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Comment Re:No jurisdiction (Score 3, Informative) 17

Incorrect. Computer misuse within the US, regardless of where the individuals who are doing the misusing are located, is under US jurisdiction. This is long-established. Laws dealing with multi-jurisdictional issues (such as patents/copyrights, illicit interstate commerce, sex tourism, computer misuse) are old-hat.

Attacking US servers located in US territory is an attack carried out within the US, regardless of where the keyboard warrior is.

Now, if the servers attacked are in Ireland, then they're also covered by EU jurisdiction (no matter what the US likes to think).

The law is the law, and nobody, in any nation, is immune. A fact a lot of nations like to pretend they're somehow immune to. They aren't and there will always be a price to pay for such cavalier attitudes.

Submission + - WhatsApp Catches Spyware Firm NSO Defying No-Hacking Court Order (securityweek.com)

wiredmikey writes: Meta-owned communications app WhatsApp says it recently detected and disrupted a spear-phishing attempt linked to spyware company NSO Group. The attack is allegedly in defiance of a court order that bars the spyware maker from targeting WhatsApp. WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against NSO in 2019, after it came to light that a zero-day vulnerability had been exploited to deliver spyware to users.

NSO has been seeking to overturn the order blocking it from targeting WhatsApp users, arguing that the company will “suffer irreparable harm”.

Comment Re:How about at least... (Score 1) 95

Free open source models that cost a tiny fraction as much for the same capabilities?

I can understand your stance if you think that AI is just a fad. But for those who believe that AI is going to kick off a new industrial revolution, it's the difference between that new industrial revolution being in the hands of people like Musk and Altman (who are profiting off of having scraped the commons), vs. the public as a whole.

Comment Re:At 89 be glad of death's mercy. (Score 1) 72

Maybe I should make this simpler for the hard of thinking.

Smoking impacts your chances of getting lung cancer. It is not a 100% guarantee, but it's pretty damn high. It is called an impact by anyone with anything close to an intellect that actually functions.

Having a vaccine impacts your chances of getting a disease. It's not a magic forcefield. It increases the payload needed to overwhelm the initial immune response, and it increases the severity of the infection needed to be anything more than a brief annoyance, but it isn't Harry Potter. And some would probably whinge about magic fields if it were. In many cases, the impact is a 90-95% level of protection, but we call it an impact.

God, the level of brain-dead morons here is so depressing.

Comment String theory and falsifiability (Score 2) 43

Physics has used indirect testing for many years, and I don't think anyone expected string theory to be any different.

There are research papers that detail specific properties that must be present in any string theory-based model of gravity, for example. If we find, in our efforts to study quantum gravity, that those properties can't hold, then string theory cannot be correct. Not just a specific string theory, ANY string theory at all.

Any string theory that requires a supersymmetry that is reachable by the LHC once it gets updated will be falsified within a very short space of time. If we persist in not seeing supersymmetry after this further round of updates (and we've already had several to improve luminosity), then none of the string theories involved can be correct. They have to be false.

None of these allowing string theory would prove string theory "true", but if any are false then string theory cannot be true. If ALL of them permit string theory, then whether or not string theory describes anything real, the maths that has been done must nonetheless describe real things.

Comment Re:At 89 be glad of death's mercy. (Score 1) 72

You are correct, AI (which is basically a neural network, and thus really just a glorified classifier) is superbly good at classification and if you want to classify what a condition is and how it connects to other conditions, then classifiers are by far the fastest and most reliable way to do this. You've said as much yourself, and I absolutely agree with you on every detail of what you've said about AI.

A lot of my private research into AI is to push it to the absolute limits and see where it fails. It fails in some fascinating ways, too. So, yeah, I also agree with your conclusion. It is really good in some areas and completely bad/potentially damaging in others. My personal efforts are centred around trying to parameterise exactly where that line is, but ultimately I think we're both absolutely agreed there is a line and we need to know where it is.

Providers have fatigue because they're overworked - in terms of caseload, in terms of cognitive effort per case that's needed, and in terms of how long their shifts end up being. You're right that AI could have reduced the caseload and cognitive effort, but you're right in what you say about the medical services needing more staff and shorter hours per staff member, and that it's an entirely legal failure cascade.

It's not clear to me how to fix the law (analysis suggests politician skulls are made of some sort of dwarf star alloy that seems to occupy most of the head region). I've generaly filed politics under Social Quantum Mechanics (you can either see the solution or create policy, but never both at the same time).

Comment Re:At 89 be glad of death's mercy. (Score 1) 72

Please, do "educamate" me. It's the best you're gonna do, given that I probaly understand medicine, biology, and indeed statistics to a far higher level to some snotty-nosed brat whose UID runs into 7 digits.

What you eat and drink, what you do, how you stand, how much you exercise, who you hang out with - you're seriously telling me these don't have an impact on health? Whew, you've got a LOT of learning to do. I didn't know anyone was still that naive, post the 18th century.

Your physical and mental health, past around 50, is directly dependent on how you treated your body up to that point. Anyone who says otherwise is either an AI or a nematode cos there's no way anyone with more than 6 functional neurons can imagine otherwise.

Comment Re:I'm not convinced (Score 1) 48

Prompt:

Hey ChatGPT, who is being reasonable in this argument?

---
Rei: " ... We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!), but they're all individuals each acting on their own.... "

Synonymous Homonym: "Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

Rei: "That's not what I said. I said that the word "drone", as in a mindless unthinking being, is derived from drones, as in male bees. I did not say "all bees are drone bees"."

Synonymous Homonym: "What you actually said:

We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)

Suggesting that the word "drone" means "mindless bee.""

Response:

Rei is being more reasonable here.

The key issue is whether Rei's original sentence implied that all bees are drones or that "drone" as a metaphor comes from bees.

Rei wrote:

"We think of bees as mindless drones (literally, we took the very word!)"

The parenthetical "literally, we took the very word!" naturally reads as:

The figurative word drone (meaning a repetitive, unthinking worker) comes from the bee term drone.
Therefore, our cultural association of bees with "dronelike" behavior is reflected in language.

That is a claim about etymology, not about bee taxonomy.

Synonymous Homonym's first correction:

"Drones are specifically the male bees. Most bees are not drones."

is technically true, but it doesn't actually address what Rei was saying. Rei wasn't claiming that all bees are male drones.

Then Synonymous Homonym shifts to:

"Suggesting that the word 'drone' means 'mindless bee.'"

This doesn't accurately paraphrase Rei either. Rei never said the word means "mindless bee." The sentence only suggests that the metaphorical sense of "drone" is derived from the bee term.

If I were judging the exchange, I'd say:

Synonymous Homonym's factual statement is correct: drones are male bees.
But it's responding to a claim Rei didn't make, making it a misreading.
Rei's clarification directly matches the ordinary reading of the original sentence.

So the stronger interpretation is that Synonymous Homonym misunderstood the original remark, and Rei's correction is justified.

Or to put it more simply: you're attacking a straw man (a claim I never made) because you cannot defend your actual scientifically inaccurate comments about bees having half-hour memories.

You are confusing "forgetting" with "disruption".

I am not.

Your entire argument was that bees have short-term memories. The example you cited demonstrates precisely the opposite - that bee memory is if anything too durable>/i>, such that bees will refuse won't even bother searching for their hive if it has been moved, that they always go back to the spot where they remember it being last.

However, what you are choosing to ignore is that, once a bee has been accepted into a different hive, it becomes part of that hive

That's like claiming that if you move to a different city, you've "forgotten" where you used to live.

When a bee, due to a navigation error or its previous hive being gone, enters a different hive (drifting), it absorbs the pheromones of the new hive. It is now chemically marked as belonging to that hive. Chemicals are communication to bees, just as much as vocal commands are to you. Bees do not learn all of the other bees in their hive, they don't have some sort of rolodex. If you smell like hive A, you're allowed into hive A. If you smell like hive B, you're allowed into hive B. Bees don't particularly "care" which hive they're in; they have their own individual motives and drives, which simply involve being in "a" hive. Once they're marked as belonging to hive B, they can no longer enter hive A (at least not safely).

Note in the above what has nothing to do with any of this? Memory. It's just about smell. Memory is about where the hive can be found after foraging (which is also about memory) - and it remains, even after drifting (they'll continue to return to the same spot - again, even if the new hive is moved). Smell is about which hive you can enter. Or for a summary version:

1) A bee leaves the hive to go foraging

2) It remembers where the best spot to visit is (usually from having gone there before, but occasionally from having seen a waggle dance) and what flowers (shapes, smells, sizes, etc) will be yielding best there at what times of day, and what areas to NOT go to, where there may be threats. This information persists for days, weeks, or even the bee's entire life. It can target an area to an accuracy of a couple hundred meters, and then begins a search.

3) When done, it returns back to where it remembers that the hive should be (this memory is highly persistent, and can only be reset by an orientation flight.

4) The bee starts by using the sun and broad navigational features as with outbound flights to get to within a couple hundred to a few dozen meters (the "visual catchment area"), then gradually switches to small-scale features and searching. This is all based on memory.

5) For the final approach, the bee relies on a mix of sight (remembered), sound (generic), and smell. The latter is not a learned trait, it's "whatever you happen to smell like". While it's usually described as recognizing the smell of their sisters, that's not exactly right. The actual underlying mechanism not so much learning what something does smell like as it being unable to detect what they do smell like

The mechanism the same as how humans become unable to notice their own body odour or perfume: sensory adaptation. Because they're constantly smelling themselves, their brain learns to tune out their own smell. However, it doesn't tune out the smells of others. When they return to their own hive, the scent is something that they're adapted to tune out. But when they arrive at a different hive, they're hit with a scent that they're not adapted to, and that they can detect.

If you want to put it in human terms, the underlying mechanism is "this hive thinks you're stinky, that one doesn't smell you because you've all been around each other for so long".

If you want to call sensory adaptation "forgetting", then you're going to need to call human sensory adaptation "forgetting" as well. And again, none of this has anything to do with actual memory tasks, such as navigation and how to find the best flowers. Bee memory is exceptional with them.

Comment Re:How about at least... (Score 1) 95

(My personal hot take is that, both for copyright reasons ("Purpose and Character of the Use", aka for-profit, is a critical factor in determining copyright violation, such as from scraping), and general moral reciprocity argument (closed commercial models extracts profit from the commons without giving back), closed source trainers should fundamentally be required to give back to the commons in some meaningful way)

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