> "We set up a system where every government and a bunch of random banks and IT companies in the world holds the secret codes to everyone's encryption. Then we make them pinky swear not to abuse it, with stern talkings to if they do. And now it's all on fire, because one of them was irresponsible!"

You can know the intractability of the problem that PKI is solving, and the (worse) alternatives that have been tried, but that doesn't make this system not-insane to a normal person, and its at least a little bit the fault of the collective "us".

And it's not like it is an impossible problem; we rely on TOFU for SSH, we have remotely-attestable TPMs everywhere, ZKPPs / PAKEs exist, session keys and federation protocols are widespread. Somewhere in the set of "possible solutions" are options that don't sound unhinged when you explain how we got to this eMuhdra situation.

It would need to be a 3, 5, or 7, since a prime is required.

It is utterly baffling to me that this is a thing someone felt needed expressing. Surely, intuitively knowing this is part of being human?

How else do we explain the blues, love songs... anything?

And every such burst of inspiration is accompanied by bullet-points to flog the dead horse further.

Lest you think it wasn't mind-numbing enough, now we're turning it into a narrative arc worthy of a screenplay: text, coming of age, has become markdown (which the author certainly loves). Completing the arc, we're going to acknowledge its limitations ("be unbiased / balanced"), and then come to a denouement where we tie it up with a bland bow.

This is specifically an area that "text" is quite bad and is the source of much woe. Your provided example would be parsed by most parsers today as a string, since it mixes spaces (non-numeric) and surrounds it with quotes.

In fact, given well-defined binary, it is rather simpler to turn it into "text" than the reverse. It seems like you've forgotten that "0x32 0x20 0x37 0x20 0x2A..." is literally what is in that file you would view. Plain text is, after all, just one example of a binary format.

These incumbent labs are angling for regulatory capture by stirring up hysteria and suggesting that existing laws are insufficient. Don't do their job for them, first test whether there's actually a legal gap here.

Because it seems to me that a chief indicator that waste likely exists is an inability to show ROI.

I do not believe anyone who has consulted in federal IT or worked on contracts is capable of making such a statement. All of the motivations for all parties are heavily bent towards waste, and in fact any attempt to make things more efficient (reduce headcount, for instance) would be recieved poorly by department heads and contractors.

As one example, a department head who reduces staff by 20% has just reduced their own next year's budget AND kneecapped their resume.

Aren't insane.

When did the industry put the onus on the user to understand how the computer works? What happened to the old days of Xerox PARC's HCI studies putting the user first? The computer is in service of the user, not the other way around!

If I need to build a mental turing machine to understand your application, it is a bad application. It is rather the engineer's job to build a mental model of the user and their needs, and if you can't do that you should not call yourself a software engineer.

There are user-centric and dev-centric Linux distros. Windows is "Microsoft cloud onboarding" centric, and the experience has been dramatically degrading for years.

If that were not the case, why would senior executives at Microsoft say things like "we've heard you" and "we intend to reverse the suck in the coming year"? Even their management knows users hate the Win11 experience, and have placed it on their backlog....

> I dislike how janky its various GUI desktop managers are...igh pixel density, different audio setups, multi-touch trackpad support

These things are objectively better on a modern KDE linux. Out of the box I can output youtube videos to a dual-Sonos / Airpod setup by... clicking the sound icon, which pulls up an interface reminescent of "Windows 7, when the mixer wasn't terrible".

The reasons not to use KDE these days are because you need Windows software (usually: edge, teams, Office), or especially because LibreOffice is terrible. The core desktop experience, however, is notably and demonstrably less jank than the mess that is Windows 11.

UX design is treated as a subjective matter, as if it is equally valid to clearly label UI elements as it is to have magic, nondescript UI pixels that serve as vital control surfaces.

Go watch videos of the research Xerox did on UI/UX and HCI in general, and weep for what we have lost...

It's extremely common and has been for literally millenia.

I was also fooled and gave it too much credit, if you engage in a philosophical discussion with it it seems purpose-built for passing the turing test.

If LLMs are good at one thing, it's tricking people. I can't think of a more dangerous or valueless creation.

I think everyone here is pretty clear how they would ethically view such a thing, but view it from NIST's (/ NSA's) perspective for the sake of argument. Maybe there's a specific threat where NIST (or presumably the NSA) believes it has a mandate to insert a backdoor.

In order to successfully do this, NIST needs to maintain a very large bank of social capital and industry trust that it can spend on very narrow issues.

But over the years there have been enough strange things (Dual EC DRBG being the most notorious) that that trust, at least when it comes to crypto design, simply isn't there. My perception is that newer ECC standards promoted by NIST have been trusted substantially less than AES was when it was released, and I can think of a number of major issues over the years that would lead to this distrust.

The inevitable outcome is that NIST loses much of its influence on the industry, which certainly is not in its own interest.

And how can one easily determine, while looking at a particular paper, whether it has been replicated? And whether those doing the replication have any undisclosed ties to the original?

At an epistemological level, the idea of a knowledge source like a journal where the information is only deemed reliable if personally verified seems problematic. Why even have it if all of its uncountable claims are indistinguishable from very clever lies, and attempts to quantify the extent of those lies indicate that they are pervasive?