Comment Is it even relevant? (Score 1) 37
Is it even relevant when the government doesn't seem to give a flying fart for any kind of law?
Submission + - R.I.P. Mythos and Fable - murdered by the US government (towardsai.net)
hherb writes: On the afternoon of June 12, 2026, at 5:21 p.m. Eastern, Anthropic received a letter. By the time most of the world noticed, two of its frontier models (Fable 5 and its less censored Mythos 5) had gone dark for every user, everywhere. Not throttled or regionally restricted. Disabled.
The instrument was a U.S. government export-control directive, issued under national-security authorities, ordering Anthropic to cut off all access to those models "by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States". This is category so broad it swept in Anthropic's own non-American employees. The only way to comply was to pull the plug for everyone.
Anthropic said so plainly and complied within hours, while disputing the basis for the order: the government's stated concern, as far as Anthropic could reconstruct it, traced to a narrow technique for getting the model to read a codebase and point out software flaws-a capability the company noted is widely available in other deployed models and used every day by the defenders who keep systems running.
This might be the final straw, the lesson the world needed to be taught to never again depend on any US facility and accelerate digital sovereignty.
https://pub.towardsai.net/rip-...
The instrument was a U.S. government export-control directive, issued under national-security authorities, ordering Anthropic to cut off all access to those models "by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States". This is category so broad it swept in Anthropic's own non-American employees. The only way to comply was to pull the plug for everyone.
Anthropic said so plainly and complied within hours, while disputing the basis for the order: the government's stated concern, as far as Anthropic could reconstruct it, traced to a narrow technique for getting the model to read a codebase and point out software flaws-a capability the company noted is widely available in other deployed models and used every day by the defenders who keep systems running.
This might be the final straw, the lesson the world needed to be taught to never again depend on any US facility and accelerate digital sovereignty.
https://pub.towardsai.net/rip-...
Comment OUCH! Doesn't instill much confidence (Score 1) 65
"""Nobody was aware that you can recreate audio from a picture," a spokesperson for the board said. " """ - OUCH! Doesn't instill much confidence in their competence. Should be bleedingly obvious that the image of a spectrogram has got all the information needed
Submission + - We're Building Neal Stephenson's Primer. We need your help. (github.com)
hherb writes: https://github.com/hherb/prime...
In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer changes the life of a street kid named Nell. It doesn't teach her by lecturing. It teaches her by telling stories that respond to her life, asking questions that force her to think, and never once dumbing things down. It meets her where she is and walks beside her as she figures things out.
Thirty years later, we have the technology to build it. So we are.
The Primer is an open-source Socratic AI learning companion for children aged 5 to 14. It runs today as a desktop application and text REPL in Rust, holds real conversations with children, and is designed from the ground up to eventually run on a battery-powered handheld device with no internet required.
It's AGPL-3.0 licensed. Every line of code is public. And we need contributors: especially for languages beyond English and German. There is a fabulous manual for developers wanting to jump in: https://github.com/hherb/prime...
In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer changes the life of a street kid named Nell. It doesn't teach her by lecturing. It teaches her by telling stories that respond to her life, asking questions that force her to think, and never once dumbing things down. It meets her where she is and walks beside her as she figures things out.
Thirty years later, we have the technology to build it. So we are.
The Primer is an open-source Socratic AI learning companion for children aged 5 to 14. It runs today as a desktop application and text REPL in Rust, holds real conversations with children, and is designed from the ground up to eventually run on a battery-powered handheld device with no internet required.
It's AGPL-3.0 licensed. Every line of code is public. And we need contributors: especially for languages beyond English and German. There is a fabulous manual for developers wanting to jump in: https://github.com/hherb/prime...
Comment competition unwanted (Score 2) 42
Corporates do not like competition. The USA (sort of a corporate muscle) wants to keep its monopoly on spying on the world's telecommunication, and the competition (e.g. the Chinese) want a piece of the pie too
Comment Re:Directional antennas? (Score 1) 183
Plain old GPS is not accurate enough for aircraft which want accurate elevation and location data while traveling at high speed. Aircraft use a ground based supplemental signal known as WAAS to correct the natural errors in GPS. Without WAAS enabled GPS is not certified for primary navigation. I suspect that it is the WAAS correction factors that are being spoofed not the satellite signal.
Comment Google becoming more and more evil (Score 0) 12
I am old enough to remember when google was still the company that "does no evil". How I yearn for those golden days long gone by...
Comment Re:That's socialized medicine for ya! (Score 1) 212
The US is ranked last among developed nations in terms of health care rankings, including health outcome: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/0...
https://www.commonwealthfund.o...
If you measure innovation as number of patents granted, then the US patent and economic system will almost invariably produce the highest number. If you measure it in terms of groundbreaking innovations (including those with no immediate commercial application or gain), the USA don't fare that well. Furthermore, do not forget that a substantial part of innovation including Nobel prices by USA citizens/residents were obtained by recent immigrants that had their schooling (often publicly funded) in other countries.
If you measure groundbreaking innovation / capita, countries such as Norway (which incidentally ranks #1 in health care) still beat the USA.
Comment Imperial Fear Mongers (Score 1) 348
Fact is, excess mortality mass not increased anywhere yet with omicron - and especially in South Africa, there has already been enough time for it to rise: https://www.samrc.ac.za/report...
Time will show, but so far no cause for alarm.
Comment Why do they use the term "libertarian" ? (Score 1) 320
Why do they use the term "libertarian" for a dystopian feudalistic system?
This is obviously a system of corporate totalitarianism with a token citizen representation - the defining majority of 6 are the 4 corporate appointees plus the two biggest land owners
Comment Old Guy Reminising (Score 1) 252
Remember the days when we could have blamed this kind of outage on having the site make the front page of Slashdot and the servers buckle under the load? Ah, the good old days
Comment Re:Corporate Arrogance (Score 0) 91
Same as now you can't even get a facebook account unless you own a cell phone.
Burner phone costs you, what, $10?
Comment Re:Not just at work (Score 1) 579
transgenderism is a profound gender dysphoria
[Citation Needed]
Comment Re:Trump will win (Score 1) 579
After we turn socialist overnight what then?
The joke is that those who are afraid of "turning socialist" are completely ignorant of what socialism actually is, let alone characteristics of other political/socioeconomic philosophies. In their world of alternative facts, all they know is a cartoon beatbox version of socialism, where no one owns anything and the government takes away everyone's freedom to do whatever you want.
It is not possible to have a rational constructive discussion with folks who don't care about facts and who do not care to learn said facts. "Biden hates America" and "Obama was born in Kenya" are opinions that are neither based in reality nor serious.
"Trump said he was going to build a border wall and make Mexico pay for it. He didn't do either" is based upon facts and reality.
Comment Re:Read the articles carefully before panicking (Score 1) 218
Indeed. T-cell mediated immunity might not only be more important than circulating antibody mediated immunity, it also seems that it is much longer lasting AND much more prevalent: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020... (Sekine et al: Robust T cell immunity in convalescent individuals with asymptomatic or mild COVID-19)
I wish this fear mongering sensationalism would stop and people would start a fact based discussion of covid-19.
