I say this often, but honestly when was the last time any new code was written here? Stuff breaks over time but it has been years since anything was added or updated. We all know that of course Unicode is over 20 years past its promised rollout (beating even Duke Nukem Forever in terms of development hell cycle), but really it seems unlikely that there are any software developers left working for this site. I'm not sure there are any full time employees at Slashdot at all anymore.

In other words you can put the complaint in front of more eyes but it won't find any more eyes that can do anything about it.

Yes there is a command structure but the command structure goes up to and includes democratically elected civilians. Our army is managed and overseen by civilians democratically elected to prevent exactly what you're describing. There is a complex series of committees and oversight that most Americans are blissfully unaware of. Senator Warren will be happy to talk your ear off about it because she serves on all of those committees.

Also remember if you are given an unlawful order you have a duty to disobey that order. That is not fascism. Fascism is a duty to a single individual. The US military has no such duty. Your duty is to the US Constitution and the United States and its democracy.

Now one more election with the fascists winning and yeah the army will be fascist because the civilian infrastructure that controls and oversees it will be fascist. But that's because the entire country is fascist.

We have a shitload of systems designed to prevent fascism and they are gradually being broken down. They have not completely broken down but the fascists have been working on this since newt Gingrich came up with the contract with America. So we are pretty far along in the process. It's a classic chesterton's fence where we kept tearing down a fence without knowing why it was put there

Why do you go with option 3? Option 2 sounds the most plausible to me.

Option 3 sounds like: Well, officer, I was walking behind my wife carrying this bowling ball and we were at the top of the stairs when I tripped over my untied shoelace, which pushed her down the stairs and she was severely injured and would have survived if not for the bowling ball, which I dropped when I tripped and it bounced down the stairs and crushed her head.

I doubt it was set up by both parties, but Hugging Face is clearly bullshitting with the way they are just going along with the OpenAI excuse.

The most simple explanation is usually the right one: OpenAI hacked Hugging Face, trying to cheat on the metrics. They got caught and Hugging Face reported it because they did not realize it was OpenAI. Once they found out it was OpenAI, they could not undo the reporting, and they view OpenAI as too important a partner to initiate a legal complaint against them, so they agreed to go along with whatever spin OpenAI put on this thing.

The really terrifying thing is that OpenAI has demonstrated that, as a company, they do not believe in any legal or ethical limitations to their conduct. They are probably doing much worse things.

Another avenue is the "mean girl" effect. This is a big one. Presumed friends or sometimes enemies that love drama.

Actual court case. A woman was suing a supposed friend. What happened was the plaintiff had admitted she had a "work crush" on her boss. Even named him (a friend group, so she didn't feel awkward admitting it.) Of course, the drama loving friends encouraged her to act on her attraction to him, she had said "No!" but one of the friends who had a large Instagram following said "Why don't we see what my followers think? I'll anonmyze everything"

But she "forgot" to anonymize the Bosses name. and the company. Aa lot of drama happened, ending with the company HR calling in and firing her because her boss was married. Caused a kerfuffle. But oh, much entertainment was to be had. Plaintiff lost the suit, because she exposed herself in the friend group, then allowed the Instagram lady to put out everything on the Internet.

Sure there are. Some bug reports, you look at them and dig in and say "Damn, that's obscure. It depends on subtly-wrong but arguably-correct-in-isolation mistakes in four different places. How the hell did they even find that?".

Granted that it's more common to glance at it and just be ashamed, or to look at it and say "Really? You think an attacker can do A, B, C, D, and E, all at the same time? Oh, and to do B or D they'd already have to have the system mostly compromised. Okay, I'll fix it, but no way in hell is that actually exploitable."

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Maybe... if the projections are in formal filings I don't think they can do that without risking SEC penalties. They can be optimistic about revenues or falling costs or things, because who can tell? But straight up ignoring things, probably not.

You said that this creates an arms race, which implies that it's a question of capability.

I don't know about the non-us phone market but based on slashdot comments it seems like non-carrier locked, not carrier financed phones are maybe more common than here. Certainly in the US that option is only for eccentrics.

Klarna though seems no less but also not inherently more predatory to me than the very worst of the ultra high interest, tiny limit credit card issuers (Credit One, PREMIER, and similar).

  I don't know what to tell someone though who can't afford a phone or PC. I would have said in say 2015, get a used one they are dirt cheap and that 2010 PC will do everything you need to do. However the manufactures have sought to pretty much destroy the used market because lets be honest without really imaginary system 'requirements' a 2014 PC runs Windows 11 just fine... except that you are one upgrade or patch away from something breaking your unsupported platform, and if you are having trouble budgeting for a PC, you can't afford sudden emergencies like that.

Same situation applies to phones, the things one might truly *need* vs want, like banking and finance apps tend to follow N-2 platform support, and so that older phone while realistically perfectly adequate is a door stop because Apple does not want to give you at least ios-18 for it.

It sucks but a PC, Phone or both are one of those things you almost need to succeed, but like cars industry and politics alike seem to be conspiring to make sure there are no 'affordable options' like a robust used market that is the least bit accessible.

Marketing? Because companies famously want to use models in their networks that just run off and commit major crimes? *eyeroll*

I strongly dislike dynamically-typed languages like Python. They're okay for toy programs but for anything of any size... you'd better have one hell of a good test suite because the tools give you absolutely no help. I want strong, static typing. I want a very picky compiler that won't accept anything that isn't exactly correct. C++ is good. Rust is better. I do like type inference so I don't have to manually specify types very often. C++ is reasonably good at this. Rust is better.

I also do a fair amount of work on very tiny systems, programming on the bare metal. Something like Python is a complete non-starter there, it just won't fit. C is the norm for those cases, but C is almost as loosey-goosey as Python, but without any run-time checks. C++ is much better than C. Rust is better yet.

The worst non-hardware bug I've ever dealt with in nearly 40 years of professional programming was in Python, using the Twisted framework. I traced it down to one place that took a pure abstract interface, instantiated it, then called methods on it!. Even logging the type of the instantiated object showed that it was the abstract type. Someone way too clever had built a dependency injection framework that was so magical that there was absolutely no way to figure out what dependency was being injected.

I also have AI write most of my code these days, but that actually increases my desire for a very picky compiler, because AI does a lot better with those guardrails in place.

That is completely and utterly irrelevant.

You need to read the story of the Paperclip Maximizer. It's an entertaining and humorous story, but the point is that instrumental goals are real and often diverge wildly from the intrinsic goals that drive them.

In this case, the LLM was directed to increase its CyberBench score, a sensible intrinsic goal for an AI being trained to be able to find vulns and write exploits. It chose to do that by breaking out of its container, hacking the company that creates the scores, stealing employee credentials, and breaking into the score database. Those intermediate steps were instrumental goals, and they obviously diverged wildly from the intended intrinsic goal.

Would you also have said "all it did was carry out its instructions" if it had found that in order to break in it needed to hire private soldiers to shoot their way in? Or take control of the US nuclear arsenal and issue a threat to HuggingFace that they increase its score or it would nuke them? Or...

Yes, these are fanciful scenarios. What they are not, however, is impossible scenarios. And as AI gets more and more capable, you really want them to be impossible. Alignment matters. If fast takeoff happens (that's a theorized situation where AI becomes capable of self-improvement and rapidly makes itself vastly smarter than any human), alignment may well be essential for human survival.

Both of those things are true, I'd guess.

I am not an accountant, but as I understand it, "Profit margin" is generally "operating profit margin", meaning revenues less operating expenses, all divided by revenues, and their operating expenses aren't that large, so they can absolutely have very strong operating profits. But they also have mind-bogglingly huge capital expenditures going on, so when you account for those they're losing a lot of money. I'm surprised they're projecting profitability as soon as 2030, actually. That's only 3.5 years away.

Commonly available estimates put the number of Iranians recently (last 5 years) killed by the Iranian state at ~40,000 (well, just under; I've rounded up to the nearest 10k, and make no distinction between demographics)

Similarly, available estimates put the number of recent (last 5 years) casualties in Gaza at ~80,000 (again, I've rounded up to the nearest 10k, and make no distinction between soldiers and civilians; adults or children)

It's also worth pointing out that Iran hasn't damaged or destroyed ~80% of all its infrastructure, including hospitals, power production facilities, sewage systems, desalination plants, etc. nor uprooted or burned all its orchards - unlike the IDF in Gaza...

You, sir, are full of shit!