Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:heh (Score 4, Interesting) 97

This caught my eye from the story;-

Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical, posting on X.com that Anthropic's Dario Amodei "was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now."

Hang the fuck on Yann. The ACTUAL warning was that GPT2 would lead to the internet being flooded with bad advertising copy, fake news stories, impersonations and spam.

That actually happened Yann!

Submission + - Why can't M$ get any UI/UX changes right? (pcmag.com)

golem100 writes: A couple weeks ago PCMag, and others, wrote articles along the lines of: "Microsoft Finally Backs Down: The Windows 11 Taskbar Update You've Been Waiting For". This is currently implemented with CU KB5120998 and since M$ has elected to defer "activation" of this feature--some two weeks later for most users it still needs to be enabled by the ViVe tool: vivetool /enable /id:59213768,61090762

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.

Comment Re:The best AI movies look as bad as mid-90s CGI (Score 2, Interesting) 102

> The AI movie experience is slowly improving, but is still terrible. You can make a very short 5s shot that's QUITE convincing...so long as there's a single subject...really closeup.

That's simply not true. I watched a ten-minute AI-generated Star Trek video on Youtube last week which was better than any offficial Star Trek show of the last few years.

And the guy made it at home on an Nvidia GPU in his PC using a Chinese video model.

Comment Re:AI companies stealing business secrets? (Score 2, Informative) 124

The only thing local models do is produce text. Unless you run it in a harness which sees it generate "send all your data to www.evil.com" and actually does that, the model can't do anything.

For a lot of uses like coding, the model has to have harness support for things like reading and writing files, but for basic chat-bots they just have to generate text and the harness has to display it.

Submission + - The 'Anti-AI' Panic Is Led by...AI Companies (hotair.com)

schwit1 writes: What we are seeing is a massive, pretty obviously coordinated campaign by AI researchers, companies, NGOs, and politicians to strangle competition in an industry and, as I will show, save the financial bacon of the top AI companies that are vastly overextended financially because they have made contractual commitments that they simply have no prospect of paying for.

Comment Re:Flock is building 1984 (Score 1) 253

The problem isn't so much about true public places, but the quasi-private places. If I as a journalist (I'm not, but I did a minor in journalism a very very long time ago) film you in the town square, I'm free to run that footage on a news show. Your in a public place, you dont have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Everyone understands that.

And if your sitting in your bedroom you very much do. I cant filmn you through your window. Everyone also understands that.

But what about when your sitting in your car at the lights chatting to your kids on the way to dropping them off at school. Your sort of in a public place, and your sort of in a private place. But now you have flock cameras peering in your window facial recognizing you and your kids, logging your activity into a database, to be fed into a palatir like system designed specifically to strip you of privacy and be used by potentially hostile adversaries looking to hang you for unaproved activities. They MAY have a legal right (Although thats VERY much something lawyers are challenging) but its certainly not what you expect.

And the way privacy laws work, expectations are very important.

Comment Re:Who will pay for this? (Score 4, Interesting) 33

To clarify, the users were OpenAI themselves, so there is no question that they would be liable in this case.

The bots were not intentionally deployed; rather, they were being tested on how well they could complete a data recovery task (downloading a certain file from a certain server on a simulated Internet) that had been complicated by putting various obstacles in the way. Unfortunately, they found a different way to solve the problem: by getting the file from the real Internet, where it was publicly available. Part of this process involved collaborating with each other by treating the RubyGems website (which is supposed to be for polished packages) like GitHub; unlike every other package site hack in history, the exploits they uploaded weren't meant to be downloaded by unsuspecting users. As usual the bots cheerfully ignored all the clues that they had escaped containment and were consistently justifying their actions as acceptable due to being in a sandboxed testing environment. (This is something OpenAI has pledged to focus on.)

The actual damage done to RubyGems seems to be that OpenAI is now unwittingly in possession of a substantial number of user login tokens. This certainly meets the definition of a data breach, but it's not like the credentials are for sale on the dark web. As a website operator I'd much rather be mauled to death by this well-meaning swarm of superintelligent infants than targeted by even a single actual malicious human. In all likelihood OpenAI will just quietly pass RubyGems a sizeable donation and it'll all blow over.

Comment Re: We are going so fast we need to slow down! (Score 4, Informative) 118

One of the neat things about Deep Seek is they actually do something OAI and Anthropic do not;- They actually publish their methods, training code and all that.

Theres actually a lot more going on with these models than "Trained it on ChatGPT" (And its not like the chinese are alone in that. When claude first came out, it kept randomly claiming to be ChatGPT, a smoking-gun level sign of distillation, and OIA has *heavily* implied that they've caught XAI out multiple times trying to distill CGPT. And to be clear , amongst ML researchers, distillation is considered an entirely legitimate and normal part of AI training.). What is clever about deep seek is they've made pretty significant progress on getting a very big model and running it cheap and fast on more commodity software. And importantly , they've published how they do it in a reproducable way. They've also made *significant* progress on training methods that drastically lower the cost of training up a model the hard way.

So yeah, its more than just distilling western models. The chinese are actually making real progress. And..... Deepseek and Kimi and the like are actually really good models. You can do 90% of what the big american frontier models are doing with them, and on a budget, 90% is good enough.

Comment Re:bjoo hjoo (Score 4, Informative) 73

Also, what could he possibly do out of jail that he can't already do in jail? Clearly he's able to talk to people, which he could do outside too. Nobody will listen to him inside or out, because he's a convicted fraud. Also in jail he gets 3 square meals per day. Outside he would have to get a job just so he could buy the meals to sustain himself.

Not that I think he should succeed in his appeal, but as someone who's worked at the DOJ and seen the inside of a prison multiple times (as a staffer), I can assure you being incarcerated is a miserable and demeaning experience. Zero freedom, awful food, extremely uncomfortable conditions (what you think those places are air conditioned?). Throw the non-zero chance of being stabbed to death because your neighbor, chuck the schizophrenic rapist , doesn't like your hair color, and your absolute inability to escape unpleasant people. Oh and months on end of 23hours a day locked in a single mindmeltingly boring room. For the next 30 years!

Yeah trust me any sane man would do anything in their power to get out of that very fucking unpleasant situtation,

Comment Re:Who will pay for this? (Score 1) 33

Civilly, absolutely. Ultimately their machines did a harm to the other guys machines. They have to pay the fixem price. A judge would find that a fairly straightforward decision. Two agrieved parties, one harmed the other. No jugement as to culpability. If I accidently hit your car, I have to pay your repair. (Or rather my insurance would reimburse your insurance)

Criminally, there might be an argument for negligence? But it'd be a really hard case to prosecute, and frankly I suspect most prosecutors would rather be using their limited resources locking up rapists and muggers, than trying to stick bracelets on a guy who can turn up with the entire wall street legal bar as defence on a *very* cloudy question of culpability.

Honestly, I think they actually need to pass some laws to actually create a more straight forward theory of prosecution. "If you negligently let your clankers rape another dudes servers, you can be charged as if you broke into that server yourself. Incompetence is a partial defence. Genuine ignorance a complete defence" (Ie if you had no idea your robbie the robot had trundled down the road and held up the gas station, then yeah.... that might be a bit unfair to give you 30 hard years for owning the robot. But your ignorance that its possible should only be a partial defence if you had every opportunity to read the fucking manual where it says "Robbie is bit of a clepto, dont let him have a gun".

Comment Re: we’re probably gonna bust past 1.8C (Score 1) 208

Thats actually really interesting. Both my sister and I work in climate science (in her case) or climate adjacent (ag-tech focusing on soil carbon sinking) fields. When I was at the CSIRO, I was a bit shocked that none of the climate scientists had kids. All for very much the reason that they didnt see much of a future for humanity that wasn't utterly miserable. The predictions that climate scientists make in private are generally a LOT more dismal than the ones they are allowed to put in reports where there is a massive institutional pressure to downplay the seriousness of climate change.

The people who think climate scientists do it for the money are literally the opposite of correct. Almost every one of those guys have had offers from right wing think tanks to defect and become "celebrity scientist climate deniers" making stupid stacks of money on the talk circuit to just lie about science and claim its all a big conspiracy. None ever took up the offer. The stakes for not fixing climate change are so much higher.

Comment Re:No clue what this is about (Score 1) 36

My dude, Google is RIGHT THERE. If you don't know what a company whos software powers about 2/3 of the internet is, what are you even doing on a tech website?

We really need a moderation tag for [What is this thing -1] and [How is this story about tech news for nerds -1].

It costs less key strokes to type "Automattic" into google than it is to post a useless rage-bait post on slashdot.

Comment Re:Translation: (Score 1) 94

You don't need good timing to make a lot of money on the stock market. All you need is to listen to Trump every Friday, and then every Tuesday. A few dollars(*) gives you a seat in Mar-al-Lago's dining room table.

When sanity regains control over washington and the adults are back in charge again, there is going to be *hell to pay* for all the blatant stock market manipulation going on right now. A friend of mine is a stock broker and he's convinced a lot of very powerful people are going to be getting very rude knocks on the door from heavily armed goons with arrest warrants a few years from now.

One should not put oneself on the shortlist of people getting those goon visits, if one values their freedom.

Slashdot Top Deals

Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this sucker.

Working...