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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Most large corporations’ tech leaders don’t actually have any idea how tech works. They are being told that if they don’t have an AI plan their company will be obsoleted by their competitors that do; often by AI “experts” that also don’t have the slightest understanding of how LLMs actually work. And without that understanding companies are rushing to use AI to solve problems that AI can’t solve.

    AI is not smart, it’s not magic, it can’t “think”, it can’t “reason” (despite what Open AI marketing claims) it’s just math that measures how well something fits the pattern of the examples it was trained on. Generative AIs like ChatGPT work by simply considering every possible word that could come next and ranking them by which one best matches the pattern.

    If the input doesn’t resemble a pattern it was trained on, the best ranked response might be complete nonsense. ChatGPT was trained on enough examples that for anything you ask it there was probably something similar in its training dataset so it seems smarter than it is, but at the end of the day, it’s still just pattern matching.

    If a company’s AI strategy is based on the assumption that AI can do what its marketing claims. We’re going to keep seeing these kinds of humorous failures.

    AI (for now at least) can’t replace a human in any role that requires any degree of cognitive thinking skills… Of course we might be surprised at how few jobs actually require cognitive thinking skills. Given the current AI hypewagon, apparently CTO is one of those jobs that doesn’t require cognitive thinking skills.




  • I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.

    The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.

    Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.

    Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.

    Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.

    Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.

    The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.



  • Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.

    Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.

    You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.

    Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.

    You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.

    And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.

    Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.

    It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…

    …or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.


  • Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.

    There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.

    Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.


  • You wouldn’t be able to MITM a plaintext connection inside a corporate network with this attack by itself. You could only MITM something that the attacker can access without your VPN.

    Any corporate network that has an unsecure, publicly accessible endpoint that prompts for credentials is begging to be hacked with or without this attack.

    Now you could spoof an login screen with this attack if you had detailed info on the corporate network you’re targeting. But it would need to be a login page that doesn’t use HTTPS (any corporations, dumb enough to do that this day and age are begging to be hacked), or you’d need the user to ignore the browser warning about it not being secure, which that is possible.


  • I can’t see routing traffic to some kind of local presence and then routing back to the target machine to route out through the tunnel adapter without a successful compromise of at least one other vulnerability.

    That’s not to say there’s nothing you could do… I could see some kind of social engineering attack maybe… leaked traffic redirects to a local web server that presents a fake authentication screen that phishes credentials , or something like that. I could only see that working in a very targeted situation… would have to be something more than just a some rouge public wi-fi. They’d have to have some prior knowledge of the private network the target was connecting to.



  • Not all VPN traffic. Only traffic that would be routable without a VPN.

    This works by tricking the computer into routing traffic to the attacker’s gateway instead of the VPN’s gateway. It doesn’t give the attacker access to the VPN gateway.

    So traffic intended for a private network that is only accessible via VPN (like if you were connecting to a corporate network for example) wouldn’t be compromised. You simply wouldn’t be able to connect through the attacker’s gateway to the private network, and there wouldn’t be traffic to intercept.

    This attack doesn’t break TLS encryption either. Anything you access over https (which is the vast majority of the internet these days) would still be just as encrypted as if you weren’t using a VPN.

    For most people, in most scenarios, this amount to a small invasion of privacy. Our hypothetical malicious coffee shop could tell the ip addresses of websites you’re visiting, but probably not what you’re doing on those websites, unless it was an insecure website to begin with. Which is the case with or with VPN.

    For some people or some situations that is a MASSIVE concern. People who use VPNs to hide what they’re doing from state level actors come to mind.

    But for the average person who’s just using a VPN because they’re privacy conscious, or because they’re location spoofing. This is not going to represent a significant risk.


  • So for this attack to work, the attacker needs to be able to run a malicious DHCP server on the target machine’s network.

    Meaning they need to have already compromised your local network either physically in person or by compromising a device on that network. If you’ve gotten that far you can already do a lot of damage without this attack.

    For the average person this is yet another non-issue. But if you regularly use a VPN over untrusted networks like a hotel or coffee shop wifi then, in theory, an attacker could get your traffic to route outside the VPN tunnel.



  • Who cares? Because I assure you, Microsoft doesn’t.

    20-25% of those webservers are running on Microsoft Azure hardware. Microsoft is the #2 cloud provider and has been slowly but closing their gap behind AWS in recent years. All of that is in large part due to them embracing Linux and open source support on their platform.

    Software isn’t the battleground, and hasn’t been for a decade. The people behind Apache and Nginx aren’t making bank on their web server dominance. Microsoft and AWS still rake in money hand over fist regardless of what software runs on their servers.

    The author of this article’s apparent attitude that this is some kind of indicator of Microsoft’s market failure is one of the most ridiculous conclusions I’ve heard in a while.


  • We’re both correct.

    LCOE is based on total operating costs of new electric power generation station over a 20+ year operation life. There are obviously a lot of assumptions in these sorts of analyses but Nat Gas is projected to become cheaper than Coal over the life of a new project, which some of that is expected to be due to carbon taxes.

    LCOE has some flaws as a comparable number when comparing wind and solar to fossil fuels, but is good for understanding what will be cheapest to build of fuel based generation.

    For current existing power stations, coal is cheapest of the fuels. The EIA numbers are here and here’s Statista research here on the historical cost of nat gas vs coal specifically which is frustratingly why coal phase outs have been so slow. Keeping existing coal plants operating is cheaper than building new almost anything.

    And you are correct, price is specific to geography and availability of each. My blanket statement of “coal being the cheapest fuel” is over generalized and not universally correct.


  • It’s expensive and dirty fuel.

    It’s definitely the dirtiest fuel by a good margin. But coal is actually the cheapest fuel. Which is the main reason it still gets used.

    Uranium used to be cheaper than coal, but now that we all but stopped building nuclear power plants it’s gone up significantly.

    Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal for electricity generation, if we can limit growth in energy demand to a rate lower than the growth in renewables, economics will eventually push all electricity generation off of coal.