Readit NewsI've written bugs that would have been caught by the compiler in a memory-safe language. I think the last time was maybe in 2012 or 2013? I still write plenty of bugs today but they're almost all logic errors that nothing (short of AI tools) could have caught.
It is much more computationally feasible to create two inputs from scratch that hash to the same value than to forge an existing documents hash (the threat model I’m assuming they’re discussing in relation to the law).
As far as I know I am not aware of a demonstrated second preimage attack on md5. Not saying to keep using it, just trying to not spread fud.
Edit: I do see second preimage is mentioned about 3/4 of the way through the article. I confess that I did stop reading and started skimming before then.
After the first high-profile case where authenticity of evidence gets called into question because a seized electronic document was deliberately doctored to allow for a hash collision (if that ever happens), there will be a will to change to something new.
The best way I’ve heard it explained to help people get it through intuition is by changing the number of doors and goats. Say there are 100 doors, and they all have goats except one, which has a car. You pick door 1. Monty then proceeds to open doors 2 through 48, skips door 49, and then opens the remaining doors. After all that, he stops and asks you, would you like to switch?
"Growth" is the culprit. "What if we just acted like the successful restaurant: packed every night, very profitable, solid employment for my kids?"
Nah. We have to keep growing.
1. It's easy enough for a lone entrepreneur with no investors to make principled long-term decisions. It's not so trivial when you owe a fiduciary duty to a board of venture capitalists.
2. Your team of engineers (which has grown steadily as you've scaled up) have built The Thing and everyone loves it. Now what? You only need 5% of the team to maintain the software. You could fire 95% of the team, which will make your company mighty unpopular to future hires, and moreover your best developers won't want to stay and do maintenance for the next decade. Easier to have them work on gratuitous frontend redesigns, bloated features that increase engagement metrics, etc. In a restaurant the contractors who build and furnish the place aren't your employees.
Each probablility of a mistake may be low on its own, but they compound with every avenue to make mistakes.
"Rust makes a few classes of bugs impossible to write by construction" is a very nice feature of the language. But I'm really turned off by how insufferable the Rust community is (which shines through in the OP's blog post and several comments elsewhere in the responses): it's never the quote at the start of this paragraph; it's always "writing software in anything but Rust is fundamentally irresponsible!" or "if a Rust program compiles, it must be correct!" No, not even close.
Superconductors will not help with the latter.
Doesn't seem like such a massive breakthrough when they are throwing so much compute at it, particularly as this is test time compute, it just isn't practical at all, you are not getting this level with a ChatGPT subscription, even the new $200 a month option.