A Byte of Coding Issue 364

Hey-yo,

There’s this lovely point during meditation, probably around the 10 minute mark, where it feels like all of the white noise in your brain gets suddenly silenced. It kind of feels as if you were submerged underwater, and all of the background noises are suddenly gone. With phone notifications, emails, social media, and the plethora of other things that are constantly bombarding us with requests for our attention, it sometimes gets to the point where it feels like you’re struggling against your own errant thoughts to think straight. Running a company also doesn’t help, where it feels like there’s always more to do and fires are starting faster than you can put them out, leading to constantly deciding what to prioritize and what can be put off till later.

In other news, since the start of 2024, my company has already made $25k more than it made in all of 2023, so that’s nice! Hopefully the growth continues and I can soon retire to an island somewhere, spending my days perusing software articles and sharing the best ones with you ;)

Anyway, here’s the issue.

Cognition is All You Need -- The Next Layer of AI Above Large Language Models

Published: 4 March 2024

Tags: ai, machine learning, research

Nova Spivack, Sam Douglas, Michelle Crames, and Tim Connors have written a research paper that proposes using a dual layer approach to creating AI models that take a step closer towards AGI. PDF can be accessed on the right side of the page (on desktop).

Some highlights:

• the authors declare that AGI isn’t possible with only the current probabilistic approach to generating output

• one layer is like the current LLMs and is responsible for processing and responding to linguistic inputs

• second layer is responsible for “higher-order cognitive processes”

Numerous vulnerabilities in Xunlei Accelerator application

Published: 6 March 2024

Tags: infosec, web

Wladimir Palant illuminates all of the different vulnerabilities he found in a pretty weird application that is popular in China.

Some highlights:

• the Xunlei Accelerator app does a variety of things, from being a download manager to a gaming platform (?)

• the application can be made to open any arbitrary website

• there are issues in pretty much every part of the app and chrome extension

Towards zero-downtime upgrades of stateful systems

Published: 7 March 2024

Tags: system design, haskell

Stevan takes a stab at designing a system that can upgrade a stateful system with zero downtime, from within the system’s language.

Some highlights:

• “In [Erlang/]OTP there’s a library construct called release, which can be used to perform up- and downgrades”

• system is implemented in haskell

• “In a world where software systems are expected to evolve over time, wouldn’t it be neat if programming languages provided some notion of upgrade and could typecheck our code across versions, as opposed to merely typechecking a version of the code in isolation from the next?”