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I knew the pace of exploitation of security issues was getting faster and faster, but this chart shocked me. In just 5 years since 2021, the time between when a security issue is found and security researchers find people trying to exploit it went from 1.3 years to 1.6 DAYS.

While not entirely due to AI, I think hackers and exploiters are likely using AI to more quickly generate exploits. Project Glasswing was started because the upcoming version of Anthropic’s AI was finding zero-day exploits in browsers and operating systems at an alarming rate. Instead of just releasing the AI, they’re working with OS vendors from Apple to Microsoft to Linux to fix many of them before hackers take advantage of the holes.

SGI system’s were the absolute pinnacle of 80’s and 90’s era graphics computing. Re-creating that world, however, is harder than one thinks. While old OS’s are often easily run in virtual machines, SGI’s Irix and other os’s do not run well in virtual machines. In fact, only certain versions of MAME seem to work – and getting it working is a real experiment in patience.

Here’s one of the few instruction threads that seems to work.

In a 1969 radio broadcast (later published as Faith and the Future), a young Joseph Ratzinger made a number of predictions from the culture he saw developing in that time.

He believed the Catholic Church was about to experience a major sifting. He believed after a long process of losing political influence, inclusion as an important part of social structures, and culling of members, the remaining little flock would be a Church that has lost much, but would be the “Church of the meek” that would become the answer to a world in which mankind would reach a point of profound emptiness.

Movements and members that focused on political activism and political stances would quickly fade and die. Members that are overly focused on a social aspects (even good ones like hospitals and schools) that aren’t focused primarily on it’s part of the mission of Jesus – will also likely fade into larger society. Believers will need to overcome a constant state of distraction (addictions to pleasure, recreation, and social/media distraction) to find their meaning fully in Jesus again. Priests can not be simple social workers – since that kind of work can be replaced by simple social work and psychotherapists. Only those that live primarily in Jesus, for Jesus, and profess Jesus will remain.

It’s definitely worth reading Ratzinger’s writings in this book and several others as he clearly understood the direction the world was headed even 60 years ago.

A lot of this has happened. Hospitals and schools are largely no longer run by religious organizations. The organizations that have strayed most from the message of Jesus Christ have died in tremendous numbers. Congregations have dramatically shrunk; and the Church’s political influence has been dramatically muted.

But perhaps we are seeing a turn as the Catholic Church has seen several years of record conversions and people being baptized.