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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • 'Forget Coders. The Real AI Threat Is In the Back Office'
    by EditorDavid on 12/07/2026 at 10:29 pm

    Which jobs are most threatened by AI? "Programmers, software engineers and other tech industry employees," goes one common answer. "But many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers," reports the New York Times: customer service reps, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and HR specialists, "who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs..." They are spread across the country and throughout the economy, working in every industry, in big cities and small towns, at major corporations and mom-and-pop businesses... These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one — much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalisation and automation wiped many of them away... For now, such an outcome is a fear, not a forecast. Despite high-profile layoffs in tech and finance, there is little firm evidence that AI has hurt the labour market as a whole. Economists have become increasingly convinced that disruptions are likely, but they say it is too early to know where or how widespread they will be. They remain broadly sceptical of claims that the technology will lead to mass unemployment in the near future. Some AI industry leaders have walked back such predictions in recent weeks. But given the extraordinary pace at which companies are adopting AI — and at which the technology is improving — economists say policymakers need to consider the potential effects on the labour market. And they say they are concerned that the public debate has focused too much on software engineers and a relative handful of other high-status careers — lawyers, consultants, economists — rather than the workers who could be most vulnerable... Economists at Northwestern University recently recalculated measures of AI exposure based on the makeup of the total workforce, not just the people using the technology. Administrative and front-line roles, such as customer service representatives, rose to the top of the list. "The most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks," said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper's authors. "They're not computer scientists or data scientists at all." The article also includes this counterpoint from an economist at the University of Illinois who has studied earlier waves of white-collar automation: that like other disruptive technologies, AI likely will also create new jobs. So the possibility exists AI will make workers more productive and allow them to earn more. "I would be cautious about just focusing on what are we losing as opposed to what are we going to gain on the other side." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Linus Torvalds on AI, Junk Patches, Humans, and Godzilla
    by EditorDavid on 12/07/2026 at 8:55 pm

    Linus Torvalds once said LLMs might bring a 10X increase to programmer productivity. But speaking at Open Source Summit India 2026, he now says that number was "not scientific," reports ZDNet. "That was pulled out of my ass number, obviously." Today, he continued, "we're at the point where hopefully it creates more productivity than it takes away," but "we certainly saw more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until the like early this year.... it can actually be a huge drain on resources when it takes humans a lot of effort to figure out that, hey, this machine-generated report was not true." Even now, he said, "most of the good ones require more than just the LLM," because "we've had to push back quite a bit... if you find a bug with an LLM, it's not enough to just ask the LLM to make a bug report and then throw it over the fence to us. We want to see a suggested patch; we want to see the human who ran the LLM act as a kind of back-and-forth." Torvalds described many AI-generated patches as "mindless band-aid kind of patches... they may fix the immediate problem, but the kind of bug remains, and it just is waiting in the hallway to hit you in another place." For his own toy projects, he uses LLMs as prototypers: "I use them as a way to prototype things... quite often the code is not usable in that form, but it's a great way to try something out," while insisting that for kernel-level fixes, "LLMs, in my experience, have not been at that level yet." Torvalds acknowledged that some AI-found issues have been "absolutely, stunningly, I mean, interesting in a painful kind of way," especially security problems that "show up in the technology press two days later." Despite the embarrassment, he said, "I'm very much not a shoot-the-messenger kind of person. I think we're much better off with LLMs finding bugs, even when they are embarrassing, and they are things that we should probably have found two decades ago." Torvalds also said he's using AI "for my own toy projects... Every time I travel to some new place, and this is the first time I've been to India, I send the kids pictures of where I am, and for some strange reason, Godzilla seems to follow me around and gets added to those pictures." ZDNet notes that Torvalds concluded, "There are many useful and less useful uses for AI," and "I think Godzilla is a great place to stop." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Elon Musk And Sam Altman Spar On X After Apple Files OpenAI Lawsuit
    by EditorDavid on 12/07/2026 at 6:50 pm

    "Elon Musk and Sam Altman criticized each other in new posts on X," reports CNBC, "highlighting the billionaires' long-standing tussle over OpenAI's evolution." This week, SpaceX released the Grok 4.5 generative AI model, while OpenAI debuted its own GPT-5.6 Sol. For days, Musk and Altman have hyped up their respective releases, but on Saturday the rivalry got personal. In response to a post about Apple filing suit against OpenAI on Friday over alleged theft of trade secrets, Musk wrote, "Scam Altman strikes again ...." Minutes after his post, Musk doubled down, writing, "He takes scamming to a whole new level." Next, Musk published a photo of Altman that included the words, "I'm doing this because I love it." "By 'this' he means scamming," Musk wrote, including two rolling-on-the-floor-laughing emojis. Musk then replied to that post, writing, "He might literally love scamming more than any human alive!" The flurry of social activity got Altman's attention. "[H]omeboy you're the one sellling public market investors on short-term space datacenters," Altman wrote in an X post of his own that garnered over 11 million views. "We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves," Musk fired back. Separately, Altman put Musk's fresh wave of attention in the context of OpenAI's fresh model release. "[T]here are a lot of benchmarks that suggest 5.6 sol is the best model in the world right now, but the most reliable way to tell is that elon is obsessed with me again," Altman wrote on X. Reacting to another post, Altman wrote that he was "not afraid of apple, but i have tremendous respect for them. s-tier company," CNBC reports — leading to a sarcastic response from X's head of product. "Incredible trade secrets as well, some of the best." And CNBC notes that Musk "replied with a face-with-tears-of-joy emoji." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • SK Hynix CEO Warns 2027 Will Be Memory's 'Worst Year' Ever. Shortages May Outlast the Decade
    by EditorDavid on 12/07/2026 at 5:50 pm

    The CEO of SK Hynix, one of the three largest DRAM producers, predicted to Reuters that the memory industry will see its "worst-ever" supply shortages in 2027, reports the hardware/gaming news site Wccftech: SK Hynix has also forecasted that, given the current market demand, they will fall way short of fulfilling the market demand, and that will continue beyond 2030. The comments from SK Hynix are in line with what Samsung and Micron executives have already said. Samsung has warned of 2027 being the worst year in terms of shortages and that things will continue this way till 2028 and beyond. Meanwhile, Micron has said that the current shortages are only the "first innings" and that both DRAM/NAND supply will be tight, as they are only able to meet 40-50% of the total market demand in the coming years. Heightened demand from AI customers and multi-year agreements further put pressure on the market. The big three DRAM makers have already prioritized premium DRAM segments such as HBM and LPDDR5X, while commodity memory such as DDR5, DDR4, and entry-level LPDDR RAM has taken a back seat. While these have boosted the profits of SK Hynix, Micron, and Samsung, they have devastated the consumer segment, which is facing the worst kind of price hikes that are affecting all sorts of components and platforms, including PCs, Smartphones, Consoles, etc... SK Hynix, like Samsung and Micron, is also preparing to embark on a multi-year and multi-billion dollar expansion plan with new fabs and facilities being laid out across South Korea. SK Hynix is also considering the construction of Fabs in the US, Japan, and Southeast Asia, though the final plans are yet to be cemented. Micron recently started construction of its new facility that will be used for DRAM production. As SK Hynix proudly marks its Nasdaq debut, its CEO's sobering forecast serves as a clear reminder: the memory industry is entering its most challenging chapter yet. With 2027 poised to bring the worst supply shortages in history and tight conditions likely persisting beyond 2030, the AI boom is reshaping the entire semiconductor landscape. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • WSJ Reports on 'Hard-line Activists Ramping Up for the War With AI'
    by EditorDavid on 12/07/2026 at 4:34 pm

    The Wall Street Journal says "an intense 27-year-old activist who had been leading sit-ins at OpenAI to protest the dangers of AI" was just part of a larger movement. "The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups." Their cause is now riding a surge of anti-AI backlash. Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, data center sprawl, reports of chatbot-fueled attacks by unstable users and hacking tools that have panicked cybersecurity professionals. Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. But for activists on the front lines, the driving fear is often more dramatic: human extinction. They cling to dire predictions, like Geoffrey Hinton's. The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans. At its most extreme and troubling end, some believe they must stop an AI apocalypse by any means necessary. In April, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis councilman, leaving a note: "no data centers." That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home in San Francisco, and charged him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an anti-AI document with a section on "our impending extinction," according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said his actions appear to have been driven by an "acute mental-health crisis, not a desire to harm." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Is the COSMIC Desktop Getting Better Than KDE and GNOME?
    by EditorDavid on 12/07/2026 at 3:34 pm

    "While KDE and GNOME dominate the landscape, a relative newcomer is starting to make waves with features other desktops still don't fully support," argues XDA Developers: Linux 7.0 was the first release of the kernel to officially support Rust, but COSMIC has been all-in on Rust since the very beginning, and COSMIC 1.1 finally stripped all the leftovers of C language from the desktop. It no longer has any traces of Nautilus (the GNOME file manager), and then there's now a COSMIC-native system monitor to replace the GNOME System Monitor, so you have even fewer chances of being afflicted by C-related problems. [The article calls COSMIC's system monitor "much better at showing detailed information about everything from processes to network and disk usage compared to the GNOME and KDE alternatives."] Stacking Windows As someone who used to love following Windows news, one of the most disheartening announcements was when Microsoft gave up on Sets, a feature that essentially turned every app window into a tab you could combine with other apps in the same window. I never thought I'd see that feature again, until COSMIC came along. Simply called "stacking", COSMIC has a feature that is exactly what Sets was supposed to be, though this time, you have more control. By default, apps still open in their proper, typical windows, with a title bar as you'd expect. But if you do want to combine multiple apps into one, you can right-click the title bar (or press Super + S) to enable stacking for that window. Then, simply drag another window over that one to start stacking them as tabs. This essentially gives you a whole new way to create "workspaces", as you can have a single window with all the tools you need, so you don't need to jump between different windows all the time, and you can keep a given window focused on a specific workload, but have multiple apps within it. It's a great reminder of what Microsoft took from us, too. Tiling, But On Demand Tiling windows is one of those features some power users simply love, and yes, there are ways to make it happen on KDE and GNOME with third-party apps or extensions, but those aren't ideal. It's an extra step to set them up, and very often they don't play nice with all the features those desktops offer, especially as new updates come out and those tools may have a hard time keeping up with the development of the desktops themselves. COSMIC is fantastic because not only does it have built-in window tiling, it's entirely controllable by the user. You can set any workspace to use tiling or floating windows depending on your preference, all completely independent of each other, and you can also choose the new default behavior for new workspaces so things are always tuned to your preferences. You can turn tiling on or off for a given workspace easily, and of course, even while tiling is on, you can allow certain apps to ignore it and still float above others. Not all these capabilities are exclusive to COSMIC, but to have this kind of feature built in with this level of control is still leagues better than anything KDE or GNOME offer in this regard. The article argues COSMIC also makes customization extremely simple without stifling your options (like tweaking color options for your desktop). "This desktop environment just keeps getting better, and it's quickly establishing itself as a major competitor to long-standing alternatives." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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