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Comment Re:Avoiding bubble collapse consequences (Score 1) 146

Spot on, well said.

Also his family is invested in these zany ventures and 'can't' lose out.

Making them part of the MIC ensures endless graft.

Ted Postol has a good analysis of the Patriot PAC-3 and shows how the vendor has failed to tell the truth about their systems for decades while collecting endless taxpayer funds based on the lies.

Soldiers die, we get poor, they get rich. Zoomers aren't having any of it.

Submission + - America PAC's VoteSafe.org is nothing but a honeypot (cybernews.com)

echo123 writes: Elon Musk’s bogus voter registration website is collecting extensive user data and selling it.

The website was funded by Musk and is operated by America PAC, a conservative political action committee founded in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The VoteSafe.org website has been promoted as a way for Americans to register to vote and check their registration ahead of the November midterm elections.

But MeidasTouch and Snopes found that despite presenting itself as a voter-registration resource, the site doesn’t actually register users to vote.

The site's privacy policy says America PAC can collect information, including:

        Users' names
        Dates of birth
        Addresses
        Email addresses
        Phone numbers
        IP addresses
        Location
        Information about how they interact with the site

It also permits the collection of "inferences" about users, including their preferences, characteristics, behavior, attitudes, and psychological tendencies.

The policy says the information may be shared with or sold to business partners for targeted marketing.
 

Comment Re: Rust designed to mitigate limitations found in (Score 1) 90

Wrong again.

Moreover, many of the big complex systems I've worked on were big and complex mainly because OOP nitwits had designed them. They often didn't understand how computers actually work, lost sight of the fact that they were writing a computer program, and spewed out frameworks that filled countless gigabytes of resident memory with endlessly deep layers of nothingburger abstractions. Maybe that didn't matter so much when memory was cheap, but that's no longer the case.

If you think that there's only one way to deal with large data sets, you're a just noob that needs more experience before spouting your theories.

Submission + - Fruit fly beats advanced AI at chess in just 11 moves (nypost.com)

alternative_right writes: The lowly fruit fly just beat one of the worldâ(TM)s most advanced AI models at chess.

Thatâ(TM)s just one of dozens of wild experiments that have gone viral since scientists fully mapped the neural pathways of an adult male fruit fly â" whose entire brain fits on the head of a pin â" and posted the data online.

The threshold-crossing technology, achieved by HHMI Janelia Research in Virginia and Google Research, catalogued all 166,000 individual neurons and 25.6 million connections in the flyâ(TM)s brain and made it downloadable on Sept 3.

Inventive nerds then used the digitized neural network to power and navigate a wide variety of contraptions, apps and games.

Creator Maxime Labonne hooked the mapped pathways up to a chess engine and pitted it against Claude Opus 5, which is one of the most advanced AI models on the market.

The fly delivered a checkmate in just 11 moves.

Submission + - Upgrading a 29y old debian install from spinning rust to rPi5 and N355 mini PC

marcmerlin writes: If you are interested in the story of upgrading a 28 year old debian install with raids of spinning rust drives from 2TB with 26 SCSI SCA drives to 60TB of SATA spinning rust to 18 4TB SSDs to save power and move off randomly failing drives, this first upgrade story shows a failed attempt with a raspberry pi5 which could not sustain a 4way M2 PCI splitter and 18 SSDs: https://marc.merlins.org/perso...

But this second attempt with a 4 M2 NVME CWWK N355 mini server, worked. Amazing how small those servers are now and what they can do with barely more power use: https://marc.merlins.org/perso...

Also, hat to debian for having allowed me to run the same Linux install for 29 years without any re-install

Submission + - U.S. almost attacked Chinese ship over hallucinated AI nuclear arms report (cnn.com)

fahrbot-bot writes: CNN is reporting that an AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack on a Chinese ship.

The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.

The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.

It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.

The report, according to one of the sources, was “entirely false.” But it also “almost started a war,” the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.

The kind of “hallucination” that the tool used by the analyst in this case conjured has not been an isolated incident across the intelligence community since these tools began proliferating across government, according to one of the sources.

Comment Re:Rust designed to mitigate limitations found in (Score 1) 90

Dr. Dobb's Digest March 2009: The Safe C Library

Dr. Dobb's Journal March 1991: Array bounds checking with Turbo C

The ideal for memory safety is to have an air-tight pressure vessel.

With C, you're starting that task with a colander. You've managed to fill two of the colander's holes with silicone caulk. Congratulations.

Comment Re:The brilliance of our tech overlords (Score 5, Insightful) 179

Facebook launched the day after DARPA shut down Digital LifeLog and was funded directly by Peter Thiel. It's been connected to all the intelligence agencies since its founding. He doesn't actually need to make money. That's not the point. I deleted my Facebook years ago and everyone still says shit like "Didn't you see it on my Facebook?" How?! People are oblivious, and it's still used for nearly all small business instead of actual web pages. It's not going anywhere and it already has full capture.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 45

Engineers need to remember that time exists.

You have three months to teach a teen how to control a robot with a microcontroller.

OK, how much of that do you budget to CS and assembly?

Month 1: Architecture and data structures? You have 18 40 minute periods and maybe homework assignments.

Half of the class won't even gain mastery in that time. By time your class is over they will still be having memory management problems.

So then you've failed to achieve the goal.

There are engineers who remember that time exists and for the rest we have engineering managers. Not ideal, just how it is.

To be sure engineering schools are doing a bad job at teaching reality. Even in a dx/dr environment, it's so weird.

Submission + - When and why black holes burp (theguardian.com)

Bruce66423 writes: 'Scientists have solved the mystery of when black holes “burp” – when the astronomical bodies launch jets after feeding on stars, blasting material enormous distances in space.

'Scientists know from rare observations of stars being torn apart by black holes – a process that involves a stretching effect known as “spaghettification” – that “only about half of the star that gets too close to the back hole will end up eventually being swallowed by that black hole”, Goodwin said.

'The other material is launched back into space in powerful jets and outflows, sometimes so large they “can influence the entire evolution of a galaxy”, she said. “You can think of it as a black hole burp.”'

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