Comment Re:Gets rid of all internships (Score 2) 46
So, how does anyone enter the workforce?
OpenAI Says Models Programmed To Make Stuff Up Instead of Admitting Ignorance (theregister.com) 78
AI models often produce false outputs, or "hallucinations." Now OpenAI has admitted they may result from fundamental mistakes it makes when training its models. The Register: The admission came in a paper [PDF] published in early September, titled "Why Language Models Hallucinate," and penned by three OpenAI researchers and Santosh Vempala, a distinguished professor of computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology. It concludes that "the majority of mainstream evaluations reward hallucinatory behavior."
The fundamental problem is that AI models are trained to reward guesswork, rather than the correct answer. Guessing might produce a superficially suitable answer. Telling users your AI can't find an answer is less satisfying. As a test case, the team tried to get an OpenAI bot to report the birthday of one of the paper's authors, OpenAI research scientist Adam Tauman Kalai. It produced three incorrect results because the trainers taught the engine to return an answer, rather than admit ignorance. "Over thousands of test questions, the guessing model ends up looking better on scoreboards than a careful model that admits uncertainty," OpenAI admitted in a blog post accompanying the release.
The fundamental problem is that AI models are trained to reward guesswork, rather than the correct answer. Guessing might produce a superficially suitable answer. Telling users your AI can't find an answer is less satisfying. As a test case, the team tried to get an OpenAI bot to report the birthday of one of the paper's authors, OpenAI research scientist Adam Tauman Kalai. It produced three incorrect results because the trainers taught the engine to return an answer, rather than admit ignorance. "Over thousands of test questions, the guessing model ends up looking better on scoreboards than a careful model that admits uncertainty," OpenAI admitted in a blog post accompanying the release.
Comment So Long... (Score 4, Funny) 41
...and thanks for all the fish.
Submission + - Color-changing organogel stretches 46 times its size and self-heals (phys.org)
alternative_right writes: Scientists from Taiwan have developed a new material that can stretch up to 4,600% of its original length before breaking. Even if it does break, gently pressing the pieces together at room temperature allows it to heal, fully restoring its shape and stretchability within 10 minutes.
Comment Transparency (Score 5, Insightful) 109
One reason for quarterly reporting is that it gives greater transparency and insight into how a business actually works. Many businesses are seasonal. Most obviously, virtually all retail has its best quarter at the end of the calendar year. But many other types of businesses have key cycles each year that are tied to, for example, the buying habits of their largest customers. Suppliers matter, too; if farms have a bad quarter due to weather or other factors, for example, you're going to want to watch how that impacts food producers somewhere down the line.
Submission + - SPAM: Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape
alternative_right writes: If you don’t feel like reading that article, semihosting is basically syscalls for embedded ARM microcontrollers. You throw some values/pointers into some registers and call a breakpoint instruction. An attached debugger interprets the values in the registers and performs certain actions. Most people just use this to get some logs printed from the microcontroller, but they are actually bi-directional.
If you are older than me, you might remember a time before Wi-Fi and Ethernet, the dark ages, when you had to use dial-up modems to get online. You might also know that the ghosts of those modems still linger all around us. Almost all USB serial devices actually emulate those modems: a 56k modem is just 57600 baud serial device. Data between some of these modems was transmitted using a protocol called SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol).2
This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP. The slattach utility can make any /dev/tty* send and receive IP packets. All we have to do is put the data down the wire in the right format and provide a virtual tty. This is actually easier than you might imagine, pyOCD can forward all semihosting though a telnet port.
Link to Original Source
If you are older than me, you might remember a time before Wi-Fi and Ethernet, the dark ages, when you had to use dial-up modems to get online. You might also know that the ghosts of those modems still linger all around us. Almost all USB serial devices actually emulate those modems: a 56k modem is just 57600 baud serial device. Data between some of these modems was transmitted using a protocol called SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol).2
This may not come as a surprise, but Linux (and with some tweaking even macOS) supports SLIP. The slattach utility can make any
Link to Original Source
Thieves Busted After Stealing a Cellphone from a Security Expert's Wife (elpais.com) 41
They stole a woman's phone in Barcelona. Unfortunately, her husband was security consultant/penetration tester Martin Vigo, reports Spain's newspaper El Pais.
"His weeks-long investigation coincided with a massive two-year police operation between 2022 and 2024 in six countries where 17 people were arrested: Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru...." In Vigo's case, the phone was locked and the "Find my iPhone" feature was activated... Once stolen, the phones are likely wrapped in aluminum foil to prevent the GPS from tracking their movements. "Then they go to a safe house where they are gathered together and shipped on pallets outside of Spain, to Morocco or China." This international step is vital to prevent the phone from being blocked if the thieves try to use it again. Carriers in several European countries share lists of the IMEIs (unique numbers for each device) of stolen devices so they can't be used. But Morocco, for example, doesn't share these lists. There, the phone can be reconnected...
With hundreds or thousands of stored phones, another path begins: "They try to get the PIN," says Vigo. Why the PIN? Because with the PIN, you can change the Apple password and access the device's content. The gang had created a system to send thousands of text messages like the one Vigo received. To know who to target with the bait message, the police say, "the organization performed social profiling of the victims, since, in many cases, in addition to the phone, they also had the victim's personal belongings, such as their ID." This is how they obtained the phone numbers to send the malicious SMS...
Each victim received a unique link, and the server knew which victim clicked it... With the first click, the attackers would redirect the user to a website they believed was credible, such as Apple's real iCloud site... [T]he next day you receive another text message, and you click on it, more confidently. However, that link no longer redirects you to the real Apple website, but to a flawless copy created by the criminals: that's where they ask for your PIN, and without thinking, full of hope, you enter it... "The PIN is more powerful than your fingerprint or face. With it, you can delete the victim's biometric information and add your own to access banking apps that are validated this way," says Vigo. Apple Wallet asks you to re-authenticate, and then everything is accessible...
In the press release on the case, the police explained that the gang allegedly used a total of 5,300 fake websites and illegally unlocked around 1.3 million high-end devices, about 30,000 of them in Spain.
Vigo tells El Pais that if the PIN doesn't unlock the device, the criminal gang then sends it to China to be "dismantled and then sent back to Europe for resale. The devices are increasingly valuable because they have more advanced chips, better cameras, and more expensive materials."
To render the phone untraceable in China, "they change certain components and the IMEI. It requires a certain level of sophistication: opening the phone, changing the chip..."
"His weeks-long investigation coincided with a massive two-year police operation between 2022 and 2024 in six countries where 17 people were arrested: Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru...." In Vigo's case, the phone was locked and the "Find my iPhone" feature was activated... Once stolen, the phones are likely wrapped in aluminum foil to prevent the GPS from tracking their movements. "Then they go to a safe house where they are gathered together and shipped on pallets outside of Spain, to Morocco or China." This international step is vital to prevent the phone from being blocked if the thieves try to use it again. Carriers in several European countries share lists of the IMEIs (unique numbers for each device) of stolen devices so they can't be used. But Morocco, for example, doesn't share these lists. There, the phone can be reconnected...
With hundreds or thousands of stored phones, another path begins: "They try to get the PIN," says Vigo. Why the PIN? Because with the PIN, you can change the Apple password and access the device's content. The gang had created a system to send thousands of text messages like the one Vigo received. To know who to target with the bait message, the police say, "the organization performed social profiling of the victims, since, in many cases, in addition to the phone, they also had the victim's personal belongings, such as their ID." This is how they obtained the phone numbers to send the malicious SMS...
Each victim received a unique link, and the server knew which victim clicked it... With the first click, the attackers would redirect the user to a website they believed was credible, such as Apple's real iCloud site... [T]he next day you receive another text message, and you click on it, more confidently. However, that link no longer redirects you to the real Apple website, but to a flawless copy created by the criminals: that's where they ask for your PIN, and without thinking, full of hope, you enter it... "The PIN is more powerful than your fingerprint or face. With it, you can delete the victim's biometric information and add your own to access banking apps that are validated this way," says Vigo. Apple Wallet asks you to re-authenticate, and then everything is accessible...
In the press release on the case, the police explained that the gang allegedly used a total of 5,300 fake websites and illegally unlocked around 1.3 million high-end devices, about 30,000 of them in Spain.
Vigo tells El Pais that if the PIN doesn't unlock the device, the criminal gang then sends it to China to be "dismantled and then sent back to Europe for resale. The devices are increasingly valuable because they have more advanced chips, better cameras, and more expensive materials."
To render the phone untraceable in China, "they change certain components and the IMEI. It requires a certain level of sophistication: opening the phone, changing the chip..."
Comment Irrelevant levels (Score 1) 64
The level found is largely irrelevant.
You might not want it, and as policy it's great to get them out of the supply chain; but at these concentrations a lifetime of heavy drinking will increase your risk of dying by bicycle (as a pedestrian) higher than the increase risk from this source.
Comment Re: This is why (Score 1) 64
Beer isn't distilled.
Submission + - So many birds are migrating that they're appearing on weather radar (washingtonpost.com)
alternative_right writes: Between 2010 and 2013, the radars were upgraded with technology that allows both horizontal and vertical pulses of energy to be emitted. By comparing the returned signals, meteorologists can determine the shape of whatever is in the sky. Raindrops are a bit wider than they are tall, and shaped like hamburger buns; snowflakes are — obviously — flaky; but lofted tornado debris is spiked or jagged.
Birds, meanwhile, appear as somewhat spiked objects, as do insects. But insects appear a bit more round and uniform on radar, and are also lightweight enough to become caught up in the wind. Birds travel higher than most bugs, and also can fly against or perpendicular to the wind. After all, they have places to go — southward. Meteorologists can also determine their direction of motion through their analyses.
Birds, meanwhile, appear as somewhat spiked objects, as do insects. But insects appear a bit more round and uniform on radar, and are also lightweight enough to become caught up in the wind. Birds travel higher than most bugs, and also can fly against or perpendicular to the wind. After all, they have places to go — southward. Meteorologists can also determine their direction of motion through their analyses.
Comment Re: It took me a bit to understand this (Score 1) 73
Based on the company selling them as if they knew exactly what they were; I'm wondering if they actively participated in the process and "accidentally" took them with other stuff that was intended to go.
Comment This decision looks like a precursor (Score 1) 34
This decision looks like a precursor to outright corruption.
Submission + - How USB-C Ended the Great Connector Wars (itbrew.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It's easy to forget the dark ages of peripheral connectivity. A twisted nest of proprietary connectors was the norm. Then, in 2014, a hero emerged: USB-C. It promised a reversible connector, high-speed data transfer, and enough power to charge a laptop. It was a revolution. This article from IT Brew breaks down the three waves of USB-C adoption, from its humble beginnings in the PC industry to its EU-mandated takeover of the mobile world. It's how a single connector brought order to the chaos and became the undisputed king of the hardware industry.
Comment RSS? (Score 0) 26
Have you ever looked at the specs?
Not something I'd claim ownership in, even if I had contributed.
White House Asks FDA To Review Pharma Advertising On TV (whitehouse.gov) 64
President Trump on Tuesday issued a memorandum directing the FDA and HHS to crack down on misleading direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads, requiring clearer disclosure of risks and ensuring that promotions don't overstate benefits or push costly drugs over generics. Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares an excerpt from the memorandum: The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall therefore take appropriate action to ensure transparency and accuracy in direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising, including by increasing the amount of information regarding any risks associated with the use of any such prescription drug required to be provided in prescription drug advertisements, to the extent permitted by applicable law. The Commissioner of Food and Drugs shall take appropriate action to enforce the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act's prescription drug advertising provisions, and otherwise ensure truthful and non-misleading information in direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertisements. "Advertising dollars is a major avenue for pharmaceutical companies to influence news and attempt to shape public opinion," comments sinij. "Advertising was a major contributor to painkiller addiction, where networks were hesitant to cover early reports of addictiveness. It is likely directly contributing today to lack of critical coverage of Ozempic. It is just too big of a conflict of interest to allow to stand."
Slashdot Top Deals
He keeps differentiating, flying off on a tangent.
