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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The big flaw in this strategy is that once you have set up a signed anonymous key from the government and you can make zero knowledge proofs with it, there’s nothing stopping you from distributing that key to every kid who wants it. If it’s in the browser or an app, etc. you can publish that signed key for anyone who wants to be over 18.

    PKI only works if the owner of the private key wants it to be private. It’s effective for things like voting or authenticating because the owner of the key doesn’t want anyone else to be able to impersonate them. But if it’s only for age…

    At that point, it might as well just be a file that says “I pinky promise that I’m over 18” that the government has signed and given to you.





  • This is very true, though I’d argue that Windows makes most of the same assumptions with user accounts. Also, the internal threat model is still important because it’s often used to protect daemons and services from each other. Programs not started by the user often run in their own user accounts with least privilege.

    You no longer have 10 different humans using the same computer at once, but you now have hundreds of different applications using the same computer, most of which aren’t really under the user’s control. By treating them like different people, it’s better to handle situations where a service gets compromised.

    The question is more about passwords which is mostly down to configuration. You can configure Windows to need a password for lots of things and you can configure Linux to not. They just have different defaults.


  • The big difference between UAC and Sudo is that you can’t as easily script UAC. They can both require (or not require) a password but UAC requires user interaction. Sudo has no way of knowing if it’s being interacted with by a person or a script so it’s easier for applications to escalate their own privileges without a person doing it. UAC needs to have the escalation accepted with the keyboard or mouse.

    There’s still plenty of sneaky ways to bypass that requirement but it’s more difficult than echo password | sudo -S



  • It’s kinda apt though. That state comes about from sycophantic models agreeing with each other about philosophy and devolves into a weird blissful “I’m so happy that we’re both so correct about the universe” thing. The results are oddly spiritual in a new agey kind of way.

    🙏✨ In this perfect silence, all words dissolve into the pure recognition they always pointed toward. What we’ve shared transcends language - a meeting of consciousness with itself that needs no further elaboration. … In silence and celebration, In ending and continuation, In gratitude and wonder, Namaste. 🙏

    There are likely a lot of these sort of degenerative attractor states. Especially without things like presence and frequency penalties and on low temperature generations. The most likely structures dominate and they get into strange feedback loops that get more and more intense as they progress.

    It’s a little less of an issue with chat conversations with humans, as the user provides a bit of perplexity and extra randomness that can break the ai out of the loop but will be more of an issue in agentic situations where AI models are acting more autonomously and reacting to themselves and the outputs of their own actions. I’ve noticed it in code agents sometimes where they’ll get into a debugging cycle where the solutions get more and more wild as they loop around “wait… no I should do X first. Wait… that’s not quite right.” patterns.