It's actually pretty on-par for most bug bounties. They used the same exploit on a few programs and got $11k total which ain't bad return on time.

No I know it's on par I guess better rephrasing would be the par is still too low

Compared to what? What's your baseline for how much a user-interaction-required XSS vulnerability should be worth?

I'm not basing it on math.

Are you saying tho that 2.5k wouldhave been adequate in 2019? I expect 5k would have been on par then too. But idk

There's generally no grey market for XSS vulns. The people buying operationalized exploits generally want things that they can aim very specifically to achieve an outcome against a particular target, without that target knowing about it, and operationalized XSS vulns seldom have that nature.

Your other potential buyers are malware distributors and scammers, who usually want a vuln that has some staying power (e.g. years of exploitability). This one is pretty clearly time-limited once it becomes apparent.

I've seen code persist a long time because it is unmaintainable gloop that takes forever to understand and nobody is brave enough to rebuild it.

So no, I don't think persistence-through-time is a good metric. Probably better to look at cyclomatic complexity, and maybe for a given code path or module or class hierarchy, how many calls it makes within itself vs to things outside the hierarchy - some measure of how many files you need to jump between to understand it

I second the persistence. Some of the most persistent code we own is because it’s untested and poorly written, but managed to become critical infrastructure early on. Most new tests are best-effort black box tests and guesswork, since the creators have left a long time ago.

Of course, feeding the code to an LLM makes it really go to town. And break every test in the process. Then you start babying it to do smaller and smaller changes, but at that point it’s faster to just do it manually.

Or do people stop changing their minds because they're worn down, their brains no longer as capable of making space and joy for new ideas?

Which these stem cells, if they pan out, very specifically fix

Possible, but many concepts and principles are frozen by the age of 30 already.

I have never seen someone which is left on the political spectrum at 30 become a Keynesian by 50.

I know such people exist, but they are the exception.

Personality psychology shows personality does not change much after 30.

And there is even some theories such as the “impressionable years” (15-25) which are even more extreme in that respect, stating that basically very little changes after 25.

Overall this makes me doubt stem cells can change any of this.

But I am myself way past my impressionable years, my mental flexibility is lessened, I may be wrong and not open to new ideas.

It would feel sad though, having civilisation lead by the same people over hundreds of years if not more, somewhat stratified, predictable, dull.

Not really - that 1GB is the seed for a procedural generation mechanism that has been finely tuned to its unfolding in an environment over 4 billion years.

DNA is the ultimate demoscene exe

Sure. But that’s just compression, right? I guess you could argue that some information is stored outside the genome, in the structure of proteins etc. But the counter argument is that that information is quickly lost in cell divisions. Only DNA has the error correcting mechanisms needed to reliably store information, is my impression.

A bunch of us in the rest of the world are making great strides in reducing our greenhouse gas emissions without it tanking our economies. Australia is, per-capita, one of the worst offenders and we're on track to reach net zero by 2050.

I think your position is based on very cynical premises. There is no reason to assume with high confidence that humans will obliterate each other in that next 50 years (especially if we do something about one of the major stressors causing conflict)

There is also no reason to believe that reducing greenhouse gas emissions over 15-20 years will cause "more" damage than the worst impacts of climate change? Can you cite sources on this claim?

It is still possible to mitigate the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change.

YT's skateboard introduces the telescopic contact smartwheels pretty early on as a Courier essential.

I don't recall Hiro's motorcycle being much a part of the story, it might also have had the smartwheels but isn't discussed until later...

Yep. His motorcycle is introduced in great detail and then afterwards Stephenson deliberately trolls us with "...after that, it's just a chase scene" and it's never mentioned again. ;)

I would love mailing lists to be a thing again, but the experience of using email is just so bad for me. The sheer amount of unsubscribing I have to do to make it usable - not even taking spam into account - makes email a place I don't want to spend any time.

I tried to order - looks like you're not shipping to Australia? Any plans there?

To some extent? But then we have lobby groups, PACs, regulatory capture and astroturf campaigns that have proven to be quite successful techniques to subvert the political process.

I'd argue that those techniques put us back at the mechanistic system being elevated above other values.