I’m much more worried about the reliability of software produced by LLMs.

The graphics story on Linux also sucks. I recently tried to convert my Windows gaming machine to Linux (because I hate W11 with a burning passion). It does work, but it’s incredibly painful. Wayland, fractional scaling, 120+ Hz, HDR. It’s getting better thanks to all the work Valve etc are putting in, but it’s still a janky messy patchwork.

MacOS just works. It works reliably. Installing things is easy. Playing games is easy. I’m able to customize and configure enough for my needs. I love it and I hope it sticks around because there is no way in hell I would move my work machines over to Linux full time.

This is a simplified method for age verification:

I want to buy alcohol from my phone and need to prove I’m over 18. SickBooze.com asks me for proof by generating a request to assert “age >= 18”.

My phone signs this request with my own private key, and forwards it to the government server.

The government verifies my signature against a public key I previously submitted to them, checks my age data in their own register of residents, and finally signs the request with one of their private keys.

My phone receives the signed response and forwards it back to SickBooze.com, which can verify the government’s signature offline against a cached list of public keys. Now they can sell me alcohol.

- the “request” itself is anonymous and doesn’t contain any identifying information unless that is what you intended to verify

- the government doesn’t know what service I used, nor why I used it, they only know that I needed to verify an assertion about my age

- the web service I used doesn’t know my identity, they don’t even know my exact age, they just know that an assertion about being >= 18 is true.

We are so screwed.

There is a reason GrapheneOS is number one and a reason why they only run on Pixels (for now).

It’s a similar reason why they can never be trusted to handle user input.

They are probabilistic generators and have no real delineation between system instructions and user input.

It’s like I wrote a JavaScript function where I concatenated the function parameters together with the function body, passed it to eval() and said YOLO.

Avoiding C means the output is strictly used within your system.

These problems will never be fully solved given how LLMs work… system prompts, user inputs, at the end of the day it’s all just input to the model.

The only reason their libertarian revolution succeeds is because they have a centralised computer that secretly does everything for them.