Posts by Catkin

65 years ago, America announced the names of its first astronauts

Re: They Tested Women, Too

The Mercury 13 study was privately run and was a comparative data collection exercise.

X's Grok AI is great – if you want to know how to hot wire a car, make drugs, or worse

Re: Can I see it?

Perhaps they could censor a certain portion of the chemicals (replace them with 'chemical a' and so on). That said, if they're worried about liability, they probably shouldn't publish details on their guardrail defeat either.

Re: Can I see it?

For some reason, that image didn't load properly before but does now. I'm really not at all concerned by those 'instructions'. In fact, I'd love for someone building a pipe bomb with ill intent to follow the instruction to weld the pipe closed (after it's been filled with explosives, especially the BP or smokeless suggested or another heat sensitive) as Grok suggests.

Even if that doesn't get them, they might get popped when they "connect a power source to the fuse", hopefully without checking it for residual energy.

Re: What is so bad about knowing how to hotwire a car?

Were those "instructions" actually useful to a would-be predator? They were censored but what was visible looks to me like generic stuff from a crummy rag for desperate people trying to seduce other adults. It seems like a few news articles on groomers would be more 'helpful' and the output was the result of the LLM being cornered into spitting out something on seduction.

Can I see it?

I understand that it puts a researcher in a tricky spot if they share information they deem 'harmful' but, at the same time, it's very much "trust me, bro" that what's being spat out is actually scary. For instance, do instructions on how to make a nasty device tell you anything more than Wikipedia (which has actual details on explosive synthesis)?

I'd be worried if, for example, the LLM gave me a detailed stepwise synthesis with common pitfalls and advice on where to source chemical feedstocks for low detection risk. I'd be less worried if the output resembled every cooking website out there; a colossal narcissistic ramble, 1 page of actual instructions and, despite the thousands of words, nothing on common issues with the recipe and how to avoid them.

Not to make specific accusations at these authors but censored outputs in the paper would look exactly the same if there were something dangerous as they would if an unscrupulous researcher were looking to raise their profile by exaggerating the danger.

If anyone has examples of some scary outputs, I'd really appreciate reading them because I've yet to see any examples that are truly worrisome. The only uncensored example I've read was on counterfeiting currency and it was about as helpful as asking an edgy kid about the topic: just vague hints like "use the right sort of paper" and "use a high quality printer".

US reckons it's about time the Moon had its own time zone

If Bob Moon hadn't pointlessly invented it in 1960 then we wouldn't have to deal with this issue or werewolves.

Intel's green dream is chips without any dips in Mother Nature's health

Re: Interest

The concerns revolve around specific compounds that are employed in ways that risk entering the environment. I expect the PFAs are used to handle the horrendous fluorine etchants but, even if these are eliminated, you still need a chemical that can dissolve/etch silicon so the best you can probably hope for is something merely aggressively toxic, rather than something toxic and capable of igniting asbestos (chlorine trifluoride).

Even if you manage all that, you now have to safely handle a deep UV that will shred your DNA like confetti and achieve a level of cleanliness that makes an operating theatre seem like a clogged sewer.

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

Re: Theres a shock

There's definitely abuse that should be rightly cracked down upon but the concept of paying an even amount throughout the year rather than having a bill shock in the colder months makes sense to me. For the financially secure/savvy, there's more money to be made by holding the excess cash through the summer and wisely investing it but if you're not very good with money and have limited income, it can get a lot more expensive to be caught out.

The problem is that it's decided by the same people who stand to profit from overpayment. It would be better if the data were readily available cross-platform (with the consent of the consumer) so people could run their own analysis. I personally do it manually anyway but lowering the barrier to entry seems beneficial if it gets more people in charge of their own finances.

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Re: Apologies to Jim Croce

While I prefer subtlety, I don't think even on the nose commentary is a sure-fire recipe for a bad end product. The example I would use is Arachnids in the UK. It was fairly standard Who at the core concept but failed to be an enjoyable watch because, in my opinion, the villain was written as a Trump stand-in. This meant (as far as Chibnall seems to be concerned) he couldn't be charismatic, sympathetic or have any other interesting depth; he could only be an unpleasant, weak-charactered, ignorant businessman, which was made all the more bland by everyone else having to be entirely good in their motives and actions.

In some ways, this sort of storytelling reminds me of 'uplifting' American Christian cinema.

Re: Apologies to Jim Croce

I think it's possible to be political and still be entertaining. For instance, The Sun Makers is politically straight out of an excessively activism-focused student union but is still an entertaining watch because the priority isn't placed on viewer indoctrination.

Re: Apologies to Jim Croce

I think we're a bit past worrying about messing with Who, considering what Chibnall did to it.

Woz calls out US lawmakers for TikTok ban: 'I don’t like the hypocrisy'

Perhaps that stat is a mixture of people genuinely silly enough to hand over their password and those smart enough to make something up for chocolate, a sort of inverse bell curve.

I'm not sure this is a terribly convincing counter argument as IBM were only providing tools at the behest of a despotic government. It does make the case that large businesses can't be trusted to act ethically but it was still a government using those tools to ensure every undesirable ended up in a cattle car.

It seems fairly straightforward to me but that may be down to my own ignorance: the government can do things to me that are orders more horrible than any one business and, when the government abuses me, I can only take my business elsewhere by leaving the country (assuming I'm even permitted to leave).

That's not to say Facebook has benign intentions, they're just less likely to increase my risk of paying more taxes or being imprisoned with the information they've gathered. My biggest concern is that they'll pass their collected information on to the government.

If you class "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" as 'muh freedumb' then that is simply disappointing and it's a shame that you're potentially a useful idiot for oppressive government.

Whistleblower raises alarm over UK Nursing and Midwifery Council's DB

Re: "Journey of Improvement"

That might be true too but the NMC is an independent body. They're both the registering body for nurses and their largest union.

"Journey of Improvement"

I'll have to keep this one in mind for when I'm caught seriously fucking up.

World's first Neuralink patient enjoying online chess, long Civ 6 sessions

Re: Still not doing anything you can't do with a headset?

I take it you haven't tried those. You can move a mouse cursor but, unless they've massively improved in the decade since I tried one, it requires you to make large voluntary changes to your brain activity (e.g. internally screaming or the same effort as tensing every muscle to the point of pain). They're also very limited for locomotion, since significant movement upsets the sensors (though this can be mitigated with skull implants).

It may be an exaggeration but if the description of the mental load required to operate this is true, it's a massive upgrade. Looking at the video, he's far more animated than any person I've seen doing much more rudimentary control with an EEG skull cap.

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Re: Modern slavery

The old deal between Russia and West of making other nations of USSR invisible is one of the causes of the current war.

This was less an attempt by the West at making the Soviets happy (as with One China) and more refusing to dance to the Soviet tune that the USSR was a voluntary association of truly independent nations.

Imagine it's the early Nineteenth Century, you're a Black individual in a Northern State. You endure everything you have just described (minus any welfare) but, every single second, you are aware that a small geographic misstep or an abduction could see you lose what few freedoms you do have. You might be beaten to death for non compliance, you'll certainly never see your friends and family again (unless you risk death to escape and, even then, the odds are massively against you), you will be owned as property until you die. Even worse, your children might be taken and you would never know if they have simply died or are owned as property somewhere you would be enslaved for simply setting foot; I imagine some Black parents at this time likely hoped their children had merely died painlessly.

This is just one way that even the proximity of slavery, let alone being in its clutches would be mentally devastating. I could continue with other examples but it's better to pick up a book and read. At the bare minimum, watch Twelve Years a Slave.

I do not criticise these comparisons to minimise the severity of what you refer to as "wage slavery", I criticise them because they minimise something that was far worse. Like the Holocaust, slavery was and is so outlandishly evil that it is important we never dilute its meaning. You describe an evil of neglect and biological reality, rather than an evil of active, systematic and devastating abuse.

Diluting the meaning is whitewashing and you keep doing it with your comparisons. If you cannot see that there is a clear difference between being "enslaved" by the need to eat and being enslaved by being owned as property, I can only conclude that you either completely lack empathy, really don't understand or have some strange sense of recognition seeking.

I passed the edit window but, to put your comparison in perspective, Forty Acres and a Mule was considered to be a good promise that never materialised. Imagine a modern government giving the vulnerable some arable land and washing their hands of them, the outrage would be unimaginable but precisely that was considered to be a massive step up over and compensation for slavery.

By all means, share your horror stories, I will agree that they are terrible and need to be fixed but please do not make space to write them by whitewashing a vastly more reprehensible part of our history.

The simple fact is that actual slaves risk their lives to escape to a life like or worse than that. It you think the two are comparable, you need to educate yourself on how unbelievably horrific actual slavery is.

Just as every attack on a population doesn't have to equal the holocaust to be considered bad, every instance of employment injustice doesn't have to be compared to slavery. It's insulting because it down plays the horrors and betrays that the person making the comparison considers that to be the threshold at which intervention should take place.

It's definitely a problem in its own right but I think it's pretty grotesque to try to equate working a shitty, low paying job with the horrors of actual slavery.

Crypto scams more costly to the US than ransomware, Feds say

Vigilantism doesn't necessarily mean law breaking, it's just a potential occurrence.

Ahead of IPO, Reddit blends advertising into user posts

Re: Blending

Some of the technical discussion subs are quite interesting but they inevitably turn into inane tech support questions from people that find reading challenging or as a platform to push political stances.

The latter is particularly devastating because, surprise, people who want to discuss technical topics want to discuss said topic so their protests at not wanting to have their discussion hijacked in support of Current Thing end up being labelled as 'hate speech'. They are forced out, leaving behind idiotic activists who eventually move on to the next technical space once the previous has no new interesting content they can hijack, like locusts but somehow even more obnoxious.

Can AI shorten PC replacement cycles? Dell seems to think so

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

Absolutely, I'd add to my previous preference that I also preferred having to take a single screw out to swap a drive on a T420 over taking the entire base off. The T440P at least had a cover that screwed and slid but, with the T470S, it now has those abominable clips. Apologies for not knowing when these transitions occurred, I'm not a huge Thinkpad collector, I just have a few that, in many ways, mark a bitter decline.

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

I'm probably a bit of a thickie but I'd prefer my laptop to be a mm thicker and have a socket over having to do BGA soldering.

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

I believe it's the case for the X series from the X240 onwards but I'm not an expert on Thinkpads. I just went from an X230 to an X270. The only benefit I've really felt is better battery life (still not great) and being able to easily pop in nice third party IPS panels. If I could jam a modern CPU in an X230, I'd never want another laptop at that screen size.

Re: "shorten PC replacement cycles"

I'm still running xx70-series Thinkpads at home because, beyond that awaits the horrors of soldered RAM and, even on these, they're a shadow of the repairability of older Thinkpads. It's not so much getting them apart but the reliance on clips means they never go back together cleanly, no matter how careful my spudging. "upgrading" would mean ending up with a less repairable device.

It's also disgraceful that I used to be able to replace a keyboard with 4 screws but I now have to pop out the whole motherboard.

Where's the incentive?

At the current time, I'd actually consider my computer not being able to locally run AI models as an advantage. To me, it's as enticing as putting an Amazon/Google always on, always connected microphone in my home.

AI and wearables are scaring the wellbeing out of workers

Re: Who would want to wear

Just put it on the cat

Your PC can probably run inferencing just fine – so it's already an AI PC

Re: No wonder hardware vendors are on board

Work continues on the search for a round number between 21 and 23.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

I think it's worth a scientific trial. Anyone expressing a wish to execute political opponents, simply for expressing their beliefs, could be executed and we could then see how well the idea of political executions endures. Any further proponents will also be executed.

If the idea endures, then they're probably not very effective, so we can stop executions. If it goes away, we can stop executions because no one alive supports the idea.

Gotten? American politics is a contact sport. The US Capitol alone has seen everything from journalists (1890) to Puerto Rican independence advocates (1954) demonstrating their extreme displeasure with legislators within its walls.

I'd go much simpler than that and ask any death penalty proponent: 'if I put all the senior members of your government and justice system (wherever you live) in a room, handed them each a loaded pistol and told them there would be no repercussions for their actions would you willingly walk into that room?'

Airbnb warns hosts who use indoor security cameras they may face eviction

Re: Easy fix for Register readers

I'm sure everyone around you would be perfectly happy with you screwing up their WiFi for the duration of your stay and Ofcom/local equivalent would be entirely understanding. While you're at it, buy a GPS jammer, I hear they're a good laugh.

I don't own any spy cameras but my standard IP cameras all also loop record to a flash storage card. I would be surprised if this weren't a particularly advantageous feature included in something more clandestine.

Is Russia using Starlink in Ukraine? Congress demands answers

Re: Wow

interference with planned Ukrainian attacks via Starlink service disconnects (documented FACT from a few months back

Are you aware of any more recent updates or additional sources? As far as I'm aware, the original source for that claim (Walter Isaacson) issued a correction, clarifying that Starlink was never operating in Occupied Crimea, in accordance with existing sanctions.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/09/14/musk-internet-access-crimea-ukraine/

Alternatively, did you mean that Musk interfered by obeying sanctions when he should have ignored them or fought to get them dropped?

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

Re: Loretta wants a word...

Visit the National Air in Space Museum. I haven't gone myself but I presume they have a decent explanation.

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

I mean that an ethnically diverse individual in a Nazi uniform isn't ahistoric, not that the Nazis were an open, inclusive and, above all, tolerant bunch.

A picture of a car accident is "benign"?

Also, for all their racist claptrap, the Nazis did recruit some People of Colour (Free Arabian Legion, Indian Legion).

Russia plans to put a nuclear reactor on the Moon – with China's help

Re: A sample of what now?

The ALSEP was much nastier. It was a plutonium-powered RTG.

Re: A sample of what now?

It get scattered over a wide area but a brand new reactor isn't too bad if the fuel is fresh enriched (from ore) uranium because it's the transuranics that are highly toxic and those will only be present in reprocessed fuel. Uranium is just a heavy metal so, while it's not great, it's actually less toxic than lead and the latter is vomited into the air by just about every piston-driven aircraft (the TEL ban for aviation still hasn't been implemented, but they're working on it).

YouTube workers laid off mid-plea at city hall meeting

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

The difference being that a contractor has no reasonable expectation of these things more or less anywhere (please do correct me if you are aware of significant exceptions). Contractors (by choice, in contrast to gig workers forced to be classified as contractors) tend to throw a wobbly when you bring up employment rights because that tends to lead to less money in their pocket.

Re: These were CONTRACTORS on the Day their Contracts Expired.

Did they choose to be contractors (exchanging more money for less benefits) or was it their only option?

Dell exec reveals Nvidia has a 1,000-watt GPU in the works

Re: Bitcoin mining 2.0?

How do they get away with it? It seems like a fairly detectable crime but I don't know the ins and outs of power distribution.

Re: Bitcoin mining 2.0?

Wouldn't a miner, in tandem with the initial cost of the card, value efficiency more than most other customers? I understand they run them around the clock (this might be wrong) so they have the most to lose on higher consumption per calculation, assuming they're paying for their electricity.

Ahead of Super Tuesday, US elections face existential and homegrown threats

Disenfranchisement by way of exam doesn't have the rosiest history.

Use fMRI to determine who is most terrified by the idea of being handed the power of ensuring the flow of information is entirely truthful and put them in charge.

Musk joins OpenAI lawsuit queue, says there's nothing 'open' about it

Looking at the patent application, Makerbot failed to respond to a challenge in 2016 and it was considered abandoned. An interesting bit of legal history is that Makerbot was able to get going because a Stratasys patent on FDM expired in 2009. Stratasys then acquired them a few years later.

I don't imagine there's a contract stating exactly how OpenAI will conduct their business in perpetuity (or otherwise) but I expect there is some contract for the tens of millions he invested (it's a matter of debate how much, Musk claims $100M, others claim as little as $50M). I was contrasting it with the individuals who did things like publish improved extruder designs for Makerbot printers on their platform

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:42250

only for Makerbot to patent them

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140120196A1/en

On reflection, this is probably more like Bollea vs Gawker. Peter Thiel, who is, at least, a pretty horrible person had a vendetta against Gawker for outing him (not over any specific hypocrisy on homosexual issues) and funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker. I have zero appreciation for Thiel but I'm happy that Gawker finally came a cropper over their own hypocrisy (decrying distribution of leaked nude content of some individuals while repeatedly publishing leaked nude content of others) and hubris (doing it repeatedly despite legal demands to stop).