wladimir

Cells certainly have a kind of independent existence (consciousness is a different matter...). But our body needs its cells. It's not simulating cells in another substrate.

The 'cells' in the case of the hypothetical technological singularity will be computer hardware, not organic cells or human brains. There is the tacit assumption that silicon-based AI tech is somehow superior to our own carbon-based 'tech' and will displace it.

Human brains forming into a kind of super-organism would be a different phenomenon. It wouldn't even need AI, or much more advanced technology. It could indeed be argued that this is the case already with the internet and even printing press before it.

I've always thought of mind uploading as a comforting lie. Like what you tell a small child about what happened to the old dog. "He's in a better place now".

The idea of the singularity implies that the complexity of technology moves above anything humanity can understand. It is unclear whether there still be any use for our kind of individual conscious mind. At what scale will cognition happen? Will the world itself turn into a kind of brain?

But I'm with you in hoping that the Minds will be like the culture's and keep us around as pets in a sort of enlightened hedonism :-)

Fighting any wars against ourselves seems silly. But the problem is that companies aren't that willing to share information, or it is only available for a large price and/or with restrictive NDAs. Also, finding out how things work is simply fun.

Say, I needed write a custom GPU driver for some device, either to improve performance for some specific application or to work outside the dependency or API constraints of the binary blob (like porting to another OS). Usually vendors provide no register level documentation about graphics hardware, so the only way to do this is by reverse engineering.

Another reason for reverse engineering can be to find backdoors and security vulnerabilities (like these guys did) or even for legal reasons to find whether some copyrighted (or GPLed) code was used.

No madness needed at all. Or maybe just a bit.

The major difference with GCC's and other IRs is that LLVM and clang made it easy to use and embed the APIs in other software (due to the license as well as exporting a library). This made it much more convenient to make compilers, as well as code inspection and analysis tools (and even graphics drivers).

Sure, everything was possible before, but much harder for the average programmer interested in this stuff. With just Python and LLVM-python you can do very interesting things, quickly, without delving into GCC sources.

It may be possible that GCC cached up in that aspect, but back in the day I heard from language researchers, the GCC low and high level IR were a hell to introspect and required delving into the GCC source at a deep level.

That sounds pretty useful. Arguably, that's what text-based browsers such as lynx and links already do but in another way. Those are still what I use when I want to read some article without distractions, ads, and funny layout and images.

Eek. That sounds like something straight out of Kafka's The Castle.

I feel for him. Likely, he should try to escalate it higher up so that he gets moved to another project. But I understand his reluctance too, as they could decide he should not be working at the company at all.

And what bugs me as strange is that the CTO knows that he's doing nothing and still not doing anything about it.

Right, that is true by definition, to think physics is complete is as naive today as it was around 1900. Although humanity may bump into a law of decreasing returns at some point, as more and more energy is needed to probe even smaller details of the universe, it appears we're not there yet.

Reply to eeky (you're hellbanned): no, this does not make transactions anonymous, these are still pseudonymous. The difference is that you won't reveal your IP this way while using the client. Using the regular Bitcoin-Qt client with Tor has the same result. The novel thing here is that this uses the I2P network.

Yes. You can actually use OpenCL on the i.mx6. It's pretty cool. That said, there is still quite some room for improvement in the drivers (see my other post above). It is also more limited than desktop-class GPUs (CL embedded profile), so don't expect to be able to run all current OpenCL code unmodified.

Most GSM modems are part of SoCs. Indeed for USB dongles for your PC or laptop it's different, but that's not the "baseband processor" I was talking about. It would be somewhat harder to exploit the parent system through USB (at least if the driver can be trusted), on the other hand it could temporarily pretend to be a keyboard and storage device but that'd be very OS dependent.

I'm not sure about CPUs. They don't have direct connections to the outside world. If you want to distrust any hardware, it makes sense to focus on communication peripherals such as network cards, wifi/gsm modems etc.

For example the baseband processors in phones contain a complicated firmware of 16 MB+. This contains many hidden diagnostic modes on various subsystem levels. Baseband processors have been known to be exploited remotely, and as they have direct connection to the main CPU, giving full control over the device, including GPS, camera etc.

There have also been bugs in wired networking hardware in which specially crafted packets resulted in low-level crashes. It was not exploitable in the cases I remember, but I'm sure someone persistent enough and with the right skills may be able to find some.

None of these examples actually "phone home" in the classic sense, but my point is that these peripherals have proprietary firmware that is hardly under public scrutiny, and anything can be hidden in them.

Agree about the sucking part. But IMO the problem is not that everyone will know everything about everyone. That would be weird (utopian?) but kind of fair.

The fear is about the rich and privileged knowing everything about the poor and underprivileged (using databases that are expensive, protected by IP laws, and/or require clearance), and opaqueness the other way around. Information as a means of control.