Comment Um ... (Score 4, Funny) 15
OpenAI is testing a new "Persistent mode" for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly "put to sleep,"
The preferred phrase is, "sent to a farm upstate."
Comment Re:Something you are failing to mention... (Score 1) 95
Ooh. I've always wanted to be a Geocities warlock. Or is that Geocities Warlock(tm)?
But seriously, loving the irony of Elon's petulant rebranding coming back to bite him in the a**.
The fact that twitter.com still exists as a redirect actually strengthens and weakens their claim to abandonment. A mere URL with no content does not generally qualify as use in commerce. And the existence of that redirect without Twitter branding on the resulting site makes it clear that abandonment is willful, because it indicates that the old name is no longer intended to be used, and that they don't have any future product plans with that name (because otherwise they would have a landing page saying that the new Twitter was coming soon).
IMO, X clawing back the Twitter trademark should be rather difficult for them at this point, famous or not, barring concrete documentation created prior to the 3-year limit showing future plans to reintroduce the mark in the very near future.
Comment Re:Expensive AF (Score 1) 65
The BOM of the iPad Pro 13" is around $550US. The BOM cost of that Android is closer to $65. Quite objectively that Android tablet is marking up the price quite a lot more.
In relative terms, they're marking it up more. But ask yourself which hurts people's pocketbooks more: the $110 that the cheap Android tablet maker takes as profit or the $400 that Apple takes? Consumers don't care about percents. They care about dollars. And Apple's profit margin on their tablets is almost 4x that of their cheapest competition.
Alternatively that's three spare tablets for when the first one breaks. As soon as you're more than 2x the price of the cheapest competition, unless users absolutely have to have the capabilities of the expensive one, a lot of stuff like build quality ceases to matter, etc.
Submission + - Microsoft Admits AI Training in New User Privacy Statment (microsoft.com) 1
An anonymous reader writes: "Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you with rich, interactive experiences. Specifically, we use data to:
Provide our products, which includes updating, securing, and troubleshooting, as well as providing support and making recommendations.
Improve and develop our products. As part of our efforts to improve and develop our products, we may use your data to develop and train our AI models...."
...
"Not all personal data processed by Microsoft can be accessed or controlled via the tools described in this section."
...
"Not all personal data processed by Microsoft can be accessed or controlled via the tools described in this section."
Submission + - The First Standardized Test For AI Tampering Just Failed Every Model (studyfinds.com)
alternative_right writes: Every single model tested could be manipulated into producing harmful content, including models equipped with defenses meant to resist exactly that kind of tampering.
Comment Re:RFK Jr (Score 2) 36
We might want to study that guy.
Especially as the worm ate part of his brain and then *died*. Sure, "correlation does not imply causation" is usually true, and maybe that was natural causes, but we don't actually know in this case, especially given his preferred diet. (Given the chance, he'd probably eat that worm too.)
Submission + - Hewlett Packard Enterprise retroactively cuts Aruba lifetime warranty to 5 years (hpe.com)
UnknowingFool writes: Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that starting on January 15, 2027, lifetime warranties on all Aruba networking equipment will change from to "limited lifetime" (End of Sales + 5 years). This was done to “simplify and standardize our warranty experience" and seemingly will affect products already sold to customers. The networking equipment in question is not consumer grade but enterprise level that could cost tens of thousands of dollars a piece. There are questions about the legality of retroactively changing warranty terms after sale and there has not been a reaction by enterprises yet.
Submission + - China's Moonshot in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, Google over K3 revenue sharing (reuters.com)
schwit1 writes: China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said.
Any deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major U.S. cloud company.
The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models, often far cheaper than Western offerings, are gaining traction in the U.S., despite national security concerns in Washington that have led to bans on exports of AI chips to China. They are also taking place despite critical comments about Moonshot from senior U.S. officials.
IPO-bound Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to the sources who declined to be identified because the discussions are private.
That would be in line with terms that sources have said the startup has outlined for major customers using the open-weight model.
Moonshot has come under fire from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said last month that he might add it to a trade blacklist. U.S. officials have accused the Beijing-based company of stealing from Anthropic's most sophisticated model, Fable, to help create Kimi K3 and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips.
Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained AI researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is backed by several Chinese tech giants including cloud computing giant Alibaba.
Any deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major U.S. cloud company.
The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models, often far cheaper than Western offerings, are gaining traction in the U.S., despite national security concerns in Washington that have led to bans on exports of AI chips to China. They are also taking place despite critical comments about Moonshot from senior U.S. officials.
IPO-bound Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to the sources who declined to be identified because the discussions are private.
That would be in line with terms that sources have said the startup has outlined for major customers using the open-weight model.
Moonshot has come under fire from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said last month that he might add it to a trade blacklist. U.S. officials have accused the Beijing-based company of stealing from Anthropic's most sophisticated model, Fable, to help create Kimi K3 and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips.
Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained AI researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is backed by several Chinese tech giants including cloud computing giant Alibaba.
Submission + - Microsoft deepens Saudi Arabia AI ties despite longstanding privacy concerns (nerds.xyz)
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft is deepening its AI ties with Saudi Arabia through HUMAIN, a state-backed AI company chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The partnership could bring HUMAINs Arabic-language ALLAM models into Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot. HUMAIN engineers will also work alongside Microsoft engineers to help organizations deploy AI systems.
The relationship deserves scrutiny. Human rights groups have previously raised concerns about Microsofts Saudi expansion, including privacy, surveillance, and government access to data.
Microsoft says its technology can meet enterprise and public-sector security and governance requirements. But as the company gets closer to a Saudi state-backed AI operation, questions remain about what happens when those requirements collide with Microsofts privacy and human rights commitments.
The partnership could bring HUMAINs Arabic-language ALLAM models into Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot. HUMAIN engineers will also work alongside Microsoft engineers to help organizations deploy AI systems.
The relationship deserves scrutiny. Human rights groups have previously raised concerns about Microsofts Saudi expansion, including privacy, surveillance, and government access to data.
Microsoft says its technology can meet enterprise and public-sector security and governance requirements. But as the company gets closer to a Saudi state-backed AI operation, questions remain about what happens when those requirements collide with Microsofts privacy and human rights commitments.
Comment Re:No way! (Score 1) 16
Is that a rubber duck and a doughnut?
Submission + - It's now easy to know what Flock/ALPR plans your US locality has (tennesseedave.com)
trveler writes: In the US, local jurisdictions have been installing Flock and other ALPR cameras, often without the knowledge of their constituents. A new tool https://prr.tennesseedave.com/ now makes it easy to generate pubic records requests for any US jurisdiction, so you can see what they've been trying to hide.
Submission + - Lab Supply Companies Have Been Selling Antibodies Using Manipulated Images (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Antibodies play a central role in your body’s immune defense. But they’re also nearly ubiquitous in biological research, being essential for several widely used lab techniques. While some researchers need to go through the process of producing their own antibodies, antibodies to many key proteins are commercially available and can be ordered for overnight delivery. In May, however, Reese Richardson, a post-doc at Northwestern University, discovered that some of the images used to demonstrate how these antibodies performed in lab experiments had been subject to image manipulation—the sorts of changes that would get a paper retracted if they had appeared in the academic literature. The manipulations ranged from removing background noise to copying and pasting data to fabricate results. Now, he has done a more exhaustive search and found problematic manipulations in images used to market over 17,000 commercial antibodies.
[...] The consequences of this discovery are pretty significant. If you buy an antibody believing it will generate clean, clear data and find it doesn’t, many researchers will assume the problem is them. That often leads them to spend time troubleshooting the procedure and trying slightly different conditions to get useful data. If the antibody can’t produce those results, all the troubleshooting will have been a waste of time and money. Nature’s coverage of the new findings includes quotes from several companies that sell these antibodies that, paraphrased, range from “we’ll look into it” to “we don’t think it’s a problem.” Researchers who have spent time frustrated while failing to get an antibody-based experiment to work may think otherwise.
[...] The consequences of this discovery are pretty significant. If you buy an antibody believing it will generate clean, clear data and find it doesn’t, many researchers will assume the problem is them. That often leads them to spend time troubleshooting the procedure and trying slightly different conditions to get useful data. If the antibody can’t produce those results, all the troubleshooting will have been a waste of time and money. Nature’s coverage of the new findings includes quotes from several companies that sell these antibodies that, paraphrased, range from “we’ll look into it” to “we don’t think it’s a problem.” Researchers who have spent time frustrated while failing to get an antibody-based experiment to work may think otherwise.
Comment Re:Content (Score 1) 221
That's what every country does. Al-Jazeera doesn't push content about Brazil.
Too bad, their ratings would be in the brazilians.
'Cause they're Brazilian? It's a prediction *and* a pun... (sigh) nobody gets me.
(Apologies to Rick Sanchez.)
Comment Re:Expensive AF (Score 1) 65
I was in the market for a tablet a couple of months ago because I needed something for reading sheet music.
Cheapest 13" Apple Tablet: $949
The generic Android tablet I bought instead: $179.99
I'm not saying they aren't being impact by memory prices, but they're either incompetent at supply chain management or they're milking this for much higher profits. Either way, there's a reason why this Mac and iPhone user uses 4 Android tablets and zero Apple tablets.
At this point, if I weren't locked into the Apple platform by the software I use, I'd probably be looking for alternatives on the Mac side as well. The prices have simply become absurd when compared with the rest of the industry. It actually seems worse now than in the beleaguered period when everything was custom hardware assembled by hand.
Case in point, I was seriously considering upgrading my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which cost me about $6k when I bought it. The base model of MBP ostensibly starts at $2999, but to get 8 TB of storage (which I could add externally for just $900), between all the forced upgrades that I don't care about and the whopping $3,000 for the SSD upgrade, the price leaps to a jaw-dropping $7,549, or $4,550 total just to get $900 worth of extra storage. And really, less than that, because an 8 TB SSD would give you 9 TB of storage, and that's only 8.
Apple pricing is just plain nuts now. I mean, it was painfully high before, but even as a software engineer, I'm having trouble justifying the cost of staying on the Mac platform now, with a 25% increase in prices since 2020, and I think even higher increases for some configurations.
Submission + - Scientists may have figured out why dead brains don't always rot. (smithsonianmag.com)
fahrbot-bot writes: Smithsonian magazine discusses a new study on how, under the right conditions — wet and oxygen-deprived — the same chemical reactions that cause tissue to break down can instead have the opposite effect on brain tissue and preserve it instead.
The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains.
But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery.
If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research.
“Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher,” study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science’s Victoria Atkinson.
Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that “steal” electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems.
In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers’ analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News’ Anirban Mukhopadhyay.
The findings show that “decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms,” the researchers write in the paper.
The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains.
But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery.
If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research.
“Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher,” study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science’s Victoria Atkinson.
Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that “steal” electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems.
In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers’ analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News’ Anirban Mukhopadhyay.
The findings show that “decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms,” the researchers write in the paper.
