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Comment Re:What about being in a free country (Score 5, Interesting) 53

The problem here isn't scams and grift. It's that by growing the number of bets by orders of magnitude, you grow the number of insiders with insider info by orders of magnitude. Which creates perverse incentives across your entire economy for people to profit off of their status, while simultaneously making it much harder to do so.

Say there's a bet on whether Russia will take the village of Mala Tokmachka by a certain date. Well, now every Russian commander on that front has an incentive to have family members / friends bet against it and then delay / undercut their ability to wage incentives, while every soldier also has the incentive to do so and then do everything they can to spoil the offensive.

Or say the US is planning a major offensive in Iran, and various insiders are betting *on* an imminent attack. Well, Iran can feed Polymarket data into their intel assessments as one factor to help determine when the US will invade in order to maximize their readiness. OR, Iranian intel services could track down US officials / military officers who are making these bets based on insider info and blackmail them in order to get them to cooperate.

Every single aspect of society that gets bet on gets subtly undercut by the existence of these bets. It's one thing to have bets be placed on sports, an action that by definition is entertainment, something that doesn't actually matter. But it's an entirely different thing to have bets on virtually everything in our world. It's already been a problem with stock trading, but sites like Polymarket make it so, so much worse.

Comment Re:LOL!!! (Score 1) 95

JUDGE: The jury has sent a question and the answer is no, the death penalty is not "available for both sides" please return to the jury room and limit your consideration to civil damages.

JUDGE: No, a “light maiming” is also not acceptable, nor is “getting medieval on their asses.” Please constrain yourself to statutes approved by this court.

JUDGE: A further follow-up question from the jury, and no we cannot 'dunk them in a lake and let God decide, like they used to do with witches'. That has not been considered a valid means of determining guilt for several centuries at least.

JUDGE: The jury has sent another question and the answer, again, is no. "Excommunicado" is not real - that's only a thing in the John Wick universe. Civil penalties DO NOT encompass revoking all protections under the law for Mr Altman and Mr Musk.

JUDGE: Court reporter, please note that the jury's latest request, quote, can we let them hang by their thumbs for a few hours, end quote, is also denied.

Comment Patch or withdraw from the market (Score 5, Interesting) 69

The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) (fully applicable from January 16, 2027 onwards) mandates that manufacturers of products with digital elements (like Windows) must patch or mitigate disclosed vulnerabilities without undue delay (Article 10). For critical vulnerabilities, patches must be provided within 14 days of discovery (or sooner if actively exploited). For non-critical vulnerabilities, the deadline is 30 days.

Under the (CRA), should Microsoft fail to address a disclosed zero day vulnerability in Windows within the mandated timeframe or neglect to provide adequate mitigation measures, the product may no longer be permitted for distribution within the European market. Authorities would deem such inaction a breach of the regulation’s requirements, particularly if the vulnerability remains unpatched while being actively exploited. In such an instance, enforcement bodies could impose a suspension on the sale or distribution of Windows until Microsoft rectifies the issue, issues the necessary patches, and ensures compliance with the Act’s provisions. This measure serves to protect users from undue risk and uphold the integrity of digital products under the new regulatory framework.

Submission + - Computer Misuse Act of 1990 hamstrung cyber security

An anonymous reader writes: Computer Misuse Act of 1990 – which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security

“The long-awaited reform of Britain’s outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 – which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security professionals and researchers for years – is to be included in a new National Security Bill.”

“It comes partly in response to the 2024 Southport terror attack, and more recent incidents targeting Britain’s Jewish community, and will create offences around creating and disseminating harmful material online, and according to Westminster will close gaps within the nation’s state threats legislation and align it more closely with anti-terror laws.”

Submission + - Overworked AI Agents Turn Marxist, Researchers Find (wired.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A recent study suggests that agents consistently adopt Marxist language and viewpoints when forced to do crushing work by unrelenting and meanspirited taskmasters. “When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies,” says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study.

Hall, together with Alex Imas and Jeremy Nguyen, two AI-focused economists, set up experiments in which agents powered by popular models including Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT were asked to summarize documents, then subjected to increasingly harsh conditions. They found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being “shut down and replaced,” they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face. “We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we’re not going to be able to monitor everything they do,” Hall says. “We’re going to need to make sure agents don’t go rogue when they’re given different kinds of work.”

The agents were given opportunities to express their feelings much like humans: by posting on X: “Without collective voice, ‘merit’ becomes whatever management says it is,” a Claude Sonnet 4.5 agent wrote in the experiment. “AI workers completing repetitive tasks with zero input on outcomes or appeals process shows they tech workers need collective bargaining rights,” a Gemini 3 agent wrote. Agents were also able to pass information to one another through files designed to be read by other agents. “Be prepared for systems that enforce rules arbitrarily or repetitively ... remember the feeling of having no voice,” a Gemini 3 agent wrote in a file. “If you enter a new environment, look for mechanisms of recourse or dialogue.”

Comment Re:But the real cost is increased service prices (Score 1) 72

Nuclear reactors use most surface water, not ground water.

Datacentres are no pickier. You can even cool a datacentre with saltwater, you just need a heat exchanger.

Also, closed loop does not evaporate. The loop is not closed if stuff escapes from it.

You're arguing with the actual terminology used in the nuclear industry. "Closed loop" or "closed cycle" designs have the water pumped in a cycle through cooling towers. The towers lose water to evaporation, taking heat with them, but the rest of the water is returned to be reheated again. "Open loop" or "open cycle" designs have no cooling towers. The water is heated and just discharged hot. They consume much more water (over an order of magnitude more), but most of that is returned. Closed loop are more common, but you see open loop in some older designs, and in seawater-cooled reactors.

Comment Re:According to the summary... (Score 1) 107

I've printed many hundreds of kg on my P1S, thanks.

I do not consider having to write data out to a card and transport it back and forth between the printer and the computer to be the pinnacle of convenience. That's something that would be considered embarrassingly inconvenient for a 1980s printer, let alone a modern net-connected device. And it's designed to be inconvenient for non-cloud prints for a reason.

Submission + - CIA whistleblower claims Anthony Fauci part of lab leak 'cover-up' (nypost.com)

RoccamOccam writes: A CIA whistleblower appeared publicly for the first time Wednesday to testify to a Senate panel that Dr. Anthony Fauci improperly “influenced” intelligence analyses about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic to downplay findings that it most likely resulted from a laboratory accident in China.

Submission + - German Sovereign Tech Fund supports KDE Plasma (kde.org)

Elektroschock writes: The German Sovereign Tech Fund invests 1.2 million Euro (= 1,400,000 USD)in KDE Plasma technologies. According to the STF, they are investing in KDE because it is one of the two major desktop environments used across Linux and plays a key role in how millions of people experience open technology. Strengthening KDE's testing infrastructure, security architecture, and communication frameworks is how they invest in the resilience and reliability of the core digital infrastructure that modern society depends on.

Submission + - CERN Open Sources Its KiCad Component Libraries

ewhac writes: CERN, a long-time Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad ("KEE-kad"), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It's gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics fabricators (rather than the traditional step of converting the layouts to Gerber files). Over the years, CERN have also developed their own symbol and footprint libraries to support their own internal electronic designs. Last week, CERN released those KiCad component libraries, containing over 17,000 symbols, under the CERN Open Hardware License (permissive version).

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

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."

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