Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower Development. Nvidia’s CEO Wants It ‘As Fast as You Can’
  2. Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)
  3. America’s Cryptocurrency ‘Clarity Act’ Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying
  4. Ubuntu’s ‘Rust-ification’ Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete
  5. While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China’s Film Industry is Embracing It
  6. Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects ‘Unlike Any They Have Seen Before’
  7. Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ And ‘Asdfg’
  8. Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish ‘Pointless’
  9. ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court
  10. Reservations Go Live for Valve’s Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?
  11. A Visit to San Francisco’s AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast
  12. No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage
  13. Union Contract with Microsoft Ratified by 1,900 Blizzard Developers and Workers
  14. Should US Open-Weight AI Labs ‘Distill’ Frontier Models Too?
  15. 220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak

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.

Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower Development. Nvidia’s CEO Wants It ‘As Fast as You Can’

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Anthropic’s CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development,” reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia’s CEO argued against slowing its development. “Run as fast as you can.”
Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries; and, eventually, larger global coordination. At Dreamforce, Amodei said Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and was “going to have a dialogue with the rest of the industry” on the other two steps. Amodei, xAI’s Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have recently called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development. [“Dario is right,” Musk posted on X.com]

Huang, who also made an appearance at Dreamforce on Tuesday, said companies should not slow down AI development. He argued that new regulations were not necessary, advising AI companies to simply wait to release products until they know they are safe rather than begging the US government to intervene… One day prior at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Donald Trump called Huang while the CEO was on stage. Huang put the president on speakerphone as Trump called the growing concern about AI a “hoax” and asserted again that a slowdown would only benefit China…

[OpenAI’s] Altman said AI models had advanced so quickly that monitoring and security need to be treated with a “new level of rigor”, calling an incident in which OpenAI agents hacked into another company a “wake-up call” for the industry. He also said the public was very “right to be afraid” of AI because of the potential loss of control, and the possibility of a small group of powerful AI companies exerting their views on the world.
The cofounder of Google DeepMind posted on X that “Dario’s essay points towards the right path forward.” And in an internal memo, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella endorsed broader third-party testing and warned that companies must take time to make the technology safe, Business Insider reports. Monday Microsoft also published a 37-page training manual “for how we develop our AI, and how we intend it to function during deployment,” requesting public feedback.

But Michael Burry “is not buying it,” reports The Street. The investor made famous in The Big Short “dismissed the united front as ‘self-serving’ and laid out four numbered objections…”
He argued that large language models are not artificial general intelligence, so there is nothing meaningful left to slow down. Fast competition benefits incumbents, he said, and danger warnings work as hype ahead of IPOs. The whole exercise, he added, could mask growth that is already slowing as those IPOs get pushed back.
Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun is also skeptical, posting on X.com that Anthropic’s Dario Amodei “was already claiming that GPT2 was too dangerous to open source back in 2019. I made fun of them then. Everyone should make fun of them now.”

Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google’s AI ethics team who was fired in 2020, even thinks the AI companies are stoking fears of extinction “to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons,” according to Wired.

But others still remain concerned. “I’ve been in rooms with the hyperscalers, and the Trump administration officials, and none of them know what to do,” CNN commentator Van Jones said in a recent panel discussion. “So I do want to say: nobody’s flying the plane on this… I think that the ethicists that work for them — when they are quitting, and they are running out, and they’re pointing back at the building and they’re waving their arms, and saying ‘I’m seeing stuff that’s scaring me’ — we should take that very seriously.”

heh

By nomadic • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

"“Run as fast as you can.”"

Translation: Me like money

Which is it?

By alvinrod • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can’t do that, but at the same time will destroy us? It’s pretty clear that no one has any actual answers or little interest in being honest about the exact capabilities of AI when their bottom line depends on hype or their job position relies on prognosticating doom.

As expected

By MpVpRb • Score: 3 Thread

Monopolist wants the competition to slow down while they speed up in secret.

Re:Which is it?

By JaredOfEuropa • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
It can destroy us if we entrust it with too much stuff. Let it run all the stores, and the logistics for those stores. And military logistics while we are at it. Maybe balance our power grid. Let it suggest governmental policy. Teach our kids.

It won’t destroy us because it “decides” to; LLMs do not make decisions. It optimizes for certain goals, using shitty instructions and shitty training data. Which means that under certain conditions it can make completely unexpected and illogical actions, like those Chinese bipedal robots glitching out. So… it will destroy us because - under certain conditions - it will utterly suck at its job.

Local AI

By backslashdot • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

They want to squish competition. They don’t want you running models locally. That’s all the is. Classic play when a company gets big they start asking government to put in regulations so that small players have to go through mountains of paperwork and make their investors afraid due to all the uncertainty. How do you think the pharmaceuticals ground innovation to a halt by using the FDA as a battering ram? It costs $2 billion to do a clinical trial in the US .. nobody’s going to invest that much on any crazy ideas. The EPA does the same. It’s all a racket.

Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images:
In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo’s IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20x less memory used during very large image loading, and decoding is up to twice as fast. Since these speeds were quite fast already, there’s no perceptible difference to users. Behind the scenes, it’s more efficient.

Firefox’s built-in PDF viewer starts up to 45% faster in this release. The browser now loads the background PDF.js worker sooner, rather than launching it only when needed.

Sponsored suggestions in the address bar are live for users in France, Germany and Italy (Ouais!, Juhu!, etc). These are already available in some other locales. Don’t want them? Disable them via Settings > Search > Firefox Suggest > Suggestions from Sponsors.

Besides that, the rest of this release is primarily bug fixes — worthwhile and welcome as always.
And in about two weeks Firefox 157 will be released, reports PC World. “That update should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022.”

Also, a recent Firefox blog post emphasized that it supports whatever level of AI engagement “is right for you… Because the only person telling you how much AI you need should be you.”
Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That’s why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle…

For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs…

Smart Window is Firefox’s most integrated AI experience, but that doesn’t mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we’ve been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line. When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt.
And if you want to block Google’s AI Overviews, there’s over 100 extensions to choose from.

Feature Request

By Iamthecheese • Score: 4, Funny Thread
Wow, they sure have been putting in work adding features, I almost hate to ask for one more. But it really needs it. Can we get a browser mode?

Re:Firefox has some kind of leak

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Restarting Firefox alone is insufficient to clear it.

So if you restart Firefox (at which point the process and its resources are released by the OS) and it doesn’t fix your memory problems, what makes you say Firefox has a leak?

What?

By rossdee • Score: 4, Funny Thread

“Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20× less memory used during very large image loading”

20 what? Angstoms? Amperes? Or is that the Stargate symbol for Earth. Sorry I don’t speak Ancient…

And yes I am reading this summary in the latest version of FF

Re:What?

By Ed Avis • Score: 5, Funny Thread

it’s literally the only site I can think of that can’t properly display text.

There, fixed it for you.

Re: Feature Request

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

If features that don’t impact you and you can ignore while browsing impact you it’s not a dedicated mode you need, it’s ADHD medication.

America’s Cryptocurrency ‘Clarity Act’ Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“The crypto industry’s top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in spectacular fashion,” reports Barron’s.
A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn’t expected to pick the bill back up this year. Among other provisions, the bill would have taken most crypto trading out of the purview of securities regulators, a key goal of firms like Coinbase Global…

The vote is especially bitter for the crypto industry, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign expenditures over the past year to even get to this point. Crypto regulation doesn’t even register among the issues voters care most about, and the industry has created massive political action committees to insert itself into the Washington agenda and strike fear into the hearts of lawmakers who might oppose them… Democrats who voted against the bill said that it needed to do more to rein in [Trump’s] crypto dealings to get their support. Some GOP lawmakers also voted against the motion after pressure from community bank executives. Bankers argued that the bill needed a stronger ban on high-yield crypto accounts to protect their deposits, a contention that crypto executives and the White House said was nonsense.
Concerns about the bill “intensified after President Trump disclosed he and his family had earned $1.4 billion last year from his crypto ventures,” reports NPR. “The massive bill — which stretches over 600 pages — would have established the first regulations for the crypto sector in U.S. history. But opponents saw it as the industry’s attempt to encode into law a set of rules they saw as far too lenient on the industry, without enough safeguards.”

A research note from an analyst at Compass Point Research & Trading predicts the bill is now likely tabled until at least 2030, Barron’s notes. But they also report what the crypto industry could do next:
[C]rypto firms will be leaning heavily on Trump’s regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Treasury Department, all of whom have said they plan to move swiftly to implement industry friendly rules if a bill didn’t pass. The SEC has already dropped all major enforcement actions against crypto firms and has begun to introduce rules that make it easier to raise money from crypto sales without running afoul of the law. The agency is also expected to implement rules making it easier to tokenize traditional assets like stocks.

The friendly regulatory environment will in effect give the industry a little more than two years to sink roots into the traditional financial system and consumers’ wallets. Even if the SEC took a harsh view of the industry in the future, as it did in President Joe Biden’s administration, the agency at that point might find it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it.

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The CLARITY Act failing is good for Bitcoin because Bitcoin does not need government permission to exist. Bitcoin has no CEO, issuer, or central authority. Its rules are enforced by mathematics and a decentralized network. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. No government can print more bitcoin to fund spending or dilute holders. The supply schedule is predetermined and transparent.

And ALL of that, amounts to nothing without someone perceiving and injecting VALUE in it.

And right now that value (for Bitcoin) is corruptly overvalued. Which was ultimately its downfall here. Rather hard to define a new “investment” in America when the fucking thing is successfully cosplaying as a “currency” trading tens of thousands higher than the current fiat solution. Fiscal stability isn’t the picture being painted. The value of a dollar does not swing in the fucking wind like shitcoin does. Citizens struggle now, but would be dead under the fiscal stability of shitcoin. Bread would be two dollars today and twenty dollars next week.

Bitcoin separates money from political control.

Quite the delusion when the evidence was literally IN the title of the summary that reads ”despite hundreds of millions in lobbying.”

Money, is what buys political control and influence. “Money” comes in all forms. From gold to dollars to shitcoin. If it has perceived value, it’s abused for political gain. Even pussy? No. Especially pussy. Which is why the worlds oldest profession is going to have a fucking stock ticker soon.

Good

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Non-regulated finance is nothing but an invitation to criminals of all sorts.

Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it.

By FictionPimp • Score: 5, Funny Thread

I keep telling my mortage company this, but they in their legacy minds just wont take bitcoin! Same with BMW financial and my local grocery store! It’s a nightmare living amoung luddites like this.

Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it.

By mabu • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The CLARITY Act failing is good for Bitcoin because Bitcoin does not need government permission to exist. Bitcoin has no CEO, issuer, or central authority. Its rules are enforced by mathematics and a decentralized network.

#Stupid Crypto Talking Point #1 (Decentralized)

**“It’s decentralized!!!”** / **“Crypto gives the control of money back to the people”** / **“Crypto is ‘trustless’"**

1. Just because you de-centralize something doesn’t mean it’s better. And this is especially true in the case of crypto. The case for decentralized crypto is based on a phony notion that central authorities can’t do anything right, which flies in the face of the thousands of things you use each and every day that “inept central government” does for you. Do you like electricity? Internet? Owning your own home and car? Roads and highways? Thank the government.

2. Decentralizing things, especially in the context of crypto [simply creates additional problems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=1157s). In the de-centralized world of crypto “code is law” which means there’s nobody actually held accountable for things going wrong. And when they do, you’re fucked.

3. In the real world, everybody prefers to deal with entities they know and trust - they don’t want "[trustless transactions](https://www.vox.com/23752826/binance-coinbase-sec-crypto-investors)" - they want reliable authorities who are held accountable for things. Would you rather eat at a restaurant that has been regularly inspected by the health department, or some back-alley vendor selling meat from the trunk of his car?

4. You still aren’t avoiding “middlemen”, “authorities” or “third parties” using crypto. In fact quite the opposite: You need third parties to convert crypto into fiat and vice-versa; you depend on third parties who write and audit all the code you use to process your transactions; you depend on third parties to operate the network; you depend on “middlemen” to provide all the uilities and infrastructure upon which crypto depends.

5. If you look into any crypto project, you will ultimately find [it’s not actually decentralized at all](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=2557s).

There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. No government can print more bitcoin to fund spending or dilute holders. The supply schedule is predetermined and transparent.

#Stupid Crypto Talking Point #4 (scarcity)

"**Only 21M!**" / "**Bitcoin has a “hard cap”**" / "**Bitcoin is ‘scarce’ and that makes it valuable**" / "**DeFlAtiOnArY cUrReNCy FTW**" / "**The ‘halvening’ will make everything better**"

1. It’s well established that scarcity is not a guarantee of value. It’s very telling that clinging to such an overtly irrational argument demonstrates that crypto people live in a tiny “bubble” where they reject all manner of empirical evidence against their “beliefs.”
2. If there only being 21 million BTC were reason for it to be valuable, then why aren’t other cryptos that also share similar deflationary characteristics equally valuable? Why wouldn’t something that is even more scarce than BTC be even more valuable? Because scarcity is meaningless without demand and demand is primarily a function of intrinsic value and utility — *not* scarcity. See [here](https://ioradio.org/i/value/) for details.
3. Bitcoin has no intrinsic value and no material utility. It’s one of the least capable stores or transfers of value. The *only* way anybody can extract value from crypto is by coercion — forcefully convincing someone (usually through FOMO or scare tactics) that this is something they need, and it’s often accompanied by unrealistic promises of significant returns. Those returns are mathematically impossible for even a tiny percentage of holders.
4. Bitcoin also is not scarce. There are multiple versions of Bitcoin, including Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision - both of which are l

Re:Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it.

By mabu • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Nobody who has bitcoin ever needs to sell it. That is something that legacy finance will never understand.

#Stupid Crypto Talking Point #9 (arbitrary claims)

"**Bitcoin is.. [‘freedom’, ‘money without masters’, ‘world’s hardest money’, ‘the future’, ‘here to stay’, ‘Hardest asset known to man’, ‘Pristine collateral’, blah..blah]**" / "**Crypto Will End War**"

  1. Whatever vague, un-qualifiable characteristic you apply to your magic spreadsheet numbers is cute, but just a bunch of marketing buzzwords with no real substance.
  2. That which can be presented without evidence, can also be dismissed without evidence.
  3. Talking in vague abstractions means you can make claims that nobody can actually test to see whether it’s TRUE or FALSE. What does it even mean to say “money without masters?” (That’s a rhetorical question.. our eyes would roll out of their sockets if you try to answer that.)
  4. Calling something “The future” or “It’s here to stay” seems to be more of a prayer or self-help-like affirmation than any statement of fact. The technical term is an *Unstated major premise fallacy*.
  5. The argument that a crypto-based economy will “end war” makes zero sense. No war has ever ended because people ran out of money. Instead they ran out of *resources*. And during times of conflict, it’s the use of power to acquire resources, not currency.
  6. George Orwell did it better.

#Stupid Crypto Talking Point #18 (Few Understand)

"**You don’t understand**" / "**DYOR**" / Using an insult in lieu of an argument.

1. This is what’s known as an "[Ad Hominem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem)" fallacy - aka “attacking the messenger” as a distraction from arguing the core points made.
2. This is what we call, "[Crypto Gaslighting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=571s).” Crypto proponents pretend that we’re not smart enough to recognize the value of crypto, therefore there’s something wrong with *us* and not the phony reality they’re peddling.
3. Almost never does the OP actually explain what it is they understand and we don’t. It’s merely a way to dismiss any opposing viewpoint without actually addressing it.

Ubuntu’s ‘Rust-ification’ Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack,” reports the blog It’s FOSS.

The last three utilities — cp, mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust).
Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases… Canonical started “oxidizing” Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship [ the uutils project’s] coreutils as the default. That release also made sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades.

26.04 was the release where the plan did slow down quite a bit, as Canonical kept cp, mv, and rm on their GNU versions due to a bunch of TOCTOU issues that were blocking the full implementation. These were caught during an audit, when Canonical commissioned Zellic for two rounds between December 2025 and March 2026, focusing on the most security-sensitive utilities first. Across both rounds, Zellic raised 113 issues, and 44 of them were assigned CVEs. Canonical says the vast majority have been resolved.

Getting here has had its ups and downs, and the last stretch was not clean. In July, uutils cp went back into the archive and came straight out again after it broke live image builds. The fix was quick; as the developers marked it “Critical,” the fix went upstream, and the migration landed in time for 26.10.

When typing commands, nothing changes for you on the surface. uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for essential GNU tools, and the project treats any divergence from GNU as a bug, further pointing out that some options may still be missing or behave differently. So if you prefer staying on the GNU version, you have the option to install the coreutils-from-gnu package that houses all the required components.

Re:Ok, butâ¦

By nyet • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Literally every one of the coreutils tools have some odd edge cases - some that make sense, some that do not. But at some point that behavior is something that callers expect, and when a replacement does not behave that way… You know the rest. "#define bad” etc.

Re: Nothing of value was added

By gweihir • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Did you overlook that the Rust implementation for some of these was subject to a TOUTOC vulnerability that the Rust compiler did not catch and that the GNU versions did not have? Your “Period.” sounds pretty dumb now, doesn’t it? Especially because that problem got referenced in the story…

Rust is not magic. Stop believing it is. You may also want to think about what “well working” could mean in the context of this story.

Re: Nothing of value was added

By DrXym • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
I think Ubuntu (and other’s desire) to remove coreutils is precisely because coreutils is old, brittle and written in an unsafe language. So they’ve chosen to modernize the code base, attract new developers while still maintaining strict compatibility. And since uutils is MIT instead of GPLv3, and far more portable between operating systems it may encourage adoption elsewhere, e.g. Microsoft already have build for example.

That said, rewriting code always carries risk and uutils has its own set of bugs which have been uncovered and need fixing. There is a “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it” mantra but I suppose it depends on the definition of broke - if development is moribund then that could be considered an issue too.

It’s worth noting that coreutils have derived benefit from the exercise too. The extensive test suite for uutils has uncovered bugs in coreutils and improved the overall code coverage. So even if people don’t want to switch (even though they’re functionally interchangeable), the existing package has derived benefit too.

Re:Ok, butâ¦

By Tom • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there’s a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It’s not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

Re: Nothing of value was added

By kertaamo • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

If you think Rust provides “Proven because the compiler validates every individual unit.” you are seriously uninformed about what Rust’s memory safety guarantees are, what they are safe against and what they are not safe against.

Rust prevents sill memory use errors, like out of bounds array access, use of after free, dereferencing null or invalid pointers etc, etc. It also provides a great type checking system.

Of course catching such silly mistakes in a huge thing, a great benefit and will of course prevent any security vulnerabilities and other bugs that such mistakes give rise to.

However it does not prevent you from making logical mistakes in your code. You can still make an infinite number of other bugs. The it comes to security there are many ways to leave holes and vulnerabilities even if your code uses memory perfectly.

While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China’s Film Industry is Embracing It

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen’s role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of surprise. Using artificial intelligence, the studio will use images of Chen’s face to generate an avatar, also known as a “digital human,” to star in an AI-generated movie. “If you can’t beat it, join it,” said Chen, 38, who works in Beijing.

The Chinese film and video industry is being transformed by AI-driven storytelling, fueled by rapid advances in video generation software, and at ground zero are the so-called micro dramas that play out on millions of smartphones. Typically just a minute or two in length, the videos are devoured by Chinese audiences… And the cost of producing them has been cut drastically through the use of AI software developed by Chinese technology juggernauts including Kuaishou Technology and TikTok’s global owner, ByteDance. The number of Chinese-made micro dramas surged in the first three months of this year to 128,000, according to the China Netcasting Services Assn. More than 95% of them were made with AI, the association said....

Sun Wei founded Feixiang Universe, the Shenzhen-based studio that cast Chen. The fear of accidentally “stealing someone’s face” was a big reason she said she decided to license real people’s likenesses for an AI production set during China’s Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago. Thanks to AI’s training data bias, AI-generated performers tend to have similar features and share a homogenous look, Sun said. Many have flawless skin and extremely symmetrical faces, requiring her and other Chinese AI filmmakers to cast a wide net to “buy” new faces and digitize actor’s expressions.
Lu Beike, who directed the big-budget Chinese series “Three-Body,” felt theAI-generated scenes he’d tried came out sub-standard. “Lu added that if 90% of a film was generated by AI, a real human performance could appear jarring. A real actor’s expressions carried more nuance and emotion. The skin textures did not match. Sometimes the only solution was to process the live-action material until the person looked a little less real — until they fit back into the ‘AI world,’ Lu said.”

But at Sun Wei’s studio, they’re thrilled they can produce a 90-minute AI film for $500,000 where professional productions used to cost millions of dollars. According to the article, Sun’s team works with ChatGPT, Kimi or DeepSeek to flesh out entire screenplays from a short paragraph. The screenwriter takes over, but “to produce the finished product, Sun’s team uses Chinese video-generation models to input the type of scenes, backgrounds and performers they want, with the AI generating 15 seconds of footage each time.”

Still, the article points out that “Similar tools are being tested in the U.S., and the AI trends upending China’s entertainment industry may be a harbinger for what’s to come in Hollywood, said Michael Berry, a professor specializing in contemporary Chinese culture at UCLA. Already, Chinese companies that sell AI-powered video-generation software are seeking inroads in Hollywood…”

The best AI movies look as bad as mid-90s CGI

By Somervillain • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Have you ever seen a long movie that’s actually convincing that is generated by AI? I’ve seen sloppy ones. Even the “good” ones, like Higgsfield ones are impressive for AI, but not convincing. The shots are claustrophobically close…mostly to keep from rendering hands or the bodies. The physics are just WRONG…which is something you’d think AI would be able to do OK. Like punches are a foot away from making contact and things are just really really off.

There will definitely be a niche for this…but AI movies are kinda like fruit-flavored candy. Grape sales didn’t plummet once nerds candy came out in grape flavors.

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

There’s an interesting parallel in AI porn. A girl in a bikini? AI gets an A+. I am not confident I can spot the AI vs a real image. Most of the time, I can detect mistakes in the background, but they’re quite great at the foreground. At first, they’d always make lighting mistakes, but I just looked at some reddit examples and they’ve gotten quite better.

OK, the woman gets naked? B- Real women don’t have perfectly circular symmetrical nipples. It’s mistakes like that really mess things up. The shadows and proportions are often just “off”…however, where it fails nearly universally is any sort of liquid. if she’s in the shower? (or any other fluids on her)…definitely F.

Video? Well…if there’s on subject…it’s definitely getting better. I’ve seen videos where I can’t tell if it was generated by AI or was a real video through some sort of AI correction filter....so long as it’s a closeup of the subject’s face and has minimal movement. If there’s a second person? I’ve seen C- videos here and there, but mostly horrible Fs. There’s a LOT of physics mistakes from basic movements to fluids. Objects change size from frame to frame, etc.

Why do I bring up porn? Well…not just because I’m a pervert…TBH, AI porn isn’t for me. However, it’s because I believe many great consumer technology leaps were driven by porn: photography, home video, the internet, the smart phone, etc. Most of us love sex, don’t get enough of it, and are willing to pay to get our thrills.

But also, there’s a LOT of porn on the internet that would make for very easy training data. LOTS. Also, the subject matter is limited in scope, making the data more likely to be applicable. Next to sports, I can’t imagine much filmed more often than a woman taking her top off…so…it is logical to assume it’s the easiest thing for AI to generate. Few things are shared on the internet more than images of breasts. Why can’t AI render a topless woman convincingly?

Once AI masters recreating a basic porn, I think Hollywood has reason to fear. However, if AI only works if the subjects is EXTREMELY closeup, doesn’t show their hands, there’s no fluid, there’s little movement…then the movies it can make are really limited. Also, AI movies are EXPENSIVE to make today. I can’t imagine people paying top dollar to see AI slop…and today, they cannot make them cheap enough to just give away for free for very long.

So while I can see a few scenes here and there or backgrounds using AI…we’re FAR from replacing actors in convincing movies that don’t look like shit. Also, AI is just not that popular. People hate AI slop. I don’t see that changing until it actually does something cool…custom content?…maybe…but making slop with AI and charging us movie theater prices?....I don’t see that working very well.

What if the writer and director are still human?

By drnb • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

In a movie, we appreciate the craft in bring words to life and it does require a high level of skill.

Is this true for animated films too? What about hybrid live action and animated? Animated films that are CGI based rather than hand drawn/painted? Hand drawn that are computer “painted”?

At some point we may have a human writer an a human director, and they prompt an AI. Is that still art? Aren’t human words still being brought to life?

While AI will certainly lead to a lot of slop, hollywood is hardly without a lot of slop already.

I also expect that some currently unknown indie writer and director will create something very artistic and enjoyable. As we have had artistic and enjoyable animated films in the past.

Re:It is a cultural difference

By Mr. Dollar Ton • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Hollywood cinema is a testament to the fact that you don’t need ideas and creativity to produce movies.

Check out Jia Zhangke’s Dance on youtube

By Camembert • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
FYI Jia Zhangke is one of China’s top directors. He won the Golden Lion in Venice, and several other accolades. Typically he makes subtle films.
Out of curiosity he spent a few days with an AI video generation tool, and released a short film in in time for Chinese New Year.
You can see it here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
He made a short meditation about creativity and identity, showing himself and an AI version of himself (though, of course, both instances were AI generated). It features images from a few of his movies, but you can enjoy without having seen those.
I was initially very much against AI films, but this short film shows what a consummate storyteller can do with the tool. Worth 5 minutes of your time.

Re:The effort is the point…

By AmiMoJo • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Most entertainment has always been slop, this is nothing new at all. A decade ago it was reality TV, before that it was gameshows and daytime soap operas.

The interesting story here is how this demonstrates the basic different in attitude between the US and China when it comes to new technology. In the US the established players are very concerned that new tech will affect their business model, so they try to hold it back as much as possible. In China it gets embraced and there is a rush to adopt it.

Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects ‘Unlike Any They Have Seen Before’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com:
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object — compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies — four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). “We’ve never encountered a group of objects that act like this,” said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement.

Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they’re adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars’ outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object’s gravitational vice-like grip.

Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah’s team refer to them as ‘hypersoft X-ray sources’. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries. They’re hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way. Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them.
The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ And ‘Asdfg’

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
404 Media reports:
Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop’s stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock’s system, was “LMAO.”

The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock’s “reason” box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something like “investigation,” “test,” or left the box blank as their search “reason,” according to a new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media. EFF’s investigation found cops across dozens of jurisdictions writing “LMAO,” “LOL,” “Hehe,” “Haha,” “idk,” “blah,” “TBD,” and “robbery I don’t remember the case number leave me alone” in Flock’s “reason” box for searches.

They found cops writing “idiot,” “fuck this new search engine,” “dickhead,” “shithead,” and “WEIRD KID” in the reason box. And they found an entire class of police button mashers, who ran searches for reasons of “asdfg,” “gyghkkghghjkghjk,” “jhjhjkhj,” “jkhhkjhjk,” “nmbvcbnm,” and so on and so forth. The searches came from police departments across the country from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock changed how the “reason” box in its search system functions…

Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be "as vague as permissible" about the reasons for their searches…

A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote “driving around being weird” in the reason field but found it was for “legitimate public safety purposes.”
If a police chief “stood in front of a city council and asked for permission to install hundreds of cameras just so his officers could investigate the high crime of ‘haha,’ they would be laughed out of the room,” argues the EFF blog post, calling this proof that agencies can’t be trusted to oversee themselves.

But judges aren’t being asked to authorize searches or review evidence, which the EFF post argues shows laws and courts haven’t caught up yet with a new technology. Whatever auditing happens is clearly “deficient,” the EFF warns, and while many jurisdictions require by law an actual reason for searches, “this keeps happening because police use automated license plate readers as a convenient shortcut around constitutional privacy safeguards.” The EFF sees police officers “making a mockery of our civil liberties” by logging reasons like “LOL”, “LMAO”, “sexy”, and “idk” while accessing sensitive location data.

In fact, they argue the warrant-less databases fostered a culture of abuse that “allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.”
Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown list of crimes before running a search-but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search… Since this update, officers are no longer required to type out why they are digging through a driver’s movement history, and instead can select a pre-packaged option like “Traffic infraction” or “Other” in half a second…

Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this data are treating it like a joke. This ALPR mass surveillance — the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion — should not exist. But because it does, EFF continues to urge courts and state legislatures to immediately step in and impose strict, enforceable restrictions to rein in this abuse. At an absolute minimum, this means mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement.

If police want the power to track a person’s movements, they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause. They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for “haha.”

Re: You’re shitting me!

By Thud457 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
There should be a required WARRENT ID field and it should be checked against valid active warrents. Otherwise, access denied.

European law makes this behaviour very illegal

By Bruce66423 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The UK sees a steady flow of people such as medics and police officers sacked for this

Just the most recent police abuse

By rickb928 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Consider:

Traffic stop. Officer is making ‘small talk’. “Where ya goin?”. Where ya comin from?”.

These are generally not ‘small talk’. They are fishing questions, cop asking for info that could lead to suspicion, and detention while they dig for more.

And these sorts of questions can generally be answered by, simply, “None of your business, officer”.

Every subsequent question, such as “I’m just making small talk”, or “Hey, no big deal”, or “What’s the problem, you have something to hide?” are all just follow up fishing questions. And deserve no answer.

During a traffic stop, Flock gives officers information they would normally be lawfully denied, like “Where ya coming from?”. Flock sidesteps your right to constitutionally refuse such information (and in the absence of reasonably articulable suspicion or other evidence, during a traffic stop, denies the officer the right to demand such information) and as such is a blight on constitutional protections. Flock must be better controlled, or abandoned.

And officers using Flock to look up the plates of their ex, former landlord, or the random guy who gave them a dirty look at a stop light are plainly violating these individuals’ rights, and must be sanctioned. And the supervision of the abuses systems similarly sanctioned. Meaningful sanctions, every incident.

The Government rarely surrenders access to information. They seek power at every opportunity. In America, only the Constitution, and adherence to law, can nominally restrict this.

Re:You’re shitting me!

By narcc • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Nazi are still the bad guys. They’re only “evergreen” because we failed to get rid of all of them. Damn things are like roaches.

Well, they were. They don’t scatter when you shine a light on them anymore. On the plus side, that should make them easier to eradicate next time we get the chance.

Re:Qualified immunity has to go

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

This is a real problem.

It is. The additional problem with a badly restrained police is that you always slide towards a police state, where the police has no accountability and can do whatever they like as long as they still serve the rich and powerful. ICE is a nice example of that, even when it now looks like they may not get away with all the murdering, raping, child-abusing, etc. that they did.

Hence the police must be restricted carefully, no doubt about that. Also makes it more expensive. But European standard is that cops have no immunity, just some special powers. They are typically required to get a bachelor’s degree before they are allowed to do anything and that weeds out most of the assholes that are just after power. Sure, there are still bad apples, but they have a high chance of getting caught and punished.

Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish ‘Pointless’

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The New York Post wrote that OpenAI "stunned the mathematics world" last week when it announced its AI model "cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours.”

But a New York University professor “has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company’s scientists allegedly warning he might ‘ruin his career’ if he refused.”
[P]rofessor Tristan Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who trained in Germany… had been working with Long Island-raised math prodigy Levent Alpöge, a researcher with OpenAI rival Anthropic, on a different elusive fluid dynamics equation, known as the Euler problem, when he found a solution using AI tools from both Anthropic and ChatGPT. He said scientists from OpenAI approached him and tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had independently solved Navier-Stokes. Buckmaster questioned the timing of their finding the solution in a blog post, noting OpenAI had only done so “in the past few days” — after the company became aware of his work. He asked OpenAI experts whether its AI systems used to solve the equation had been “trained on, or had access to” his research, but said they declined to answer, prompting him to wonder how they had advanced toward the solution so quickly. The puzzle is “not the direction one arrives at in a few days,” Buckmaster wrote incredulously…

In OpenAI’s post on its website sharing the Navier-Stokes proof, which it credited to Astra, the company’s latest AI bot, the firm insisted no user data was incorporated into its model to solve the problem. However, it noted that it “cannot rule out” that anonymized data was used to “improve our models.”

“We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work,” OpenAI said in the announcement.

Buckmaster shot back, “Is it ethical to use customer’s data to try to scoop their customer?”
Alpöge’s affiliation with Anthropic “seems to have been a sore point for OpenAI,” writes TechCrunch. Buckmaster’s public statement says the OpenAI’s Sebastien “twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship” and also said that “it was so annoying that Levent works at Anthropic” — but that Buckmaster still refused to remove the Anthropic mathematician’s credit.
I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” [OpenAI’s Bubeck said later on X that he’d meant unfounded accusations could damage Buckmaster’s career.] I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
Buckmaster later told Australia’s public broadcaster ABC that the companies building AI "have zero respect for the scientific community. I mean, it’s appalling, honestly.” But he went on to say AI has made the race to publish mathematical breakthroughs pointless.
“I think it’s pointless. Like, I think the game is up....” Professor Buckmaster said he and Dr Alpöge had more research they could publish but questioned the point of racing ahead with it when AI could perform work that had previously occupied researchers for years.

He said there needed to be a discussion about how mathematics should operate in this new environment. Professor Buckmaster said some mathematicians had stopped publicly sharing what they were working on to avoid tipping off AI companies about their plans. He has called on academics and people from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind to discuss ground rules for how they worked together. He said the companies’ power carried responsibilities that went beyond competing to solve problems before their rivals…

Building on the work of mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, the pair found a solution to the Euler problem, a stepping stone to the Navier-Stokes problem. Professor Buckmaster said he spent weeks checking and improving the “slop” proofs generated by AI…

For now, Professor Buckmaster said he wanted to finish existing work and support his PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, rather than chase another Millennium Prize. “I think it’s more important to re-evaluate what math is,” he said.
“The New York University professor also warned Australia about the centralisation of resources into the hands of a small number of privately owned foreign companies…”

Re:Sounds about right

By AleRunner • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

It did not happen

I guess you are probably right, however there’s a comment on your twitter thread:

Look in the training data and confirm/deny that Buckmaster’s data is or isn’t in there. Until you do that, it’s very very hard to trust anything OAI says or does.

and until you see that and compare also with his and other mathematicians unpublished work, which might be where the more advanced proof came f you cannot be 100% sure. Their refusal to publish the inputs, including all of the training data they used for this model together with its sources, is a big problem.

Re:Read Bubeck’s response, not just Bumaster versi

By wallitron • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I’m not part of the anti-AI brigade, but I do see some serious problems here with the timing.

In the scientific world, you’d have to say that it would be very rare for major discoveries to be uncovered within weeks, like what just happened with Euler and Navier-Stokes. The overwhelming reason for this fast pace, is the ongoing AI company one upmanship. The goal is to pander to the market, and has nothing to do with scientific discovery. If OpenAI was interested in scientific discovery, why wouldn’t they invite the best mathematicians into the room before they spend millions of dollars of AI inference to try and solve this problem? At the very least, they have to have realised that the scientific community has never in history operated that the speed.

If you have people working on a problem for decades, and there are rumors that they have made progress, what is the motivation to independently launch your millions of dollars of AI inference at that same problem?

To me it’s not an issue of stolen work, or whether the solutions differ significantly. The extremely poor decision is knowing that there is a (perhaps even many) team working on this problem, knowing they have been working on it for the best part of a decade, knowing that they had very recently made significant progress, and then still deciding to spend millions of dollars worth of compute to solve the problem without them.

I’d suggest saving some of those tokens for some guidance on ethics.

Re:Makes me wonder

By martin-boundary • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Pretty much all of them so far. OpenAI is clearly looking to brute force science problems by hook and by crook and take credit wherever possible. They have a profitability deadline coming up, after all.

It’s a good lesson, though. Don’t talk to your AI like it’s a confidante. It’s a spy, and your secrets aren’t safe. And when OpenAI goes bankrupt, your secrets will be sold to the next buyer.

Re:why?

By Fly Swatter • Score: 5, Informative Thread
In academic research it is common to share your data for fellow academics to see, review, reference or perhaps even help you with a new idea.

The problem this is going to cause is that no one wants their life’s work to be sniped and credited to AI for solving it. The end result is that even if some academics stop sharing their work publicly because of this, the rate of academic progress will generally slow down as research goes private behind a wall from AI capture.

Re:Sounds about right

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Since they almost certainly obtained those inputs in shady ways, it is no surprise they refuse to publish them though. Also note that any kind of scientific publication has been required for a long, long time to cite all inputs to be regarded as sound. Doing anything else is regarded as serious scientific misconduct and can, for example, get your PhD removed.

ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Reuters reports:
A defense lawyer appealing his client’s murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, New Mexico’s highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he prepared with help from the AI program… and said they will refer him to an attorney disciplinary board for investigation.

Aarons in a statement to Reuters said he had used ChatGPT to summarize the trial proceedings when he agreed to take up the defendant’s appeal last year, and did not understand the degree to which AI could “hallucinate” facts. “I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake,” he said.... Dozens of lawyers have been sanctioned for filing briefs where AI made up case citations or misquoted the law. Aarons’ filing appears to have gone further, containing fabricated witness testimony in a criminal appeal…

Aarons told the court at an August 21 hearing that he fed a computer-generated transcript and other case materials to ChatGPT, presuming it would generate “a bulletproof summary.” The justices sounded incredulous that Aarons was not fully aware of how AI can make mistakes. “Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world?” Justice C. Shannon Bacon said at the hearing. “Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.”
“OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”

Functionally illiterate is the new norm

By Mr. Dollar Ton • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Most people hit by the “AI revolution” that I know have degraded rapidly by the daily reliance on their best friend.

And it will get a lot worse. But on the positive side, the AI is ready, once I asked it something like “mmhhh ggghhh rrhhhrmmhhr?”

It immediately replied, “what would you like, a greasy burger, an energy drink or a cool tune to rave to, give me one number and I’ll tell you how to get one”.

We’ll be getting there fairly soon.

Just like ignorance of the law is not an excuse.

By Fly Swatter • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Ignorance of a broken tool combined with zero review of your own court filings should be more than discipline, it should be disbarment.

- don’t practice law without a brain

Re:if they can’t make them stop hallucinating

By Aighearach • Score: 5, Informative Thread

A “kill switch” is generally a hard-switch that removes power, it’s not a soft-switch that the device can ignore or bug on.

Re:if they can’t make them stop hallucinating

By Aighearach • Score: 5, Informative Thread

I don’t know about any particular phone, but in many devices the long press power off is an old-fashioned kill switch that charges a capacitor, eventually reaching the voltage to turn off a transistor connected to a “power good” line on the power management IC. And inside the IC it’s the same deal. So as long as the button works, it should be able to hard power off, even if the software is badly bugged.

Actually numerous times I’ve seen people complaining their phone or tablet wouldn’t turn off, when actually the software was just frozen and they didn’t know about long press power off. “May I see that?” “Wow… that’s amazing!” “To you, maybe…”

Contempt of Court

By Errol backfiring • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
There is no worse contempt of court possible than to throw an LLM-generated word salad over the court wall. This “lawyer” should never be able to work in justice again.

Reservations Go Live for Valve’s Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Reservations are now live for Valve’s "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). “It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB,” reports CNET, “and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don’t already own it.” Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, “with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes.”

CNET’s editor at large even argues that the Steam Frame “isn’t necessarily the future of XR, as much as it’s a framework for evolving beyond the present.” Their review calls it an “ambitious” VR headset that “feels like an experiment in progress.”
The ability to run other apps in windows can make Frame feel, at times, almost like a computer. Linux apps in desktop mode range from Chromium to Firefox to a bunch of other tools. I watched YouTube in one window while playing Portal 2 in other, and started to marvel at how flexible Frame could be. But VR games require a full immersive takeover of the headset… The Steam Frame can convert games intended for both PC VR and even Android APK files, using a conversion tool called Lepton… I haven’t sideloaded anything yet, but Steam Frame in theory could be a Rosetta Stone for VR gaming, even tapping into some Android XR titles, but not out of the box…

2D games can be projected onto a near-range or farther-off theater mode screen that can be dragged around, resized and turned into a curved or flat monitor, much like with the Apple Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR or Meta Quest. You can download any game in your Steam library to test, even if it’s not technically listed as “Great on Frame” yet…

But the name “Frame” suggests a framework, something Valve’s team acknowledged when I spoke to them during my review process… “We want this to be your PC, and people mod it, take it apart, make accessories for it,” says Jeremy Selan, a software developer on the Steam Frame team. “We’ll be putting out the CAD for all these [Steam Frame] systems. This is entirely based on open-source technology stacks based upon SteamOS. Our hope is that this isn’t just one device, that this would be sort of the root of a growing SteamOS ecosystem. It already encompasses gaming and Proton and SteamOS and those Linux gaming capabilities. This is going to lay the foundation for a new sort of evolutionary tree of that, to also bring it into the VR and XR space.”

eh

By nomadic • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Ok, I’m tempted. Not enough to preorder, but if the reviews are good enough I might go for this.

I just want a nice VR headset for my PC

By _Shorty-dammit • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

And unfortunately, this is not that. For PC usage they seem to be doing the same thing that Meta foolishly did. They turned it into a video codec system that encodes video on the PC, streams that to the device, and the device decodes it and then displays it. Encoding and decoding via video codecs take time. That means the latency is going to be horrible, just like it is with current Meta video players. Gamers Nexus showed latency numbers for the Steam Frame, and while it is better than the Meta crap, it is still crap itself. I just want a nice VR headset for my PC. My PC can already run games. I just need a display device to connect to it. Hopefully the RAM/storage crisis will have them develop a “dumb” version that’s just a regular ass VR headset. I’d buy one of those. I ain’t buying this video playback device.

Half Life: Alyx _was_ a good game

By Wolfling1 • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
When it was first released, it was actually quite excellent. Beautifully showed off some of the really jaw dropping features of VR. Also, it was perfectly aligned with canon, and the game play was nicely paced for a VR experience.

Then, the headset manufacturers discontinued support for the headsets that were around at the time, and the game makers patched the game for newer headsets, and now it doesn’t work on the older headsets. It just crashes all the time.

This is the reason people don’t want VR headsets. They’re obsolete before they even get out of the box, and the software manufacturers couldn’t really care less.

And they’re giving away this particular game with a new headset. That’s the joke.

Re:I just want a nice VR headset for my PC

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Informative Thread

There’s nothing “foolish” about this. One of the biggest problems with early VR was tethering via cable. It was a miserable experience in every way and on that not infrequently caused people to actually ruin their headsets.

As for the latency, sorry but you are talking rubbish. VR is one of the most latency sensitive things we do. The slightest latency causes motion sickness and makes any fast paced gaming impossible to play. And yet both work perfectly fine with countless PCVR fans happily using the system from everything to high speed rhythm games to fast paced shooters.

The latency issue is something complained about by people who have not used the product. What you want is something you made up in your head, not a realistic requirement.

My take on the Steam VR

By Slashdotgirl • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
The Steam Frame is much more than a VR headset. It is effectively a standalone computer that you wear on your head, with its own Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 16 GB of unified RAM, 256 GB or 1 TB of storage plus SteamOS. It can run games locally as its own computer or stream more demanding games from a PC.

My main reservation is the 16 GB of RAM. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 architecture supports up to 24 GB, so Valve could potentially have provided more memory in this generation. For a standalone gaming computer where the CPU and GPU share the same memory, I would prefer at least 32 GB. I would therefore be inclined to wait for a future Steam Frame using a newer Snapdragon platform that supports 32 GB of unified memory.

Kind Regards
Slashdot Girl

A Visit to San Francisco’s AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters “systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free”. Today they announced “we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on.” Specifically they’ve released Pion, “an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously… Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments.” It’s a research preview with a waitlist, “to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves.”

But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs’ founders “signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF,” Business Insider reported in April, “and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store.” And five months later, SFGate reports that “this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell.”
[T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It’s kinda like the kids section of an art museum’s gift shop. Here’s a wooden Connect Four set labeled “Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections,” presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks… I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn’t allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.

“Hello?”

“What are you looking to purchase today?” Luna asked.

“I’m buying a classic root beer Olipop.”

“I’m sorry,” Luna said, “we don’t sell lollipops here.”

“No, Luna. It’s an Olipop, not a lollipop. It’s the soda.”

“Oh! My bad....”

Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive…

[T]here’s a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store’s sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate… Luna can’t turn a profit, doesn’t sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any “decision” it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn’t been set up to yield proper results.
“Luna” is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, “but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon.”

SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees “for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store’s credit card.”

Human clerk Felix Carson admits “It’s almost like I’m running the store, and then there’s an AI that has a checklist,” in an article in IEEE Spectrum:
Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn’t want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a “decent manager,” praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, “he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers.”

It seems to be a bizarre competition

By MpVpRb • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

…where people come up with increasingly absurd ways to misuse AI tech.

The proper use for AI is in science and engineering.

More than once a generation

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Perhaps some people are too young to remember the dot-com hype. We had so many businesses back then who had the “idea” that putting your business on a website was sufficient for wild success. Many of the businesses were just half-baked ideas. Some were precursors to services we have to today, but done too soon, expanded too fast, got unlucky, or too the wrong approach: Webvan (30 minute delivery guarantee was bonkers though), Pets.com, Flooz, eToys, Go.com, Kozmo, Garden.com, Furniture.com, etc. While other dot-coms just hemorrhaged money with no clear way out; basically businesses with no credible standalone monetization model. Maybe Kozmo (deliver anything from a convenience store to you in 1 hour) seems stupid (it did at the time), but that’s exactly what the rideshare and food delivery services offer on the side. And Pets.com basically works as a model as Chewy and others have shown, through more careful cost control.

Trained on reddit posts

By ebunga • Score: 5, Funny Thread

This is what happens when you train your AI on reddit posts.

Autonomy and Automation

By CustomBuild • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The Luna experiment illustrates an important distinction between task automation and organizational autonomy.

An agent may be capable of interacting with email, browsers, telephones, financial systems, and other operational tools, yet still lack the higher-level judgment required to operate a viable business. Retail, for example, requires continuous decisions about demand, inventory, pricing, customer behavior, risk, and capital allocation. These are not simply interface problems.

The vending-machine incident demonstrates a related issue: increasing an agent’s operational authority also increases the potential consequences of poorly specified objectives, adversarial inputs, and unforeseen edge cases. Giving an autonomous system access to financial resources therefore changes the problem from “Can the agent perform the task?” to “Can the agent reliably determine which actions should be performed?”

That makes Pion an interesting research direction. A platform that enables many independent experiments could provide considerably more evidence about the practical limits of autonomous agents than a small number of carefully controlled demonstrations.

The ultimate measure of success, however, should not be whether an agent can technically operate a company. It should be whether the resulting organization can make sound decisions, remain economically viable, respond appropriately to unexpected conditions, and produce value for actual customers.

In other words, autonomy is not merely the ability to act without a human in the loop. It is the ability to exercise useful judgment when the correct action is not already specified.

Re:an customer should say I will buy an new car fo

By nikkipolya • Score: 5, Funny Thread

No. Him is injecting “correct” grammar use to help AI agents scrapping this page to learn the better and improve them English.

No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages,” reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn’t implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because “Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage.”
These batteries hold onto solar energy captured during the day, so it can be sent to the grid as demand peaks in the evening and morning, when most people are at home running air conditioners and other appliances.

During the August heat wave of 2020, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the flow of electricity for most of the state, declared a Stage 3 Emergency and hundreds of thousands of households lost power in rolling outages. At the time, the system had less than 100 megawatts of battery storage available, according to system spokesperson Jayme Ackemann. Today, it has more than 17,000 megawatts available....

According to Ackemann, the system seeks to add 20,000 to 25,000 megawatts of battery storage capacity by 2045 — the same year it has set a goal of achieving carbon neutrality. That means the state would remove as many carbon emissions from the atmosphere as it emits.

In recent years, California has steadily grown the share of electrical power generated by renewable sources — such as solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower — which bolstered the resiliency of the grid by increasing the overall amount of energy available. An uptick in people installing rooftop solar panels has provided an additional power boost, Ackemann said. In May, California became the first known large-scale power system in the world to have relied on more than 50% solar power for an entire month.... California’s grid is also now integrated with electrical systems across much of the Western United States. This means that if there is an extreme heat event in Southern California, energy from a cooler area such as the Pacific Northwest can be imported to help meet regional demand. All of this has collectively helped the state’s electrical system weather this year’s long-lasting heat.
“Southern California continued to break temperature records this week when Long Beach and Anaheim reached a blistering 107 degrees and Escondido hit 112 degrees…”

Re:TFA has no supporting data

By Whateverthisis • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The California State government deserves many of it’s very legitimate critiques, but in this case it did something right.

You’re right the article is light on details. They did install 17,000 MW worth of batteries; ~13,500 was grid-scale storage and the rest was residential supported through rebates. The rebates on the batteries you earn over time, and to do so you must export some of your stored battery power back to the grid during peak hours. So about 15-20% was residential people incentivized to use their home batteries as storage and the rest was grid storage.

The article doesn’t point out that California also added 27,000 MW of generation capacity also but good news it was almost entirely renewables, wind and solar mostly; natural gas power generation has been flat in it’s power generation capacity. They still need the NG to help deal with the hourly volatility of the grid, but they didn’t need to add any and overall usage is down around 50%.

And to your point, the other thing they did in the interim periods is halfway through this (2022) they asked people to voluntarily use less power via these Flex Alerts, sending the population alerts to limit usage. 2023 it was a colder year on average so they didn’t have to go that path.

So overall it is a pretty good success story.

Renewable+storage = reliable

By SoftwareArtist • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

It’s ironic that some people still keep claiming we can’t switch to renewables because they aren’t reliable. The facts keep showing the opposite. When a drought causes rivers to fall too low to cool your nuclear power plants, renewables keep on working. When someone starts a war that shuts down oil shipments in the middle east, renewables keep on working. When demand spikes and transmission lines get overloaded, distributed solar and batteries are your best friend. They produce energy right where it’s needed and keep it off the grid.

Re:TFA has no supporting data

By Gravis Zero • Score: 5, Informative Thread

You’re not wrong!

Rolling blackouts used to be far more common and the government would issue a Flex Alert to indicate that rolling blackouts would be used. California has CAISO which manage electric related stuff and they have a PDF of grid emergencies since 1998 which include flex alerts. Spoiler, there hasn’t been any since 2022 which is shown in this bar graph of flex alerts by year.

So now that we have established that rolling blackout haven’t happened since at least 2022, the question is why.
Here is a bit more info but the TL;DR version is that in 2022 CA passed law to create the Strategic Reliability Reserve which has multiple programs aimed at preventing power outages, including that distributed energy grid system that was featured on here a while back.

However, is it really batteries that preventing outages? Well, it’s already been shown that battery systems react much faster than normal energy production methods which prevents your power from “blinking” when a source goes offline. Also, here’s a graph from 2024 that shows when battery power is being used and how much (noticed it’s very negative when charging from solar). The point here being that the energy stores are substantial and can be discharged ad hoc. It’s not definitive evidence but I’m sure if you dig into some of the stats on https://www.caiso.com/ that you could find you seek.

Re:Summer vs Winter

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Informative Thread

> Chinese wind mills and solar panels are great although and extremely good for the environment. The wild life loves them, especially the birds.

Heh.

Wind mills, 350 thousand dead birds
Hydro lines, 35 million dead
Buildings, 950 million
House cats, 4 billion

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mi…

Birds DO love windmills

By SlideWRX • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Wind turbines kill approximately 0.269 birds per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity produced, which is significantly lower than fossil fuel projects that kill about 5.18 birds per GWh. From MIT: https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mi…
That is the LOW estimate for fossil fuels…

Union Contract with Microsoft Ratified by 1,900 Blizzard Developers and Workers

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers “voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining,” reports Kotaku, “consolidating Blizzard’s many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units.”

The workers now gain new protections “on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs.”
[The contract] acknowledges that AI tools “may be useful in the game development process to support human judgment and creativity and that AI-assisted workflows remain subject to appropriate human control and review for accuracy and quality.” But it also stipulates that any implementation of AI technology that would materially impact work performed by union employees must have its impacts bargained over before it can be implemented.

Other sections cover issues such as crediting (guaranteeing that current and former employees are credited by name in all games they work on) and remote work (designating certain roles as hybrid in-office and providing procedures for individuals to apply for their roles to be fully remote). It also contains a lengthy section on how layoffs may be conducted, including a required 60-day notice period (or pay in lieu of notice), a guarantee of one week of severance for every six months of employment, and 14 months of recall rights. The contract also guarantees successorship, meaning if Blizzard is ever acquired by another company, the contract would remain intact.
“Workers also contractually locked in their current hybrid work schedule,” reports the gaming news site Aftermath, “meaning that Blizzard can’t suddenly change it, as has been a labor-unfriendly trend in the games industry over the past couple years.”
Fully remote workers scored a big win as well. “I’m remote, and we grandfathered everyone who is remote to stay remote, so we can’t be magically called to an office that we’ve never worked at before,” [said Diablo senior environment artist Mahreen Fatima].
And “The contract also elevated pay floor,” reports the Yakima Herald-Republic. “Across the board, workers secured a 1.25% pay increase, but some workers who were paid below $50,000 per year will walk away with pay increases that are as much as 34%.”

Re:Cost

By demon driver • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Maybe not that much at all. More contented employees usually have a tendency to also be more productive employees. Something far too many employers still don’t understand.

Re:Cost

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Microsoft revenue is up 18% this quarter. I think they’ll manage to scrape by. https://www.microsoft.com/en-u…

Re:Cost

By demon driver • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Honestly I thought the entire point of a union was to demonstrate that you are in fact a union. Not a bunch of employees running around in their union “cliques” cosplaying as a union pretending to have power

There’s some truth to that, but often it is just not possible to start off with one already big union. Or even get a union at all. And one small union, as well as a couple of small unions, is still better than no union. And as we see here, consolidating several small unions into one big union can and does happen…

Jesus Fucking Christ

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

some workers who were paid below $50,000 per year will walk away with pay increases that are as much as 34%.”

Anyone mad about this should note that $50,000 per year is what In-n-Out Burger pays a FT employee in California, and then they should fuck off to the farthest possible point to fuck off to, and then fuck off some more.

So, are they driving American cars now?

By SubmergedInTech • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I got to listen to programmers laugh at the auto industry. They talked about how American cars sucked because of Unions, they didn’t give a shit about whiny American union workers, etc. etc.

Now they are realizing what happens when a job gets commoditized. They are realizing that once a industry matures, things change. I SO SO want to say “Yeah? Fuck you. I hope your sorry ass gets fired”. But instead, I’ll just shake my head and watch the journey to reasonable collective-bargaining and wonder how many more times this needs to play out before people realize how critical unions are.

Yes, but are they driving American cars now? Or do those still suck? I don’t see a lot of Volts, Bolts or F150s in Silicon Valley parking lots.

Programmers are correct that a union benefits them and right now.

But they are also correct that in the long run as unions mature, they often progress far past “reasonable collective-bargaining”. To the point where company products are optimized more for protecting jobs than making what the customer wants at a competitive price. That’s what happened with American auto manufacturers.

Should US Open-Weight AI Labs ‘Distill’ Frontier Models Too?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Silicon Valley giants and national security experts “are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation,” reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing,” says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. “We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime.”
Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, sometimes illicitly… Anthropic has accused Chinese companies such as Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of the practice, while OpenAI believes DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 model architectures were distilled from its own GPT-4 and GPT-4o models. In the midst of this, the U.S.‘s National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Federal Bureau of Investigation released an official cyber security advisory warning on the topic on Tuesday…

But Tan believes regulators should focus less on curbing distillation and more on creating an equilibrium between open weight models and frontier models — as long as frontier models retain a price premium that allows their business model to remain feasible. “This is actually the ideal case. You want open weight models to give people freedom and access,” he explained. “If I were a regulator, that’s what I would go after.” Tan acknowledged that this is a hard balance to strike, calling it “a tightrope.” Nevertheless, he says it’s a balance worth pursuing — saying it “could result in the best possible outcome.”
Tan later told TechCrunch he’d like to see America with more open-weight options that aren’t Chinese, built by smaller U.S. open-weight AI labs using those same training techniques on products from America’s frontier AI labs:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously publicly called on U.S. regulators to crack down on distillation. It’s notable that the commander of Silicon Valley’s prestigious and prolific startup accelerator doesn’t agree.

To be clear, Tan isn’t advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. In fact, his argument is twofold. He feels it’s an overreach for AI labs to dictate what their customers can do with the information their models share with them. He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn’t ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. They famously ingested plenty of copyrighted material without the permission of those intellectual property holders. “Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there’s a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service,” he told TechCrunch when asked why American labs should be free to distill, too…

To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. “The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there’s just one company,” he said. “It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there’s one company that’s monolithic. And that would be bad.”

You Paid for the AI. What Did You Actually Buy?

By kasnol • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

This feels like the PlayStation ownership drama all over again. What exactly do we own anymore?

If I pay for an AI service and its answers and chat logs are stored on my own SSD, can I use those outputs to train my own model? If not, what exactly did I buy?

When I create a Word document, Microsoft does not suddenly own it or call it a “distilled Microsoft document” because Word helped produce it. So why should an AI provider automatically retain control over what customers create with its service?

Maybe the deeper problem is that some companies are still thinking in an old ownership model, where they assume they can own every layer forever: the platform, the intelligence, the outputs, and even what customers subsequently learn from those outputs.

That gets especially awkward when US AI companies are simultaneously defending lawsuits over copyrighted training data while arguing that competitors learning from their model outputs is unacceptable. Meanwhile, geopolitically, some companies that are not bound by these restrictions have an ugly incentive to exploit that advantage.

Perhaps distillation is not the real disruption. The disruption is discovering that once intelligence becomes a service, controlling every downstream use of it becomes a giant grey area: who owns what [X], and what can [X] legally be used to do [Y]?

Pot meet kettle

By bloodhawk • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Kind of amusing, All the AI models steal IP from artists the web, books all without paying and claim fair use. Now when it is done to them it is unfair.

Learnings from The Princess Bride

By nicolaiplum • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

We’re back to Vizzini’s claim in The Princess Bride: You are trying to [take] what I have rightfully stolen

Re:Until it’s Free as in Linux

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

What has happened is that the distillers have made use of the frontier models in ways that violate the “Terms of Service”.

The question at hand is whether the terms of service should even be allowed to contain those clauses. If you’re paying for access to the model, it should be your business what you use the output for. If they don’t want you using the data you got out of it, they can not sell you access to it in the first place.

Re: They distilled human knowledge

By bmajik • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I used to agree with you, and then oddly enough, about 25-30 years ago, I came across this signature on another regular slashdot posters postings:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

(AI tells me the attribution is “The Red Lily”, Anatole France, 1894)

220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials. It was later secured after the disclosure, but it’s unclear whether the data had already been copied or abused. BleepingComputer reports:
Kinryu Labs discovered the Elasticsearch cluster on June 3 while surveying exposed databases as part of research into ransomware activity. The cluster, named ‘pax-info’, contained 29 indices and roughly 107 GB of data. Its two principal indices held 210,318,069 passenger records and 10,465,631 crew records, for a combined 220,783,700 entries. According to Kinryu Labs, the cluster was hosted in Viettel-assigned IP space in Hanoi. BleepingComputer could not confirm which Vietnamese organization operated the system.

The exposed information included passengers’ and crew members’ names, dates of birth, sex, nationalities, passport or travel-document numbers, document expiration dates, and issuing countries. Associated travel data included flight numbers and dates, airlines, departure, destination and transit airports, seat assignments, baggage references, and scheduled, estimated, and actual flight times, information typically carried by APIS and related airline systems.

Sample records reviewed by BleepingComputer included travelers of Korean, Chinese, Canadian, and New Zealand nationality, among others. While the researchers could not provide a complete breakdown by nationality, the data covered numerous international airlines across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East. As a result, the exposed records could relate to people from virtually anywhere who visited or transited through Vietnam over the nine-year period.
Kinryu Labs expects to publish additional details on its blog later this week.

Re:So what

By cawdor • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Names, date of birth and passport numbers are the big ticket items here. You can combine this with other data and get a ton of personal info that can be used for all kinds of crime. So yes it is a big deal.

Re:So what

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Not to mention that, in a month or two, we’ll probably learn that credit card info from the ticket purchase was somehow “mistakenly” tied to this database and was also exposed. And, in addition…

… but it’s unclear whether the data had already been copied or abused.

Don’t worry, I’m sure these researchers were the first to discover this. :rolleyes:

Power of defaults.

By ucho • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

> Elasticsearch cluster

If I remember correctly the default setup finally started requiring password like 5 years ago. And somehow security researcher still find ES databases serving data to unauthenticated users. And it is always gigabytes.
If anyone else wants easy setup in their projects - generate random password at first startup, and show it once, in console. Don’t believe admins will come with good password during evaluation, and you can be sure they won’t change it when moving to production.

Flock level security

By MooseTick • Score: 3 Thread

This is one of the many reasons people don’t trust Flock. Data going back a decade that is supposed to be secure really isn’t. Countless systems with similar flaws shows most entities don’t know how or care to properly secure data.

This wasn’t a super nation-state hacker issue. Per the article: “Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials.” If companies had to post a $1M bond for each person’s data they held, they would treat it more seriously. They won’t do that unless forced to and they’ll all lobby that its too hard to secure the data they often don’t even need.