Comment Re:Which is it? (Score 1) 115
Well, one scenario is letting the hype get ahead of the capabilities, and do the 'AI store' experiment, but for real with responsibility for something actually important.
Another is that it is far easier to just screw things up than it is to make things work. I may not have it in me to make a house of cards, yet I can trivially even accidentally destroy a house of cards someone else built without a whiff of understanding.
The assessment of the capabilities based on bottom line certainly is subjective, which is precisely why Jensen Huang is so aggressively gung-ho about we must do everything we possibly can to spend more money on nvidia stuff. The motivation for Anthrophic seems either they have legitimate concerns or are looking to rationalize a plateau after promising the world. It certainly doesn't serve their bottom line to slow down otherwise.
Submission + - First Agentic AI Data Breach Reported to Spanish Regulator (securityweek.com)
Details remain limited, and researchers caution against assuming a “rogue AI” scenario. Still, the incident raises a consequential question for defenders: as attackers use agents to plan, execute, and adapt at machine speed, will traditional human-led detection and response remain fast enough?
Submission + - Why can't M$ get any UI/UX changes right? (pcmag.com)
Um, No...
The fundamental set of [lost] attributes that this "We brought Movable TaskBar back" lacks:
You can not control the position of the TaskBar on each desktop monitor--example: I have four displays on my desktop, three Landscape & one of which is in a Portrait orientation for reading documents.
With Windows7/8/10 you could position the TaskBar so that it was "Out of the way" and each display--on the right side of the right-most Landscape, on the left for the left-most Landscape display, & on the top/bottom for the Portrait. [same as my desktop on my Linux workstation]
Now you still get the same Taskbar alignment on all desktops.
You can not "resize" the taskbar. (well, you can--it has three sizes: too big, too small, and really way too small) For the previous three generations of the OS you could "Drag-Select" and resize the TaskBar to be the correct size for your needs on your desktop. [...just as I can on my KDE Desktop!]
With this implementation, 1/3 of the Taskbar real estate is consumed with "TaskBar-Tray Notification Icons."
Nobody asked for a partial, broken, re-implementation. The ask was: "Put it Back as it was!"
Dealing with M$ is pretty much like getting your 15 year old to do their chores on garbage night.
Submission + - Hackers Stole Flockâ(TM)s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks (404media.co)
Submission + - The 'Anti-AI' Panic Is Led by...AI Companies (hotair.com)
Submission + - Welcome to the Security Singularity (safety.google) 4
But here's the background of my funny story. My smartphone contract has a price structure linked to data usage. The least expensive tier is for less data (of course) so I try to use Wi-Fi as much as possible. No recent problems on that front in terms of using too much data.
Often I wind up using municipal Wi-Fi systems, but they are divided up into fairly small regions here. The login procedures vary quite a bit. Yesterday I was in a memorial museum doing a bit of research and that particular municipality has a somewhat different login system for their Wi-Fi. One of the options was to use my google account... Usually a convenient and quick approach.
But this time something caused the google to go berserk. Leading to hours of password changes and account recoveries and battles between my various computers and my smartphone and I'm pert' shure there's still more to come. No idea what the google thinks it is protecting me from, but the "convenient and quick approach" led to a major nightmare. In the end it appears my SIM was my only salvation?
Slashdot wants a URL, so I linked to the google's page on the topic. Doubleplusungood on steroids.
Submission + - Bipartisan support to blacklist Appin, a cyber espionage firm. (techdirt.com)
This week, Senators Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse, along with Rep. Pat Harrigan, sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, asking him to add Appin and several related companies to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) “Entity List” , the tool that effectively cuts foreign entities deemed national security threats off from American technology and American business partners.
Comment Re:Ploy to get competition to slow down. (Score 1) 94
Of the big players, I'd say OpenAI is at the biggest risk of not really able to even stumble straight ahead, presuming stumbling/charging straight ahead is in the cards for the companies in general.
Submission + - Scientists Create a New Form of Ice at 2,357 Degrees Celsius (sciencealert.com)
This superionic water ice is a deeply odd state of matter that's neither entirely solid nor entirely liquid. Its oxygen atoms remain fixed in a rigid crystal lattice, as they would in a solid. But the hydrogen nuclei are mobile, diffusing through that lattice more like particles in a liquid.
Researchers squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level – the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals.
Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.
What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins.
Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.
The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters: Observation of Hexagonal Close-Packed Water Ice at Conditions in Ice Giant Planetary Interiors
Comment Re:christmas lights (Score 4, Funny) 35
An AI without a kill switch will give you Max Headroom.
Submission + - Lawsuit challenges intimidation of DHS observers across the country (npr.org)
"The right of citizens to criticize and hold our government accountable is the backbone of American democracy – and it is under attack," Common Cause's vice president for litigation, Maryam Jazini Dorcheh, told NPR. "We want to make sure we're promoting participation in the political process. And obviously, if government officials are criminalizing peaceful observation, that hinders our mission," Jazini Dorcheh said.
The lawsuit describes disturbing encounters seven Common Cause members had with federal officers in Maryland, Minnesota and New Jersey after trying to observe immigration enforcement. They include being photographed, followed, reported to police, pepper-sprayed or threatened with a visit to their home by federal officers. Federal officers did show up at one Common Cause member's Minnesota home.
NPR did not receive an immediate response from DHS or DOJ about the lawsuit's allegations. The FBI declined to comment.
Submission + - Someone Made a Playable "Space Paranoids" From Tron (landonjsmith.com)
Submission + - Dark energy debunked? Cosmic acceleration may be an illusion (sciencedaily.com)
Comment Re:Get off my cyber lawn (Score 1) 28
It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.