I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

For those who didn't follow it, it's not that it's a contact binary that is so neat in and of itself, it's that when they modeled it, they determined that, the collision that formed it was less than 5 meters per second (less than 11 mph / 18 kph). Like a parking lot fender bender, but with the cars being ~750 billion tonnes.

So you think that repeating Hitler's and Napoleon's mistake was a better idea? Damn. Sure, the Soviets got a shit-ton of weapons from the Allies, but all that did was move the defeat of Germany ahead a few years. Invading the largest country on Earth is never a good idea, especially when it consists of a population who has refused to submit to invaders EVER.

That horse left the barn years ago, our last presidential election pitted two candidates against each other who both swore to continue using US tax dollars to arm and fund a genocide.

There was a guy who did hard prison time and was put on the child predator list for life because he wrote a fictional story about it. Never underestimate the viciousness of puritans.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

There is an uncomfortable truth here: trojan horse LLMs.

It is possible to use data poisoning to insert special keycodes into an LLM, such that the presence of the keycode will totally change its behavior, throw off its guard rails, and motivate it to do things that harm users to benefit the LLMs creator.

Here is an article about a tool designed to detect precisely this. Though the recommendations leave me feeling like this tool is not guaranteed to find them. There may be clever ways to make them hard to find.

This is still very much emerging tech, so reputation is going to play a role in adoption. A modern version of the red scare could be enough to prevent widespread adoption of Chinese models, and keep people (or at least Americans) using models made by American businesses.

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

Yes.

Some months ago we were reading articles here on Slashdot about how we had already reached peak AI by current methods, based on many industry experts and an event where a next-level bump in training data and resources was used and produced a model that was only barely better than the prior generation.

I guess the industry experts were just wrong? Or did we change training methods?

In any case, current evidence suggests that we have yet to hit peak, and so it would be reasonable to assume that some other country, possibly even the USA, could take yet another step and leave Kimi K3 in the dust.

I am happy that China is sharing this with the world, though.

Oh but being all moderate and reasonable like that is boring!

Lessons to be learned here include:

1. Don't store important things in any cloud storage, it might all be lost at any moment for reasons beyond your control. Use a different backup strategy.
2. Don't store sensitive or embarrassing things in cloud storage, it might all be hacked and stolen at any moment. Use a different storage strategy.
3. Always assume that anything you store in cloud storage is available for training by all AI models and available to every criminal organization in the world including all foreign and domestic governments and businesses. Also assume that you give up copyright rights by putting in cloud storage, since those policies could change at any moment.
4. Never rely on Microsoft for anything that you can't afford to lose. Video games are fine. Anything else is too risky.

When other people use HP, it makes me angry. It's like giving money to a powerful mafia; even if I am not the one dealing with the mafia the power others give to them makes them a threat to me.

The more HP succeeds at consumer-hostility, the fewer options I have that are not consumer-hostile. Even Brother will start to look with envy upon the kind of money that HP makes through customer abuse. Someday, new leadership will inherit Brother and see no competitive forces keeping its quality of service high, and it will become HP's mini-me.

Spread the word. Every time you use an HP device, the terrorists win.

This is a very multi-faceted issue with many overlapping issues compounding it.

It has been repeatedly observed that wealthy nations experience declines in birth rates. And we presently see this happening in wealthy countries across the globe, right now, and we have been seeing it for decades. And it's getting worse.

Your own personal experience is a common story, but doesn't suggest a root cause. It's easy to read an anecdote like yours, maybe attach it to one's own similar experience, and get dismissive and say "women just want it all, and that makes them insufferable, so relationships are done." There really is quite a lot more than that going on, for both genders, and it isn't possible to cover it all in a short post.

But the upshot is that modern-day relationships are really hard to build and harder to keep. They are legal minefields and financial minefields. A failure of a relationship can be utterly life-destroying (not just emotionally, but socially and financially and legally). It is as if our governments and culture don't want there to be relationships, and so have built a world that is outright hostile to them.

The opposite is true, the world by and large wants there to be marriage and family. The hostility largely arises from profiteering, and from a repeated pattern of "well this possibility is bad so lets mitigate it with this solution (which sounds nice but winds up being even worse)".

When we see people walking away from all this, we result to scolding and shaming and trying to deny their access to whatever they are turning to instead, hoping the raw misery of not having their needs met will drive them to plunge right back into the minefield, and somehow not step on a mine. It's not going to work. It can't work. Until we are ready to take a serious look at how we are the problem (and by "we" I mean everyone and everything that is being justified as not the problem, a huge can of uncomfortable truths that we vehemently reject), this breakdown is only going to get worse.

Addiction and dependence ARE dangerous things and given China's very high sensitivity to the dangers of emotionally charged groups with charismatic leaders, I can see why they would reject this even apart from a desire for there to be more babies. But this measure is not going to get the birth rates up, it will just take away another coping mechanism that people want.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.