I don't think AI is going to destroy humanity.

I don't even think AI is going to destroy (much) paid employment, in the end.

But I increasingly strongly suspect that it is going to destroy the internet – this incredible network-of-networks – at least in any recognisable form.

The whole thing is too obviously riddled with security holes that we only got away with until now because no one was looking all that hard.

Now a huge amount of computer power is looking very hard. 24/7. Relentlessly.

PHP is over a million lines of C.

Wordpress is over 300,000 lines of PHP.

It's a wonder that it works at all, never mind that it runs a third of the web.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, and the giants are made of cardboard, string and glue.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117485038738893225

Apart from the easy syntax, one big thing with PHP is that its per-request model feels correct for web work, and many other available web languages get this wrong, allowing state to bleed between requests, cause crashes, etc.

The "copy some files" deployment model is also big for people who want to put something on the web but wouldn't know where to start with git. A lot of people on here think such people shouldn't be allowed to have websites, but there are plenty of them.

The good news here is that it's big enough news that even rinky-dink Wordpress R Us hosts have updated it

Current status: People who had not heard of PHP until today are asking me if their PHP is OK

As someone who does a lot of Wordpress, I am way more pro-PHP (and anti e.g. Node or whatever) than most people. But its reputation isn't exactly undeserved. It's a language where near-amateurs can get a lot done, and that's a double-edged sword.

I use PHP every day. I have a bunch of opinions about its upsides (which are many) and its flaws. Please don't give me the blanket "blah open source volunteers work hard" thing if I mention a flaw. It's very tedious.

Running non-static websites in the AI era is going to feel like trying to keep a Windows network secure in the early 2000s

RE: https://mastodon.social/@csilverman/117480409181212678

It is strange how PHP is treated as 'legacy' in tech circles when you consider its sheer popularity – mostly driven by Wordpress.

A significant percentage of websites are effectively abandoned. I am glad in many cases that they are still online. A web where abandoned sites are rapidly destroyed is not a better one.

Just to add to this (after some other conversations today): I get that the "just update, duh" sort of mentality is very prevalent here. And that's a good cultural norm! But it demonstrably doesn't engage with the way PHP users behave, and the huge amount of outdated PHP out there on the web. Blaming the users is not very useful.

There's a ton of arrogance towards people still running PHP 7, or even PHP 5, who are statistically unlikely to update today – the best hope is probably that a web host forces it.

I don't think this is a personal failing. It's an ecosystem one.

PHP has been trying for years to shed its bad reputation by making big breaking changes.

For the 'prosumer' user base it appeals to, upgrading PHP became synonymous with everything breaking.

Now a huge chunk of the web runs on ancient PHP.

Cyberattacks are now inherently much faster-moving than they were before.

Whack-a-mole with patches isn't going to cut it.

We're ultimately going to have to ditch Wordpress and friends in favour of static websites.

It's funny how people talk about AI superintelligence taking over as if we live in a society where whoever is most intelligent takes charge.

One look at the US presidency would not only disprove that but indicate that something close to the opposite may be the case.

If you invent such a thing as an internet-connected supermarket fridge, don't be too surprised when hackers make it self-immolate
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/hackers-cause-chaos-french-supermarket-fridges-50c-5Hjdjnb_2/

Encountered someone who does what I'm calling "outbound-only email".

They email me. I ask a clarifying question. No answer.

After a while, a separate email (new subject line) arrives with some additional information, generally unrelated to my question. This repeats for a while.

It is then assumed that I have the info I need.

No idea how to engage with this behaviour pattern.

Look, I know spam is a big problem, but stop adding this endless SPF DMARC DKIM crap. At most, there should be ONE of these to set up, it should be robust, and it should guarantee delivery once set up instead of intermittent random failures and smug little bounce messages from Microsoft, Google et al.

AI 'art' sucks. AI posters suck. They are visibly, aesthetically repulsive.

I'm not so sure, though, that I care about code.

Code could have aesthetic value, in theory, maybe. But 99.9% of it is just a means to an end.

I don't feel all that bad if high-level languages are replaced with natural language that generates something approximately similar. (But still more buggy, probably.)

And it doesn't seem to end all jobs either, since only programmers can make this stuff work anyway...

I set up a DMARC rua=mailto: for a domain, and uh. Why would anyone want this? I'm now getting spammed to heck with reports from 100 different Yahoo domains

Believing that an AI is conscious or sentient requires you to believe that perfectly comprehensible and replicable mathematics, performed sufficiently quickly, can somehow summon consciousness.

The *impression* of consciousness emerges from the input data: the entire web, all obtainable human literature to this point, etc. It's an echo of that vast corpus – nothing more.