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Submission + - pre-1931 vintage LLM can code Python (talkie-lm.com)

Submitted by puzzled
puzzled writes: Talkie, an LLM trained on text from no later than the end of 1930, can learn to code Python after seeing just a few examples. This puts an end to the thinking that models just memorize really well, instead of actually learning.

Vintage models open a whole range of experiments involving trying to reproduce science that was not discovered until after their training cutoff. This opens up the possibility of exploring just how the frontier models of today might be making new discoveries.

The Talkie model is a 13 billion parameter LLM available on HuggingFace. There's even a 4 bit quantization of it that will run on a 16GB Mac.

Submission + - Should schools get rid of homework? Some educators are saying yes (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Federal survey data shows that the amount of math homework assigned to fourth and eighth grade students, in particular, has been steadily declining for the past decade.

Some educators and parents say this is a good thing — students shouldn't spend six or more hours a day at school and still have additional schoolwork to complete at home. But the research on homework is complicated.

Some studies show that students who spend more time on homework perform better than their peers. For example, a longitudinal study released in 2021 of more than 6,000 students in Germany, Uruguay and the Netherlands found that lower-performing students who increased the amount of time they spent on math homework performed better in math, even one year later.

Other studies, however, suggest homework has minimal outcomes on academic performance: A 1998 study of more than 700 U.S. students led by a researcher at Duke University found that more homework assigned in elementary grades had no significant effect on standardized test scores. The researchers did find small positive gains on class grades when they looked at both test scores and the proportion of homework students completed.

Submission + - Interview with Charles Forsyth of Plan 9 (www.livinginthefuture.rocks)

Submitted by kyusaku
kyusaku writes: Interview with Charles Forsyth about the history and features of Plan 9 and Inferno including how the powerpc port came to be and some of the main features of the OSes. A good introduction to both operating systems and their innovations.

Comment Re:Strange Days (Score 1) 54

by greenfruitsalad (#64092905) Attached to: Fedora Asahi Remix Officially Released For Apple Silicon Macs

Apparently, a frozen in time mixture of Fedora and Centos Stream are used as the basis for Amazon Linux. Fedora CoreOS is also very popular as a host for containers. But Fedora as a desktop OS is not something I'd want to have. Too bleeding edge, too blob-free and too few packages. And by the time you finally make everything work, new release comes out and you start over. But it's fun to play with if you want to see the things that'll come to your normal distro in a year or two.

Submission + - Attack discovered against SSH (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by jd
jd writes: Ars Technica is reporting a newly-discovered man-in-the-middle attack against SSH. This only works if you are using "ChaCha20-Poly1305" or "CBC with Encrypt-then-MAC", so it isn't a universal flaw. The CVE numbers for this vulnerability are CVE-2023-48795, CVE-2023-46445, and CVE-2023-46446.

From TFA:

At its core, Terrapin works by altering or corrupting information transmitted in the SSH data stream during the handshake—the earliest stage of a connection, when the two parties negotiate the encryption parameters they will use to establish a secure connection. The attack targets the BPP, short for Binary Packet Protocol, which is designed to ensure that adversaries with an active position can't add or drop messages exchanged during the handshake. Terrapin relies on prefix truncation, a class of attack that removes specific messages at the very beginning of a data stream.

The Terrapin attack is a novel cryptographic attack targeting the integrity of the SSH protocol, the first-ever practical attack of its kind, and one of the very few attacks against SSH at all. The attack exploits weaknesses in the specification of SSH paired with widespread algorithms, namely ChaCha20-Poly1305 and CBC-EtM, to remove an arbitrary number of protected messages at the beginning of the secure channel, thus breaking integrity. In practice, the attack can be used to impede the negotiation of certain security-relevant protocol extensions. Moreover, Terrapin enables more advanced exploitation techniques when combined with particular implementation flaws, leading to a total loss of confidentiality and integrity in the worst case.

Comment Re:Alternative (Score 1) 203

I recently had to go to a mcdonalds to buy gluten free burger for my child as there was no gluten free alternative around (and we were travelling). I was surprised there were no cashiers, only touch sensitive kiosks. The only people I could see working there were a lady handing out ready meals, the cooks and the forced-smile-lady helping customers figure out the kiosks. It was very dystopian.

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