What price common sense? • June 11, 2024 7:30 AM
@Levi B.
“Those who are not familiar with the term “bit-squatting” should look that up”
Are you sure you want to go down that rabbit hole?
It’s an instant of a general class of problems that are never going to go away.
And why in
“Web servers would usually have error-correcting (ECC) memory, in which case they’re unlikely to create such links themselves.”
The key word is “unlikely” or more formally “low probability”.
Because it’s down to the fundamentals of the universe and the failings of logic and reason as we formally use them. Which in turn has been why since at least as early as the ancient Greeks through to 20th Century, some of those thinking about it in it’s various guises have gone mad and some committed suicide.
To understand why you need to understand why things like “Error Correcting Codes”(ECC) will never by 100% effective and deterministic encryption systems especially stream ciphers will always be vulnerable. //
No matter what you do all error checking systems have both false positive and false negative results. All you can do is tailor the system to that of the more probable errors.
But there are other underlying issues, bit flips happen in memory by deterministic processes that apparently happen by chance. Back in the early 1970’s when putting computers into space became a reality it was known that computers were effected by radiation. Initially it was assumed it had to be of sufficient energy to be ‘ionizing’ but later any EM radiation such as the antenna of a hand held two way radio would do with low energy CMOS chips.
This was due to metastability. In practice the logic gates we use are very high gain analog amplifiers that are designed to “crash into the rails”. Some logic such as ECL was actually kept linear to get speed advantages but these days it’s all a bit murky.
The point is as the level at a simple logic gate input changes it goes through a transition region where the relationship between the gate input and output is indeterminate. Thus an inverter in effect might or might not invert or even oscillate with the input in the transition zone.
I won’t go into the reasons behind it but it’s down to two basic issues. Firstly the universe is full of noise, secondly it’s full of quantum effects. The two can be difficult to differentiate in even very long term measurements and engineers tend to try to lump it all under a first approximation of a Gaussian distribution as “Addative White Gaussian Noise”(AWGN) that has nice properties such as averaging predictably to zero with time and “the root of the mean squared”. However the universe tends not to play that way when you get up close, so instead “Phase Noise in a measurement window” is often used with Allan Deviation. //
There are things we can not know because they are unpredictable or beyond or ability to measure.
But also beyond a deterministic system to calculate.
Computers only know “natural numbers” or “unsigned integers” within a finite range. Everything else is approximated or as others would say “faked”. Between every natural number there are other numbers some can be found as ratios of natural numbers and others can not. What drove philosophers and mathematicians mad was the realisation of the likes of “root two”, pi and that there was an infinity of such numbers we could never know. Another issue was the spaces caused by integer multiplication the smaller all the integers the smaller the spaces between the multiples. Eventually it was realised that there was an advantage to this in that it scaled. The result in computers is floating point numbers. They work well for many things but not with addition and subtraction of small values with large values.
As has been mentioned LLM’s are in reality no different from “Digital Signal Processing”(DSP) systems in their fundamental algorithms. One of which is “Multiply and ADd”(MAD) using integers. These have issues in that values disappear or can not be calculated. With continuous signals they can be integrated in with little distortion. In LLM’s they can cause errors that are part of what has been called “Hallucinations”. That is where something with meaning to a human such as the name of a Pokemon trading card character “Solidgoldmagikarp” gets mapped to an entirely unrelated word “distribute”, thus mayhem resulted on GPT-3.5 and much hilarity once widely known.
Simultaneity Ain't what It Used to Be
One of the most fundamental deductions Albert Einstein made from the finite speed of light in his theory of special relativity is the relativity of simultaneity—because light takes a finite time to traverse a distance in space, it is not possible to define simultaneity with respect to a universal clock shared by all observers. In fact, purely due to their locations in space, two observers may disagree about the order in which two spatially separated events occurred. It is only because the speed of light is so great compared to distances we are familiar with in everyday life that this effect seems unfamiliar to us. Note that the relativity of simultaneity can be purely due to the finite speed of light; while it is usually discussed in conjunction with special relativity and moving observers, it can be observed in situations where none of the other relativistic effects are present. The following animation demonstrates the effect. //
... by extracting transmissions from the LM from those originating in mission control onto separate tracks with the Audacity audio editor, I was then able to time-shift transmissions originating from the Earth by the light delay of 1.2865 seconds to reproduce what Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong heard through their headphones in the cabin of the Eagle lunar module on the surface in Mare Tranquillitatis. During the landing phase, an on-board tape recorder in the lunar module captured the voices of Armstrong and Aldrin even when they were not transmitting on the air to ground link. From this noisy source, I have restored the few remarks by Armstrong which were only heard within the cabin. This is, then, the lunar touchdown as heard by the astronauts who performed it.
Now it's obvious what happened to Armstrong's post-landing transmission! Right before he began the call, Duke's message, sent a second and a quarter earlier, arrived at the Moon. While, from an earthly perspective, this was spoken well before Armstrong said “Houston”, on the Moon this message “stepped on” the start of Armstrong's transmission (especially considering human reaction time), and caused him to pause before continuing with his message. Note also that on the Earth-based recording, Duke's response occurs almost immediately after the end of Armstrong's transmission, but on the Moon, the astronauts had to wait for the pokey photons to make it from the home planet to their high gain antenna on its distant satellite.
that one in the cornerSilver badge
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Re: Makes you proud
The one that gets me is when you find and fix a long-standing bug in some code and wonder how in hell it managed to keep going in its original state for so many years!
You have to tread carefully around those sorts of bugs, just in case it turns out to be a Schroedinbug - and you have just observed that, unfixed, it can't possibly work. Which collapses its wave function and, through spooky action at a distance, every running copy of that program will suddenly stop working!
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