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Submission + - Artificial Intelligence used to design brand new viruses (bbc.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.

It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.

The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.

The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns.

Comment Re:Ok, so since market has started ignoring him (Score 2) 208

Why aren't we freaking the fuck out right now?

Because there are four categories of people here:
1} Non-indoctrinated non-investors... are freaking the fuck out right now but are powerless.
2} Indoctrinated non-investors... don't have money so don't care what Trump does to the stock market.
3} Non-indoctrinated investors... are quietly more interested in any money-making opportunity than principles.
4} Indoctrinated investors... have been encouraging all of this.

Category 1 is way, way outnumbered.

Remember when the very hint of being shady like this would disqualify someone from a office nearly as high as President? This is why I was upset when Trump started lying in his first term. He normalized deceit then and he's been normalizing corruption now.

This is Pandora's box; there's no real reason for anyone in the future to not follow this precedent because America statistically condoned it. Frankly without an armed revolt making it clear that misbehaving won't be tolerated, it obviously will be.

Submission + - An Ancient Poop Explosion Could Have Helped Complex Life Evolve (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: If the earliest animals hadn't been such prolific poopers, life might not have diversified into all the weird and wonderful forms we see today.

That's the conclusion reached by a new review study published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The team of scientists in Australia and Germany found that the Cambrian explosion â" a period around 540 million years ago when the ancestors of most animal groups arose â" could have been partly set in motion by an explosion of feces, left by those that came before.

Comment Re:Don't know about Australia (Score 1) 97

In America taking away social media from your kids would be pretty fucked up. At least assuming you can't either taxi cab them around town, buy them a car and get them a license or pay for a shitload of taxi rides That's because the suburbs have basically spread us out to such a ridiculous degree that kids don't have a lot of opportunities to socialize. And no school doesn't really count you get maybe a half hour for lunch. Hell people have been talking about how suburbs isolate people for ages. And it's only gotten worse. Back when my kid was in high school they were a good 40 minutes away from their closest Friend by bus. By car it was something like 10 minutes but like most places my city's bus system sucks balls. And when you have two or three hours of homework a night minimum sometimes as much as four or five that's just not going to cut it. I suspect it was less of a problem for us old farts because not only were a lot of us in denser living conditions but even if we weren't we didn't have the crazy amounts of homework that modern kids get. Admittedly it's been years since my kids have been in high school but as far as I know that hasn't changed and kids still get multiple hours of homework a night despite all research showing that doing that's very counterproductive... More of the puritanical bullshit you just can't shake from our shitty culture. So pretty much the only place your kids get to socialize unless you are very well off or they are very lucky is going to be on social media. We could of course do away with the suburbs and make walkable cities but the car companies are worth tens of billions of dollars so there sure is shit not going to let us do that even if you could convince old people who are hung up on cars to do it I suspect that old people are just going to keep grinding their kids into dust. Honestly I think most of us didn't want to have the little shits anyway. Men want sex and women want babies.

I'm skeptical of this conclusion.

When we were primarily a farming civilization, the physical distances between kids and the nearest kids they weren't related to wasn't orders of magnitude different from what it is today. Indeed, considering how many people live in cities - offsetting the weirdos who live dramatically far away from any neighbors - things are much better for kids today.

Also, there's a difference between social media and contact. There's nothing preventing Australian kids from texting, calling, or even video calling each other. They don't need Facebook specifically. Stuff like TikTok isn't about person-to-person contact. It's about attention-adhesion.

Submission + - A fundamental flaw leaves LLMs strikingly vulnerable to attack (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology.

By taking advantage of this flaw, which concerns how LLMs identify who or what is giving them instructions, the researchers were able to make popular LLMs spit out information they had been trained not to provide, such as how to synthesize cocaine and how to sabotage a commercial aircraft’s navigation system.

“There’s a real probability that this is going to be a problem that’s fundamentally unsolvable,” says Charles Ye, an independent researcher and coauthor of the ICML paper.

Companies will typically hire teams of human testers to try to come up with novel attacks that break existing guardrails, a process known as red-teaming. Model makers also use LLM super-hackers (such as OpenAI’s GPT-Red) that find and exploit weaknesses in other models to automate parts of this process. The goal is then to take those attacks and train a new model to resist them and anything that looks like them.

The problem, says Jasmine Cui, another independent researcher and coauthor of the paper, is that the approach amounts to giving the models a list of things they shouldn’t do. But no list is exhaustive. “It’s like watching The Simpsons and they have Bart writing ‘I will not say something inappropriate to my teacher’ a hundred times,” she says. “And he still does things that are pretty crass anyway.”

The ICML paper describes attacks against several of OpenAI’s models, but Cui and Ye say that they have since seen similar results with models made by Anthropic, Alibaba, and DeepSeek.

Cui and her colleagues wanted to find out why an attack like chain-of-thought forgery was so effective. They suspected it had something to do with the mechanism that LLMs use to keep track of where their instructions are coming from.

But what Cui and her colleagues discovered is that LLMs are in fact very bad at keeping track of different roles. In a series of experiments that looked at what was going on inside a handful of different models, the researchers found that LLMs seem to identify the role of a specific chunk of text not by the tags around it but by the style of that text and the words it contains.

The upshot, the researchers claim, is that all an attacker needs to do to hack an LLM is write text that spoofs a certain role. And because roles are a fundamental part of how LLMs work, no amount of training will fully solve the problem.

Ye is worried that nobody is ready for what’s coming. “There’s going to be a huge economic incentive for people to do jailbreaks and prompt injections,” he says. The best defense could be to expect the worst. Organizations shouldn’t trust LLMs, and they should expect that anything done by agents could be unsafe, he says: “That’s not a great solution, but it just might be what we have to do.”

“It’s really incredible that these things are being deployed everywhere to control super-critical systems,” he adds. “There’s been no study of the fundamental science here. We’re all doing it ad hoc.”

Submission + - AI Companies Destroying Books At Scale (futurism.com)

Submitted by nightflameauto
nightflameauto writes: AI companies are purchasing books from pre-AI times. The claim is that those books are free from the defects of AI generated text, and therefore more valuable for ingestion into AI datasets. In order to accomplish this, they are tearing the books down to be scanned, then destroying them as the scans are completed. This includes rare and out-of-print books that may be some of the few copies of any given published work left in existence.

Submission + - Is Mark Zuckerberg Actually TRYING to Destroy Meta? (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Lately, it almost feels like Zuckerberg is trying to destroy his own company. He’s burning through mountains of cash in a desperate attempt to keep up in the AI race. Yet despite the untold billions it’s spent so far, it’s being destroyed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Its employees have even resorted to using AI models made by its competitors, a humiliating reality check for how far behind Zuckerberg’s efforts have fallen.

It’s also a financial nightmare. Capital expenditures have risen dramatically, erasing any appetite for Meta on Wall Street. Its stock price “has been dead money for more than a year,” as Yahoo Finance notes, as investors continue to debate whether Zuckerberg is chasing the AI industry as it careens off a cliff — or edging ever closer to an AI-fueled industrial revolution.

Submission + - The first active shooter suppression service

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Schools to tackle active shooters with pepper-spraying drones that can ram attackers

Pepper-spraying drones aimed at tackling active school shooters are being rolled out at campuses across three states.

The drones, part of the Campus Guardian Angel program, can ram into targets at speeds of up to 70 mph and are capable of weaving through the air to avoid gunfire. Three schools in Florida, five in Georgia and one in Colorado are part of pilot schemes using the aerial technology.

Submission + - Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Our daily lives are built on multitasking, but are our brains actually doing two things at once, or just switching very quickly between them?

Well, it depends. The science shows it's the latter, for cognitively demanding work.

But in a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in the US have revealed that we can put certain tasks on autopilot in a way that enables something closer to true multitasking.

Driving is the perfect example: When you take your test, your entire mental and physical energy is concentrated on executing the right combinations of movements and thoughts.

After a decade behind the wheel, the brain is no longer consciously thinking everything through in great detail.

Submission + - AI Data Centers Being Built Faster Than They Can Be Secured (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: AI is reshaping data centers and introducing security risks traditional architectures weren't designed to handle. As AI data centers scale at breakneck speed, security isn't keeping up. Researchers outline the Top 10 AI infrastructure security risks, including hardware integrity, multi-tenant isolation, high-speed network fabrics, supply chain compromise, and patching failures.

Submission + - Physicists create first room-temperature quantum material (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.

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