I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).

It’s not smaller but it is faster.

AI makes it pretty trivial to vomit out large amounts of code. 250,000 lines is nothing. The code quality is garbage, of course, and will be hell to maintain in the coming years. It will likely just be rewritten again if the company is still around.

If there’s one thing high school students have a ton of it’s free time. When I was that age I put thousands of hours into video games and got nothing to show for it. I applaud this kid for turning his high school hobby into a paycheque.

Sounds very cozy! I suppose you could also simply carry the carafe to your coffee mug and pour it there, as though you were working at a diner with you as your favourite customer!

Move your coffee machine to your desk so you can make and pour coffee without having to move the mug!

Why not vote against subsidies for farmers then? I’m just as against subsidies as I am in favour of land ownership. The biggest problem I have with subsidies and high taxes and government control of property is that it politicizes these decisions and pits special interests against the common good.

Once you create a subsidy it becomes very difficult to get rid of it, politically. The farmers who benefit from it will fight tooth and nail to keep it regardless of whether or not the subsidy actually benefits society.

It’s either your land or it’s someone else’s. In a place like China the government owns all the land which means it’s all owned by wealthy, ultra-powerful, ultra-connected party elites. At no point is there a situation where millions or billions of people all share land in common. There is always politics, there will always be powerful elites, there will always be people getting screwed over.

The difference with Denmark is that individual small people have a tiny bit more power than individuals in China. The fact that this results in progress being impeded is a tradeoff that brings enormous benefits for personal freedom.

Read about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Over a million people were forcibly displaced from their homes as a result. Many cities, towns, and villages were completely destroyed. The living conditions of the displaced deteriorated and their lives were irrevocably altered.

The Bible is notably silent on government social programs. Many Christians have taken it upon themselves to believe that social programs are evil, that they perpetuate the problems they’re intended to address, that they destroy the nuclear family, etc.

They sincerely believe that they are doing good by getting rid of these programs because they want to see the Christian family and the church take the central role on these issues, not the government. Furthermore, they believe that a government which tries to solve all social problems and create a utopia for everyone is fundamentally evil, hence the phrase:

“Don’t immanentize the eschaton.”

In their view, he would. They believe that Jesus wants people to give directly to charity, not to create government programs for it.

Not sure how these body washes caught on. I just use a plain old unscented bar of soap!

He also said:

the impression words form in the reader is more important than their intent

He didn’t intend for the master/slave connotation. He intended for the recording master connotation. Either way, he regrets using the word master and he’s supportive of the change.

Not according to pasky, the git contributor who picked the names.

Yes exactly. It’s a reference to the recording industry’s practice of calling the final version of an album the “master” which gets sent for duplication.

I mean who knows. Maybe they just steal whatever valuable parts they can carry and dump the rest.

The model has to be stored in the car for it to work. I mean can you imagine the car driving along and a network interruption causes the self-driving system to be unresponsive for a second? That could cause a crash immediately!

So then if the model is stored in the car itself it can be stolen and sold to a rival self-driving car company in Russia or what have you. And in that case they could definitely repurpose the entire stolen car itself. They just need to replace the client code with their own so that the car connects to their servers.

Besides, the model isn’t going to have maps or server connection stuff built into it. The maps are external and part of the GPS navigation, so those can be replaced. And all the command and control stuff is just conventionally programmed client software that can be redirected to another server or even a server hosted locally within the car itself for autonomous driving.

Fundamentally, the reason self-driving cars are a bigger target than regular cars is that they leave no witnesses if you can disable the surveillance/logging. You don’t have to disable the cell towers for that, just the real time surveillance (just the company servers). Once the car goes dark it can no longer be tracked.

It’s transmitted that data but the gang has blocked the server from receiving it. I mentioned that earlier. This whole operation doesn’t go down unless you take out the eyes and ears of the company.

All that other stuff can be replaced. It’s still a car with a $15,000 battery in it and drivetrain and all the sensors and electronics.

And if the hackers can break in and steal data, they can steal the source code. Then they have all the keys to the kingdom.

Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.

The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.

Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.

If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.

There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing (edit: for regular, not self driving cars). Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.

They are taking over Internet accounts though. They hack people’s social media profiles, Netflix accounts, Amazon accounts etc. They also take down websites via DDoS attacks.

Here’s the thing with fleets of self-driving rental cars: unlike power plants or manufacturing robots, these cars will be on the public Internet. They cannot be airgapped on a private LAN the way a fixed robot in a factory can.

So all it takes to control these things is to hack into the authentication system and steal the credentials for the master control account for the cars. Then they’ll be able to connect to the cara remotely and issue commands to control them, just as the company would for say, ordering them to return to base to recharge, get cleaned up, or be repaired.

That’s the vulnerability. And even if they put all the cars on a VPN it’ll still exist because hackers can and do steal VPN credentials just like any other credential.

By the way, there has been at least one high profile hack of manufacturing robots: the Stuxnet worm which targeted Iran’s nuclear program. Since a fleet of self-driving cars is going to have millions and millions of dollars in value (tens of thousands of cars on the road) it’s going to be an extremely high value target for criminal gangs. While their resources might not be as extreme as the probable Stuxnet creators, they will be very large (and might even gain state actor support from unfriendly countries).

Most security workers at companies overestimate hackers abilities. That’s why all these companies are hacked all the time and there are tons and tons of data breaches.

The thing very few people understand about hackers is that they can code and they share their hacks as tools with each other on the black market. This means you’re essentially up against the combined effort of all hackers on the black market. When one succeeds, they all succeed. When one piece of server software is hacked, all companies who use that software get hacked.

No, a kilogram of bell peppers is about 3-4 peppers. These things are massive! 5.30€ is about $7.80 Canadian. A bit cheaper but not much.

I don’t know if you have a lot of greenhouses in Europe. Here in Canada we have some but nowhere near enough to feed the country. We import a lot of vegetables from California and Mexico. Can’t always grow locally when there’s a metre of snow on the ground and the air is -10C or colder for 6 months.