locacorten

From my standpoint, this isn’t about revenge. It’s about accountability and alignment with broader realities. Over the past 18 months, we've seen over a million layoffs across the US tech sector alone. White-collar industries everywhere are tightening belts. The US government also had massive layoffs due to DOGE.

And yet, I haven’t seen a single example of administrative downsizing in our public universities—not one. Instead, I hear about professors losing grant funding and international students facing stress over visa uncertainty.

So when I say universities aren’t hearing the message, I’m referring specifically to the glaring lack of reform in their administrative structures. Until I see serious efforts to address this—starting with large-scale administrative layoffs—I'm not inclined to offer my sympathy.

In the city where I live, the contrast is striking: the local state college boasts dorms and facilities that are remarkably luxurious—architecturally grand, stylish, and visibly well-funded. Meanwhile, the local NVIDIA office operates out of a building that looks decidedly unremarkable, even shabby by comparison. One is supported in part by public funds; the other is a profit-driven enterprise.

I absolutely believe in the value of academia and agree we should support it. But this administration has made it clear that reform is expected. I’m not convinced that message is being fully heard. Until we see meaningful changes—such as a leaner administrative structure and a shift away from spending on vanity infrastructure—I’ll pass.

I wonder what would be a really effective incentive to the construction industry to build more homes.

Something like -- no tax on any homes construction for the next 5 years. Wouldn't that create a construction boom?

I beg to differ.

Regular human beings would die 100% of the time. Not 80.

I'm disappointed to hear this news. Understanding the origins of Covid is one of the most important things we can do in this century.

No. It's not deep in their nature. People do not compete in a system offering no incentive to compete.

I think everybody is missing the point. If one grad student was able to do this, imagine what a team of dozens of well-paid, well-equipped, and highly experienced security experts could do.

In other news, we just learned that any half-decent security agency has already injected their own vulnerabilities and back-doors in OSS.

I get a server error (500)

It might be flawed, wrong, stupid, etc. but that’s not a reason to flag it. Argue against, bring more light into the discussion. Censoring it brings no good.

Censorship should be rarely and carefully used.

Sam, I know that you now spent a couple of months with researchers, and thus can write "deep" articles on researchers vs. founders now. Everyone knows that the best kind of researchers in the world are all at OpenAI now, and that gives you a chance to observe them.

On a serious note, I beg you to write about things other than research and researchers. Leave them alone, outside of the media spotlight and your writings. You see the media and its spotlight have a tendency to disrupt and destroy value. If you truly want do good, leave them alone. Please.

All drawings, paintings, and art I saw in Africa, all of them depict people in a group. There is never a single person depicted in any imagery.

You won't find any Mona Lisa in African art. :-)

I have not read the paper, and I could be wrong. However, these appear to be attacks against the crypto implemented inside a TPM/fTPM.

The reference implementation of TPM 2.0 leaves the choice of the crypto library up to the platform vendor. If my suspicions are correct, it sounds like some of the platform vendors decided to use crypto libraries vulnerable to timing attacks. Hmmm...

On iOS, OneNote has a completely broken search experience. That's a showstopper for me.

Great point.

But there should be a distinction between academic conferences where professors from U. Mich are publishing and practitioner conferences aimed at industry (including sales, etc.).

My criticism is about academic conferences -- there's little skepticism left when reviewing papers describing attacks. As long as it's cool, it's in.

Look at the title above: "Hard Drive of Hearing: Disks that Eavesdrop...". It's not far off from the headlines on CNN or Fox News. At this rate, I predict by 2025 we'll have Breaking News red banners on academic conferences sites.

Let me re-assure everyone out there ... No, your disks are not eavesdropping. Disks eavesdropping should be the least of your worries security-wise.

The main trait of a top researcher is skepticism -- the willingness to doubt results. You learn to be skeptical as part of the training during your Ph.D.

Unfortunately, the standards have fallen. The security community is one of the worst instances of the lack of skepticism in the science arena. The community has started to reward clickbaity papers because they "sell". It's a race to the bottom.

Two points:

1. The article's point is that the "The Race to 5G is BS" and not "5G is BS". Please adjust.

2. I can try to offer an answer to the author. History has shown that a novel piece of technology often leads to innovation. Dial-up led to BBNs and the Web, broadband led to audio and video content delivery, and so on. Winning the "race to 5G" means the US will be the first to innovate in systems that take advantage of faster wireless broadband networks. That's important. IMO.

I really hope this event is picked up by the media. This is truly worrisome because it unnecessarily erodes US's ability to be at the forefront of technology research.

This is not about H1B visas. Not about the Muslim ban. Not about China.

This is about a famous scientist from a friendly country who has already traveled to the US countless times. Oh, and due to him, we can conduct secure electronic transactions on the Internet now.

IMO, somebody at the US State Department should be fired.

Yes! What could possibly go wrong?

This is very interesting. I wish I could read more about it.

Is this true of minimum-security prisons too?

A whole bunch of links don't work or have empty pages:

Code Development Overview https://microsoft.github.io/mu/CodeDevelopment/overview/

Code requirements: https://microsoft.github.io/DeveloperDocs/code_requirements

Has someone been able to build the code and reflash their surface? I'm trying to understand whether the code posted online is complete.

I think you're under-estimating how important his refusal to use force was. This was an unprecedented reversal of 50+ years of policy of using force.

More importantly, it was humane. We sit in comfy chairs with Starbucks lattes in front of us arguing the pros and cons of Communism. But in Communism, people died for no good reason. People had no free will. People had no ability to express a thought freely. Gorbachev's policies (implemented from within the regime!) signaled a change. That's no small feat.

Solzhenitsyn's writings gave hope to people, to their minds and souls. Like Voice of America and other channels of information from outside the curtain. But saying that they destroyed an empire is an overclaim.

In my opinion, no single factor destroyed the empire. However, if I were to pick the most important one I'd say Gorbachev.

Yes, it's a hypothesis. A hypothesis that has been invalidated by data again, and again, and again, and again.

This is byte-addressable persistent memory. They look like DRAM DIMMs and they plug into DIMM slots. You access them using your memory controller and not your storage controller. People sometimes refer to them as non-volatile memory (NVM). Intel used to call it Apache Pass.

They're a nightmare to program because OSes do not have a good abstraction for them (at least not yet). Accessing them through the file-system seems sub-optimal (this is byte-addressable memory and not a block device). Accessing them through virtual memory is also pretty bad because they're much slower than DRAM.

For any files, my expectation of a backup program is that Restore(Backup(FS)) == FS, where FS is the state of my file system.

Nice job.

I'm a little skeptical though -- I think the devil is in the details. It's a lot of work to make a highly reliable backup program. As a Windows user, here's a list of questions I'd ask:

1. Does Relica work with OneDrive on-demand files? [1]

2. Does Relica work with WSL files? [2]

Supporting all these corner cases on Windows, Mac, and Linux will be a TON of work.

[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/learn-about-onedriv...

[2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/06/15/wsl-file-sys...

Can you provide more details? I'm also an Arq user and haven't noticed any problems.

I have been and continue to remain very skeptical about all this hoopla about AI.

Five years ago, I thought the hoopla about AI is just a fashion and it's all going to quickly pass.

Two years ago, I thought it's a bubble that will eventually burst.

At this point, I'm wondering whether what's happening is pure re-branding where we'll stop using the term CS and instead use the term AI.

If I think of AI as CS, I'm ok with it although I don't think graphics, comp. architecture, networking, and OS are AI. But if the rest of the world wants to call them AI, then let them.

In my opinion, this is criminal behavior and Uber's senior leadership should go to jail.

We believe that AI should:

1. Be socially beneficial.

2. Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias.

3. Be built and tested for safety.

4. Be accountable to people.

5. Incorporate privacy design principles.

6. Uphold high standards of scientific excellence.

7. Be made available for uses that accord with these principles.

While I like this list a lot, I don't understand why this is AI-specific, and not software-specific. Is Google using the word "AI" to mean "software"?