It would need to be as close to like-for-like as possible or people are going to reject the results, so presumably if they've grown rump steak, say, then they'd need to not just compare it with some actual rump steak, but prepare and cook the two cuts at the same time in the same way. The ideal result here for them here is either "lab grown is better" or "can't tell them apart", after which buying decisions should come down to bang-per-buck, and that might even hold if lab-grown isn't quite as tasty, but is sufficiently cheaper to keep it in consideration.

Sure, they could - and probably will - try and stack the deck in their favour. It is marketing after all. But that can only go so far; if they try and compare a premium lab-grown cut with born-and-bred offal, they're going to get called on that and for many people that will mean that they won't get a second chance, ever. Pepsi was a mostly a pure taste test of two otherwise identical fizzy liquids, but food is really about all of the senses so if they really want to sell this and overcome the ick factor, they'll have precut bite-size pieces of meat ready that look the same, cook them on that stand, and let you compare the appearance, smell, texture, and hear the sizzle while cooking as well as taste the samples.

Supposedly, pork. "Long pig" is the literal translation of the word that was used in many South Pacific cannibal cultures and was used by European explorers to refer to the practice.

It needs a version of the "Pepsi challange" blind taste test from yesteryear. I'd certainly take that if given the opportunity, but have yet to find anywhere with the stuff to try in the first place, let alone to do so in a blind test. If it's equally as good as they claim (and the science says it *is* the same, right down to the cellular level), then they shouldn't have any problem convincing people that it's a viable option to regular farmed meat, and if they can do that, then the cheapest option should win in many cases.

I suspect there may be some legitimate corner cases about "free range", "corn fed", and similar dietry or lifestyle things that will have at least some effect on the texture of the meat (e.g. buff animals vs. couch potato animals), but maybe there are ways to replicate at least some of that in the lab too?

Not yet, anyway, but they do presumably get to see emotional responses like this from humans in their training data. If there are enough human tantrums over code submission rejections in that data, then it's not a huge stretch to where that would be an acceptable sort of content template for an AI to build on to generate a response. A lot of the rest is probably exactly what evanh suggests in their post immediately below; humans using an AI to play games to get a kick out of being mean or, in the case of the ArsTechnica article, a lazy "journalist" not fact checking the quotes from the AI they sent off to do their research and write an article for them.

On Slashdot? Sure. What's more, we'll probably get to have at least one of them twice!

Yeah, some of us used to do that with *NIX systems back in the day. Seperate /sbin and /usr volumes, mounted read-only, and various other volumes, like /home and /tmp, depending on the system use, set to not allow execution. You needed to be root to remount to read-write in order to install patches or updated binaries, then reboot to get back to the read-only mountings. Regular users were not capable of doing jack with the sensitive OS partitions, and most forms of attack were really, really, hard when you couldn't modify any system files or run any scripts/binaries you'd managed to get onto the system.

Used to be you could do that on Linux too, until systemd decided /usr needed to be part of /, which generally also includes a bunch of stuff that has to be read-write. Progress, huh?

I expect that will be a major part of it, but I can see a few areas where AI might be genuinely useful without compromising existing jobs as much as some fear it could. For instance, creation of storyboarding options, replacing modelled and scripted CGI for greenscreen production, creating location shots/B-roll, tweaking existing IRL backdrops to add additional features (e.g. the manipulation of actual shots of places like Dubrovnik in "Game of Thrones", or Valencia in one of the later seasons of "Westworld"), as well as some of the post-production tasks like colour grading and the like.

If they're going to prioritise things like script production (which would almost certainly be deritive because that what AI does) and a reduction in headcount on both sides of the camera (quite likely, given this is Amazon) in order to churn out an even larger pile of mediocre dross for the same total budget then I can easily see that backfiring as the genuinely decent shows could easily end up getting lost in the noise.

The people running these services are essentially re-broadcasting paid-for content for a fraction of the price.

That's quite probably not all they are doing. Remember, if it's too good/cheap to be true, then *you* are probably the product or, in this case, your bandwidth and IP address.

Pardon the cynicism, but I remember Google claiming that they would "do no evil", yet here we are. I'll enjoy the ad-free Claude while it lasts, and hopefully that will be for a long time, but sooner or later I fully expect the desire for advertising dollars to trump any laudable claims they might be making today.

Brexit is a factor for sure. The UK's economy has generally underperformed compared to its peers since the result was announced, let alone the actual exit, but it's definitely not the only factor. It also overlaps with the decision to increase the minimum wage and various inflation busting public and private sector payrises which, while maybe warranted, also have the flipside of increasing costs and that is often clawed back through headcount reduction. That's particularly noticeable in the hospitality sector which always runs on thin margins and has been hit pretty hard; AI isn't making beds and prepping food. Another factor would be all the uncertainty over the US, one of the UK's largest trading partners, putting a lot of focus on business development elsewhere and that doesn't yield results, let alone jobs, overnight if you don't already have a foothold to build from; I'm seeing a *lot* more Brits at overseas BD events than 12-18 months ago because of this.

I know we like to hate on AI a lot here, but while I'm sure it's contributed to shifts in the job market it's incredibly disingenous to claim AI is responsible for the entirely of the UK's current employment woes, and frankly I'm not even sure who would really benefit from making that claim. Companies using it as a convenient excuse for layoffs because of other reasons on the otherhand... Yeah, I can totally see that.

I think a home charger is more likely for Pwn2Own. Winning an L3 DC fast-charger is cool and all, but it's not likely that the successful hacker is going to be able to do much more with it that use it as a garden ornament or oversized door stop, unless they offer a cash alternative, because things like DC fast chargers should absolutely be subjected to this kind of thing just as much as the typical consumer tools that make up most of the targets.

A cybersec seminar I was at last yeaar had a speaker from a major pen-testing company describing how they had got a L3 DC EV charger setup into a Faraday cage to see if it could be exploited (they didn't state which make, before you ask, presumably because they are in active use, but they did say that the charging network operator was their client, which is not necessarily the same as the manufacturer of the equipment, so I'm guessing probably NOT Tesla). Turns out these things were a comms nightmare, and despite the fact that they often have to have buried HV cables due to their location on the forecourt, they use wireless data links rather than hardwiring then via a secondary LV cable duct). This is broken down into:

Usage/payment processing. You'd expect this to be secure because of standards like PCI-DSS and because it's a glorified version of those remote card terminals you see everywhere, so a known tech that has been audited over and over, and that was mostly true - they couldn't get at the payment info - but they were still able to interfere with it and create a DoS and extract an awful lot of PII from users of the charging pods sent from their phone apps.

Management. These things often sit out on a forecourt, but there is usually also a management terminal located somewhere onsite showing status info, etc.. This proved to be woefully insecure, and they were able to send bogus data to the management console, and get it to show whatever status info they wanted, which is important because of the third data network.

Power supply regulation. When installed in a group, the chargers "chat" amongst themselves to optimise the distribution of the available power from the grid when the bank is close to maxing it out so that you can have a car arriving with an almost flat battery prioritised over one that is already 80% full, as well general management and heat regulation through redistribution of supply current so that nothing gets too hot. Turns out this was woefully insecure too.

By the culmination of their exercise, they were able to combine the hacks and were able to both take arbitrary charge pods offline, fiddle with the power regulation to generate potentially dangerous current draw scenarios, and simultaneously present the operator dashboard with information indicating that everything was just fine. While some of that did require opening a panel and connecting to a USB debug port in one of the pods, with a variety of vehicles parked up and a pre-attack recon of the CCTV setup, I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to engineer things so that one of the pods was hidden from the cameras long enough for you to attach the required cable and replicate the attack in the wild.

That's what I love about these things; the Striesand Effect factor. As usual, all the targetted domains are listed in the linked complaint (the PDF at the start of the second paragraph of TFS) starting from page 11. Now, I'm pretty sure some (probably most) of those domains are malware infested hellholes, but one thing you'll note is that they almost all list alternative domains with different registrars to prevent this kind of domain takedown from knocking them completely off the web and let them spin up replacements. The smarter operators will already have a few "spare" domains registered, just in case. Let say - since they are mentioned in TFS - Togo complies and all the ".to" domains go dark; how long do you think it'll take before replacement domains spring up, including on the .to ccTLD?

Hollywood et. al are *still* essentially playing whack-a-mole after all these years because they have nothing new to try (kinda like much of their content), and even if they get some token results from this, it's still going to be about as effective as all their previous attempts. The mole ducks down, and pops up again somewhere else.

HDDs are still the most cost effective solution for large storage arrays that don't need particularly fast random data access, although putting an SSD in front of the drive array to act as a cache can make even some of those workloads viable. I think the issue has been more that the size of the array where that becomes a significant enough cost difference to offset the "screw it, let's just go all-in on SSD" has been increasing rapidly.

For instance, it used to be that media creatives would have a SSD for their go-to / work drive and a high-TB HDD or RAID to store the bulk media data, but - at least until AI blew the market apart - unless you were either seriously budget-limited or producing a vast amount of raw content, then a lower-spec high capacity multi-TB SSD or two was a potentially affordable option. In high-end server land, it was similar; you were spending so much on things like per-core software subscription licenses and however many chassis full of CPUs/RAM, that the storage uplift from HDD to SSD on the drive arrays (excluding the stuff that really needs to be SSD, like VM image storage) is largely a rounding error for PO approval until you get up into the 100s of TB or even PB range. But again, then along came AI...

I suspect a lot of people with upcoming hardware refreshes and large SSD drive arrays are going to be taking a good hard look at how much of that data *really* needs to be on SSDs until the AI bubble pops. It might be a bit of a last hurrah for the tech, but the next few years could be very good for distributors and other bulk suppliers of HDDs if those reviews go the way I expect.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. Subtract one number from the other, and you get the profit on the movies from theatres - after all the usual Hollywood math has been applied. That's a few points in the black, which is fine by some metrics, but is still only for the movies made since the original trilogy, so my main point was that it doesn't seem to include the profits coming from other areas, which are going to make the RoI for Disney look a lot better overall.

Point taken on the level of success on the movies alone though. Ignoring all the other income streams from the franchise, that's still a pitiful amount of RoI for a franchise with a reputation and loyal fanbase that should have ensured every single one of the movies landed in the top end of the highest grossing movies of all time list if they'd even been remotely decent. I doubt Disney are going to be unhappy with the results, but equally they are probably not as happy as they probably hoped to be when they bought LucasArts.

It's not the best phrasing, but that's just on the box office (after "Hollywood Math" has been applied), and it's a profit which is as far as many people will need to read. I'm pretty sure once you add in the TV shows for overseas broadcasts and people who subscribed to Disney+ specifically for them (less their production costs), all the license costs for all the toys/collectibles/video games, etc. produced by third parties, and all the other ways Disney rakes in money from the franchise it's even more financially rosy for them.