AES-256 is fine actually. The best known quantum attack reduces key strength from 256 bits to 254.4 bits. The problem is that in order to use AES (which is a symmetric encryption scheme) you need to exchange keys using an asymmetric system like RSA, which is known to be weak to quantum attacks.
Honestly? If AI systems stopped improving forever? That’s probably best case scenario. LLMs are already superhuman on a knowledge level, human-level in terms of speed (tokens per sec, etc), but subhuman in many other areas. This makes them useful for some tasks, but not so useful that they could cause any sort of existential threat to humanity (either in an economic sense or in a misalignment sense). If LLMs stagnate here then we have at least one tool in our AI toolbox that we’re pretty sure isn’t conscious/sentient/etc., which is useful since that makes them predictable on some level. Humans can deal with that.
Unfortunately, I see no reason why AI systems in general wouldn’t continue to improve. Even if LLMs do stagnate they’re only one tiny branch of a much larger tree, and we already have at least one example of an AI system that is conscious and sentient - a human. This means even if somehow the human brain was the only architecture ever capable of sentience (incredibly unlikely), we could always simulate/emulate a human brain to get human-level AGI. Simulate/emulate it faster? Superhuman AGI.
Not really. While working at the OS-level can typically require ‘unsafe’ operations a core tenet of writing Rust is making safe abstractions around unsafe operations. Rust’s ‘unsafe’ mode doesn’t disable all safety checks either - there are still many invariants that the Rust compiler enforces that a C compiler won’t, even in an ‘unsafe’ block.
And even ignoring all of that, if 10% of the code needs to be written in Rust’s ‘unsafe’ mode that means the other 90% is automatically error-checked for you, compared with 0% if you’re writing C.
Strong disagree. I ran non-ECC memory on my server and services would unexpectedly crash maybe once per week. Over the span of a year I had two databases get corrupted that cost me a lot of time to fix. I tried swapping sticks but it happened with all of them. I switched to ECC memory and the problems disappeared. I needed more memory anyway and the price delta for ECC was about $100. I didn’t have to swap CPUs or anything, AMD desktop CPUs and chipsets support it out of the box. ECC memory is absolutely worth it.