> In a major blow to the U.S. case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, a military judge ruled on Friday that the prisoner’s confessions to F.B.I. agents were not voluntary and cannot be used against him at trial.
> … his confessions have always been challenged because the government used torture to question him in secret C.I.A. prisons years before he was charged.
It's beyond embarrassing how the Bush admin took cases that in 2003 would have produced a slam dunk guilty verdict from any federal court in the country and decided to taint the evidence with torture (producing a bunch of spurious unactionable garbage) to be "tough", so instead they've been in legal limbo for 2 decades.
This is a complaint I hear others voice and one I have myself. I think it comes down to the text being poorly written. Sure, LLMs are good at a lot of the surface indicators of good writing: they have a wide vocabulary, they use grammatical sentences, they break up the text into paragraphs, sections, and lists. But they're terrible at organizing the text and marshalling a concept to get it across to a specific audience. The section and paragraph breaks are meaningless, the metaphors are unenlightening, the rhythm is exhaustingly uniform. Pre-LLM, you'd find this kind of text in marketing materials, corporate PR, and heavily padded sophomore essays.
Possibly an inevitability, since LLM text is specifically generated to be low entropy. It’s smooth, optimized for minimal perplexity.
And if you don’t find any of the word choices a little bit perplexing, your brain can just gloss over it. There is no meaning here. It’s like smalltalk.
Interesting — do you happen to have any suggestions for something I could read about this?
It really bugs me, this aspect of LLMs, and yet I find myself sounding like a lunatic when I describe it, until others chime in and say they have the same experience.
The TV's license agreement attempts to shift the burden onto the TV's owner. Taken at face value, it's the owner who is guilty of recording people without their consent.
> Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack [...] is widely regarded as a threat specific to compilers. We show that it is not
And yet, from Reflections On Trusting Trust:
> In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode.
The paper is certainly a nice worked-out example of the attack, which is worthwhile, but it's not novel.
It goes back to Paul Karger's MULTICS Security Evaluation where he invented and described the attack. Thompson learned it from him. Karger invented a lot of attacks and security techniques a decade or more ahead of the hacking community.
I think when I hear the terms, a "dashpot" is a specific mechanism and a "snubber" is its purpose. You can use dashpots for other purposes, and you can build snubbers out of things other than dashpots.
Nothing requires the wormhole "surface" to be a sphere, just like nothing requires the wormhole in the 2D analogy to be a circular hole. If you make it a sphere with one flat side, travelers won't have to traverse curved space (with the attendant weird tidal/gravitational effects).
Why do bubbles naturally always end up as spheres instead of cubes or some other shape? Even though wormholes as discussed aren't real, geometric and physical optimizations of energy are going to push for a 'natural' shape so long as there isn't concerted effort and energy to retain an unnatural, unoptimized shape.
Regarding the curved space, I think you bring an interesting observation. Instead of a flat sided sphere, it's still a sphere, but the curve that connects the two spaces has Radius = 0 (the spaces are touching, no tunnel needed), so there wouldn't be any distorted curved space to traverse.
However, to conserve matter, this idea requires the hole to be infinitesimally small (or tiny with a negligible tunnel), which explains why we don't see wormholes in real life
Futel runs a handful of non-pay payphones in and around NW Oregon, some urban and some rural. There are other regional organizations doing similar things.
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