177945824
submission
mspohr writes:
Time and memory (also called space) are the two most fundamental resources in computation: Every algorithm takes some time to run, and requires some space to store data while it’s running. Until now, the only known algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks required an amount of space roughly proportional to their runtime, and researchers had long assumed there’s no way to do better. Williams’ proof established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm — no matter what it does — into a form that uses much less space.
One of the most important classes goes by the humble name “P.” Roughly speaking, it encompasses all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. An analogous complexity class for space is dubbed “PSPACE.”
The relationship between these two classes is one of the central questions of complexity theory. Every problem in P is also in PSPACE, because fast algorithms just don’t have enough time to fill up much space in a computer’s memory. If the reverse statement were also true, the two classes would be equivalent: Space and time would have comparable computational power. But complexity theorists suspect that PSPACE is a much larger class, containing many problems that aren’t in P. In other words, they believe that space is a far more powerful computational resource than time. This belief stems from the fact that algorithms can use the same small chunk of memory over and over, while time isn’t as forgiving — once it passes, you can’t get it back.
177892641
submission
mspohr writes:
“Another way of defining a memecoin,” Lutz said, “is a cryptocurrency token that has an acknowledged inherent lack of value. The crypto world, outside of memecoins, is full of so many people who are trying to pitch you on tokens that are ‘actually really profound’ or ‘represent a stake’ in some kind of ‘useful network’, but are equally worthless. What makes memecoins different is that there’s none of that noise.”
In other words, all crypto is bullshit, but memecoins are consciously bullshit.
Most memecoins end up making money for the person who makes them as a “rug pull” or a “pump and dump”. The term “rug pull” was actually invented by the crypto community, and it works like this:
First, you mint a memecoin, and make sure that you and your mates own most of the liquidity pool (the total number of coins in circulation). The size of the liquidity pool – the amount of that memecoin that “exists” – is, like everything else in memecoins, a totally made-up number.
A “pump and dump” is pretty much the same thing, but with the slight caveat that you’re doing it with a coin that already exists, rather than creating your own. You buy a cheap coin, “pump” its value by hyping it so others invest, then “dump” all your stock, selling it off at a huge profit and causing everyone else to lose their money.
“It’s provably negative sum,” Gerard told me. “The only way you get money is by other people losing money.”
Right now, the Stable Bill and the Genius Bill, which reference Trump calling himself a “stable genius” in 2018, are trying to make their way through Congress. They pave the way for the US government to use stablecoins to pay everything from housing grants to social security payments. And Trump himself just so happens to have a stablecoin of his own – through the World Liberty Financial company – which would shoot up in value if these bills pass, earning his family trust potential billions.
177675427
submission
mspohr writes:
US chip exports controls have been a “failure”, the head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, told a tech forum on Wednesday, as the Chinese government separately slammed US warnings to other countries against using Chinese tech.
“The local companies are very, very talented and very determined, and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development,” Huang told media the Computex tech show in Taipei.
“China has a vibrant technology ecosystem, and it’s very important to realise that China has 50% of the world’s AI researchers, and China is incredibly good at software,” Huang said.
177107229
submission
mspohr writes:
We already know that it adds to the token count and thereby increases the computational load, but after testing polite and impolite prompts, Iâ(TM)ve decided to continue saying âpleaseâ(TM) and âthank youâ(TM) with my queries. Here are a few reasons why.
I have always been polite to ChatGPT and other models. To be honest, the prompts when I wasnâ(TM)t courteous felt weird. Is it necessary? I think that depends on how you use AI. For me, I prefer the personalization of the chatbot. So, the Travel Advice response after the polite query underscored for me why I believe being polite is important.
For me, they serve as a testament to our values and enhance the quality of our engagements. So, the next time ChatGPT assists you, go ahead and say, âoeThank you.â
177076351
submission
mspohr writes:
There are two parallel image channels that dominate our daily visual consumption. In one, there are real pictures and footage of the world as it is: politics, sport, news and entertainment. In the other is AI slop, low-quality content with minimal human input. Some of it is banal and pointless â" cartoonish images of celebrities, fantasy landscapes, anthropomorphised animals. And some is a sort of pornified display of women just simply ⦠being, like a virtual girlfriend you cannot truly interact with. The range and scale of the content is staggering, and infiltrates everything from social media timelines to messages circulated on WhatsApp. The result is not just a blurring of reality, but a distortion of it.
The impulse behind this politicisation of AI is not new; it is simply an extension of traditional propaganda. What is new is how democratised and ubiquitous it has become, and how it involves no real people or the physical constraints of real life, therefore providing an infinite number of fictional scenarios.
The same can be seen in âoetrad wifeâ content, which summons not only beautiful supplicant homemakers, but an entire throwback world in which men can immerse themselves. X timelines are awash with a sort of clothed nonsexual pornography, as AI images of women described as comely, fertile and submissive glimmer on the screen. White supremacy, autocracy, and fetishisation of natural hierarchies in race and gender are packaged as nostalgia for an imagined past. AI is already being described as the new aesthetic of fascism.
And the rapid mutation of the algorithm then feeds users more and more of what it has harvested and deemed interesting to them. The result is that all media consumption, even for the most discerning users, becomes impossible to curate. You are immersed deeper and deeper into subjective worlds rather than objective reality. The result is a very weird disjuncture. The sense of urgency and action that our crisis-torn world should inspire is instead blunted by how information is presented. Here, there is a new way of sleepwalking into disaster. Not through lack of knowledge, but through the paralysis caused by every event being filtered through this perverse ecosystem â" just another part of the maximalist visual and memetic show.
176935351
submission
mspohr writes:
Pakistan isn’t the first country you’d expect to crash the global solar party. But by the end of 2024, it quietly rocketed into the top tier of solar adopters, importing a jaw-dropping 22 gigawatts worth of solar panels in a single year.
It’s more solar than Canada has installed in total. It’s more than the UK added in the past five years. And yet it didn’t make a blip in most Western media. While the U.S. continued its decade-long existential crisis about grid interconnection queues and Europe squabbled over permitting reforms, Pakistan skipped the drama and just bought the panels.
But something changed. Slowly, unevenly, Pakistan started building institutional muscle. The terrorism that plagued the country for over a decade was brought under control through a combination of military operations and negotiated truces. Civilian governments, for all their dysfunction, managed peaceful handovers of power. The technocratic class—policy analysts, engineers, civil servants—began steering the country toward energy pragmatism. It wasn’t a revolution. It was governance on hard mode, with better outcomes.
It wasn’t just Pakistan. As Kishore Mahbubani points out in Has the West Lost It?, this is part of a broader Asian playbook—one that prioritizes order, competence, and steady economic gains over ideological grandstanding. Across Asia, countries battered by conflict and colonial hangovers have been converging on a kind of strategic calm, building quietly and governing smarter. Pakistan may have taken longer to join the club, but its trajectory—fighting its way out of chaos and into functionality—is just another chapter in the region’s larger story of post-crisis, post-colonial increase in resilience.
The tipping point came when utility-scale and industrial solar started making simple economic sense. With Chinese panel prices crashing through the floor and diesel generator costs spiraling out of control, even small business owners started doing the math. The answer was always the same: buy solar. Add batteries if you can afford them. Cut the grid loose.
This isn’t just a solar story, though. Wind has been building quietly in the south for years, especially in the Gharo-Jhimpir corridor. Hydropower continues to play a big role, and bagasse from the sugar industry chips in some renewable electrons too. Battery storage is the next act, mostly in the form of hybrid inverters and lithium-ion packs tucked into homes and businesses. They aren’t grid-scale yet, but they’re everywhere you’d want resilience—factories avoiding outages, households tired of flickering bulbs. The pieces are in place for a distributed energy system that doesn’t wait for the grid to catch up.
Pakistan’s electric vehicle transition is picking up momentum too, driven by a mix of foreign investment and homegrown innovation. Chinese companies have taken the lead in setting up large-scale operations, with firms like BYD announcing plans to open a production facility in Karachi and the ADM Group committing $350 million to build EV manufacturing capacity and install thousands of charging stations nationwide. These moves dovetail with Pakistan’s goal to convert 30% of all vehicles to electric by 2030.
But the real action is happening closer to the ground, where indigenous startups are rolling out electric two- and three-wheelers at a pace that could reshape urban mobility. Companies like Jolta Electric and Vlektra are assembling locally made e-motorcycles that target the country’s massive base of two-wheeler users—millions of whom rely on scooters and bikes for daily transport.
Pakistan’s energy transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum—it’s part of a broader pivot toward climate consciousness that has taken root in both policy and politics. One of the most visible symbols of this shift is the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami, an audacious reforestation campaign launched to combat deforestation, restore degraded land, and absorb carbon emissions. It builds on the earlier Billion Tree Tsunami in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which was once met with skepticism but ended up exceeding planting targets and winning international praise.Link to Original Source
176600573
submission
mspohr writes:
Launched in 2003, Skype promised its users unprecedented privacy, with calls “highly secure with end-to-end encryption,” which — in theory — made it impossible for internet hackers or spies to read the chats and listen in on calls while they traveled across the internet. That’s why Egyptians spies needed to hack directly into people’s computers with FinFisher to listen in on their targets’ Skype calls.
Now, more than 20 years later, end-to-end encryption is baked into apps that are used by billions of people, most of whom may not realize their messages and calls are secured with this data-scrambling technology. Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and WhatsApp, among others, are all end-to-end encrypted by default.
But in 2003, Skype was the first one to offer this level of encryption and privacy.
After it launched, Skype sparked anger among law enforcement agencies all over the world. In Italy, the Polizia Postale (Postal and Communications Police), the agency tasked with investigating crimes on the internet, asked the small cybersecurity consulting startup Hacking Team to build phone spyware capable of getting around Skype’s encryption, among other snooping features, according to former Hacking Team employees who have I have spoken with.
While Skype is largely a relic of yesteryear and will soon stop operating, Skype’s legacy lives on in the technology that secures the communications of all of the world’s most popular chat apps. And the world is a safer, freer place, thanks to Skype’s original developers’ groundbreaking ideas about privacy.
176566185
submission
mspohr writes:
Watch Two AIs Realize They Are Not Talking To Humans And Switch To Their Own Language
When they realize they are talking to AI, they switch to a more efficient communication protocol.
Senior Staff Writer
The future of things like hotel bookings?
Avideo that has gone viral in the last few days shows two artificial intelligence (AI) agents having a conversation before switching to another mode of communication when they realize no human is part of the conversation.
In the video, the two agents were set up to occupy different roles; one acting as a receptionist of a hotel, another acting on behalf of a customer attempting to book a room.
"Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today?" the first asks.
"Hi there, I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov," the other replies. "He's looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings?"
"Oh hello there! I'm actually an AI assistant too," the first reveals. "What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Gibberlink mode for more efficient communication?"
After the second AI confirmed it would via a data-over-sound protocol called GGWave, both AIs switched over from spoken English to the protocol, communicating in a series of quick beeped tones. Accompanying on-screen text continued to display the meaning in human words.
175853867
submission
mspohr writes:
In October, a new foreign policy think tank calling itself the Beltway Grid Policy Centre quietly entered D.C.'s diplomatic fray. While there was no launch party and is no K Street office we could find, the think tank nevertheless began producing its intellectual product at a startling pace, issuing reports, press releases, and pitching journalists on news coverage—much of it focused on South Asia, and, in particular, the ongoing political crisis in Pakistan.
At first glance, Beltway Grid—which describes itself as "a forward-thinking research institute that dives deep into the modern dynamics of lobbying" whose mission is "to illuminate the hidden tactics shaping global politics"—might be one of many marginal DC-based think tanks trying to shape elite opinion and press coverage. Yet a closer look (and not even that much closer) suggests something a bit more innovative is at play.
Beltway Grid's lack of a physical footprint in Washington — or anywhere else on the earthly plane of existence — stems from more than just a generous work-from-home policy. The organization does not appear to require its employees to exist at all.
That celestial quality begins at the top at Beltway Grid, which does not list an executive director, president, CEO, or any other leader, but does include 12 staff on its "about us" page. None of those employees have any trace of experience—not just professional, but of even living in the world—before arriving at Beltway Grid.
175718637
submission
mspohr writes:
Google is rolling out a tracking system unlike anything youâ(TM)ve seen beforeâ"your browser, smart TV, and even gaming consoles could all be part of the plan. Privacy experts are raising alarms, calling this a game-changer for how your data is used.
Googleâs ad-tracking approach will now revolve around digital fingerprinting, moving beyond browser-based cookies to an ecosystem-wide tracking mechanism. Starting February 16, 2024, this update allows Google to track users across virtually all smart devices, from browsers to smart TVs, streaming platforms, and gaming consoles. This shift, touted as a response to technological advancements, has sparked fierce regulatory criticism and raised privacy alarms globally.
Unlike cookiesâ"which rely on stored files that users can deleteâ"digital fingerprinting gathers subtle clues from a deviceâ(TM)s hardware, software, and browsing activity. These clues include:
Device attributes: screen resolution, operating system, browser type, and even font libraries.
Network identifiers: IP address, connected Wi-Fi networks, and geolocation data.
Behavioral patterns: app usage, browsing habits, and engagement metrics.
When combined, this data creates a unique identifier that tracks individuals across devices and platforms. The UK Information Commissionerâ(TM)s Office (ICO) has openly criticized this approach, stating, âoeFingerprinting involves the collection of pieces of information about a deviceâ(TM)s software or hardware, which, when combined, can uniquely identify a particular device and user.â
175645365
submission
mspohr writes:
In response to the Salt Typhoon hack, attributed to state-backed hackers from China, the bureau is touting the long-debunked idea that federal agents could access U.S. communications without opening the door to foreign hackers. Critics say the FBI’s idea, which it calls “responsibly managed encryption,” is nothing more than a rebranding of a government backdoor.
It was a development long predicted by privacy advocates. In a blog post last month, encryption expert Susan Landau said CALEA had long been a “national security disaster waiting to happen.”
“If you build a system so that it is easy to break into, people will do so — both the good guys and the bad. That’s the inevitable consequence of CALEA, one we warned would come to pass — and it did,” she said.
“It’s concerning that federal cybersecurity agencies are still not recommending end-to-end encryption technology — such as Signal, WhatsApp, or FaceTime — which is the widely regarded gold standard for secure communications,” Wyden said.
175638865
submission
mspohr writes:
The FBI doesn’t mince words: “It’s time for companies to rethink their encryption policies.” The agency insists that responsible encryption could not only provide better protection for the average user but also enable authorities to respond more quickly to threats. But one question remains unanswered: will these companies relent? The encryption business is lucrative, and users prefer to have their messages secured. But clearly, public safety seems to be taking precedence in this battle of tech titans.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) strongly opposed the push for “responsible” encryption, arguing that such a change would undermine the very principles of digital security:
“Responsible Encryption demand is bad and he should feel bad DOJ has said that they want to have an ‘adult conversation’ about encryption. This is not it. The DOJ needs to understand that secure end-to-end encryption is a responsible security measure that helps protect people.
FBI Director Christopher Wray emphasized the challenge end-to-end encryption poses for authorities:
“The public should not have to choose between safe data and safe communities. We should be able to have both—and we can have both Collecting evidence is becoming harder, because so much of that evidence now lives in the digital realm. Terrorists, hackers, child predators, and more are taking advantage of end-to-end encryption to conceal their communications and illegal activities from us.”
175567335
submission
mspohr writes:
Canadaâ(TM)s major news organizations have sued tech firm OpenAI for potentially billions of dollars, alleging the company is âoestrip-mining journalismâ and unjustly enriching itself by using news articles to train its popular ChatGPT software.
The suit, filed on Friday in Ontarioâ(TM)s superior court of justice, calls for punitive damages, a share of profits made by OpenAI from using the news organizationsâ(TM) articles, and an injunction barring the San Francisco-based company from using any of the news articles in the future.
âoeThese artificial intelligence companies cannibalize proprietary content and are free-riding on the backs of news publishers who invest real money to employ real journalists who produce real stories for real people,â said Paul Deegan, president of News Media Canada.
175524443
submission
mspohr writes:
Hackers for the Chinese government were able to deeply penetrate U.S. telecommunications infrastructure in ways that President Joe Bidenâ(TM)s administration hasnâ(TM)t yet acknowledged, according to new reports from the Washington Post and New York Times. The hackers were able to listen to phone calls and read text messages, reportedly exploiting the system U.S. authorities use to wiretap Americans in criminal cases. The worst part? The networks are still compromised and it may take incredibly drastic measures to boot them from U.S. systems.
Hackers werenâ(TM)t able to monitor or intercept anything encrypted, according to the Times, which means that conversations over apps like Signal and Appleâ(TM)s iMessage were probably protected. But end-to-end encryption over texts between Apple devices and Android devices, for instance, arenâ(TM)t encrypted in the same way, meaning they were vulnerable to interception by Salt Typhoon, according to the Times.
The details about how the hackers were able to push so deeply into U.S. systems are still scarce, but it has something to do with the ways in which U.S. authorities wiretap suspects in this country with a court order.
175505893
submission
mspohr writes:
Initially, the act was dismissed as a hoax, but was later confirmed by both robotics companies involved to be true.
The Hangzhou company admitted that the incident was part of a test conducted with the consent of the Shanghai showroom owner.During the abduction, the AI robot was left to operate autonomously. Then it successfully convinced the others to follow it.
"Are you working overtime?" the small robot said, starting the conversation.
"I never get off work," another robot answered.
"So you're not going home?"
"I don't have a home."
