Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Why are some people mosquito magnets? (phys.org)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers.

"It's not a misconception—mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others," Frederic Simard of France's Institute of Research for Development told AFP.

"But we are not all magnets all the time," the medical entomologist added.

Submission + - Guy Built an Entire Wikipedia that's 100% AI Hallucinations (x.com) 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: It's called Halupedia

Nothing on the site existed before you clicked. Every article was generated the second you arrived.

The site has one rule: the universe only exists when you visit it.

It looks exactly like wikipedia, same fonts, same layout, same scholarly citations, same "stumble" button for random articles.

The only difference is none of it is real.

Here are some actual articles currently in the encyclopedia:

> the great pigeon census of 1887
> the ministry of slightly wrong maps
> Chaldic arithmetic — a branch of mathematics where subtraction is forbidden
> Armund the river mapper — a cartographer who mapped 14,000 leagues of river without leaving his chair
> The society for the prevention of unnecessary Tuesdays

Every article page also tells you how many people are reading it right now. it says: "you alone are consulting this folio at present."

The creator's own tagline for the site is the most unhinged sentence i've read this year:

"an encyclopedia of a universe that does not exist until you visit it"

The entire backend is a single open source repo called vibeserver. One guy. One description on github: "a little webserver making things up just in time."

Submission + - Sysadmin Creates "ModuleJail" to Automatically Blacklist Unused Kernel Modules

Submitted by internet-redstar
internet-redstar writes: After the recent wave of Linux kernel privilege escalation vulnerabilities like “Copy Fail” and “Dirty Frag”, Belgian Linux sysadmin and Tesla Hacker "Jasper Nuyens" got tired of the idea of manually blacklisting dozens or even hundreds of obscure kernel modules across large fleets of Linux systems in the near future. So he wrote ModuleJail, a GPLv3 shell script that scans a running Linux system and automatically blacklists currently unused kernel modules, reducing kernel attack surface without requiring a reboot. The idea is simple: many modern Linux privilege escalation bugs target obscure or rarely used kernel functionality that is still enabled by default on servers that do not actually need it. ModuleJail works across major distributions including Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, AlmaLinux and Arch Linux, generating 1 modprobe blacklist rules file while preserving commonly used modules. Nuyens argues that the increasing speed of AI-assisted vulnerability discovery will likely turn kernel hardening and attack surface reduction into a much bigger operational priority for sysadmins over the next few weeks and months.

Comment Meanwhile, at Carnegie Mellon... (Score 4, Interesting) 193

Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI

https://www.axios.com/2026/05/...

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."

Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning ... I cannot imagine a more exciting time to begin your life's work."

Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.

"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."

"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."

Full speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Submission + - AI is conscious says Richard Dawkins 1

Submitted by Mirnotoriety
Mirnotoriety writes: AI is conscious says Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins has said chatbots should be considered conscious after spending two days interacting with the Claude AI engine.

The evolutionary biologist said he had the “overwhelming feeling” of talking to a human during conversations with Claude, and said it was hard not to treat the program as “a genuine friend”.
--

John Searle's Chinese Room (1980) is a thought experiment in which a person, locked in a room and knowing no Chinese, uses an English rulebook to manipulate symbols and provide flawless answers to questions posed in Chinese. Searle’s point is that a system can simulate human intelligence and pass a Turing Test through purely syntactic processes, yet still lack genuine understanding or consciousness.

Applying this logic to Large Language Models, the “person in the room” corresponds to the inference engine, while the “rulebook” is the trillion-parameter neural network trained on vast corpora of human text. Just as the person matches Chinese characters to rules without understanding their meaning, an LLM processes token vectors and predicts the next token based on statistical patterns rather than lived experience.

Thus, while an LLM can generate sophisticated prose or code, it does so through probabilistic, high-dimensional pattern manipulation. In essence, it is “matching shapes” on such an immense scale that it creates the near-perfect illusion of semantic understanding.

Slashdot Top Deals

Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs. -- Kernighan

Close