True, but not all non-UTF8 bytestrings contain 0xFF bytes, so it’s not very useful in practice.

> UTF-8000 is in no way endorsed by or representative of the Unicode Consortium.

Not until they decide to expand the emoji range, allocate space for all past and future fictional languages, as well as birdsong and dog barks.

Someone at the consortium is rubbing their hands with glee with all the newfound space.

But honestly, cool hack! If you invent a method to encode large numbers into bytes, why limit yourself to 24-bit numbers?

Yet another downside of using ‘safe’ languages. You don’t get cool stuff like this.

I remember the days of DOS and getting a direct pointer to video memory. And I've enjoyed the long history of video game exploits and even arbitrary code execution. But at the same time, I'm also glad that era is over. The same bugs that help you jailbreak a phone can also be the bugs that help you gain illicit access to one.

Illicit access as defined by Google / Apple? If the three letter agencies are interested in you, they don't need to exploit any bugs, they can just demand access from those two companies, and get it. To the device that you carry in your pocket 24/7, with GPS, microphone and camera.

In the days of DOS, the BIOS would load the first sector of a floppy disk or hard drive into memory and transfer control to it. You could replace that sector, and not a single line of code that you didn't write yourself would be executed after that. THIS is how it should be on a PERSONAL computer. A virus could do the same, of course, and gain full control of the machine, but that is not an argument against giving control to the user. You could blame DOS for not intercepting attempts to rewrite the boot sector and asking the user for consent, but completely preventing something like this in the name of security would be even worse!

Imagine if back then, there was a "secure boot" mechanism so that only a boot sector with Microsoft's cryptographic signature was allowed, and that boot sector code would in turn verify everything loaded afterwards. Linux wouldn't exist. So, neither would Android, but the situation would be much the same as it is now, only with Microsoft Phone OS instead -- and absolutely no concept of how it could be different, of a computing device controlled by its user instead of a giant corporation.

You aren't arguing for jailbreaks, you are arguing for the phone to be in the user's full control.

Ideally, ios and Android would be secure enough that no jailbreaks are possible, but open enough to allow the user to replace the OS with one of their choosing.

Having it locked down and then resorting to exploiting loopholes is the worst of both worlds.

Many safe languages still suffer from integer overflows. For example in Rust and C# you can pick between an exception being thrown, or silent wrapping when an overflow happens.

I don't think that's suffering at that point. The programmer has made an explicit decision to let things overflow, so he should be prepared to handle that possibility. It's not like a language where overflow happens silently without warning.

Or using the saturating methods.

Nuclear Gandhi would never have been a thing.

Nuclear Gandhi is an urban legend. Turns out there was no such bug in Civ 1.

And in more recent games where there is Nuclear Gandhi it's because of that legend.

If you write a game in a decent language where such a thing won't happen by mistake you can still have it be present on purpose and in some cases that even fits the game's lore.

Random glitches are confusing and bad. Falling off the world in Blue Prince due to collision bugs is annoying for example. However "glitches" which are intended behaviour are fun. I've enjoyed every time I saw somebody get that note and gift from Mrs Babbage because they drafted that particular room in that particular place and it had an effect which in hindsight they now realise was both foreseeable and regrettable...

I know. The urban legend would still not be a thing.

It would’ve been debunked by Snopes on day 1: “impossible, the game is written in Rust”

(I can’t think of one language that defaults to saturating integers)

The post-2022 Eternal September cohort and the deluge of new green accounts really love AI

I’d rather use Lobsters if I had an invite (hint hint wink wink), they are much more moderate about LLMs if not mildly negative, which is a breath of fresh air after a few minutes on here.

Yes, but the “architecture-independent” bytecode for these RISC machines that run underneath your various Intel and AMD CPU models is the x86_64 instruction set.

I really don’t know how we went from “there are people bullish about AI, and others that see it as an existential threat” to the complete reversal/psyop in the past few months where AI doomer has become a synonym of booster (?) and grouped with rationalist and other pro-AI weirdos.

Like, I have never participated in the rationalist communities, I am not a neo-rx, I have always believed AI research to be an existential risk for humanity, and voicing this opinion now puts me in the same category as Yudkowsky and Altman/Amodei, the latter two being the total anathema to O.G. AI doomers like me because they’re the ones that are building the bloody thing

I really do not get what is going on, but this role reversal smells like a massive psyop campaign in tech circles to just silence any form of dissent against AI.

There's no connection between neo-rx and the Berkeley rationalists. A guy with a lot of expertise in Wikipedia shenanigans (David Gerard) manufactured a connection to smear the rationalists.

I feel your frustration, but it’s just normal human behavior, no need for a psyop. A lot of people are emotionally invested in AI being a fad, useless, easily controlled, a capitalist boondoggle, a circular financing scam, a bubble about to explode. The alternative is that we live in an incredibly dangerous time, because obviously if we’re building something smarter than ourselves, we’re building the kitchen where we’ll be cooked.

So you get the normal reactions:

1. Nothing that happens is ever surprising. Navier-Stokes was stolen, HuggingFace was pedestrian and normal, and coding agents that last year could barely write a function and now can do a day’s worth of work in ten minutes will never be able to do anything more, because this is the end of history.

2. The people that say otherwise are lying. Because it’ll make them rich (although they are already rich). Because they are a cult (although regular people asked if we should build machines that are better than us at everything have the same reaction). Because they are marketing geniuses (although suspiciously few companies advertise the lethality of their products).

3. The people who’ve been warning about this the longest are weird and in a sex cult. (Except Alan Turing.) (Except Geoffrey Hinton.) (Except Stephen Hawking.) (You are in this group. You must be, otherwise they’d have to listen to you.)

I do hope they’re right. But their song will never change, and when some misaligned AI kills thousands, they will say that of course AIs were always going to kill thousands, but did you know the guy who told us so also writes fanfic?

Double tap? It was a triple tap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

The page you linked says "Attack type: Double tap missile strike"

Edit: it also explicitly says "double tap" under "Events" and links to the article for "Double-tap strike"

I don't think a third strike is confirmed, but I also think "double-tap" is more of a category meaning "followup strikes to hit responders" so I wouldn't be surprised if 2 followup strikes instead of 1 are still categorized as a "double-tap strike". It seems like splitting hairs either way. We know that the strike caused surviving teachers/students to congregate in a prayer hall. 40 minutes later that was hit as well killing almost everyone

Page has been edited after my comment and changed from triple to double tap, and now they had to protect the page from vandalism.

The third missile didn't hit I guess

Also known as the Cobra effect