Grocery stores can be as behind the times as they want. I'm worried about hospital fridges.

You have to wonder if this site will go next.

He's dead, Jim.

The number of weak classes of elliptic curve would have to be gargantuan for this specific search to produce some. If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake.

drand48() could be one of hundreds of methods that were tried to produce specific values with plausible deniability and happened to produce them. The other searches were discarded.

That could be a valid suspicion if the RNG chosen was particularly obscure. drand48 isn't - it's part of the standard C library.

Not really plausible if it was used for all the curves.

Then why not turn this around and say which (hopefully small set of) specific classes of curves are known to be avoided, but otherwise have a free for all?

> If that many curves are bad, then ECC was a mistake.

I mean that is the logical conclusion from the behaviour around this approach where a few good things are effectively endorsed without justification.

The fact is any application of an algorithm that involves so much "trust me bro" on the selection of what are a large number of opaque quasi random but not quite or provably so numbers only has as much trust in it as you have in the people that created it.

Good characters are rare in hard sci-fi, but I do find it frustrating when (human) characters do illogical or inhuman things, just to move the plot forward. Arthur C. Clarke's characters were cardboard cutouts, but at least they didn't act like weirdos just so the humans could get aboard Rama.

> but I do find it frustrating when (human) characters do illogical or inhuman things,

The difference between fiction and reality is fiction has to make sense. After the past decade or so my realization that humans do illogical things all the damned time just keeps being reaffirmed. We are highly emotional beings and it's very easy for said emotions to override our thinking.

Well, the paper-cut-out- deus-ex-machina breaking the immersion is real and despised, rightfully so.

Where would you rank https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Dan_Sylveste - who is literally infested by a plot-device?

I loved that book, but Alastair Reynolds cannot write normal human beings to save his life. He's probably the worst offender.

A Chinese Room that isn't one.

I feel like the book cheats a little bit. On the one hand, it really wants to explore the p-zombie question, which is (roughly) "imagine there were a non-conscious being that, from the outside, could do everything a conscious one could do." Then, to drive the plot forward, it needs to posit that the non-conscious and conscious beings are actually radically different in their external actions and capabilities. At one point there's a Chinese Room that's obviously non-conscious, but the whole point of the Chinese Room hypothesis is that you can't easily tell the difference from the words it produces.

How do they determine that Rorschach (or any entity) is _not_ conscious?

They somehow talk to it and it reveals this through its inability to understand complex language.

Everyone involved in this discussion understands that evolution doesn’t create things for a purpose, that it’s just the result of selection pressures. Everyone also uses the more active phrasing because it’s much more convenient. Unless you think you’re talking to someone who genuinely doesn’t understand the nature of the process, it’s not useful to be pedantic about it.

My colleagues at NIST just got a memo directing them to refer to AI as “SI” so it does seem to be filtering down to the agencies. This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.

> This is a problem because “SI” is also a classification marking.

They can just make up another name to redefine this classification which people are already used to. How about SIBISI? This follows the transformation they instituted a'la kilobyte -> kibibyte.

I know you said /s but I'm feeling all serious or something this morning, so ...

- The US government's official policy is metric (and has been for something like 50 years now).

- The population uses a mix of metric and US customary units, not imperial.

UK is kinda similar, I suppose, but their typical usage of metric/imperial tilts more heavily in favor of metric. I wonder how many other countries are also still doing mixed measurement systems at this point?

Can’t make money off of Slovenian domains without the rebrand. That’s obviously going to take precedence for the king.

What’s the point of one party balancing the budget if the next party just blows it up? That’s been the pattern since Clinton.

As a kid who grew up playing a DX27S and an FB-01, I once had dinner with John Chowning and Max Matthews at Max’s house. Unfortunately they served tomato aspic, so I was too busy trying to wash that down with sips of water to ask the questions about FM synthesis and optimization that I really wanted to ask. Which mostly involved which crazy tricks they had to use to pack six operator FM synthesis onto whatever ridiculously primitive DSPs they had back in those days. By that time, John had moved on to studying physical modeling synthesis, and I lost track of the field after that.