te7447

> ... eventually the only thing that accrues is things that the factions agree on, or at least what ArbCom has demanded they stop fighting over

Or what the faction with the most favored access to ArbCom manages to make stick by getting the other faction banned.

A state actor could absolutely cause immense damage to Wikipedia at scale, because most admins aren't experts in the subjects whose articles they police. I'm just surprised that nobody has done so already.

It's trusted in the sense that it lets the person with power (the root of trust) trust the hardware.

That person just isn't you.

It's a way to enforce power relations by making the hardware respect them. From this perspective, it's pretty evident how it degrades adversarial interoperability, which is about ignoring power relations to build your own system.

Travelers definitely has a very distinct "seat-of-your-pants" form of plotting, though, that can seem inconsistent if you're used to something more consistently planned in advance like Babylon 5. Two big changes during S1 also made me bounce off it.

I won't claim my taste is universal: it's just something to be aware of.

Whatever it is that caused "It's not X, It's Y", it's more recent than LLMs as a whole.

As far as I remember, neither GPT3.5, GPT4, nor Claude Instant did it. I think Gemini was the first to really do it, and then out of nowhere, everybody was doing it.

I imagine you would use something that errs on the side of safety - e.g. insist on total functional programming and use something like Idris' totality checker.

Something "systems that are attacked by entities that adapt often need to be defended by entities that adapt".

> Cellular radios in a PC? You don't get root on those. Same situation as they are in a cell phone: They are licensed-band transmitters, and they are required to be tamper proof to protect the licensee.

The original post said:

> Locking down the bootloader and enforcing TEE signatures does stop malware. But it also kills user agency. We are moving to a model where the user is considered the adversary on their own hardware. The genius of the modders in that XDA thread is undeniable, but they are fighting a war against the fundamental architecture of modern trust and the architecture is winning.

So, as I read it, Fiveplus is saying that we are moving to an architecture where the user is an adversary on the computer (the phone) as a whole. While licenses may require that specific components are out of bounds, the new thing is that the whole platform is denying the user the ability to do what they want with the parts that are not explicitly off-limits.

IIRC, a Blu-Ray drive is required to store data about revoked keys and to stop playing discs if its own key is revoked. Presumably the BR license also states that the user can't be allowed to wipe this revocation list and start playing Blu-Rays again. But BR drives can still be fitted in computers where the user has root access, just like PC cellular radios.

Phones are made to be default-deny instead of default-allow, and I think that makes it different from "enclosed modules you don't have control of".

> That has been the model since day one, since you are using spectrum that, because the end users are not licensed, requires it. Radios in 100% of commercially available phones are locked to prevent user tampering.

Why, then, can users be root on PCs that have wifi cards, SDRs or cellular radios?

If you want to track how many times users revisit the site, you could do that anonymously by setting a visit counter cookie, e.g. VISITS: 1, VISITS: 2, etc. This would track the user over different IPs, but since the cookie only has a counter, it doesn't tell you if two people with "VISITS: 2" set is the same user.

That's the first example I can think of off the top of my head.

I've always wondered how you'd be able to rigorously distinguish breaking out of the simulation from just discovering novel things about your current universe.

Is a black hole a bug or a feature? If you find a way to instantly observe or manipulate things at Alpha Centauri by patterning memory in a computer on Earth a special way, is that an exploit or is it just a new law of nature?

Science is a descriptive endeavor.

I guess that some extreme cases would be obvious - if a god-admin shows up and says "cut that out or we'll shut your universe down", that's a better indication of simulation than the examples I gave. But even so, it could be a power bluff, someone pretending to be a god. Or it could be comparable to aliens visiting Earth rather than gods revealing themselves - i.e. some entity of a larger system visiting another entity of the same system, not someone outside it poking inside.