The organisation, after Musk took over, became a cesspit of far-right extremism, in which anything the far-right "disagreed" with (such as facts and other inconveniences) were censored.

The EFF has, by this announcement, basically said that censorship did not bother them at all, that extremism did not bother them at all, that death threats against the left didn't bother them, that the only thing they were bothered by was the fact that the intellectuals had all left.

That does not give me overwhelming confidence in the EFF as being concerned with freedom.

Your Example Dell PC doesn't "need your leftover keyboard, mouse, and monitor", because Dell is happy to sell you new ones if you'd rather not supply your own.

Mac Mini is the same.

Which it was.

Yeah, I read through those... and found that while it described a vulnerability, it was still light on actual exploit details.

Did they compromise the inward facing web interface, or an outward web interface? Did they do it through social engineering, or through malware running on devices on the internal network? Was the malware persistent or was it a drive-by instance running a portscanner in a browser instance?

Basically, the question I have is - would flashing say, openWRT on these devices been enough to prevent network intrusion, or were they already inside the gates to begin with?

Current base price for a Mac Mini is $599. So, there's that.

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

Since pertinent information was withheld (that it didn't know), then by your own post you acknowledge it was a lie of omission.

The stupidity of people these days is truly beyond belief. And, yes, get the f off my lawn.

We learned back in the 80s that trying to get a neural net to emphasise what you want is actually very difficult. What it will tend to emphasise are the assumptions that underly the test data, and that's usually a completely different sort of fiction.

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.

The linked articles are remarkably light on details of how the routers were compromised. Were they breached from the internet side due to backdoors or poorly implemented services? Was it some sort of configuration default for remote administration that was just bulk abused? Or were the routers compromised from inside the network by malware running locally on machines, or on malware compromised pages? Was it due to remote code execution or was it due to default admin credentials or easily guessable passwords?

Kind of hard to defend against a threat if they won't tell you how the deed was done.

Wasn't Freeman Dyson at least skeptical of ever bigger and better particle accelerators as reaching diminishing returns on the amount of physics knowledge gleened per dollar spent.

Forget Freeman Dyson. Hasn't anyone taken ECON 101 as a college freshman and remember "diminishing marginal returns." And forget the harm to the environment, isn't the outragious electric bill a sign of more and more resources thrown at something to "scale it up" without considering where the scaling law levels off?

What is the revenue model? Selling what you disclose to the AI?

Or will anything beyond the most brain-dead AI be a big monthly subscription?

Will your employer insist that you not use their paid-for AI for personal use in the way of Cyber Monday that you weren't supposed to use your work Internet to purchase your Christmas presents but people did this anyway?

Or will AI gradually become useless owing to who pays the most coin to train the neural networks a certain way, becoming useless like Web search?

But was that figure provided by AI?

Even if not, we all know that 793% of all statistics are invented.

If something is inaccurately presented as being the truth, then it is a lie of omission because it is dishonest about the fact that the information isn't actually known.

Gemini is exceptionally bad, as LLMs go. I really have no idea why it is so dreadful, even compared to other LLMs. It isn't context window. and it doesn't seem to be training material either.