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Comment Massive size. (Score 2) 29

This is a very cool and worthy project but damn if they didn't build this thing terribly because it's 179 gigabytes. I would love to tell you why exactly it's bloated as hell (I have some good guesses) but I can't even view the contents because you have to download it as a 127GiB zip file! To be honest, I'm pretty sure about 5GiB is actual OS data while the rest is an ungodly amount of packaging.

I have no doubt there is a better way to accomplish this task because this is obscene.

Submission + - Maryland Governor Signs K-12 AI Bill Under Microsoft's Watchful Eye

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Thank you, Gov. Wes Moore, for signing SB 720 into law yesterday!" exclaimed Microsoft Sr. Director of Education and Workforce Policy Allyson Knox in a LinkedIn post celebrating the passage of the Artificial Intelligence Ready Schools Act. "Microsoft was proud to support this legislation, and I was honored to represent the company at yesterday’s bill signing at the Maryland State House. This law accomplishes the following: 1) Establishes statewide AI guidance for schools ... 2) Requires every district to have an AI plan ... 3) Builds teacher capacity and professional learning ... 4) Promotes AI literacy for students ... 5) Creates tools to evaluate AI technologies ... 6) Establishes a statewide AI Education Collaborative." At the same bill-signing ceremony, Gov. Moore paradoxically also signed into law the Phone-Free Schools Act, "prohibiting the use of certain electronic communication devices by a student during the academic school day."

Knox reports up to Microsoft President Brad Smith, who last July told Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi it was time for the tech-backed K-12 CS education nonprofit to "switch hats" from coding to AI as Microsoft announced its new $4 billion Microsoft Elevate initiative to advance AI education. The Maryland State Department of Education is one of many government agencies that are participating in Code.org's Microsoft-advised TeachAI initiative. Code.org also took to social media to celebrate the Maryland win, proclaiming that "Maryland just made AI and CS Education the law."

Interestingly, Maryland's commitment to K-12 AI comes in the same week as the NY Times reports a $22.5 million AI partnership to 'bring AI into the classroom' struck last July between the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, Microsoft, and OpenAI has hit a bump in the road as the AFT urges schools to curb AI chatbots and screen time, recommending 'no screens' at all for those in second grade or younger, and no AI chatbots for students in elementary school. AFT president Randi Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for AI use in schools with 'our partners in the AI academy,' and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards. "We’re willing to walk away from the funding that we receive here if we don’t get the safety and privacy," Weingarten said.

Comment Re:Should be required by law. (Score 1) 42

I guess this must depend on the specific customer.

I'm thinking about people in general, not technically inclined individuals like those at Slashdot. Slashdot's audience is far from general, so assume people are tech illiterate, since that is a target demographic for this device.

what would "using the device as they please" mean in this case?

I suppose it would mean enabling other websites to make purchasing ebooks on the device a trivial task. Maybe add a selection menu of shops (that can be modified of course) in place of the way you buy on amazon, similar to how MS was forced to let people choose which browser to use in the EU.

Submission + - The oral tradition that built software may not survive AI (fastcompany.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Writing software is not just about knowing what to code. Verbally passing on knowledge of why something is done one way or the other, how to diagnose an issue, or what changes took place after implementation because no one documented those changes has been part of programming since day one. However, with the advent of AI, that institutional knowledge may be under threat.

It’s tempting therefore to imagine that generative AI will step into the breach and solve this for us. After all, even if you don’t want to turn a large language model (LLM) loose on a legacy code base—and there are plenty of reasons that you shouldn’t—having it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you.

But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there’s a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I’m writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision.

Moreover, it’s a chance for somebody else to understand why you did what you did. If they plan to change what I wrote (especially in a few years), they might understand why I needed to write it that way and what might be lost if you take it out. An LLM can read code that I’ve written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it’s doing. But it can’t assess authorial intent.

Comment Re:The DNC is not socialist or communist (Score 1) 5

by damn_registrars (#66163570) Attached to: A silver lining - will Trumpism bring about understanding?
I've seen people make that argument before, that there is no difference. You can make that argument if you want, but if you can't provide a viable candidate then you're not helping anything.

Let me be extra direct here. I have never seen a candidate in a race I could vote in that I agreed with 100%. Frankly anytime I meet someone who tells me they agree with a politician 100% of the time I tend to want to tell them they need their head examined (unless they are themselves a politician, in which case doubly so). Even politicians like Bernie Sanders I don't agree with 100% of the time.

Complaining about the rules is not productive. We've seen what the SCOTUS will do about such arguments, we can't get help from them either. The only way to advance is to support someone who will actually do something useful. Pretending that they all do the same shit doesn't help either; there are meaningful platform differences. Just because Drumpf has held every position on every issue doesn't mean he doesn't stand for anything, either - he's actually followed through on some of his (very worst) initial promises.

Submission + - China Is Testing Its State Surveillance Model Abroad (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: When a remote Pacific village asked for help with rowdy youth, the Chinese police arrived with a surveillance system. Then came the backlash.

Their solution was to introduce an obscure Mao-era community surveillance system: the Fengqiao Experience.

Named after Fengqiao, a town in eastern China, the system encouraged neighbors to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies. The system has been revived under Mr. Xi as part of a push to snuff out any challenges to the Chinese Communist Party.

In China, the system calls for the police to monitor individual households in sprawling apartment complexes, in one example assigning each unit a color code that denoted whether occupants presented a security risk. The police have also visited the homes of minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to promote party policies. Government workers have visited churches to give “anti-cult” lectures. And companies are required to register their employees in police databases.

The idea of introducing such a heavy-handed style of state surveillance in the Solomon Islands alarmed local politicians and observers in nearby countries like Australia, who worried it could give the government the tools to stifle freedoms.

The Fengqiao pilot was suspended after an outcry. And the election this month of Matthew Wale, a prime minister who has historically been skeptical of Beijing, raises questions about China’s foothold in the country, and whether its ideas travel as easily as the party hopes.

Comment This helps EU digital sovereignty? (Score 1) 16

I can't help but think some of the higher ups will have a problem with this. The EU has started making a push for "digital sovereignty" so it seems like it would be a massive conflict to turn over control of key infrastructure like communications to a foreign company.

However, I could see this going through if the deal is for one or more EU companies to use them to bounce their own connection signals. Relying on foreign companies would still represent a potential single point of failure but this also creates the possibility of developing your EU satellites while building out the local infrastructure and accruing users. Using starlink/amazon satellites on a temporary basis would buy EU officials the time to make the economic case to develop EU owned satellites. It would effectively solve the "horse before the cart" issue that comes with deploying expensive satellites with no supporting infrastructure/users.

Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said EU-wide satellite connectivity was "synonymous with resilience, security, and capability" given the current geopolitical context.

Security and capability, maybe... but resilience? the only way this is improving resilience is if it's merely a fallback option. Satellite communications are a poor option for dependable consumer communications as it's impacted by the weather and easily jammed. It can only improve resilience if it's solely used as a fallback option.

Comment Re:Death of security (Score 1) 74

by Gravis Zero (#66162046) Attached to: Mythos Detected 23,000 Vulnerabilities Across 1,000 OSS Projects

When the pace of bug discovery overwhelms the capacity to patch, and the discovery tools are available to... well, everybody... doing any business online is fraught with peril.

Kinda sounds like the online businesses need to start being financial contributors to ensure they are not relying on flawed software.

Besides, bugs are finite.

Mythos found only one low-severity vulnerability in Curl, with experts debating whether that is a failure of the AI model or a testament to the open source data transfer tool’s maturity.

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