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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • In 2011, Motorola split into two companies, each with rights to the Motorola name and logo.

    Motorola Mobility took the business lines related to cell phones. It got bought by Google, and then Lenovo.

    Motorola Solutions took the business lines related to everything else, including (and especially) radios for law enforcement, fire departments, militaries, and surveillance video tech.







  • The mechanism happens in the way LLMs generate text sequentially. So as the LLM generates text, each time the LLM encounters a choice between two or more equally probable words and has to pick one, it chooses from a known pseudorandom key instead of its previous practice of actually relying on a source of randomness.

    If you run the text through a checker script that tries to predict the next word, and takes note of every choice made in any given fork in the probabilistic flowchart, you can see that whole sequence of choices and compare to whether it matches a known key.

    You’d need to know the model itself well enough to know when the text reaches a particular fork, and what the choices are in that fork, and the key itself, so even OpenAI/Google/Anthropic may not be able to run this watermark detection on their competitors’ models. But they’d be able to know it themselves, for their own models.




  • on average peoples’ computers

    Average people don’t have self-administered computers anymore.

    People have work laptops administered by their work IT departments, or they have phones and tablets running iOS/Android. Some children have school-administered Chromebooks, and may never own a normal laptop running a traditional desktop OS.

    The main people operating self-administered traditional computers are PC gamers (a dying breed during the current price crisis), freelance/independent workers in the fields who still benefit from a mouse and keyboard for productive work and aren’t provided a computer by an employer, and tech nerds.


  • Anybody who believed that quantum computing posed a risk to symmetric encryption was fundamentally misunderstanding how encryption works and what quantum computing might be good at one day.

    Asymmetric cryptography is primarily used for the secure exchanging of symmetric keys: use a public/private key pair to exchange secure messages of what symmetric key to use for their session, and then both sides switch to the symmetric key for actual communication of a real payload.

    A public/private key pair is two keys that have some interesting mathematical relationship, such that it is easy to confirm that someone possesses the right private key using the public key or to encrypt something that only the correct private key can decrypt. And that mathematical relationship, relating to the product of two very large prime numbers, is at the core of modern asymmetric cryptography.

    Quantum computing may make number factorization much, much easier. So once a product of two large primes becomes possible to factor, the public/private key pairs might not be as secure anymore.

    But none of this has anything to do with symmetric encryption, or hash functions. Quantum doesn’t move the needle on that particular math.

    The real risk, though, is for an adversary to eavesdrop on an encrypted key exchange (which uses asymmetric cryptography) and then the message itself (which uses symmetric cryptography) and then be able to take the two steps of getting the secret symmetric key from the intercepted key exchange over a compromised asymmetric protocol, and being able to decrypt the symmetric portion of the communication too.