Like most of the things Spolsky says in that article it’s pretty dubious. Following it to its logical conclusion, presumably on-call debugging work be even easier if the software had been handwritten in assembler.
Quite certainly not on v4 Unix, which apparently had few other sites and would not have been in the running for use as a serious university timesharing system. However Gates and Allen had already been among the secondary-school students who modified timesharing records to give themselves more time on a PDP-10 system https://web.archive.org/web/20191013171424/http://www.washin... .
At the risk of perhaps stating the obvious, there appears to be a whiff of aggression from this article. The "fighting fire with fire" language, the "haha, we love old FakeFoster, going to have to see if we change that" response to complaints that the voice was intimidating ... if there wasn't a specific desire to punish the class for LLM use by subjecting them to a robotic NKVD interrogation then the authors should have been more careful to avoid leaving that impression.
Tried it in earnest. Definitely detect some aggression, and would feel stressed if this were an exam setting. I think it was pg who said that any stress you add in an interview situation is just noise, and dilutes the signal.
Also, given that there's so many ways for LLMs to go off the rails (it just gave me the student id I was supposed to say, for example), it feels a bit unprofessional to be using this to administer real exams.
Not that bad? I gave it a random name and random net ID and it basically screamed at me to HANG UP RIGHT NOW AND FIGURE OUT THE CORRECT NET ID. Hahaha
That does not resemble any good professor I've ever heard. It's very aggressive and stern, which is not generally how oral exams are conducted. Feels much more like I'm being cross examined in court.
Also tried it and it could have been a lot better. If I had any type of interview with that voice (press interview, mentor interview, job interview) I would think I was being scammed, sold something, or had entered the wrong room.
The belligerence about changing the voice is so weird. And it does sort of set a tone straight off. "We got feedback that the voice was frightening and intimidating. We're keeping it tho."
> By supplying addresses outside of the space allocated to the users program, it is often possible to get the monitor to obtain unauthorized data for that user, or at the very least, generate a set of conditions in the monitor that causes a system crash.
> In one contemporary operating system, one of the functions provided is to move limited amounts of information between system and user space. The code performing this function does not check the source and destination addresses properly, permitting portions of the monitor to be overlaid by the user. This can be used to inject code into the monitor that will permit the user to seize control of the machine.
(Volume 1 is at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/AD0758206 .) However general awareness of the security implications seems to have been very limited before the Morris worm, and then even for several years after that. Even in late 1996 an article which in its own words "attempt[ed] to explain what buffer overflows are, and how their exploits work" could still be published in Phrack magazine, and in fact even be quite a milestone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow#History . Some people had definitely been thinking about hardware bounds checking for a long time by then https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/ but I don't know how much they'd specifically considered just this kind of security threat.
There’s just a lot more space when you can move in three dimensions, so I don’t think the congestion limitations of non-flying cars are likely to be replicated. IIUC (I’m no expert) that’s one of the most attractive features of flying VTOL vehicles.
You're bandwidth-limited on a sparse serialized landing site map no matter what, and you need far higher distance margins that will eat up basically all of the dimensional advantages.
If ground vehicles side-swipe, it's just an insurance claim. If flying vehicles sideswipe, it's a Problem(tm).
I honestly think the most attractive features of VTOL vehicles are that they are from sci fi, and you can look up and see a bunch of empty space and wish you were there while sitting in traffic.
Thanks for that. They seem to have been embarrassed into putting the stanford.edu page back up for another few months. I think my first encounter with Stanford's website archival policies was when I found that they'd shot an old, once-much-hyped interview with Alvy Ray Smith into the void: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064844 . Anything on the Stanford website which purports to be education or history is a marketing op wearing a smiling mask. That in itself would be largely fine, but when the marketing objectives have been met they'll delete everything with what seems to be a contemptuous glee, refusing to even use the Wayback Machine. Doesn't say much for that institution.
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