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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • If this is you, then build your own home server.

    While I don’t disagree, there’s also a very considerable cost difference here between running locally and remotely.

    If a user sets up an AI chatbot, then has their compute card under average 24/7 load of 1% – which would require averaging, say, a daily session for an hour with the thing averaging 25% of its compute capacity during that session – then the hardware costs for a local setup would be 100x that of a remote setup that spreads load evenly across users.

    That is, if someone can find a commercial service that they can trust not to log the contents, the economics definitely permit room for that service to cost less.

    That becomes particularly significant if one wants to run a model that requires a substantial amount of on-card memory. I haven’t been following closely, but it looks like the compute card vendors intend to use amount of memory on-card to price discriminate between the “commercial AI” and “consumer gaming” market. That permits charging a relatively large amount for a relatively small amount of additional memory on-card.

    So an Nvidia H100 with 80GB onboard runs about (checks) $30k, and a consumer Geforce 4090 with 24GB is about $2k.

    An AMD MI300 with 128GB onboard runs about (checks) $20k, and a consumer Radeon XT 7900 XTX with 24GB is about $1k.

    That is, at current hardware pricing, the economics make a lot of sense to time-share the hardware across multiple users.



  • Yeah, I really wish that people would post context there when they post something. Some of the problem is that people see news, then promptly go to create and post memes joking about a current news item. But if you haven’t seen the news item and don’t know some of the jargon or military history or other context, it can be difficult to understand what’s going on.

    I’ve commented a bunch of times with a “context comment” on posts linking to source material.


  • To add to that, on Reddit, there was originally /r/CredibleDefense. This was intended to be serious discussion about military topics from people who knew what they were talking about making supportable statements. Like, people cited sources and such. It didn’t always actually meet that bar, but the idea was to keep the level of nonsense low.

    That’s kind of a high bar, and sometimes people don’t want to rigorously examine everything and have more-casual discussion, so then /r/LessCredibleDefence showed up.

    /r/NonCredibleDefense was developed as the logical extension of this, becoming less…serious…and consisted of people posting memes and often making completely-inaccurate statements for humorous effect.

    NCD was more-approachable than the others, and so a lot of people wound up showing up there.

    I was not around when they formed, but did show up later, and enjoyed content on all of them.

    There is no CredibleDefense or LessCredibleDefense on the Threadiverse, currently. !NonCredibleDefense@sh.itjust.works is the sole representative (well, maybe military@lemmy.world will be something like that, but it doesn’t quite deal with the same stuff). I tend to vigorously disregard the rule about not posting serious material on NCD, as a result, but it’s got plenty of memes and people making jokes.


  • Oh so both hashes and synmetric cryptography are secure entirely by doubling up the key size.

    That’s not my understanding, which is that it’s more-secure than that and doesn’t require the doubling. Assuming the pages I linked are correct and that the understanding of them from my skim is correct, both of which may not be true:

    • About a decade-and-a-half ago, it was believed that AES of existing key lengths could be attacked via a known quantum algorithm – Grover’s algorithm – using future quantum computers. However, the weakness induced was not sufficient to render AES of all key lengths practically vulnerable. it would be viable to simply increase key lengths, not redesign AES, sufficient to make it not attackable via any kind of near-future quantum computers.

    • At some point subsequent to that, it was determined that this attack would not be practical, even with the advance of quantum computers. So as things stand, we should be able to continue using AES with current keylengths without any kind of near-future quantum computer posing a practical risk.

    Take all that with a huge grain of salt, as I’m certainly not well-versed in the state of quantum cryptography, and I’m just summarizing a few webpages which themselves may be wrong. But if it’s correct, you were right originally that there aren’t going to be near-term practical attacks on AES from the advance of quantum computing, not from any presently-known algorithm, at least.


  • So, I haven’t read up on this quantum attack stuff, and I don’t know what Kairos is referring to, but setting aside quantum computing for the moment, breaking a cryptographic hash would simply require being able to find a hash collision, finding another input to a hash function that generates the same hash. It wouldn’t require being able to reconstitute the original input that produced the hash. That collision-finding can be done – given infinite conventional computational capacity, at any rate – simply from the hash; you don’t need additional information.


  • I’m not sure I follow. Could you expand on that?

    EDIT: Wikipedia says this:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

    In contrast to the threat quantum computing poses to current public-key algorithms, most current symmetric cryptographic algorithms and hash functions are considered to be relatively secure against attacks by quantum computers.[2][11] While the quantum Grover’s algorithm does speed up attacks against symmetric ciphers, doubling the key size can effectively block these attacks.[12] Thus post-quantum symmetric cryptography does not need to differ significantly from current symmetric cryptography.

    The citation there is from a 2010 paper, which is old and is just saying that this is believed to be the case.

    This page, a year old, says that it is believed that the weakening from use of Grover’s algorithm is not sufficient to make AES-128 practically breakable, and that at some point in recent years it was determined that the doubling was not necessary.

    https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/102671/is-aes-128-quantum-safe

    Keeping in mind that I am about twenty years behind the current situation and am just skimming this, it sounds like the situation is that one cannot use an attack that previously had been believed to be a route to break some shorter key length AES using quantum computing, so as things stand today, we don’t know of a practical route to defeat current-keylength AES using any known quantum computing algorithm, even as quantum computers grow in capability.


  • Because AES is NOT vulnerable to quantum computing.

    I have not been following the quantum computing attacks on cryptography, so I’m not current here at all.

    I can believe that current AES in general use cannot be broken by existing quantum computers.

    But if what you’re saying is that AES cannot be broken by quantum computing at all, that doesn’t seem to be what various pages out there say.

    https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/6712/is-aes-256-a-post-quantum-secure-cipher-or-not

    Is AES-256 a post-quantum secure cipher or not?

    The best known theoretical attack is Grover’s quantum search algorithm. As you pointed out, this allows us to search an unsorted database of n entries in n−−√ operations. As such, AES-256 is secure for a medium-term against a quantum attack, however, AES-128 can be broken, and AES-192 isn’t looking that good.

    With the advances in computational power (doubling every 18 months), and the development of quantum computers, no set keysize is safe indefinitely. The use of Grover is just one of the gigantic leaps.

    I would still class AES as quantum resistant, so long as the best-known attack is still some form of an exhaustive search of the keyspace.







  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.worldKagi Snaps
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    4 days ago

    I kind of wish that they’d unify some of their features.

    For example, I use the “Fediverse Forums” search lens to search the Threadiverse only. That’s a drop-down menu.

    Then there are those Duck Duck Go-style alias things that start with an exclamation mark.

    kagis

    Bangs.

    And now the snaps.

    Like, is it necessary to have all these as separate, segregated features? They all kind of do the same thing, are a way to ask the search engine to interpret the query differently.

    EDIT: Also, I don’t know if there’s a Kagi lemmy community, but if so, that might be a better place than !technology@lemmy.world, since most folks won’t be using Kagi. Doesn’t matter much for communities that are desperate for traffic – like, for games, I’d rather talk on a general games forum until traffic hits some point, rather than having a lot of game-specific communities that are ghost towns. But !technology@lemmy.world is one of the largest Lemmy communities, probably has enough post throughput.

    I’m not a mod, not saying that it’s community policy, just thinking about where it might best make sense.

    EDIT2: Looking at lemmyverse.net, there is, but it’s on lemmy.ml, and I’d really rather not subscribe to .ml communities. Doesn’t appear to be any other Kagi communities at the moment.

    Well, I don’t really want to mod one myself, but if anyone wants to run a Kagi community somewhere off .ml, I’ll subscribe.




  • doesn’t the UK not have a constitution because it’s basically whatever the Monarch says?

    No. In the 2024 British system of government, the monarch has essentially no power. The upper house of the bicameral legislature, the House of Lords, has very little power.

    Virtually all power is wielded by whoever controls a simple majority in the House of Commons, the lower house. They can do anything (short of limiting what future Parliaments can do). Rewrite any law, whatever.

    My understanding is that this is largely a result of having a system constructed in an aristocratic period, and shifts in power occurring, but the system of government not being restructured.

    In, say, the US, the constitution limits and specifies the powers of government. It places a set of constraints on what Congress and other bodies can do.

    The British system evolved from a situation where the aristocrats were represented in the House of Lords, the monarch was his own thing, and the rest of the public in the House of Commons.

    Part of the transition over time was to limit the power that the king had. The Magna Carta constrains what the king can do, shifted away from an absolute monarchy. In that sense, the UK is nominally a constitutional monarchy.

    But since the king has no real power today, power has shifted from the monarch, the written restrictions on his power are essentially meaningless.

    Over time, the aristocracy also lost power. The House of Lords lost most powers it has, and today has very little actual power – I believe that perhaps the most-notable is the ability to delay legislation for a period of time.

    Where basically all the power has concentrated is in the House of Commons.

    And that has no real restriction on it. The Magna Carta doesn’t restrict Parliament. Parliament has modified text from the Magna Carta with a simple majority before.

    There is no power of judicial review over the legislature on the UK – laws Parliament passes cannot be ruled unconstitutional. The executive is subject to judicial review – there were some notable UK Supreme Court cases in the part few years relating to the actions of the prime minister. But the legislature is not – the judiciary cannot rule a law passed by Parliament to be unconstitutional.

    I once read something calling the UK an “absolute republic”. I think that that’s probably a much-more-apt description for the state of affairs in 2024 than its official designation as a constitutional monarchy. The UK, as it exists in 2024, isn’t run by a monarch whose powers are limited by a constitution. It’s run by a simoel majority in the lower house of a legislature who have no real limitations on their powers.

    Not only that, but the one great convention is that Parliament cannot be bound. So Parliament cannot go write a constitution and then have it bind future Parliaments. That future Parliament could rewrite it as easily as they could do anything else, with a simple majority.

    My belief – and this is me talking here, not some British constitutional law expert – is that the plan had been to move the UK to something that looked more like a conventional, constitutional republic by way of its EU membership, by some fancy legal and political footwork. If the UK signs onto a treaty, then it cannot do something against that treaty without violating the treaty. Parliament can still, perfectly legally under UK law, instruct the UK to violate treaties. But that would have consequences with the rest of the EU, and there would come a point in political integration where being in trouble with the EU would be unthinkable, so the UK would have become de facto a constitutional republic (or part of a constitutional republic).

    If that was indeed the plan, I’d say that it was actually quite impressive – the UK has a very elderly system of government that has, over time, managed to transform itself into very different forms, de facto without revolution or an official break with the past system by kinda kludging things, and some elaborate legal reasoning. This would have added another transformation.

    But with Brexit, I suppose that that’s off the table, at least for some time.

    And there is basically an agreement to off on whatever the MPs decide because otherwise they would officially overthrow the monarch

    Sort of. There are a lot of things that are formally done by the King by way of the King-in-Parliament, where British sovereignty is theoretically vested, is the “ultimate power” in the legal system, the way the US Constitution is in the US. But in practice, the King doesn’t really have a choice as to whether to do them or not, and he’d basically get ignored if he objected, absent some sort of real question as to the legitimacy of Parliament acting (e.g. if there was a dispute over election fraud determining control of the House of Commons, I expect the King’s voice might bear weight). It’s really the Parliament, and within Parliament, the House of Commons that holds political power today.

    Also, one last note on the British system of government, as to your comment:

    UK not have a constitution

    So, personally, I’d agree with you here. The British don’t have a constitution, or at least not one with meaningful effect aside from other British law, aside from maybe the convention that Parliament cannot bind future Parliaments. But that isn’t the British legal view of things. Their take is that they have an uncodified constitution, that many different (not always specified) documents and traditions make up their constitution. My take is basically “well, in what functional way does that differ from not having a constitution”? But in the name of completeness, just wanted to keep things correct.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom

    But even if you adopt the British take on this, whether or not something is part of the constitution or just regular law becomes essentially an academic question, because there is no special status that constitutional law holds relative to anything else.

    But in Canada, there is a difference between law that is part of the constitution and all other law, so that becomes suddenly a real and meaningful distinction.