> Participants completed a structured questionnaire evaluating willingness to consume various insect-based foods, motivations and barriers, and demographic predictors of acceptance.
Neat, I guess, but I really expected this study to actually offer people insects to eat.
A "yes" on a questionnaire feels about as relevant and actionable as a "maybe" on an event invite.
> But this ruling will surely set precedent for other cases where AI is used.
I dont remember which court. But this is typically in that jurisdiction. It can be appealed higher. SCOTUS has not ruled so it’s still up for further argument
> Secure hash functions are used to make a short version of a large file. Ideally, it has several properties including making it infeasible to find two files with the same cryptographic hash. We've just gotten 92% of the way there. This has security ramifications in that other researchers are expected to be able to complete the work through similar methods as explored in the paper. We weren't sure if this was a remarkable result, since it's not a full collision
I thought this meant they were able to generate collisions for 92% of files/hashes they tried, but it sounds like they're able to generate hashes that are 92% identical?
Possible. It's up to people to decide if they're OK with a known 92% collision out there (with the unknown being there could be a 100%), or go for something stronger.
Thanks, you have this exactly right. The unknown part is especially worrying because we didn't implement many of the strongest ways to make to the final stretch yet, i.e. Wang-style message modification. Our result is basically a very strong direction in this cryptographic research, but not a full break yet.
Thank you for pointing out that that section could be clearer. I've now updated it. It now reads:
>We've just gotten 92% of the way to finding a single collision (this means that there is no full collision yet.). This has security ramifications in that other researchers are expected to be able to complete the work through similar methods as explored in the paper, and eventually produce collisions at will. We weren't sure if this was a remarkable result, since it's not a full collision, but we shared the work with the leading cryptographer in the field, who holds the world records in reduced-round attacks, and got great encouragement to proceed to publish it as a paper, so we did so.
(if we had found a single full collision, we would have just written "we broke SHA-256". This is 92% of the way to a full collision. Any collision is considered a great reduction in the security of the hash, because it means that there two different files with the same cryptographic hash. This is what happened to other algorithms such as MD5, as demonstrated in the linked tool.)
This is a really funny comment. In setting the world record for Li's 39-round collision[1] (still unbroken, and one of our favorite papers), he also set some records in sha-224, reaching 40 rounds in that one. Of course, saying sha-224 is "87% of the way" to sha-256 is correct in a sense, and that's why his record is slightly larger in reduced-round full-schedule collisions on that metric, 40 rounds for sha-224 and only 39 in sha-256. At the same time, the fact that he reached only 39/40 rounds on those shows the difficulty of getting through the full 64 rounds, which is what our paper does with a slightly relaxed schedule adherence.
not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
> without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.
Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes.
I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.
Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
Not yet. But with them changing the law to enlist foreigners (who, of course, will care less about Canadians and their rights) in the armed forces, it will change soon.
how? whatsapp, wechat, telegram, even signal, all require a phone to be used.
if i didn't need any of those apps then sure, but unfortunately there is no way around these apps if i want to keep in touch with certain people that are important to me.
If you need to use these, set the history retention to like no time. That would help a lot. They could still get the contents from the person you are communicating with, but it would require more work on their part. Humans are generally fairly lazy. If you can get the people you communicate iwth to also turn off message retention, that would help. Then they could tell you talked with Tootie, but not what you talked about, at least from the device(s) themselves.
If you “must” use those then keep a phone off in a drawer and turn it on once a day to keep in touch.
If those people won’t allow you to be offline from time to time and aren’t willing to switch communication methods as an alternative, maybe it’s not a symmetrical relationship.
Unless you have an Out of Body Experience and who the hell knows if physics continues to be at all having an effect in that realm and thus perform Free Will is a possibility.
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