Ted Chiang as eloquent as ever:
"The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.
[...]
Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.
[...]
The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."
Read the whole essay. It's brilliant. #ai
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art
Probably the strangest chip that you'll see today: the Intel 2920, a digital signal processor (DSP) from 1979. It was the "first microprocessor capable of translating analog signals into digital data in real time." Chips are usually 16-bit or 32-bit, but this was a 25-bit processor. It didn't have any jump instructions, instead running code in a loop from the 192-word EPROM. Each instruction combined an ALU operation, a shift, and an analog I/O operation. 1/7
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposes a $2.95 million penalty on security camera vendor Verkada for multiple security failures that enabled hackers to access live video feeds from 150,000 internet-connected cameras.
I recently saw an amazing Navajo rug at the National Gallery of Art. It looks abstract at first, but it is a detailed representation of the Intel Pentium processor. Called "Replica of a Chip", it was created in 1994 by Marilou Schultz, a Navajo/Diné weaver and math teacher. Intel commissioned the weaving as a gift to the American Indian Science & Engineering Society. 1/6
We just published v4.1.0 of the eslint plugin `no-unsanitized`, which prohibits the usafe of XSS sinks (e.g., `innerHTML=` or `setHTMLUnsafe()`) without the use of a preconfigured sanitizer library.
The rule helps finding and preventing XSS in various Mozilla projects, including Firefox.
Technical Details at https://frederikbraun.de/finding-and-fixing-dom-based-xss-with-static-analysis.html and source at https://github.com/mozilla/eslint-plugin-no-unsanitized
We broke 10k stars on #GitHub! Remaining in the 1st and 2nd positions on #Google for, “Reverse Engineering Tutorial”. Special thanks to @0xinfection @hasherezade @fox0x01 @three_cube @binitamshah and all of you! #ReverseEngineering https://github.com/mytechnotalent/Reverse-Engineering
this is my emotional support carwash. whenever I get sad I ssh into this Montenegrin carwash I found on shodan 12 years ago and spin the rollers a bit. makes me feel real again
I know that one should never, ever go to SciHub to find academic papers but is there a site one should never, ever go to for ISO/IEC standards documents?
Today is the 10 year anniversary of the first time I ever pwned anything!
My first exploit was a simple stack smash, overwrite return ptr, jump to admin function. This was an in internal recruiting CTF by @gaasedelen for the RPISEC
Before that day I had never even considered computer security and was primarily doing robotics.
You never know when a buffer overflow may change the very course of your life!