by decades of our industry clapping at brainless

secondarily, the remarkable thing here is just how tiny a slice of industry this actually is (and yet also how profoundly impactful that vocal little segment can be)

e.g. this shit wouldn’t fly in a bank (or at least, previously have flown), or somewhere that writes stuff that runs ports or planes or whatever.

but a couple of decades of being worn down by excitable hyperproductive feature factory fuckwads who are only to happy to shit out Yet Another Line Of Code… it’s even impacting those areas at times

some days I hate my industry so fucking much

@self @froztbyte Another big part of it is the obsession with the “young genius disruptor coder”. Which has resulted in management buying into endless fads foisted on us by twenty-somethings, and then inevitably having to undo half the things they implemented 5 years later. Well, except for React, which apparently we can’t get rid of but must forever keep reimplementing with whatever new new pattern will actually make it scale for real this time.

don’t forget the 5 blog posts you can milk out of a single example, and your Learnings (obvious fucking realisations) 3 months (one even slightly minor application/API/… revision) later

that seems very cool! I’ve been frustrated in the past by rules-based auth libraries implementing half-baked but complex declarative DSLs when Datalog is right there, so I’m hoping it works well in practice because I’d love to use it too

it’s very worrying how crowded Wikipedia has been getting with computer pseudoscience shit, all of which has a distinct stench to it (it fucking sucks to dig into a seemingly novel CS approach and find out the article you’re reading is either marketing or the unpublishable fantasies of the deranged) but none of which seems to get pruned from the wiki, presumably because proving it’s bullshit needs specialist knowledge, and specialists are frequently outpaced by the motivated deranged folks who originate articles on topics like these

for Solomonoff induction specifically, the vast majority of the article very much feels like an attempt by rationalists to launder a pseudoscientific concept into the mainstream. the Turing machines section, the longest one in the article, reads like a D-quality technical writing paper. the citations are very sparse and not even in Wikipedia’s format, it waffles on forever about the basic definition of an algorithm and how inductive Turing machines are “better” because they can be used to implement algorithms (big whoop) followed by a bunch of extremely dense, nonsensical technobabble:

Note that only simple inductive Turing machines have the same structure (but different functioning semantics of the output mode) as Turing machines. Other types of inductive Turing machines have an essentially more advanced structure due to the structured memory and more powerful instructions. Their utilization for inference and learning allows achieving higher efficiency and better reflects learning of people (Burgin and Klinger, 2004).

utter crank shit. I dug a bit deeper and found that the super-recursive algorithms article is from the same source (it’s the same rambling voice and improper citations), and it seems to go even further off the deep end.

“Solomonoff induction” is the string of mouth noises that Rationalists make when they want to justify their preconceived notion as the “simplest” possibility, by burying all the tacit assumptions that actual experience would let them recognize.

deleted by creator

there were really only three. one is 2001 anthrax that you mention; other is salmonella spread by cultists in literally 1984; and another would be 1989 medfly infestation. everything else is, relatively speaking, non-incident

Here’s an overview. Not the highest casualty count but certainly not ineffective.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8818129/

This reads to me more like assuming all terrorists are fundamentally incapable of anything remotely intelligent

The first paper you linked there lists 9 deaths and 806 injuries across 50 years. Conversely, you can look at a single example like the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 and see deaths and more injuries from a single event using simple techniques where materials and instructions are readily available. It isn’t unreasonable to look at the lack of success of amateur biological and chemical attacks and assume that plausible future attackers will be intelligent enough to simply take the tried and tested approach.

On the other hand, there might be some mileage in hyping up the threat of diy countertop plagues in the hopes that would-be terrorists are as credulous as so many politicians and media figures are, and will take the pointlessly inconvenient and inefficient option which will likely fail and make life a little safer for the rest of us.

I’m not.

Well, do what you want

What grants do you think I’m getting?

I meant authors of that paper, sorry if i was unclear about it

I mean, it’s genuinely not hard.

like i said before,

while someone who got all the way past about the first semester of organic chemistry lab is perfectly capable of making some rudimentary chemical weapons, they won’t necessarily be able to make it safely, reliably, cheaply, consistently, and without killing themselves,

but with biological weapons stakes are much higher, every single leak carries risk of ending up dead or being discovered and safety requirements are gonna be generally much more stringent than with chemical weapons. you can get away with using small amounts of something that would plausibly pass for a ww1 era chemical weapon with only nitrile gloves and good fumehood; with biological agents you’re probably looking at doing about everything in glovebox. to use glovebox, you need to get glovebox, which, among other purchases, can move such person from government watch list to government act list

and even ignoring that, you can’t just expect any random jihadi joe to make it work, you need someone who has some actual education and preferably expertise in microbiology, which if anything else severely limits poll of potential perpetrators

100% agreed, what terrifies me is that our friend here seems to see the word “science” in here and immediately assume impeccable faith and perfect knowledge

I expressly put “CBRN groups” in scare quotes to tag along with my line at the bottom “I don’t want to be dismissive of genuine attempts…but the scale and scope of this is defined by politics, not by technical possibility”

You, however, have me saying “cbrn is made up to self justify” - of course if I had said any such thing, then one counter-example would have sufficed. Although actually it wouldn’t have sufficed, because in this context we’re talking about terroristic or otherwise chaotic release of a novel weapon. We’re not talking at all about bad powerful people deliberately employing chemical weapons they already have, for which of course CBRN is a worthy use and “genuine attempt at being ready”.

“CBRN groups”, here, operates at the level of rhetoric, and that’s what I tried to draw attention to. The context in which “CBRN groups” the rhetorical and political device emerged was that in which Bill Clinton could become so enthused by a sci-fi novel about bioterrorism that he had its author up in front of the senate testifying as an expert on the subject. So on reflection, I should have deferred to Eisenhower’s original formulation: the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Edit: you could always try Alex Wellerstein for the aggressively obvious historical counter-point to this whole fantasy. In his Restricted Data he provides a useful companion to Barriers to Bioweapons in a chapter discussing the notorious “backyard atomic bomb built from declassified material” cases. But because it’s a work of history we learn the most salient fact of all: the only way anyone believed that the backyard bomb designs were viable was because somebody wanted them to believe it, or because they had some reason to want to believe it themselves.

Without that ingredient it was plain that the actual know-how was just not there, however that fact was fundamentally obscured by the desire to believe, and so people saw viability where there was none: plugging holes in their imaginary with meaningless verbiage about risk and but-what-if?