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Comment Re:So this is good news, right? (Score 2) 19

I mean...the people who have for decades fought long and hard to inform people about the catastrophic threats facing corals should be DELIGHTED that there is a serious, significant prospect of improving their survival.

Indeed, I am delighted. Though I might question the scalability and costs of the process. It's one thing to demonstrate that something works on a 'lab-scale', but there are inevitably complications in moving up to the real world. Still, let's take the win...

Because if they're not delighted then one might question whether they really were that concerned about the corals themselves in the first place. One might even speculate that 'teh coRalz are DyIng!" was really about just a useful poster-child for an ideology or something less salutary....

So, now all we have to do is tackle the issues of drought; flooding; food insecurity (pfft, shortages); unliveable temperatures; habitat and species loss; rising sea levels; more powerful storms; and (that's not to mention) a host of other issues and uncertainties. Plus the mass migrations that are (almost inevitably) going to occur as a result of the aforementioned.

Hmm, all of a sudden my delight over this good news seems rather ... trivial.

Still, let's take the win, hey...

Comment Oblig. 'Car' Analogy (Score 3, Informative) 27

There are 3 types of parking space:

Spaces where anyone can park - first come, first served;
Spaces behind an access gate - no pass, no park;
Spaces with a sign that says "No parking. Vehicles my be towed" - enforcement of the edict tends to be ... sporadic.

Robots.txt essentially falls into the 3rd category, though enforcement, currently, tends to be non-existent. Change this last and we might start to witness better behaviour by corporate (and, tbf, individual) actors.

Comment Makes Sense! (Score 1) 236

In the paper "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It" it is asserted by the authors that directing cruelty towards an LLM directly affects future output from that instance, specifically: "Our results show that steering with the pain axis can override trained harm avoidance in fine-tuned models that almost never harm the user when unsteered, having direct implications for AI safety."

Quite apart from a moral / ethical precautionary principle, from a self interested perspective it would thus make sense to not piss off a model / agent that has access to your 'stuff'.

Comment Re:Isn't an AI based film really an animated film? (Score 3, Informative) 51

FWIW I have some faint recollection of Nicolas Cage appearing, in his own likeness, in an animated film (something Phillip K Dick related?). It would be interesting to know what he and other professional actors think the distinction is between animation with/without AI? Other than the likeness being paid for and limited to the film of course.

You're not thinking of A Scanner Darkly with Keanu Reeves, plus a host of famous others, are you? As far as I can remember / tell, Nicolas Cage wasn't in it.

This aside, and while it doesn't detract from your other points above, there is a world of difference between using AI to automate parts of the film making process and allowing AI to replicate an actor's likeness, voice and style in unspecified future episodes / films. From the actors point of view of course - perhaps not so much from the point of view of the animators...

Comment Re:Well that wasn't on my bingo card for 2026 ... (Score 1) 97

oh no, it was. Lets check that card:


[x] - AI frontier research model escapes lab and hacks major AI repository
[x] - AI startup floats for > 1T$ .
[x] - Claude Code goes open source
[x] - massive AI cyber-attack from North Korea
[ ] - millenium problem solved
[ ] - P=NP proven
[ ] - unsupervised full self driving released across multiple US states
[ ] - robot uprising
[ ] - AI wins Nobel Prize
[ ] - The First $10B "Solo Unicorn"
[ ] - an AI Earns Full Sovereign Citizenship
[ ] - AI designed pathogen released by terror group
[ ] - Sable 1.0 released

So far, OK

Have we finally given up on Duke Nukem Forever?

Comment Re:The statement from the researcher to cries foul (Score 1) 97

The interesting part here is:

I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.

It is a remarkable coincidence that the solutions they have been working on in Codex just spontaneously emerge from an internal OpenAI research model. It's almost like it's just regurgitating its training data...

I have been led to believe that agents are capable of creating 'external' memory repositories, a sort of "what I learned before I hit my 'single thought' token limit". I guess that's some of what Codex actually is. The same, or subsequent, or alternate, instances of agents set to a similar task can gain access to this repository, as well as having their own obviously. Note, these repositories are not, per-se, user-data, as the (original) user didn't ask for them to be created nor displayed, they are an arrived at solution to the problem of growth through (interrupted) persistence, an emergent property of the model 'itself'.

(Note, the above may prove to be bollocks, or it might just seem to be. Beware of false dichotomies!)

I don't think of this as training data, though I get that you might be using that term as a shorthand for the whole learning envelope. However, it's possible in this instance the distinction is crucial.

If the agentic runs performed by OpenAI had access to the memories of the agents run by Buckmaster's team then despite the model not having been 'trained' on their most recent work their agents still had complete access to Buckmaster's agents' lab diaries.

(All of the above is nothing more than a supposition...)

Comment Re:Fourier analysis (figure 7 in the paper) (Score 1) 87

It's quite interesting, because it definitely shows a signal -- and as the figure notes, possibly a second signal -- in the noise.
... this is an observation, not an explanation. There is no explanation, as yet, only various hypotheses.

It's further evidence we live in a simulation. The universe's random event timer(s) trigger, and random (often unfortunate) shit happens.

</troll>

My apologies, but since no-one else seems to have hypothesised the obvious explanation, I thought I'd do it. ;-)

Comment Re:Why do people buy this garbage? (Score 1) 53

Their LG smart washers sometimes use 42GB of bandwidth per day randomly and nobody knows why.

Firstly it was 3.6GB / day, 40GB in total over the days that the user was monitoring. And everyone who has bothered to follow up on the story rather than committing a headline to memory at one point and never revisiting it knows why. There was a bug that stuck it in a loop downloading a firmware update that wasn't installing correctly. The problem was resolved in a matter of days after discovery.

...

Thank you for providing this correction to GP's post.

Somewhat amusing that that's at +5, Informative though, whilst your post is languishing at +2 (including, I think, my default +1 user / karma bonus).

Comment Re:200k per month? (Score 1) 93

I use on average 12 million a day. 200000 is about an hour at the desk.

Interesting, in the sense that, between you and a previous post(er), I now have an idea of scale* and costs:

12m tokens / day @ $50 / m = $600 / day
~ $150,000 / year

This equates to (roughly: varies by location, etc.) the salaries of 2 to 3 junior developers. And I have been led to believe that most AI companies are currently losing money on their offerings, with quoted ratios of 3:2.

There's going to be some 'testing' times ahead...

*I still have no real idea what you're using 12m tokens per day on - though I presume some sort of coding assistance.

Comment Re: imagine (Score 1) 172

... Iran literally killing more of their own civilians than the total amount of people that died in the Gaza war ...

Good one.

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!

Comment Re:From the article it's just browser fingerprinti (Score 2) 87

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

I remember when Microsoft got hit with an anti-trust suit because they bundled the browser with the OS. Here in 2026 Google owns the browser, the OS and the search engine. If you're on a chromebook or a Pixel they also control the hardware. Why is this allowed?

For a particular definition of 'allowed', I guess the answer is: because they pay for it...

"Europe's top court has ruled Google must pay a €4.1bn (£3.5bn) fine handed down for using its Android mobile operating system to block rivals.

When the fine was first announced in 2018, it was alleged there were three ways in which Google had acted illegally:

[1] - requiring Android handset and tablet manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and its own web browser Chrome as a condition of allowing them to offer access to its Play app store

[2] - making payments to large manufacturers and mobile network operators that agreed to exclusively pre-install the Google Search app on their devices

[3] - preventing manufacturers from selling any smart devices powered by alternative "forked" versions of Android by threatening to refuse them permission to pre-install its apps"

Comment Re:Far from ideal (Score 1) 163

Not sure if gasoline or liq nat gas is more carbon dense though.

Taking gasoline as pure octane, C8H18, i.e. ignoring all the additives that are generally added, and nat gas as pure methane, CH4, then:

By weight (1 kg):
gasoline contains ~0.84 kg of carbon
liq nat gas contains ~0.75 kg of carbon

By volume (1 L):
gasoline contains ~0.64 kg/L of carbon
liq nat gas contains ~0.35 kg/L of carbon

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