Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Tons of Peoples’ Claude Chats and Creations Are Exposed On Google
  2. Arizona State Launches Influencer Degree Where Students Must Gain Real Followers
  3. Earth’s Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years
  4. A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man To Prison For 18 Months
  5. Review Roundup: Framework Laptop 13 Pro
  6. Peacock to Be Included With YouTube Premium In Major Streaming Tie-Up
  7. Amazon Trying to Launch a Global Satellite Cellphone Network In 2028
  8. Nvidia, Tech Giants Launch AI Safety Initiative
  9. Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects
  10. China Begins Mass Production of Homegrown DUV Chip Tools
  11. ChatGPT Starts Blocking Direct Requests To Copy an Author’s Style
  12. Apple Will ‘Watch Everything Burn’ When AI Bubble Bursts
  13. Big Tech Accused of Stonewalling European Social Media Researchers
  14. Nvidia In Talks With OpenAI To Guarantee $250 Billion Financing For Data Center
  15. ‘KVM Chainsaw’ Expected to Hit Linux 7.3 For Dealing with ‘God Data Structure’

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

Tons of Peoples’ Claude Chats and Creations Are Exposed On Google

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media:
Claude is exposing a wealth of users’ chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see. The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, notes on meetings, and a dashboard someone made apparently to analyze medical billing data. Exposed chats reportedly include private cryptocurrency wallet keys and personal information like peoples’ addresses

Like other chatbots, Claude lets people share their conversations with others by creating a publicly accessible link of the chat. People may do this to send the full text of a conversation to their friends or coworkers in a group chat, for example. But they may not realize Google is also surfacing these links in search results, making them available to essentially anyone. […] Claude users can change their privacy and sharing settings to make their chats no longer publicly accessible.

Arizona State Launches Influencer Degree Where Students Must Gain Real Followers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Arizona State University has launched a 120-credit bachelor’s degree in content creation that teaches video, podcasting, branding, analytics, media law, and social strategy. For their capstone, students are “expected to build a real social media account and demonstrate audience growth during the program,” reports Dexerto. From the report:
The Content Creation BA is housed within ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and appears in the university’s 2026-2027 course catalog. The 120-credit-hour degree prepares students to become “an influencer and strategic storyteller” by teaching video production, podcasting, personal branding, audience analytics and social media strategy. The program was approved by the ASU University Senate in March 2026. Its proposal said graduates would be prepared to work independently as influencers and content creators across livestreaming, videography, writing, podcasting, graphics and emerging media.

[…] For the program’s final project, students will choose a social media platform, such as TikTok, create a content and growth strategy, and attempt to gain real followers throughout the semester. “They will have demonstrable audience growth,” [explained Jessica Pucci, senior associate dean at the Cronkite School]. “They will have a platform of their choice with real content and real followers and a real audience behind them.” The curriculum includes courses titled How to Become an Influencer, On-Camera Presence, Introduction to Editing, Videography, Podcasting and Audio Storytelling, Social Media Foundations and The Digital Audience.

The world needs more influencers

By Spacejock • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Also telephone sanitation engineers and hairdressers.

Is the teacher qualified?

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

That is, do they have a social media account with at least 50,000 followers?

Decide if you are a University or a Trade School

By DarkOx • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Social media influencing is “Marketing”. Marketing is an area of theoretical study. A university should be offering degrees in ‘bigger picture’ areas of expertise that one can take an apply. This is not at all to suggest that academic institutions of that type should not offer, even require course that do focus on a practical application like social media influencing. Because the ability to take the lofty concepts and applying them in practical way is part of being an expert in any given area.

You get a degree in mechanical or possibly ‘Automotive’ engineering if you want to go to work ultimately designing engines; you absolutely would be doing a good deal of course work that focus on small gasoline powered internal combustion power plants, but your overall area of study is still broader.

Universities need to get smarter about how to track trends and meet immediate labor market needs without spinning up entirely new programs, that are so narrow they face a real possibility of not making any real sense at less than a decade or two down the line. This kind of thing is why the public gets a dim view of education and why more and more people look at the ROI of these degrees and go “nope” even though the analysis might be wrong (after all they haven’t had the freshman stats course yet). They see a chart showing how going to work earlier and chasing compound interest with with lower wages beats school and higher wages later on average but forget about the fact that people with ‘social media influence degrees” who also end up making coffee pull down the average. Actually getting a degree in mechanical engineering, economics, medical etc, usually will pay off.

Re:Eh, well, why not?

By ArchieBunker • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Fox News really is your crack pipe.

Let’s hear your breakdown on how gender studies relates to Marxism (which you couldn’t explain without googling first).

Some self realization would do you wonders.

Re:Eh, well, why not?

By bjoast • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Gender studies is pseudoscience.

Earth’s Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years found evidence that mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals may cluster around a roughly 27.5-million-year cycle. The cause remains unknown, with possibilities ranging from mantle activity and orbital changes to speculative galactic influences. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert:
One possibility lies deep within Earth itself. The planet’s mantle is constantly circulating through convection, albeit at an almost unimaginably slow pace. Periodic changes in mantle convection, or the initiation of mantle plumes, could influence volcanism, plate tectonics, mountain building, and other large-scale geological processes. Because these systems are closely interconnected, disturbances originating deep within Earth could eventually ripple through the planet’s surface, oceans, climate, and biosphere.

Another hypothesis focuses on interactions between Earth’s surface and interior. Long-term orbital variations influence climate and sea level, periodically redistributing enormous amounts of water, ice, and sediment across the planet. [New York University geologist Michael Rampino] discusses the possibility that these changing surface loads subtly modify stresses within Earth’s crust and upper mantle, potentially influencing tectonic and volcanic activity over geological timescales.

Rampino also considers possible influences beyond Earth, an idea he has been weighing up since the 1980s. As the Solar System orbits the center of the Milky Way, it oscillates above and below the galaxy’s mid-plane, with the timing of these passages aligning with that of Earth’s major upheavals. These crossings, other researchers have suggested, could also gravitationally perturb comets in the distant Oort Cloud, increasing the likelihood of large asteroid impacts.

Another, even more speculative, hypothesis suggests that if dark matter is concentrated near the galactic plane, a fraction of it could occasionally be captured by Earth. Over millions of years, this process could generate small amounts of internal heat, potentially influencing geological activity. At present, however, there is no direct evidence supporting either mechanism, so they remain very controversial.

Large asteroid impacts are discussed separately in the paper. Although they were not included in the statistical analysis of the 89 geological events, the timing of several of Earth’s largest known impact craters appears broadly consistent with the proposed 27.5-million-year rhythm, as Rampino has discussed in earlier papers. Rampino suggests this correspondence may warrant further investigation, but stops short of claiming a causal relationship.

Shit journal - open-access - money grab

By TheMiddleRoad • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
This is a journal to make money for the publisher and nothing more. Anything published in there is likely shit and not worth paying attention to, because they couldn’t get published anywhere legit. But hey, maybe they’ll sell a movie script? Not 2012. No, 27,500,000!

The previous big disaster was 27 m years ago

By hcs_$reboot • Score: 5, Funny Thread
The last one was on November 5, 2024.

Fourier analysis (figure 7 in the paper)

By Arrogant-Bastard • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
It’s quite interesting, because it definitely shows a signal — and as the figure notes, possibly a second signal — in the noise.

Two considerations come to mind, however. The first is that this figure is based on 89 selected events, and while the criteria for those selections seem well-grounded, perhaps it should 62 or 117 events. In other words, have events been included that should not have been, or have events been omitted because they’re not yet known? My own feeling is that as a first approximation this list is probably reasonable, but that it would be worth examining how including/excluding certain events changes this power spectrum.

The second of course is that this is an observation, not an explanation. There is no explanation, as yet, only various hypotheses. That’s not really a criticism, a first step in understanding any process is to characterize the process as accurately as possible. I think a possible path forward here is to continue trying to do so without being overly concerned with the causative mechanism — in other words, to try to understand that “what” as thoroughly as possible before delving into the “why”.

Finally, I think it’s worth remembering that when Alvarez et.al. posited an impact event 66 My ago as the proximate cause of a mass extinction event back in 1980, the very concept was difficult for many people to accept. We now do do because it’s decades later and the substantiating evidence is overwhelming. Perhaps this is similar, and perhaps in time evidence will accrue that supports one (or more) of the explanatory hypotheses.

Is no one asking the question?

By smooth wombat • Score: 3 Thread

If these events occur every 27.5 million years, when was the last one? From that we can anticipate the next one and see what happens.

Since the paper is behind a cookie wall, I can’t read it, but I don’t see anywhere where the previous event is noted.

Randomness is a pattern, I guess

By Tony Isaac • Score: 3 Thread

If you flip a coin a million times, you’ll get heads extremely close to 50% of the time. If you flip a weighted coin, you’ll get one side up more than 50% of the time. I guess you could call those outcomes, “patterns.”

I you average the time between cataclysms, you’ll get…an average. In this data set, 27.5 million years. When you take the average of *ANY* set of numbers, you will get a single number that’s an average. That’s how math works. It doesn’t mean there is some magical, shadowy pattern we hadn’t noticed before.

A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man To Prison For 18 Months

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise. Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. (Ars readers may recognize “fus ro dah” as the Unrelenting Force “dragon shout" from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.)

Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term. Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.” […] As the court puts it, “Although the information about the usernames was available at the time of the trial, there is no evidence confirming or explaining how it went unnoticed.”

This ladies and gentlemen

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
is why I oppose the death penalty. Flimsy evidence convictions are extremely common.

Already a problem regardless of underscore count

By toutankh • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Regardless of underscore count, this is a real issue:

Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison.

So they just assumed he must be the guy despite having no evidence that he was the guy, then sent him to jail, essentially ruining his life. Shouldn’t this have been a big issue already then? Shouldn’t there be consequences for the person(s) who made that judgement?

Went to Prison as a Reviled Child Sex Criminal

By hutkept • Score: 5, Informative Thread
One of the worst things is he didn’t just go to prison for anything (drugs, robbery, assault), but as a reviled ‘chester’. Those guys are isolated and hated by the rest of the prison population, and the first to get attacked, harassed, and abused themselves. Often times they are put in special isolation to protect them, but just as often, they are not. This wasn’t a “regular” prison visit for this guy.

Re: Hopefully he sues for a few million.

By migos • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
“Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices” I would say that’s pretty reckless

Re:This ladies and gentlemen

By TuringTest • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Cool story, but this wasn’t about the death penalty.

Every story about a wrong conviction is a story about the death penalty

Review Roundup: Framework Laptop 13 Pro

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The review embargo has lifted for the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro, and the consensus across the board is that it is a massive leap forward in terms of build quality and battery life. The main issue reviewers complained about is the sky-high price, with the higher-end model jumping dramatically from $2,100 up to $2,900 due to the memory shortage crisis.

In his video review, Marques Brownlee says, “This is their best build yet. They’re finally doing what people have been asking for: a premium… modular… laptop.” ZDNET agrees that this device “represents a new approach for Framework and a maturation of the brand’s catalog,” noting that the new construction is “sleek and airtight, with no gaps, spaces, or evidence that was even put together by your hands at all.” Tom’s Hardware echoes this enthusiasm, declaring that “The Framework Laptop 13 Pro’s sturdy design, haptic trackpad, and bigger battery feel like they should have been there all along”.

Battery life, which has historically been a weak point for Framework, is now a standout feature. Ars Technica points out that the combination of Intel’s efficient Panther Lake chips and a new 74-watt-hour battery is “finally long enough to decisively eliminate ‘mediocre-to-poor battery life’ as the laptop’s biggest downside.” They also said it’s “Framework’s nicest-looking, nicest-feeling, most polished laptop design.”

For Linux users, the machine appears to deliver on its promises. Phoronix says the device “is designed with great Linux compatibility in mind,” offering a seamless out-of-the-box experience for distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.

As mentioned above, the overarching complaint is the extreme cost. Ars Technica notes that Framework unfortunately “switched to an exotic new upgradeable LPDDR5X RAM format just in time for those modules to become astronomically expensive.” Still, Marques Brownlee summarizes the long-term value proposition perfectly: while it might be painfully expensive on day one, “the longer you keep this laptop, the more it feels worth it” because you can easily repair and upgrade it over time. Compared to Apple’s flagship, the Framework is “80% of the quality, way more modular,” he says.

Peacock to Be Included With YouTube Premium In Major Streaming Tie-Up

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
YouTube Premium will include Peacock Premium at no extra charge beginning in early 2027. “The deal brings a slew of premium content to the [$15.99 per month] YouTube Premium subscription, including live sports like the NFL, NBA and MLB and entertainment like Law & Order, Saturday Night Live and Love Island,” reports The Hollywood Reporter. “It also has the potential to dramatically scale Peacock, which remains smaller than many of its streaming competitors.” From the report:
Peacock has 48 million subscribers, while YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have a combined 125 million subscribers, though they don’t break out how many each of those offerings have. The agreement, which expands on the deal the company inked with YouTube parent company Google last year, will also extend the entertainment company’s programming deal with YouTube TV, while bringing some of YouTube’s offerings to Comcast Xfinity and Xumo platforms.

There’s also a notable sports and production element to the deal, with NBC Sports agreeing to stream some live sporting events on its YouTube channels, and with NBC agreeing to serve as the production partner for select live events on YouTube. YouTube will also bundle some of the company’s International streaming offerings like Universal+ and Hayu in select markets.

Deja Moo - Part Two.

By geekmux • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Just what the public is yammering for, consolidation of one streaming silo into another, all for a price that’s guaranteed to increase year after year while the programming you came for disappears show by show. Ads on their way, too, unless you upgrade to the super premium deluxe package.

Those of us who were young enough to have to be the one to get up to turn the channel knob and move the rabbit ears realize this cord re-attaching deja moo as same shit, different century.

So they aren’t generating the metrics they need…

By PubJeezy • Score: 4, Informative Thread
So they aren’t generating the metrics they need and are just going to pay YouTube to manufacture them. This deal means that the Peacocks subscriber #‘s are going to shoot up by millions with the stroke of a pen and requiring absolutely no consumer demand. This feels like an admission by Comcast that Peacock is a failure.

the old cable is coming back with big bundles and

By Joe_Dragon • Score: 3 Thread

the old cable is coming back with big bundles and you think that the price will not go up to cover this?

Love Island…

By devslash0 • Score: 3 Thread

I’ve always wondered who the f… actually watches that total trash.

Nope

By Richard_at_work • Score: 3 Thread

US centric, so this wont be coming to the rest of the worlds Youtube subscribers

Amazon Trying to Launch a Global Satellite Cellphone Network In 2028

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Amazon has asked the FCC to approve a 5,105-satellite constellation launching in 2028 that would provide global direct-to-cell “voice, messaging, data, and emergency services,” similar to Starlink’s partnership with T-Mobile. The network would use Globalstar spectrum, support future Apple satellite services, and complement Amazon’s existing Leo broadband constellation. The Verge reports:
Advanced Television points out that the FCC application also includes a request to use spectrum assigned to Iridium’s satellite network outside the US, even as Rocket Lab is in the process of acquiring Iridium with plans to expand.

The new constellation and direct-to-device service will “complement” the broadband services Amazon also plans to offer through its Leo platform. In addition to consumer satellite service, it would also be used for things like disaster response and emergency messaging.

Amazon says the new direct-to-device satellites “will process the signals in orbit before relaying them to improve performance.” The new constellation will be nearly double the size of Amazon’s initial Leo constellation, which is planned to include around 3,200 satellites. As of July 2nd, Amazon says “over 375” of those satellites have launched so far.

Way too much space junk

By presidenteloco • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Can we just agree that if 20 or whatever it is companies and countries independently put up some kind of Internet satellite network there’s going to be way too much space junk and very dangerous low earth orbit for humans traversing it.

Re:Way too much space junk

By dskoll • Score: 4, Informative Thread

We might be dangerously near the Kessler Syndrome according to this article.

flying toasters

By awwshit • Score: 3 Thread

Who knew flying toasters was prescient?

Nvidia, Tech Giants Launch AI Safety Initiative

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek:
Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies have launched new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents. The new Open Secure AI Alliance aims to give defenders more open tools for testing, auditing and protecting AI models and agents. Nvidia points to the recent security incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, noting that when closed AI tools could not differentiate between attackers and defenders and blocked forensic work, Hugging Face used the open-weight GLM 5.2 model on its own systems to review over 17,000 actions and contain the breach.
“The right response is not to deny defenders access to capable open systems. It is to pair openness with strong safeguards, clear rules against malicious misuse, rigorous evaluation and rapid remediation. In cybersecurity, the safer path is the one that gives more defenders the ability to test, verify and strengthen the systems on which society relies,” Nvidia said.
Thanks to longtime Slashdot reader SphericalCrusher for also sharing the news.

Here it comes…

By ebunga • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

They’ve hit a wall. They know they’ve hit a wall. They just can’t say it, so now they have to hide that fact. They’ll say they’re advancing the state of the art, that they’re this much closer to AGI, that the AI is scary good at everything, but they can’t let you use it because of reasons. They’re literally ripping off the free energy conspiracy theory and passing it off as gold.

An Alliance of Companies You Trust. Really Trust.

By crunchy_one • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Adobe, Cadence, CapitalOne, Cisco, Cloudera, Cloudflare, Cognition, Crowdstrike, databricks, Dell Technologies, DoorDash, Elastic, HPE, HuggingFace, IBM, Longchain, The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Naver, NetApp, Nous, Nvidia, OpenClaw, Palantir, paloalto, RedHat, Reflection, salesforce, SAP, servicenow, siemens, SK telecom, snowflake, SpaceX, synopsys, thinking machines, and TrendAI.

Re:Here it comes…

By taustin • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

They didn’t say whose safety their safety initiative was intended to protect, now did they? Not the public’s, and not the shareholders/marks, for sure.

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Hackaday:
Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects. The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against.

In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only “license whitewashing,” but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding ‘AI’ datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized. Also covered is the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up by recent studies.

Excellent

By gweihir • Score: 3, Insightful Thread

Always good to see that there are still people with intact wits in this whole sea of crazy we have today.

That’s why I am careful with such projects

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 3, Insightful Thread

GitHub is evil? Maybe a bit. Use codeberg! Codewho?

The problem is not that the project was not sympathetic, but that it has a small and opinionated governing. GitHub will somehow need to appease the general consensus or get a huge shitstorm. That makes your project relatively save, because they cannot be that arbitrary in their decisions. Codeberg, on the other hand, can decide within a few days to ban LLM-Code.

If you migrated your project there because GitHub is evil and used LLM since some time, you would now have to move again. Where? Either GitHub that won’t surprise you too much, or the next small code hoster that tries their best, but may make arbitrary decisions to your disfavor. That’s not easy to solve (except for complete self hosting) as you always either have the large corporate monolith that tends to get enshittified, or the opinionated half-private projects that arbitrarily fuck over you when they decide that they do not longer like projects that have an “e” in their name, possibly with the majority of the (small) population being okay with it, because they never liked the letter “e” anway.

Crypto maybe, LLM-Generated Code Good Luck!

By oldgraybeard • Score: 3 Thread
As for LLM-Generated Code?
No use trying to add guardrails now! Mountains of slop are upon us!

China Begins Mass Production of Homegrown DUV Chip Tools

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
According to The Information (paywalled), a state-backed Shanghai company has begun mass-producing China’s first homegrown immersion DUV lithography machines, with about five units expected this year for SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT. Roughly 20 more units are expected in 2027. Tom’s Hardware reports:
The Information didn’t name the manufacturer, but its sources described the operation as having pulled DUV development teams from several Chinese companies, one of them the state-backed startup Shanghai Yuliangsheng Technology. SMIC has been testing a Yuliangsheng immersion tool since September 2025. Most components in the new systems are domestic, though some critical parts still come from Japan, and delays at local suppliers have held back output this year.

[…] China accounts for around 20% of ASML’s net sales this year, down from 33% in 2025, driven mainly by mainstream logic demand… Independent analysis from the AI Futures Project in June put commercial-scale Chinese immersion DUV in the mid-2030s, with ASML holding 98.7% of the immersion market. Qualifying the new machines for production lines could take many months, and they trail ASML’s tools on performance and build quality. China’s domestic EUV effort, which Reuters first reported as a working prototype in December, remains years away.

Re: Thanks Trump

By AvitarX • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I think this is less about tarrifs and more about China’s care for technological independence.

Replacing dependence on a Dutch company has little to do with US tarrifs and more to do with independence from the “West”.

Re: Thanks Trump

By korgitser • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

One tech event in isolation indeed does not look like speedrunning. But you witness them taking milestone after milestone every year, that perspective becomes challenged. Now you can piss on every achievement and say that they are nowhere near yet, but with every step they are getting closer, and they are taking the steps at speeds no one thought possible even a few years ago.

China has a homegrown AI industry running on a homegrown tech stack, and they are leaving the US in the dust by now, all the while being about 100x cheaper. They have fleets of robotaxis and trucks roaming the streets and highways like it’s no big deal. They are eating up the cheaper end of mobile and communications chips market. And so on. Better take note, Tortoise, because this Achilles don’t give a damn about Zeno.

As to them buying lito from other countries, the US is working hard at putting a stop to it. Whether they succeed or not, China can not afford to get caught by surprise.

Re: Thanks Trump

By wierd_w • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

UV has a top limit, sure. But homegrowing that tech expands what they can do *now*, builds local knowhow on building fab machines, and primes them to not be as stymied when they move on to building more recent forms of lithography. (You cannot cut off their supply of asics to prevent the manufacture of better fabs)

You kids cant see the forest for the trees, complaining about the saplings china is planting being small, while croaking pridefully about how big your own trees are.

In time, china will dominate chipfab.

Re:Thanks Trump

By toddz • Score: 4, Informative Thread
You’re right it’s not the most advanced technology, it’s a mature legacy technology that accounts for 80% - 85% of the total world wide wafer capacity. So sure they can’t make chips with the leading edge nodes but they sure as hell can make the majority of chips in production today.

Re:DUV is a dead end

By mistergrumpy • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Never been in a fab I see.

For most processes, only the first few layers (out of 50 or more) are printed with the highest resolutions tools. As you move up the device stack, the layers have both larger dimensions and are thicker. Tools like EUV can print very small features but they also have a very small depth of focus. Because of this (and cost and throughput), a fab will have just a few of the highest resolution tools, and a bunch more of the lower resolution tools all the way up to non-DUV (365 nm I-line tools) that only have 300 nm resolution. Fabs will continue to have DUV tools for a long time to come.

I have no idea if this new machine is actually capable of anything, but they are claiming immersion DUV. This is the most advanced DUV technology utilizing a layer of water between the lens and the wafer to increase numerical aperture (and make smaller features). Immersion and EUV are both embargoed from China. The Chinese are able to purchase dry (non-immersion) DUV and UV machines from ASML.

ChatGPT Starts Blocking Direct Requests To Copy an Author’s Style

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the “broad qualities” of those authors “while remaining distinct in its own voice,” for example. This morning, Ars received the following response to a test prompt asking for a story introduction in the style of Stephen King: “I can definitely write with the hallmarks of atmospheric, character-driven horror and small-town dread, but I can’t write in Stephen King’s exact style or closely imitate his distinctive voice. Here’s an original opening that captures a similar feeling while remaining its own…”

In testing, ChatGPT generated similar dodges for other authors both living (J.K. Rowling, Amy Tan) and dead (Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway). An analysis published by No Latency earlier this month (PDF) found the same behavior for living authors but found ChatGPT complied with style-copying requests for deceased authors. In refusing to directly copy the “exact style” of various authors, ChatGPT offered instead to capture an overall “feeling” by incorporating some of the common features found in those authors’ work. That may seem like a distinction without a real difference at first glance. But the slight alteration could be legally important as OpenAI continues to fight a number of lawsuits brought by book authors alleging large-scale copyright infringement by models trained on their work. One of those suits specifically cites ChatGPT’s “uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials,” for instance. An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica.

In the US, copyright law generally protects only a specific expression of an idea, not the more intangible style of an author. But an AI-generated stylistic imitation could become infringing if it becomes “substantially similar” to the work of the original author. “We’ve never had a situation in which this personal style of individual creators could be imitated as well and as inexpensively as we now have with AI,” George Washington University Law School Professor Robert Brauneis told Bloomberg Law.

AI-Nannyism

By 0123456 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

This is why the future is local LLMs, not centralized, censored commercial Nanny-AIs.

I actually had Claude tell me this one time earlier in the year… right after it had just written a story in the style of the same author. So they’ve been trying to make it work for some time but clearly taken a while.

This ruins everything

By Patrick May • Score: 5, Funny Thread

If I can’t generate my technical documents in the style of Hunter S Thompson, AI is useless to me.

Local AI

By Lobachevsky • Score: 3 Thread

The more that centralized AI turns into crippleware, it will allow local AI to flourish. Even if open models are not as good, the mere fact they won’t be crippled will make them better in many use-cases.

I tried …

By PPH • Score: 5, Funny Thread

… having AI write a math text book. But my publisher said it was too derivative.

Re:AI-Nannyism

By pla • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
The limiting factor for top models is primarily hardware.

You’re right that you’re not going to get Kimi K3 performance, requiring roughly 600GB of VRAM to run, from a small number of 24GB consumer GPUs. You’re also not going to get closed-top-model performance, because you simply don’t have any way to get the weights.

If we’re talking about K2.7, Deepseek R1 Distilled, Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.2 though - All of which can be run locally -The question really becomes what you expect from them. They’re all strong models that know more than we (individually) do about 99% of topics. A “high-school level education” is more than enough for most humans to get by in the world. Now imagine a “high-school level” understanding across every topic. It’s not doing calculus, but it can tell you what patterns to use. It’s not writing Shakespeare, but it can likely recite most of his works to you from memory. It’s not going to come up with a clean-room reimplementation of Windows 11, but it can check your syntax and tell you the function prototypes of every publicly-available library in every programming language without breaking a sweat.

More importantly, to the GP’s point - Is a model “smart” enough to understand you’re trying to abuse it necessarily better than one that just carries out your orders successfully? Case in point, lately I’ve found Gemini’s new “watcher” blocks a good 90% of my totally legit questions before the question ever makes it to the real model. Umm… No thanks? The best AI is the one that works, not the one that gives the deepest philosophical reason for saying no.

Apple Will ‘Watch Everything Burn’ When AI Bubble Bursts

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
MacRumors interviewed AI critic Ed Zitron, author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast, about what could happen to Apple if the costly AI infrastructure boom collapses. Zitron argued that Apple is relatively well insulated because it has spent far less on data centers than rivals such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He said the company could use the downturn to make selective acquisitions, though it might simply continue operating largely as before. “I think they will sit on the sidelines and watch everything burn,” Zitron said. Here’s an excerpt from the report:
If the bubble deflates the way you expect (write-downs, too much compute supply, possibly OpenAI cratering), can you walk us through what that would actually look like for Apple? Does anything break for iPhone users, or does Apple mostly watch it happen from the sidelines? Could it even benefit Apple?

I think things would look much the same for Apple. I think they will sit on the sidelines and watch everything burn. I could see them doing some choice acquisitions as things begin to collapse, but I could also see them do nothing.

I think Apple is in a very weird place at the moment. The Vision Pro was a dud, but it was also the most interesting and future-forward thing I’ve seen anyone put out in a while. If they were smart, they’d tread water and sink as much money into making that as small as humanely possible — no matter how long it takes — because the entire AI bubble is a result of everybody running out of hypergrowth ideas, mostly because we’re flat out of new interfaces.

I want to be clear that what they want to do with the Vision Pro requires it to basically be weightless and invisible and never need adjustments. When it works, it’s genuinely awesome. But that’s a load-bearing when. One slight movement means the whole thing goes out of focus. I can’t even use mine anymore because it needs an update that requires you to wear the thing the whole time. So much promise, released too early, shoved out the door by a CEO on his way out.

AI break down

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I can easily see the AI bubble crashing.

But I do not expect the ‘excess compute supply’ to be a problem. That is very likely to be the main asset that people buy up. The price will drop for it as compared to now, but not by much.

Memory prices however I expect to crater. Once that compute supply is shifted away from making AI slop to more productive uses, we will have a glut of memory chips combined with excess production.

The main fall will be the idiots that ‘invested’ in AI companies. The AI founders will still come away in the 1%, but most of that money will have been striped away from the investors.

Apple Plays It Smart

By crunchy_one • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Generally speaking, Apple doesn’t follow trends, it sets them. Not following the AI “trend” is in their DNA, and very much to their benefit.

From the start, the current AI iteration led by the likes of OpenAI has been a dumpster fire for investor money. No profit in sight, and a continuous burn rate that dwarfs every other financial bubble in history. A few firms in the hardware business have cashed in on the shovel trade, while outright fraudsters like the DRAM cartel have raked in a windfall, but neither is sustainable in the long term. Apple, unlike just about every other tech firm out there, has contented themselves with sitting out the AI bubble, and it very much looks like they’re going to benefit. At the end of the day Apple will have pile of cash on hand to cherry pick the remains, while the likes of Microsoft and Meta will be left holding so much debt it could well sink them. Oracle will be toast.

Re:AI break down

By crunchy_one • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

But I do not expect the ‘excess compute supply’ to be a problem. That is very likely to be the main asset that people buy up.

I not so sure about that. There’s not a lot of value in a depreciating asset. At least the dark fiber left over from the dot com boom had a life that could be measured in decades. Server farms are only good for 3 to 5 years, and even then become unreasonably expensive to operate vs. new equipment that’s more economical to operate.

Likely-erroneous assumptions

By swillden • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

This whole article is based on the suppositions that (a) the AI bubble is going to burst and (b) it’s going to take down Apple’s competitors. I don’t think that’s a likely sequence of events.

I do think we’re in something of an AI bubble, and that it will burst… but it won’t burst in the sense of “All this AI stuff will go away and no one will need data centers”, it will burst in the same sense that the dotcom bubble burst, or the railroad bubble burst. What happened in those cases wasn’t anything remotely like “and the hyped technology became unimportant”.

I think the railroad analogy is the most interesting because while a lot of railroads went under and a lot of railroad investors lost their shirts, it wasn’t because railroads — especially trans-continental railroads — were just as huge a game-changer as everyone thought they were, it was just because the capital investment required was massive and the payback didn’t come as fast as the financial structures built to fund the construction required. What happened was that those with the money snapped up the failing railroad assets and made a lot of money as the massive economic growth unleashed by the railroads was realized, over the course of a few decades.

Similarly, the dotcom bust famously left a lot of “dark fiber” laying around… but all of that fiber got lit up within a handful of years, plus we’ve added a ton more.

AI is looking like it will follow a similar path. It absolutely is a revolutionary technology, it will upend the structure of our economy — even more than railroads did — and there is a lot of money to be made. And even if AI gets much more efficient and doesn’t need all of those data centers, they’re still going to get used. The problem is just that some of the early investors pushed so hard trying to out-grow the competition that they’ve built some unsustainable financial structures, and there’s a good chance that AI won’t generate payback fast enough to keep those cards from tumbling down.

This probably won’t be because AI doesn’t advance fast enough, but because it takes time to figure out how to integrate any new technology, to make the business and even social adaptations to make use of it. I suspect those things will happen far faster then they ever have for such a large shift, because AI will actually help to accelerate them, but they still probably won’t happen fast enough.

OpenAI has the most exposure. Anthropic has done a better job of figuring out how to monetize AI and is a little less exposed, though still quite exposed. I don’t think Google, Amazon or Microsoft have significant exposure, mostly because they all have very large non-AI revenue streams and large piles of cash, both of which can help them survive heavy investment. For example, although Google did post its first quarterly net loss in forever, thanks to heavy data center investment, it was only a $6B loss, and for a company that would otherwise be generating $80B per quarter in net profits and has a $130B cash warchest, that’s nothing.

As for Apple? Well, Apple might be able to sit cagily on the sidelines, waiting for the crash so it can use its pile of cash to snap up the assets and buy in. But it’s also very possible that they’re going to miss the boat. Not completely, of course, but somewhat like Microsoft missed the boat on the Internet. I do agree that really making something like the Vision Pro work really well would be huge.

Re:Microsoft, Google, & Amazon are “too big to

By Whateverthisis • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Except this time the US government doesn’t have the finances to support them.

TARP was a net positive for the US. The banks that got bailed out paid back their loans with interest, and the stocks the US government took in those banks paid dividends. Eventually the US government took equity in hundreds of banks around the country through direct stock purchases and warrants (think options) of around $245B, and sold them for $275B for a $30B profit. There were several social programs to help individuals that ended up being a net loss that weighed down the overall TARP program, but the government did get paid back and in general made some money on it.

But that was when the US government was spending around 10% of net revenue on debt services and had a debt-to-GDP of around 35%. Today it’s around 100% and it spends more on debt servicing than the entire US Defense budget. So a TARP-style protection program could be much more difficult.

But aside from all of this, the government won’t want tech to fail. I doubt they really need Anthropic or OpenAI, but they will need Microsoft, Oracle, NVidia, and others for both DoD purposes and export purposes. So most likely there will be some kind of bailout when this all shakes out.

Big Tech Accused of Stonewalling European Social Media Researchers

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European misinformation researchers say TikTok, X, and Meta are obstructing access to platform data required under the EU’s Digital Services Act through rejections, restrictive quotas, costly APIs, and burdensome security demands. Although regulators have fined X and pushed platforms to improve access, researchers remain skeptical that the changes will provide reliable, reproducible data at scale. Ars Technica reports:
In recent years, social media companies shut down public access tools like Meta’s CrowdTangle and replaced them with content libraries, or, like X, paywalled their API data, forcing academics to pay “hundreds of dollars a month,” said Duncan Allen, a research officer at Democracy Reporting International (DRI) in Germany. Researchers say that without API access, what Iamnitchi describes as the “black holes” in what society knows about how these platforms recommend content or handle reports regarding sensitive content will only grow. Others, like TikTok, cap how many posts any researcher account can pull each day, which Allen said can make it “impossible to study anything at scale.”

The DSA was meant to solve this by allowing vetted researchers at credible institutions to have access to API data if they could show it would help in studying systemic risks, from illegal content to threats to fundamental rights. But two years after the law took effect, researchers say they struggle to meet its security requirements and face narrow interpretations from platforms of what qualifies as a systemic risk. Application forms differ by platform, but most require data to be stored on infrastructure that cannot be compromised — such as a machine physically disconnected from the Internet — a resource most universities lack, [said Adriana Iamnitchi, chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who leads research into online disinformation campaigns.]

Even for researchers who secure approval, “there’s no guarantee that the data is good,” said L. K. Seiling, coordinator of the DSA40 Collaboratory, a German initiative that tracks 46 DSA applications. API data is often difficult for a colleague to reproduce, so a researcher’s work cannot be checked for errors, which Iamnitchi said is a “basic requirement of science.” DSA40 data shows that of 46 tracked applications, 20 were approved and 14 rejected. But approval rates vary widely: TikTok approved 11 of 13 applications, while X rejected 11 of 23. The true rejection rate is likely higher because the tracker relies on voluntary reporting, Seiling said. “There’s no structured advantage for researchers to use this pathway,” Seiling said. “Data access as it’s set up right now tries to disincentivize researchers.”

I know it’s a single data point…

By PubJeezy • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I know it’s a single data point but the moment when Twitter started hiding the likes on a post, they were admitting that their metrics were fake and couldn’t withstand scrutiny. Of course, the back-end for the platform is still showing that nearly every like/retweet/reply on Twitter is coming from an onlyfans bot.

Social media platforms are not plausible. All the metrics are fake and they’re processing payments, running massive e-commerce platforms and massive ad-fraud campaigns. And the platforms know it. Facebook deletes BILLIONS of fake accounts every year.

From 2014-2018 the media actually covered media literacy and more and more researchers were pointing out how fake information is spread through super-spreaders and swarms of boosters all being operated in concert. And then that conversation just stopped. The platforms hid their own metrics and researchers’ finders were no longer reported in the mainstream media as the click farms started moving from the east Asia to the US.

Social media cannot be regulated. It is a massive fraud scheme. You can’t “clean up” a platforms that only profitable business models require fraud and deception.

Re:This isn’t about Social Media

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Only if your tv has the Fox News logo burned in. I’m cool with the government putting my interests above those of mega corps. In the USA it’s the complete opposite given that corporations are people.

Re:This isn’t about Social Media

By gweihir • Score: 5, Informative Thread

You know, the USA does not look so good these days. You claiming nonsense about the EU does really not change that. Well, maybe some idiots in the US believe your crap and feel a bit better about their own pretty bad situation. But that will be the extend of what you will accomplish.

Re:This isn’t about Social Media

By ArchieBunker • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

You’re cool with the government doing damn near anything as long as it grows and gets more power.

The irony, coming from a MAGA stooge.

Re:This isn’t about Social Media

By gweihir • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

The EU judiciary (!) has issued fines to companies active in the EU (!) for breaking EU law (!).

Do you not support the rule-of-law? Are you an anarchist or a criminal?

Nvidia In Talks With OpenAI To Guarantee $250 Billion Financing For Data Center

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters:
Nvidia is in talks to provide roughly $250 billion in financing guarantees for OpenAI as part of a massive data center project, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The backstop from Nvidia would help the ChatGPT maker lease a 10-gigawatt project that SoftBank’s energy subsidiary is developing in southern Ohio, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. For OpenAI, a deal would be the first step toward controlling its own infrastructure instead of renting it from Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, while for Nvidia, it would guarantee demand for its chips for years to come.

The project is expected to cost more than $500 billion in total, including the chips inside the data center, according to the WSJ. The $250 billion guarantee covers the data center lease and debt financing, but would not cover the Nvidia chips inside the center, the WSJ said, adding that the chipmaker was also discussing financing OpenAI’s chip purchases worth up to $350 billion. Nvidia’s backing would support financing vehicles aimed at reassuring lenders about the project’s funding, the report added. The first phase of the project is expected to be finished in 2028, with around 800 megawatts of power, the Journal said.
The report notes that the U.S. government will control access to the power, while Japan will fund it separately under a trade agreement tied to Tokyo’s $33 billion investment in a natural gas plant. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will reportedly help determine who receives access.

Re:We as a species have better things to do

By gweihir • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

I think this may be an entirely temporary effect in most (not all) cases. The cult-like claims of the ones praying on the great LLM altar become more obvious nonsense every day.

Let me get this right:

By MachineShedFred • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

1. OpenAI wants to build a ridiculous amount of data centers, using a ridiculous amount of GPUs.
2. Nvidia wants to sell a ridiculous amount of GPUs.
3. OpenAI runs into a funding wall
4. Nvidia gives them loan guarantees to build data centers, where they will be getting back a significant amount of that loan for their own products, while charging interest on the whole lot

Sounds like OpenAI is looking to get purchased by Nvidia at severe discount when they can’t pay the loan.

Re:Let me get this right:

By Whateverthisis • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
You’re missing a big one:

5) Nvidia doesn’t have the money to guarantee these loans. Nvidia has in current assets around 125B; about 50% to guarantee these loans.

We have a major issue here. These guys had all this circular finance with equity, where Nvidia would invest in OpenAI who then turn around and bought chips from them, adding to NVidia’s revenue. Very little cash was exchanged, the equity was exchanged, but then the equity went up (in a private valuation) because OpenAI was spending more on Capex. Now people are calling BS on this circular finance non-sense, so they’re turning to debt.

But the debt is a problem. Bloomberg came out (non-paywall source from Futurism) with a report saying they’re using Enron-style accounting, essentially shell companies to hold the debt while they own 20% of the shell, so the debt stays off their books. Debt financing like this however is extremely reckless; it is the source of the Enron crash, the Lucent technologies crash (Lucent also got into trouble with risky customer financing and crashed big time), the 2008 financial crisis, etc.

These guys are headed for a fall and will bring the economy into recession with it, right when the US government is too over-leveraged too.

I have an alternative idea

By CEC-P • Score: 3 Thread
How about they all fuck off, give us our RAM and GPUs back, and they can’t build a datacenter until they can build their own chips and RAM modules from scratch at a separate FAB and supply their own power privately. How about that? Anyone in on that idea?

‘KVM Chainsaw’ Expected to Hit Linux 7.3 For Dealing with ‘God Data Structure’

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot
An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:
A patch series that appears destined for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is what’s dubbed the “KVM Chainsaw” as a major code clean-up in dealing with the kvm_mmu “god data structure”. Red Hat engineer and KVM maintainer Paolo Bonzini has merged the kvm-chainsaw branch to KVM’s “next” Git branch. With this KVM Chainsaw work now in the next branch, it should be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle.

The KVM Chainsaw work deals with the kvm_mmu structure being overloaded with multiple uses and splits it down into three parts for better handling current KVM usage. Paolo explains of KVM Chainsaw with the merge to the KVM.git next branch:

“The kvm_mmu is a “god data structure” that includes three different tasks: describing the guest page table’s format, walking the guest page tables and building the page tables. This means that the (already poorly named) nested_mmu is only used in part, since it has no page tables to construct. Furthermore, some parts are reused across guest and host page tables (such as the reserved bits detector) but others are not; for example permission_fault is replaced by simplified code such as is_executable_pte().

This series cleans this up by splitting kvm_mmu in three parts…

But I thought…

By TheMiddleRoad • Score: 3, Funny Thread
But I thought that keyboard, video, and mouse were already split up. I’m so confused.

I see the words....

By Ritz_Just_Ritz • Score: 3 Thread

…but I’m unclear on how these changes would impact (or not) my life as a daily user of a linux desktop and occasional server. Not everyone is a kernel developer.

Re:I see the words....

By DarkOx • Score: 5, Informative Thread

KVM is kernel virtual machine, and it is used to allow Linux to act as hypervisor.

Presumably as a desktop user and occasional server maintainer this does not affect you at all. Usually they work pretty hard to not break user land, but I imagine things like qemu or android studio that couple fairly tightly to KVM behavior might see performance gains or something if you update to versions aware of the platform changes.

Why is this newsworthy?

By Junta • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Nothing in the summary really conveys why this raises to the level of news. Digging in it doesn’t really have consequences for the users in the short term.

Plausibly a good change, but a change among countless other good changes that pass without notice.

Re:Why is this newsworthy?

By swillden • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Nothing in the summary really conveys why this raises to the level of news. Digging in it doesn’t really have consequences for the users in the short term.

Plausibly a good change, but a change among countless other good changes that pass without notice.

I dunno. Given all the non-nerd news that shows up here, it’s refreshing to see something more deeply technical, even if most of use who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about VMs in Linux aren’t directly affected.

I’d be fine with a bit more coverage of possibly-interesting kernel changes. I mean, /. shouldn’t cover all of them; we have LWN for that. But picking the occasional random change of significance to highlight is worthwhile. Maybe one per week or something.