The embeddability sounds very appealing. Does anyone have experience with using this somewhere one might traditionally reach for Lua?

I have built a markup language with embedded scripting in Janet. I originally tried to use Lua, but found the verbosity extremely frustrating.

This makes me think we need something like https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-venhoek-tls-client-puz... sooner rather than later. It seems pretty absurd that everyone is running around with bespoke application layer solutions for this.

Why wouldn't PoW help? If it's tuned so that each device in that army takes 10 seconds instead of 10 milliseconds to make a request, have you not slowed the army down by a factor 1000?

Then every normal user has to take 10 seconds as well, which is an awful experience.

Presumably most users visit the site with more compute-capable devices than a fridge. But I do agree that it's sad that such an approach artificially worsens the internet experience for people on older/weaker devices. On the other hand, Cloudflare's Turnstile also significantly weakens the experience for everyone.

You just need 1000x more zombie fridges, which may be still acceptable for some bad actors.

But more expensive (to get). At the same time, the PoW would require more compute power do the same device will still be capped at the same rps

Sure. But this is kind of vacuously true for any real world DoS scenario. It's like saying "sure, your new weapons system might wipe out 999 out of every 1000 of the enemy's forces, but what does it matter, they can just scale up by a factor 1000 and we're back where we started".

Anything that amplifies the cost and effort required by the adversary by several orders of magnitude is worthwhile discussing.

> Throw the book at him, he should have known better.

What book!? The book of laws that outlaw jokes in bad taste potentially made years ago, outside the context of air travel altogether, only to be forgotten about and accidentally brought into the context of air travel where one can conceivably think of laws that make those jokes problematic?

Come on!

> Awful joke. There have to be at least some consequences for the kid, like getting banned for flying United for 10 years.

Take a step back. You yourself describe it as a joke. Are you really saying that the quality of the joke ("awful") should result in the origin of the joke (a kid, even!) should be banned from a major air carrier for 10 years? Does this really seem like a proportional response?

And this doesn't even begin to consider another possibility: the device was named what it was named in a completely different setting, and the owner just forgot about it. That makes it not even a joke, just forgetfulness.

Was any of this a good idea? No, probably not, but people need to calm down.

Yes, I guess he could havr tuned off his BT when asked repeatedly to do so, instead of wasting oassenger time and airline fuel.

… if he even remembered that it was his device in the first place! I don't remember what names my phone or my seldomly used "park speaker" report.

> I can understand the safety concern - and I think the decision to turn around was ultimately the right call.

I don't, and I think it fits what Bruce Schneier called "Cover Your Ass" security (he was referring to the equally stupid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic)

It sounds like a fantastic DDoS opportunity, you could shut down an entire nation's aviation just by putting a few tiny bluetooth transmitters in places that air passengers might accidentally pick them up. The attack relies entirely on the overreaction to non-threats by ignorant buffoons in positions of authority.

Personally, I think the airline and its policies should be publicly ridiculed. If we don't punish the airline for doing this, and make unequivocably clear that it did the wrong thing, that its "what ifs" are meaningless and bluetooth/wifi channel names are not a security threat, then this nonsense will just continue.

In general and long-term I agree with what you are saying. I assume this was a new/unknown situation. (On the other hand, the article links to other similar stories, so maybe I am cutting them too much slack). If "electronic device names" are of concern, there should be an established protocol to deal with them. Especially if this keeps happening.

IDK, this was pure technical incompetence by rubes that can barely operate a smartphone. The delay relies entirely on these supposed "adults in the room" overreacting.

I think this is just the way the decision tree works in safety-sensitive areas where many human lives are at stake. The catch-all in the decision tree, if there is no exact solution, is always the "get to safety at all costs" option. There will be some window of trying to resolve an issue (here: telling everyone to shut down devices) and when that does not resolve the issue, the catch-all kicks in. That's just the pattern and in an environment like an airplane, where margin for error is slim to non-existant, there is no deviation from that pattern.

> If it turns out they did this with full intent, there should be some _appropriate_ consequence

Sure, if evidence is uncovered of the guy say telling his friends "haha, I'm gonna make them turn the plane around", I can get behind the baying for consequences.

We're nowhere near that. There's plenty of non-nefarious ways this could all have come about, and people need to put down their pitchforks.

There's a story (apocryphal or not) that does the rounds among mathematicians: two young PhD students in differential geometry (or topology in some variations) on the way to their first conference. They're eagerly discussing as they board their flight: "… and then, you blow up the points on this plane …" :-)

Really? Could you share your techniques that get you there?

Inspired by https://github.com/scosman/cursed_browser, I have a little art project going where the CPU of a virtual machine is entirely LLM-powered. But even though the ISA is well known and clearly in the LLM's training data (it answers question about it mostly fine), I can rarely get it to even decode a handful of instructions in a row correctly. It'll e.g. do 10 instructions right (even execute right!), then just lose the ability to do bit manipulation all of a sudden and fail miserably at even decoding the 11th. If I try to help it along it'll apologize profusely, do it wrong in five novel ways, before it gaslights me saying I'm in fact mistaken.

So you're saying AI models should be allowed to freely "manipulate human behavior"?

That is almost a meaningless sentence. Cats and traffic lights both manipulate human behavior.

You know exactly what the intent of the lawmakers was.

No, I definitely dont. And neither do they, its hundreds of law makers. Meaning is usually sussed out through case law.

In common law countries, yes. Most of the EU runs on civil law though.

No reasonable person would find a system's annoying behavior on its own manipulative. It could, however, be considered manipulative if it was made that way on purpose.

Would you like to elaborate on why you think the outcome described isn't among the more likely?

It requires a nascent analogous architecture to biology (neural nets) and a discovery (next token prediction) to exactly match evolution. I think that is unlikely. Instead it will be a tool that is capable of doing certain things that machines were not capable of previously.

> What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.

I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.

That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.

Yeah that also sounds realistic, and actually there's evidence of this dulling effect from even before llms. The attention economy has been literally streamlining.. well, the road to death. And nobody is angry.

I can spin this in a weirdly positive light though. With fertility rates going down, life becoming less and less meaningful and simultaneously a small and decreasing group of people becoming extremely productive.. maybe humanity will finally stop exploiting the planet and start a sort of transition.

AI enhanced increased lifespan forest elves watching over nature. Mm I'd prefer that over soma. We are the heralds of The Great Ones

> Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.

See Brave new world.

The powerful people in our society are mostly idiots. The more they're in front of a microphone the more damage they do for themselves.