4 ms·

I like that it is a literal "back door" in that there's an opening in the barrier at the back of the brain.

ineedasername 5y ago
Yes, a pretty big oversight by anyone on the design team concerned with security. It just makes it look like humans were yet another product pushed out the door before they were ready for prime time.
- visarga 5y ago
  Maybe the backdoor has an evolutionary reason to exist. Unlike devs, nature tests its ideas more thoroughly. When reading old code you can often find some parts that don't make sense, especially if you don't know the original motivation.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I don't know, not every aspect of our biology is an evolutionary advantage. Some just didn't have enough of a negative impact to get weeded out over time. For example we're rather squishy. Considering that built-in armor is a known-feature of other animals, the devs could have added that into the release. Honestly I would expect "not squishy" to have been in the initial human MVP release. I mean, they figured out that the mouth input channel needed to occasionally be used as an emergency output-- they had some idea of what they were doing, but still missed some obvious things. Then again, if we're being developed by an evolutionary algorithm, why should I assume we're a full version release? It's possible we're still in the alpha stage. Or possibly some other developmental culdesac that just hasn't been pruned yet. We could be one of many incorrect answers to a recursive depth-first search algorithm, each iteration of which uses incremental parameter changes for the input of the evolutionary algorithm. Some dev one level up in the layers of reality might be getting yelled at right now for not using a breadth-first approach, or for using a resource intensive evolution process when the client just needed something "good enough".
    - visarga 5y ago
      Nature's search algorithm, blind as it is, got itself augmented with technology so I expect its trajectory will be different.

Yes, a pretty big oversight by anyone on the design team concerned with security. It just makes it look like humans were yet another product pushed out the door before they were ready for prime time.

visarga 5y ago
Maybe the backdoor has an evolutionary reason to exist. Unlike devs, nature tests its ideas more thoroughly. When reading old code you can often find some parts that don't make sense, especially if you don't know the original motivation.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I don't know, not every aspect of our biology is an evolutionary advantage. Some just didn't have enough of a negative impact to get weeded out over time. For example we're rather squishy. Considering that built-in armor is a known-feature of other animals, the devs could have added that into the release. Honestly I would expect "not squishy" to have been in the initial human MVP release. I mean, they figured out that the mouth input channel needed to occasionally be used as an emergency output-- they had some idea of what they were doing, but still missed some obvious things. Then again, if we're being developed by an evolutionary algorithm, why should I assume we're a full version release? It's possible we're still in the alpha stage. Or possibly some other developmental culdesac that just hasn't been pruned yet. We could be one of many incorrect answers to a recursive depth-first search algorithm, each iteration of which uses incremental parameter changes for the input of the evolutionary algorithm. Some dev one level up in the layers of reality might be getting yelled at right now for not using a breadth-first approach, or for using a resource intensive evolution process when the client just needed something "good enough".
  - visarga 5y ago
    Nature's search algorithm, blind as it is, got itself augmented with technology so I expect its trajectory will be different.