frognumber

I think part of the problem is we don't talk about these issues openly. I see a lot of posts like (from this thread):

"I followed a line of research that a senior (MacArthur Fellowship-winning) colleague had pioneered... After three years and a few negative results, I came to suspect that several high-profile publications were p-hacked and likely false positives... A very senior scientist later confirmed my suspicions about their disregard for professional ethics."

These issues should be discussed openly. This also means that the consequences should be appropriate. In many domains -- anything dealing with sex / gender in almost any culture is a good example to look at -- the consequences are draconian, be that stoning or cancel culture or ... which prevents open conversations.

These are all spectra.

FWIW: I see this pattern each time I discuss MIT (drifting from the Institutional Propaganda partyline) on HN:

1. Upvotes

2. Time passes

3. Downvotes

I'm starting to suspect Institutional astroturf.

And then they adopted it as a tactic.

No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.

That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.

No, today institutions like Georgia Tech -- which has an endowment of just about the same as MIT in the nineties adjusted for inflation -- seem to function just about the same way as MIT did back then.

I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.

And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.

Makes me sick.

MIT is so very, very overcapitalized.

These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.

Curiosity: Some facial biometrics are explicitly designed to they can't change over time, barring an accident or similar. They look at features of facial geometry such as eye versus nose positioning and similar kinds of things set by bone structure.

They're surprisingly hard to intentionally defeat. Growing a beard, putting on weight, etc. won't do it.

I looked into this some time ago, when I didn't want to be tracked. It turned out to be annoyingly hard. And e.g. "wear a hat and mask" makes you rather conspicuous.

The increasingly universal cameras are rather effective at knowing what you're doing at all times.

In theory is right. I've never seen a modern NVidia or AMD reset out of a failed state without a hardware reset.

This was possible with old-school graphics cards in the nineties and early 00's, when they were mostly a framebuffer, with a bit of 2d acceleration.

You claimed without evidence, or more accurately, bad evidence, confusing RTOS with "reliability and security." And you were somehow confused that security mattered for systems with no network connection.

FYI: For most commercial network equipment (internet backbone and similar), reliability and security are the highest priority. Most of that is Linux, BSD, and friends.

At least for regulated applications I worked on, no one cared.

The provider needs to comply with specific rules, have specific certifications, and sign specific agreements. You check the boxes, and you're good to go.

Microsoft does that better than anyone. OpenAI and Anthropic don't do that at all. Google does that rarely and poorly. AWS is not bad, but not as good as Microsoft.

Azure was always my go-to for regulated applications in the cloud. Some do require e.g. on-prem or even air gap, where even Azure is out.

Having worked in / adjacent several such industries, a lot of the question depends on scale.

A trillion-dollar business can easily trade dollars for the privacy. A business with $1M to spend won't even get a phone call with OpenAI or Anthropic, who were the only* previous players in town for doing this.

Worst-case example: Bootstrapped startup working in military.

It's also the case that an open model enables many more intermediate-cost solutions. E.g. providers certified for specific applications, on-prem rentals, etc.

* Omitting Azure, which gives some privacy for some $$$ on their models, but not at the level of high-security.

> What history? What proof? What evidence?

...

> standard commercial monolithic kernels

Note the path from A to B.

Fully monolithic: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, zOS.

Mostly monolithic: Windows, MacOS

To get to microkernels, we're reaching for QNX and Minix.

Monolithic kernels won *hard* with good reason.

> critical flight systems

Hard RTOS is a whole different domain of engineering. You're very confused if you think the same principles apply to something which makes sense in a mainstream OS.

> A GPU driver is unlikely to ever be bug free, but if the GPU is in an unstable state, because the keyboard should still be working fine, it should be easy to reset the GPU and continue the work without rebooting the computer.

Yes, it should be. I can name zero times in the past half-decade that it's been possible to soft-reset the hardware in my GPU.

The "reset the GPU switch" is the power switch on my computer.

That's true of most hardware. If my ethernet, wifi, or whatever else enter an unstable state, on paper, the monolithic kernel can do the same thing as the microkernel: unload the module, then reload the module. In practice, I've virtually never seen a driver able to pick up a piece of hardware in an unstable state and be able to "reset" it.

> With device drivers in separate processes, bugs in one should not corrupt the memory of others, so restarting a device driver should be enough, instead of rebooting the computer.

Device drivers can corrupt other devices easily enough. The hardware itself would need to be built for isolation.

> Any complex program must be designed from the beginning to be easy to test and debug. If the device drivers are distinct processes, there is no reason to be more difficult to debug them. On the contrary, because the interactions between them are more limited than when they live in a common address space, they should be easier to debug.

That's exactly the myth.

In practice, a complex data flow for a heisenbug might start at the network layer, go through the disk, and land on the GPU. Tracing that on a microkernel requires instrumentation which, while possible in theory, I've never seen in practice.

I'd love to see a hardware stack where everything is ECC, devices are isolated, etc. but for now, on a typical computer, plugging in a bad USB device can brick the whole system (regardless of the software on it). The assumption is that devices on your PCIe bus can be trusted.

> This can only make much easier the reasoning about how the entire system works.

You make very strong statements, without support.

There's a reason Linux runs on every Android phone, almost every router, and increasingly, devices like home microwaves.

> Taking a helicopter to the top of Everest is not as rewarding as climbing the mountain.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. New tools take you higher. I'll never climb Everest. A good comparison is:

- Climbing your local mountain

- Helicopter to the top of Everest

- Spacecraft to the moon

If a helicopter just saved you a trip up, you'd be right, but it can take you places you wouldn't otherwise go.

I created a new field of mathematics just yesterday, coincidentally. It wasn't a very good field of mathematics, though.

I think history has proven that this theory:

> Better security, better reliability, better modularity. Better security because in a muicrokernel [sic] system a bug in one driver only gives an attacker access to that subsystem (or maybe even that driver), as opposed to having unlimited access to the whole system like is the case with mainstream operating systems today. Better relaibility [sic] becasue [sic] a crash in one subsystem only crashes that subsystem instead of crashing everything; if windows were a microkernel system then the crowdstrike bug would have just stopped some IT security staff from getting telemetry instead of being front page news. If linux were a microkernel system then the linux kernel team wouldn't be responsible for merging every driver for every hardware device, and wouldn't be responsible for vetting code that they would have to become experts on the inner workings of every chip supported by the linux kernel to properly vet.

Is false. In particular:

- A kernel-level exploit can almost always be escalated. If I control your filesystem, you're SOL

- A kernel-level crash in any subsystem brings down the whole system. If your file system crashes, or your GPU is in an unstable state, there is no coming back

- Modularity is a question of clear boundaries. Whether those are static linking, dynamic linking, or XML-RPC doesn't change the level of modularity.

And so on.

Basically, none of the upsides have panned out. On the other hand, code complexity explodes. Microservices need to know who to call how. The whole "a crash in one subsystem only crashes that subsystem instead of crashing everything" means every subsystem needs defensive code for things going wrong elsewhere. KLOCs go up, bugs/KLOC stay constant, and things get less stable.

Plus, it's hard to reason about systemically, and without excellent telemetry, neigh-impossible to debug.

... or someone who has a hard time seeing how most actual arts, music, and humanities college degrees have that impact.

Examples of things with high-impact towards civics:

- Philosophy, especially political philosophy. Aristotle, Confucius, Marx, Smith, ...

- History, political science, economics, journalism

- Theory of law, studied academically. Lawyers, for the most part, have the opposite effect.

- Anthropology + international relations

Examples of things which currently don't:

- Most major in art, film, visual studies, literature, African/women's/LGBTQ/Asian/... studies, language majors, linguistics, ...

This is a statement about the practice of such majors. For example:

* Art/film/... ought to contribute, historically has contributed, and in much of Europe, actually still does. In most of the US, it leads to either unemployment or work in advertising, and doesn't teach the right things.

* Looking at the experiences of different minorities ought to contribute. In practice, most of these majors are dysfunctional self-admiration cults, with people citing each other's work, due to misaligned incentive structures in academic hiring.

* It's no coincidence that the most important work in philosophy, in the past century, was not done by philosophy majors.

* A Chinese / French / Russian / ... major will place you about one tier down from a Chinese / French / Russian / ... immigrant in terms of... just about everything.

In either case, many of these things do still have value, but it's not the same funding bucket.