Daily Archives: 2024-03-21

Article note: I'm really curious what it's going to look like if/when the bubble bursts on this "AI" chatterbot garbage tide. I'm not really a believer that it's possible to put technical genies back into bottles unless they become economically infeasible (and usually that has to be at least largely a physical-laws or market conditions thing, not just a legal thing, because computers and computer-mediated communication is international and accessible), but I think the required change of conditions to start another AI winter might be smaller than most folks imagine. Many of the profitable applications so far are fraud (fake reviews, fake publications, fake influencers, fake products, fake...) or fraud-adjacent ("Let's replace our support staff with chatterbots that can anthropomorphically regurgitate our FAQ page"), but it's not clear to me that the petty fraud is profitable enough (or at least that enough of the money is/can be going to the AI developer/operators) to sustain the massive compute requirements and the developers to design, train, and run models without the ongoing VC frenzy. VCs are largely dumb herd animals, and it wouldn't take that much loss-of-momentum (which seems to be happening) or regulatory condition changes (also likely) to spook many of them off, and I don't think even the Nvidia ouroboros can self-sustain without external cash injection.

Article note: The headline may actually under-sell, for the attack to work as described they have to have more or less figured out the entire MIFARE Classic RIFD system's security model (which, to be fair, was already in shambles for like a decade) in addition to the specifics of Dormakaba's Saflok implementation.

Article note: Well, this is going to be interesting. They seem to be aiming realy high (even compared to the recent EU action), I wonder if the plan is to aim high and expect it to be argued down.

Article note: Aw man, "True Names" and his Zones of Thought books ("A Fire Upon the Deep" and even more "A Deepness in the Sky") are things that I refer to all the time because they shaped how I think about the world.