https://cacm.acm.org/research/technical-perspective-backdoor-engineering/
for example. Although that paper is more about, “Given that NIST has deliberately subverted the standard, how did actual products also get subverted to exploit the weakness that NIST introduced.”
While I was typing this, quetzal_rainbow made the same point
Ascertainment bias, of course, because we only see the cases where this did not work, and do not know exactly how many members of e.g. Delta Force were originally in doubt as to their gender. We can know it doesnt work sometimes.
Well there’s this frequently observed phenomenon where someone feels insecure about their gender, and then does something hypermasculine like joining Special Forces or becoming a cage fighter or something like that. They are hoping that it will make them feel confident of their birth-certificate-sex. Then they discover that nope, this does not work and they are still trans.
People should be aware that there are copious examples of people who are like—nope, still trans—after hoping that going hard on their birth-certificate-gender will work,
Ever since NIST put a backdoor in Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, they have the problem that many people no longer trust them.
I guess it might be possible to backdoor AI Safety Evaluations (e.g. suppose there is some know very dangerous thing that National Security Agency is doing with AI, and NIST deliberately rigs their criteria to not stop this very dangerous thing).
But apart from the total loss of public trust in them as an institution, NIST has done ground-breaking work in the computer security field in the past, so it wouldn’t be so unusual for them to develop AI criteria.
The whole dual elliptic curve fiasco is possibly a lesson that criteria should be developed by international groups, because a single country’s standards body, like NIST, can be subverted by their spy agencies.
A Japanese guy I used to work with had a very serious genetic alcohol intolerance. (Like, a single drop of wine would probably be ok but anything more than that would likely put him in the hospital).
I guess if you have a known inability to metabolise alcohol, such that you’re already having be very car3fuo that anything you consume doesn’t have alcohol in it, you might want to be a little bit cautious here. but … maybe the quantity you get from the bacteria is so small it doesn’t matter.
The Northen Ireland Assembly works this way, at least for some things.
But, in general, the U.K. does not work that way. A particular political party sometimes gets a big majority.
This depends very much on how well debugged the compiler is...
* gcc on llvm on Intel hardware … very unlikely to be a bug in the compiler
you’re on some less well exercized target like RISC-V … ha, you are in for so much pain
it is so much fun debugging on experimental hardware where any of (a) your program (b) the compiler (c) the actual hardware are all plausibly buggy.
oh, I forgot (d) the tool used to convert the hardware description language (used to specify the chip design ) into logic gates, used to build the hardware, is itself buggy
As someone who has worked in both academia and industrial research labs, in both cases you can claim either academic publcation or real-world impact as a success wrt getting promoted …
a) I got a paper about this published in a top-ranking journal; vs,
b) look, those guys are now selling a product based on this thing I invented
(in an industrial research lab, “those guys” had better be the product division of your company; if you’re an academic funded by DARPA, “those guys” being anyone who is paying taxes to the US government is just great)
(With a nod to SBF). What kind of criminal mastermind creates a Signal chat group called “wirefraud”? are you going to try and tell me there was a perfectly innocent explanation?
Also, under British rules the judge can halt a case and instruct the jury to acquit. E.g. if the prosecution witness, under cross-examination, admits that their story about Ritchie Bottoms isn’t true, (and hence, the prosecution does not have a case), the judge can just stop the trial right there and instruct the jury to acquit.
As a British person, I am strictly forbidden from revealing what the jury deliberations were in any particular case.
However, in general terms: these guys are, usually, idiots. Sometimes innocent idiots whose act of monumental stupidity led to them being accused of a crime they did not commit, but still: idiots.
There is a third possibility that can, in theory, be encountered: everyone is lying. Prosecution witnesses, defense witnesses, all of them: lying. Imagine that the prosecution case rests entirely on some tall story about Ritchie Bottoms. You don’t believe he even exists, you don’t believe the prosecution witnesses. Oh, but the defendant:: you don’t believe him, either. Did he do it? No idea. Shrug. But you know the prosecutor doesn’t have a case if he can’t do better than this guy with an implausible story about Ritchie Bottoms.
Almost any word can be contextually implied to be a euphemism for a penis.
(film quote from memory) in Carry On Spying, the spies ask their handler for information on the Fat Man .. “We don’t have much information on him. He’s got a very small dossier.”
another instalment in this film series, Carry on Dick (about the highwayman Dick Turpin, of course, whatever else could it refer to) does this extensively,
so, maybe the llm has learnt something about how these jokes work,.
It’s astonishing, but yes, that is the reason why that form of string theory takes place in a 26 dimensional space-time.
wait till you see E8*E8 heterotic string theory,
Shay you want here is Matthew D. Schwarz, Quantum Theory and the Standard Model, chapter 15.
(or the original paper by CasiMir cited in the above book chapter.
Zeta regularisation is a much saner way to explain it.
====
in a physics context .. suppose that the laws of physics you have are only valid up to some energy scale E, where E is presumed large.
The physical quantity you ’re interested in is f(E) - g(E).
lim E → infinity of f(E) and g(E) is infinite, so can’t safely exchange the order of the limits and the subtraction. But lim E → infinity (f(E) - g(E)) exists and is finite, so you’re good to go, and the result is insensitive to what the energy scale E actually is,
I am not convinced by the second part of this, because you looked at a lot of points and then chose one that seemed interesting to you.
“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic”, attributed to Stalin. There is possibly an analogue in tort law, where if you kill one person by negligence their dependents will sue you, but if you kill a million people by negligence no-one will date mention it.
see also: “if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem.”
Even a “small” incident, small in the sense that it doesn’t kill absolutely everybody, could generate enough liability to wipe out Meta, or Google. For example, something on the scale of flying a jet airplane into the world trade centre.
even if. Bankrupting Facebook wasn’t enough to cover the actual loss I thin’ the prospect would be sufficient deterrent .. at least, enough to prevent it happening a second time.
covid19 might be influencing our thnking here. Even if covid wasn’t a lab leak, we now know that such lan leaks are at least possible, and lab accidents that kill tens of millions or peopl are distinctly possible. Which is too big to be covered by tort law.
There is believing in some moral value, and there is believing in some factual state of the world. Moral judgements aren’t the same as facts, but it would seem that you can have beliefs about both.
Asking someone to write down something they believe is somewhat underspecified.
Also, saying “I believe X” rather than just “X” suggests either (a) you wish to signal some doubt about whether X actually is true or (b) X is the kind of thing where believing it is highly speaker-specific, e.g. a moral value.
And the really funny bit is NIST deliberately subverted the standard so that an organization who knew the master key (probably NSA) could break the security of the system. And then, in actualt implementation, the master key was changed so that someone else could break into everyone’s system And, officially at least, we have no idea who that someone is. Probably Chinese government. Could be organized crime, though probably unlikely.
The movie Sneakers had this as its plots years ago.. US government puts a secret backdoor in everyone’s computer system .. and, then, uh,, someone steals the key to that backdoor;
But anyway, yes, it is absolutely NISTs fault that they unintentionally gave the Chinese government backdoor access into US government computers.