Hitchhiker's Guide had a slightly deeper philosophical implication though, in that the premise is that powerful computers already existed to solve complex problems. Earth was created to pose powerful questions.
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