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Comment Re: Non-consensual rapey software at its finest (Score 1) 185

Yeah you need a bunch of hacks.

You can get the context menu like before, you can get win10 taskbar with explorerpatch (github) that you can drag around, you can get win7 start menu with openshell etc. It's just a too big of a hassle for most people and only reason i bothered with 11 is drivers.

Comment Re: Lol. (Score 1) 102

They would still need to read it.

Will they? Probably not and if they do it they use the ai as the basis, biasing the grading.

Besides than that the students themselves will run it through the same thing either getting the same access to the model or by giving a fiver to the ta.

Now if the essays don't matter because they're just literal filler on a bs subjective subject and this is okay then its a separate problem. In all cases if the higher education is based on this and costs tens of thousands a year its a scam. Like think about it, there should easily be enough ta's to read them all at those rates. There should easily be 1 staffer per ten students.
Science

Have Scientists Finally Made Sense of Stephen Hawking's Famous Black Hole Formula? (science.org) 26

Posted by EditorDavid from the equations-for-entropy dept.
Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this report from Science magazine: Fifty years ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking wrote down an equation that predicts that a black hole has entropy, an attribute typically associated with the disordered jumbling of atoms and molecules in materials.

The arguments for black hole entropy were indirect, however, and no one had derived the famous equation from the fundamental definition of entropy — at least not for realistic black holes. Now, one team of theorists claims to have done so, although some experts are skeptical.

Reported in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, the work would solve a homework problem that some theorists have labored over for decades. "It's good to have it done," says Don Marolf, a gravitational theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the research. It "shows us how to move forward, that's great."
Businesses

Stability AI Reportedly Ran Out of Cash To Pay Its Bills For Rented Cloud GPUs (theregister.com) 45

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The massive GPU clusters needed to train Stability AI's popular text-to-image generation model Stable Diffusion are apparently also at least partially responsible for former CEO Emad Mostaque's downfall -- because he couldn't find a way to pay for them. According to an extensive expose citing company documents and dozens of persons familiar with the matter, it's indicated that the British model builder's extreme infrastructure costs drained its coffers, leaving the biz with just $4 million in reserve by last October. Stability rented its infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and GPU-centric cloud operator CoreWeave, at a reported cost of around $99 million a year. That's on top of the $54 million in wages and operating expenses required to keep the AI upstart afloat.

What's more, it appears that a sizable portion of the cloudy resources Stability AI paid for were being given away to anyone outside the startup interested in experimenting with Stability's models. One external researcher cited in the report estimated that a now-cancelled project was provided with at least $2.5 million worth of compute over the span of four months. Stability AI's infrastructure spending was not matched by revenue or fresh funding. The startup was projected to make just $11 million in sales for the 2023 calendar year. Its financials were apparently so bad that it allegedly underpaid its July 2023 bills to AWS by $1 million and had no intention of paying its August bill for $7 million. Google Cloud and CoreWeave were also not paid in full, with debts to the pair reaching $1.6 million as of October, it's reported.

It's not clear whether those bills were ultimately paid, but it's reported that the company -- once valued at a billion dollars -- weighed delaying tax payments to the UK government rather than skimping on its American payroll and risking legal penalties. The failing was pinned on Mostaque's inability to devise and execute a viable business plan. The company also failed to land deals with clients including Canva, NightCafe, Tome, and the Singaporean government, which contemplated a custom model, the report asserts. Stability's financial predicament spiraled, eroding trust among investors, making it difficult for the generative AI darling to raise additional capital, it is claimed. According to the report, Mostaque hoped to bring in a $95 million lifeline at the end of last year, but only managed to bring in $50 million from Intel. Only $20 million of that sum was disbursed, a significant shortfall given that the processor titan has a vested interest in Stability, with the AI biz slated to be a key customer for a supercomputer powered by 4,000 of its Gaudi2 accelerators. The report goes on to mention further fundraising challenges, issues retaining employees, and copyright infringement lawsuits challenging the company's future prospects. The full expose can be read via Forbes (paywalled).

Comment clinging mostly a cost issue (Score 1) 370

by gl4ss (#64359332) Attached to: Will EVs Kill the Stick Shift Car?

For economy cars its cheaper and has less losses. Robot auto gets the losses to same but that costs more. The less losses part then matter(ed) for gas and to get better acceleration out of the small engines.

Goes for scooters and motorbikes too, cvt is nice and all but for same engine its kinda suck and cheaper smaller engine bikes that sucking kinda matters just for running your errands.

As for ev's so? Are the ev's going to kill small engined econoboxes? Does it even matter when you can just learn to drive it fairly quickly anyway?

Now some 3rd world weirdness perspective. I know some people who "can't" drive an automatic, not really sure why but they just scare it.
Government

Can Apps Turn Us Into Unpaid Lobbyists? (msn.com) 73

Posted by EditorDavid from the keep-off-the-grass-roots dept.
"Today's most effective corporate lobbying no longer involves wooing members of Congress..." writes the Wall Street Journal. Instead the lobbying sector "now works in secret to influence lawmakers with the help of an unlikely ally: you." [Lobbyists] teamed up with PR gurus, social-media experts, political pollsters, data analysts and grassroots organizers to foment seemingly organic public outcries designed to pressure lawmakers and compel them to take actions that would benefit the lobbyists' corporate clients...

By the middle of 2011, an army of lobbyists working for the pillars of the corporate lobbying establishment — the major movie studios, the music industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — were executing a nearly $100 million campaign to win approval for the internet bill [the PROTECT IP Act, or "PIPA"]. They pressured scores of lawmakers to co-sponsor the legislation. At one point, 99 of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate appeared ready to support it — an astounding number, given that most bills have just a handful of co-sponsors before they are called up for a vote. When lobbyists for Google and its allies went to Capitol Hill, they made little headway. Against such well-financed and influential opponents, the futility of the traditional lobbying approach became clear. If tech companies were going to turn back the anti-piracy bills, they would need to find another way.

It was around this time that one of Google's Washington strategists suggested an alternative strategy. "Let's rally our users," Adam Kovacevich, then 34 and a senior member of Google's Washington office, told colleagues. Kovacevich turned Google's opposition to the anti-piracy legislation into a coast-to-coast political influence effort with all the bells and whistles of a presidential campaign. The goal: to whip up enough opposition to the legislation among ordinary Americans that Congress would be forced to abandon the effort... The campaign slogan they settled on — "Don't Kill the Internet" — exaggerated the likely impact of the bill, but it succeeded in stirring apprehension among web users.

The coup de grace came on Jan. 18, 2012, when Google and its allies pulled off the mother of all outside influence campaigns. When users logged on to the web that day, they discovered, to their great frustration, that many of the sites they'd come to rely on — Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist — were either blacked out or displayed text outlining the detrimental impacts of the proposed legislation. For its part, Google inserted a black censorship bar over its multicolored logo and posted a tool that enabled users to contact their elected representatives. "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!" a message on Google's home page read. With some 115,000 websites taking part, the protest achieved a staggering reach. Tens of millions of people visited Wikipedia's blacked-out website, 4.5 million users signed a Google petition opposing the legislation, and more than 2.4 million people took to Twitter to express their views on the bills. "We must stop [these bills] to keep the web open & free," the reality TV star Kim Kardashian wrote in a tweet to her 10 million followers...

Within two days, the legislation was dead...

Over the following decade, outside influence tactics would become the cornerstone of Washington's lobbying industry — and they remain so today.
"The 2012 effort is considered the most successful consumer mobilization in the history of internet policy," writes the Washington Post — agreeing that it's since spawned more app-based, crowdsourced lobbying campaigns. Sites like Airbnb "have also repeatedly asked their users to oppose city government restrictions on the apps." Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig work companies also blitzed the apps' users with scenarios of higher prices or suspended service unless people voted for a 2020 California ballot measure on contract workers. Voters approved it."

The Wall Street Journal also details how lobbyists successfully killed higher taxes for tobacco products, the oil-and-gas industry, and even on private-equity investors — and note similar tactics were used against a bill targeting TikTok. "Some say the campaign backfired. Lawmakers complained that the effort showed how the Chinese government could co-opt internet users to do their bidding in the U.S., and the House of Representatives voted to ban the app if its owners did not agree to sell it.

"TikTok's lobbyists said they were pleased with the effort. They persuaded 65 members of the House to vote in favor of the company and are confident that the Senate will block the effort."

The Journal's article was adapted from an upcoming book titled "The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government." But the Washington Post argues the phenomenon raises two questions. "How much do you want technology companies to turn you into their lobbyists? And what's in it for you?"

Submission + - xz/liblzma Backdoored, Facilitating ssh Compromise

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: A backdoor has been discovered in the liblzma data compression library, whose purpose is to facilitate a compromise of ssh. liblzma versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 are known to be affected. Debian's "unstable" and "testing" repos yesterday rolled back the library by pushing version "5.6.1+really5.4.5-1" to mitigate the exposure. RedHat is also recommending all users roll back to a pre-5.6.0 release.

The backdoor is not in the source code, but rather is in the test suite contained in the distribution tarballs. Hostile payloads masquerading as test data are decompressed during the ./configure phase to modify the Makefile and drop modified versions of liblzma_la-crc32_fast.o and liblzma_la-crc64_fast.o. When the compromised library is loaded by client programs (such as ssh), these in turn install an audit hook in the dynamic linker, allowing them to intercept lookups/calls to RSA_public_decrypt@....plt, which it then replaces with its own code. This compromise appears to have only been discovered in the last few days; study of the precise nature and scope of the compromise is ongoing.

Comment School has become a sickness merry-go-round (Score 2) 119

by neiras (#64354184) Attached to: Chronic Student Absenteeism Soars Across US

My kids and I have been sick so much this year. We had two more rounds of COVID across our family since September. Other families we know are seeing the same thing. Before the pandemic a few colds and MAYBE a stomach flu type thing were the norm in a school year.

All I can take away from this is that the pandemic isn't over and being sick has made us more vulnerable. Not that anyone cares.

Comment Re: Australia lack of sensors and reclassification (Score 3, Insightful) 56

by gl4ss (#64330003) Attached to: Only Seven Countries Meet WHO Air Quality Standard, Research Finds

Yeah places like finland have sort of bad air in very few places in few of the cities. Whereas in thailand when the pm2.5 index levels are commonly over 150 going to 200 in ALL of the rural areas. For reference in rural finland it would be something like 5 to 10 (and i have firsthand experience for both of these)

Australia would have great air in most of the country because most of the country is far enough from indonesia. Theres no forests to light on fire in inner australia anyway.

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