Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

US Air Force AI drone 'killed operator, attacked comms towers in simulation'

Re: I'd say it's ready for Wall Street

Wait what's wrong with the SEC now?

Eric?

These gaping holes in the ML training spec make it sound like they gave the problem to the work experience kid to just have a play around with.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Australian international airports have them.

1. This crypto-coin is called Jimbo. 2. $8m was stolen from its devs in flash loan attack

Re: It's not a "hack"

Also apologies to the cryptographers. We should reject "crypto" as an abbreviation of "cryptocurrency" and just use the whole word.

Arguably "cryptocurrency" is an awful malapropism all of its own.

You're not going mad. High energy physics makes far more sense than... whatever this nonsense is.

As a scam, it is inscrutable by design.

It's not a "hack"

Crypto goons keep telling us "code is law". Well, the code allowed this. Nothing that happened here was against the system's rules.

And now they want to go crying to the jackbooted statist thugs. I thought all of this nonsense is supposed to evade the authorities (it never does, they're just dumb enough to think it does).

Thanks for the entertainment, Jimbo!

Singapore's sovereign wealth fund regrets investment in crypto-villain FTX

I'll bet it does

But there are two types of cryptocurrency exchanges; those that have collapsed, and those that haven't collapsed yet. And they're all frauds. Even the barest minimum of due diligence should have been sufficient to steer well clear.

Parent discovers the cost of ignoring Roblox: £2,500 and heart palpitations

I got into a friend's phone's facial recognition merely by the fact of both of us having a beard. The fact he wouldn't have looked out of place in ZZ Top and while mine is only a few weeks' growth was apparently not important to the detection algorithm.

Australia asks Twitter how it will mod content without staff, gets ghosted

Re: Those funds are needed, in part, because Twitter is moderating less content

The Australian government has, quite reasonably IMO, told numerous overseas companies that if they want to accept money from and provide services to Australians, they must comply with Australian corporation and consumer laws, even if they have no office here. Although if it's a free service I think the government's available remedies become less gentle, such as IP blocks.

"...as Musk pursued his agenda of maximalist free speech..."

Except for when it suits him, of course

Tesla batteries went from fully charged to fully disabled after botched patch, lawsuit claims

Re: Street signs

It's essentially the same here, but to my understanding the Australian Design Rules require them to be between 0 and 5%, which this Nissan clearly isn't!

Re: Everybody throttles

Bjorn Nyland has noticed differences in what the dash displays vs. what is being shown on the CAN bus for some cars.

A bit of an aside but I get the impression this kind of thing isn't unusual and could even be routine. For example, when the speedometer in my particular car displays 120 km/h, an OBD-2 scanner shows 111 km/h, which can be confirmed using GPS. The sensor is accurate and the car knows exactly how quickly it's moving, but it lies to the user. I wonder how many other gauges/readouts/etc. are doing the same?

'Top three Balkans drug kingpins' arrested after cops crack their Sky ECC chats

Re: Nationalise The Drugs

If you legalise and regulate then the TGA, MHRA, HPFB, FDA or whatever your local equivalent pharmaceutical regulatory authority is, i.e. the government, will absolutely need to be involved in ensuring the supply meets minimum quality standards.

EV truck maker Nikola stalls in 2023, pulls out of Europe, hits brakes on production

Re: Why do we let these zombie shams shable around?

There is hexane in petrol, but it's only a very small percentage by volume.

Re: Why do we let these zombie shams shable around?

Hydrogen also scares the bejeezus out of the (sadly very large number of) drooling morons who apparently think "hydrogen bombs" work by combustion...

Re: Why do we let these zombie shams shable around?

Building a network of hydrogen stations isn't that complicated.

This is satire, right?

Owner of 'magic spreadsheet' tried to stay in the Lotus position until forced to Excel

Re: Better than a PM

Could you triangulate it with knowledge of the network layout and enough pings?

New York AG offers law to crack down on backfire-happy cryptocurrencies

Re: I think...

Whoops, thanks for the correction.

I think...

...the AG is being overly generous when he describes buying cryptocurrencies as "investing". It's no more "investing" than putting it all on 36.

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

Nuke it from orbit

The name "Hugging Face" doesn't fill me with confidence.

The larger and more complex these models become, the less tractable the problems of "bias, hallucinations, and jailbreaks" are, surely?

Pixies keep switching off my morning alarm, says Google Pixel owner

Well that's weird

I woke up with this song playing in my head this morning, even though the only place I've heard it is the aforementioned final scene of Fight Club, and that a long time ago.

Ex-OpenSea exec convicted in first-of-its-kind case of insider trading of NFTs

Not even that!

Who would have thought there was anything dodgy about selling pictures of cartoon apes?

Correction: ...selling cells in an append-only spreadsheet containing URLs that currently point to pictures of cartoon apes.

And there's no reason the same URL can't be included in multiple cells...

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

Re: Truly, certainly not

Yeah you're right

Re: Truly, certainly not

Give me Windows 10 with Window 7's entire UI. The Win10 UI is a glitchy and visually confusing mess.

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

Re: "Everything after clearing the tower was" <boom> "icing on the cake!"

Likewise. There's every chance the specific launch is identified in the documentary; wouldn't it seem weird (although this might be hindsight speaking) for them to attend a Voyager launch and then not mention it?

Now to track down a copy...

Re: "Everything after clearing the tower was" <boom> "icing on the cake!"

There's certainly a Saturn V in that video but it's not oriented for flight!

The rocket launching behind him is, as far as I can tell, a Titan IIIE, and might even have been one of the Voyager launches.

4chan and other web sewers scraped up into Google's mega-library for training ML

Re: Devil’s advocate

Surely everyone is entitled to be heard, no?

Only to a point, for the simple reason that "free speech" can never be absolute. You can't yell "fire" in a packed theatre. You can't* incite violence. So no, everyone is not entitled to be heard in all circumstances.

And an LLM developed by a private organisation isn't subject to the First Amendment, even when it is based in the USA...

* Although the Americans are currently trying to work this one out.

Meta virtual reality interrupted by financial reality as thousands lose their jobs

Bravo!

The euphemisms used in this article are very appropriate for the subject matter.

Military helicopter crash blamed on failure to apply software patch

Re: This is pilot error.

Blaming the pilots sounds like an administrative solution to a design flaw

Guy rejects top photo prize after revealing snap was actually made using AI

The statement seems like a total cop-out

SpaceX feels the pressure, scraps first orbital launch of Starship

A fully fuelled SH+SS stack contains 4,600 tonnes of propellant, of which 21.5% is methane. At 55.7 MJ/kg, that 0.99 kilotonnes of methane contains as much chemical energy as 13.3 kilotonnes of TNT.

So yeah, if it ever mixed thoroughly with the LOX before igniting, Starbase would be a write-off...

It is, but it existed before that contract was awarded and would still exist today even without it.

Elon Musk actually sits down and talks to 'government-funded media' the BBC

You've misunderstood, BBC was reportedly given 20 minutes notice.

Re: This is a vastly underrated long term risk for Tesla

The traditional carmakers have also been doing it for 100 years, while Tesla has been working out how to design and assemble a car as it goes along. It's learning quickly, sure, but by many accounts it still has a lot of catching up to do.

Re: Poor-quality journalism

Well to be fair, 20 minutes isn't much time to do a great deal of research.

The Boring Company

"Build subways, but fill them with traffic jams instead". What problem does that solve exactly?

Goddard Space Flight Center's new boss swears in on holy Pale Blue Dot

Sadly I think this is going to have some people foaming at the mouth...

And I'm all for it!

Cruise emits software fix after self-driving car slams into bus

Re: Unique error

It seems to me that the issue might be that self-driving models that are purely reactive are very slow, so they need to be predictive too. And in this case the predictive part took precedence over the reactive part and made a mistake.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

Re: So they removed the impossible?

Feedback used to be* my favourite part of the magazine. Among other things it gave us Nominative Determinism, after all. I imagine 325 is simply a mis-transcription of "three to five"...

*Probably still would be if I was still a subscriber. I cancelled after one too many "WAS DARWIN/EINSTEIN/WHOEVER WRONG?" covers.

Re: So they removed the impossible?

I got the impression that this was a "we did this and it seems to be going well" kind of presentation.

Hey Siri, use this ultrasound attack to disarm a smart-home system

Re: One C, one R

People record all sorts of things but the voice assistant shouldn't be responding to them

Diving DRAM prices are a problem not even AI can solve

A problem?!

Repeat after me: Consumer prices falling is not a problem.

British Prime Minister Sunak’s plans for UK NFT on ice

I think David Gerard's response after offering to help the BBC with a blockchain ("DLT") working paper, and then learning what the paper was really about, would be appropriate here too:

My recommendation was that the correct BBC approach to DLT would be for BBC Business News to investigate these ideas in depth as ongoing frauds. I also recommended an internal investigation as to how this document got this far, with a view to ensuring it never happened again.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Re: Some cats will eat dog food.

a cat with claws can teach even a big dog some respect

A neighbour's Rottweilers once made their way into my backyard, where they encountered my normally docile Burmese. They stayed on their side of the fence from then on.

Microsoft scrambles to fix Windows 11 'aCropalypse' privacy-battering bug

Re: I always use paint.

Fair enough! You might already be aware of this, but Alt+PrtScr takes a screenshot of the active window only. This is the mode I use the vast majority of the time (and what IME most people who use the snipping would be better off doing anyway). It obviously doesn't help if you want a shot of more than one of your open windows, though.

Re: I always use paint.

If you're already using MS Paint, you can skip the snipping tool step altogether by using PrtSc or Alt+PrtSc and then cropping in Paint itself

It should be reasonable to expect that your edits get "solidified" when you save or print to PDF and the hidden parts of images do get deleted...

I recall that an Australian police unit once made this same mistake in a terrible way by embedding cropped images of child abuse material in reports that they had produced: https://www.theregister.com/2004/11/26/oz_police_abuse_pics_mistake/