wladimir

Cells certainly have a kind of independent existence (consciousness is a different matter...). But our body needs its cells. It's not simulating cells in another substrate.

The 'cells' in the case of the hypothetical technological singularity will be computer hardware, not organic cells or human brains. There is the tacit assumption that silicon-based AI tech is somehow superior to our own carbon-based 'tech' and will displace it.

Human brains forming into a kind of super-organism would be a different phenomenon. It wouldn't even need AI, or much more advanced technology. It could indeed be argued that this is the case already with the internet and even printing press before it.

I've always thought of mind uploading as a comforting lie. Like what you tell a small child about what happened to the old dog. "He's in a better place now".

The idea of the singularity implies that the complexity of technology moves above anything humanity can understand. It is unclear whether there still be any use for our kind of individual conscious mind. At what scale will cognition happen? Will the world itself turn into a kind of brain?

But I'm with you in hoping that the Minds will be like the culture's and keep us around as pets in a sort of enlightened hedonism :-)

Fighting any wars against ourselves seems silly. But the problem is that companies aren't that willing to share information, or it is only available for a large price and/or with restrictive NDAs. Also, finding out how things work is simply fun.

Say, I needed write a custom GPU driver for some device, either to improve performance for some specific application or to work outside the dependency or API constraints of the binary blob (like porting to another OS). Usually vendors provide no register level documentation about graphics hardware, so the only way to do this is by reverse engineering.

Another reason for reverse engineering can be to find backdoors and security vulnerabilities (like these guys did) or even for legal reasons to find whether some copyrighted (or GPLed) code was used.

No madness needed at all. Or maybe just a bit.

How could there have been any doubts that the heavily obfuscated Python could be reverse engineered? Me, and some others, did it quite a while ago. It wasn't a lot of work to find the opcode mapping using frequency analysis and a bit of reasoning (ie, mapping against known libraries). Anyone remember dropship? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software) I wonder if they're going to send a takedown request this time too.

Oh I see dropship is mentioned in the paper, great :)

In any case, interesting that they found some previously unknown security holes this way. This again proves that security through obscurity, at least for client software, doesn't work. When will people learn. You can't hide anything on the client for the user, at least not for long.

The major difference with GCC's and other IRs is that LLVM and clang made it easy to use and embed the APIs in other software (due to the license as well as exporting a library). This made it much more convenient to make compilers, as well as code inspection and analysis tools (and even graphics drivers).

Sure, everything was possible before, but much harder for the average programmer interested in this stuff. With just Python and LLVM-python you can do very interesting things, quickly, without delving into GCC sources.

It may be possible that GCC cached up in that aspect, but back in the day I heard from language researchers, the GCC low and high level IR were a hell to introspect and required delving into the GCC source at a deep level.

That sounds pretty useful. Arguably, that's what text-based browsers such as lynx and links already do but in another way. Those are still what I use when I want to read some article without distractions, ads, and funny layout and images.

Eek. That sounds like something straight out of Kafka's The Castle.

I feel for him. Likely, he should try to escalate it higher up so that he gets moved to another project. But I understand his reluctance too, as they could decide he should not be working at the company at all.

And what bugs me as strange is that the CTO knows that he's doing nothing and still not doing anything about it.

Right, that is true by definition, to think physics is complete is as naive today as it was around 1900. Although humanity may bump into a law of decreasing returns at some point, as more and more energy is needed to probe even smaller details of the universe, it appears we're not there yet.

Reply to eeky (you're hellbanned): no, this does not make transactions anonymous, these are still pseudonymous. The difference is that you won't reveal your IP this way while using the client. Using the regular Bitcoin-Qt client with Tor has the same result. The novel thing here is that this uses the I2P network.

Yes. You can actually use OpenCL on the i.mx6. It's pretty cool. That said, there is still quite some room for improvement in the drivers (see my other post above). It is also more limited than desktop-class GPUs (CL embedded profile), so don't expect to be able to run all current OpenCL code unmodified.

Alas, the Vivante GC2000 cannot do bitcoin mining (not that you'd want to, anyway). The GPU can indeed do do OpenCL, but the maximum kernel size is limited whereas double-SHA1 requires quite a lot of operations.

It's more aimed at computer vision applications such as image filters for robotics.

FYI, I did some OpenCL tests and benchmarks on the GC2000 some time ago and reported about it here: https://blog.visucore.com/2013/3/12/opencl-on-i-mx6 . I'm also working on a reverse engineered open source driver for Vivante GPUs such as that in the i.mx6 (https://github.com/laanwj/etna_viv).

Most GSM modems are part of SoCs. Indeed for USB dongles for your PC or laptop it's different, but that's not the "baseband processor" I was talking about. It would be somewhat harder to exploit the parent system through USB (at least if the driver can be trusted), on the other hand it could temporarily pretend to be a keyboard and storage device but that'd be very OS dependent.

I'm not sure about CPUs. They don't have direct connections to the outside world. If you want to distrust any hardware, it makes sense to focus on communication peripherals such as network cards, wifi/gsm modems etc.

For example the baseband processors in phones contain a complicated firmware of 16 MB+. This contains many hidden diagnostic modes on various subsystem levels. Baseband processors have been known to be exploited remotely, and as they have direct connection to the main CPU, giving full control over the device, including GPS, camera etc.

There have also been bugs in wired networking hardware in which specially crafted packets resulted in low-level crashes. It was not exploitable in the cases I remember, but I'm sure someone persistent enough and with the right skills may be able to find some.

None of these examples actually "phone home" in the classic sense, but my point is that these peripherals have proprietary firmware that is hardly under public scrutiny, and anything can be hidden in them.

Agree about the sucking part. But IMO the problem is not that everyone will know everything about everyone. That would be weird (utopian?) but kind of fair.

The fear is about the rich and privileged knowing everything about the poor and underprivileged (using databases that are expensive, protected by IP laws, and/or require clearance), and opaqueness the other way around. Information as a means of control.

What scares me most is that now that storage is so cheap, everything can be stored for later. So even though no one may be watching now (likely), they keep a dossier with all your calls, mails, visited sites, google searches, for any time in the future to look at at their leisure.

It always reminds me of a shocking fact in Dutch history: In the Netherlands, the Germans managed to exterminate a relatively large proportion of the Jews. The main reason was that before the war, the Dutch authorities had required citizens to register their religion so that church taxes could be distributed among the various religious organizations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance)

And this looks so quaint now. We can only imagine what potentially damning information a totalitarian government can now find about every citizen retroactively.

Digital networks are increasingly an intermediate in every little communication and transaction between people. And with the internet of things, in everything we do, in the future maybe even inside our bodies (what's after Google Glass?).

We really need a way to prevent rampant data collection, otherwise the internet is a large threat to civilization. I didn't go into technology to facilitate some 1984-ish world government :(

We have the same problem with Bitcoin. On one hand we'd love a system that automatically collects a stack trace, memory dump, information about the environment on a crash and sends it to us (like Google Breakpad does). On the other hand it opens a whole can of worms if accidentally a private key is sent. Encryption is no solution in this case; the data still is stored somewhere which could be compromised. It's very hard to automatically collect diagnostic data without potentially collecting sensitive data...

Heh. It's hard for me to not be cynic on tech news now, knowing how it will be used against us. Denser storage, the "internet of things", advances in machine learning suddenly seem like just more ways in which the infrastructure to monitor and control every small thing on the world is built. Everything put in place nicely for a (future) totalitarian government.

Uncertainly, as usual, is my guess. For one thing (more paranoid) people are worried that the fallout from PRISM, the realization how easily everything is monitored, will cause a loss of trust in the internet, resulting in laws that damage it internationally. Maybe even a balkanization of global networks. Bitcoin will have a harder time operating without a united internet.

Yes, I can't wait to apply for virtual visas to visit foreign internet sites, which I guess we'll need after a full scale balkanization of the internet.

On a more serious note, I hope the internet stays together, but that the pendulum will start swinging back from "cloud" to decentralized, federated or even P2P protocols and services. Wasn't it originally meant that way? (with NNTP, email, ...).

I'm not saying HN is bad specifically (otherwise I wouldn't be here). There are obviously links to excellent articles posted here, and interesting projects. So this is not an issue with the quality, but more the quantity. Call it "information overload" if you want.

"15 second spans" was exaggerated, this is not Twitter. However reading these kind of sites causes a lot of context switches between topics and articles that seem interesting, or make me want to argue, but a few hours later I cannot really remember anymore what they were about.

It's a very fragmented experience with no clear narrative (at least, that my brain bothers remembering), but it does wear me out.

In any case, it's not that I don't have it under control, but to me it feels more like a potential addiction than coding ever did.

Reading books has been a good way for me personally to pull myself away from online pursuits that break up attention into 15-second spans such as browsing HN and news sites. That tends to be the real addiction for me (...wait, someone is wrong on the internet! must post! must read replies!).

I don't see coding as an addiction. Sure, it is a time sink and feels good, but after a focused coding session the results are (usually) constructive and I learn new things along the way.

This is different from addictions which are usually a way of instant easy satisfaction, a "high", after which you feel useless and down when it weans off. Programming is nothing like that at least for me.

Yet another Paypal PR disaster, they're good at spinning everything in the worst possible way. What are they trying to do, get some award for world's least popular company?

I immediately had to think of Kurt Vonneguts "Player Piano" published in 1952, with similar a theme of automation of all production (by "taping" actions) and the impact of that on society. It also briefly mentions a "third industrial revolution" in which even human thought will be performed more efficiently by machines.

Heresy! Graphics programmers have gotten used to all kinds of cushy abstractions such as the OpenGL pipeline and high-level shading languages, and you're proposing to throw it all overboard and compute the color value per pixel on the fly using low-level logic. Interesting times.

This is the final straw, I'm switching to KDE/Kubuntu in next release.

Even if a transparent terminal is a weird thing to like, I like it, and have always used it. Taking it away just because you think it's useless is not acceptable to me. Really you can come with 1000's of arguments why it's non-productive, "just aesthetic", "not in web browsers either" and so on but I don't care. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

(as an aside I think it could be a interesting feature in web browsers to support window-level transparency. Use a background with partial transparency and render web content directly to the background. For example, for desktop widgets)

We're in 2013 right with super-powerful GPUs of today (and even the crappy i945 in your old laptop) it shouldn't be too much to ask to do a small bit of composition. Sure, X's archaic architecture may be at fault, it may be tricky, but now there's Wayland, Android Surfaceflinger, ... Please don't go backward to better support archaic APIs.

For me, open source is about choice and customization and possibilities, if I wanted a platform with a single vision I'd go for Apple.

My main use case for Twitter is to find out whether other people are experiencing/noticing something too (and if so, what's the scope). For example, a site outage, or something that is happening locally such as a power outage.

Indeed. I use both, but for quite different purposes. Twitter to get sense of what is going on right now and RSS to keep tabs on my favorite blogs, some of which may post very rarely. Twitter just has too much noise to be suitable for the second purpose, and tends to lose tweets after a few days. Also not all blog authors tweet, but every blog I know has access through RSS.

It is impossible to predict the cost and/or gains from now to an undefined time in the future. But the good thing is that this will help non-cryptocurrency security as well.

It looks like cryptocurrency brings an incentive to finally take computer security seriously for consumer grade software and hardware. It is the first time something is really at stake apart for intangible qualities such as "privacy" and "intellectual property". It is an interesting and unexpected(?) second-order effect of cryptocurrency.

It looks like the kernelnewbies.org page is getting stampeded and is unreachable. Too bad, they usually have a nice high-level overview of the new kernel features and changes.