Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Linux Kernel Flaw Lets Unprivileged Users Access Root-Only Files, Execute Arbitrary Commands as Root
  2. Tech CEOs Call for a Universal Basic Income. But What are the Alternatives?
  3. Caltech Could Lose Control of JPL For First Time In Decades
  4. Pentagon Releases Second Batch of UFO Videos, First-Hand Testimony
  5. SpaceX’s Upgraded Starship V3 Launches For First Time
  6. Google API Keys Remain Active After Deletion
  7. Major Streamers Must Pay 15% of Revenues To Canadian Content, CRTC Says
  8. NTSB Wants PDF Removed After It Exposed Final Cockpit Audio From UPS Crash
  9. Trump Mobile Exposed Customers’ Personal Data, Including Phone Numbers and Home Addresses
  10. Spotify, UMG To Let Fans Make Their Own Music With AI
  11. This Cannes Film Cost $500,000 to Make. $400,000 Was AI Compute Costs.
  12. Venmo Redesign Makes New Users’ Posts Friends-Only by Default
  13. Samsung Chip Workers To Get $340,000 Average Bonus In AI Boom
  14. A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
  15. Steve Wozniak Tells Graduates They All Have ‘AI’: Actual Intelligence

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.

Linux Kernel Flaw Lets Unprivileged Users Access Root-Only Files, Execute Arbitrary Commands as Root

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Qualys’s Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered and published a logic flaw in Linux kernel “that permits an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions.” Friday their blog pointed out “The bug has resided in mainline Linux since November 2016 (v4.10-rc1).”

“Upstream patches and distribution updates are already available.”
Working exploits are circulating publicly, and administrators should apply vendor kernel updates without delay. During ongoing research into Linux kernel privilege boundaries, TRU identified a narrow window in which a privileged process that is dropping its credentials remains reachable through ptrace-family operations even though its dumpable flag should have closed that path. By pairing this window with the pidfd_getfd() syscall (added in v5.6-rc1, January 2020), an attacker can capture open file descriptors and authenticated inter-process channels from a dying privileged process and re-use them under their own uid. The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material [including host private keys under /etc/ssh ]

CVE-2026-46333 is local-only, but the impact is severe… Any unprivileged shell on a vulnerable host is enough to read /etc/shadow, exfiltrate SSH host private keys, or execute arbitrary commands as root through hijacked dbus connections to systemd. In practice, the distinction between an unprivileged foothold and full host compromise collapses: a phished developer account, a constrained CI runner, a low-privilege service account, or a shared multi-tenant host all become direct paths to root. With the vulnerable code shipping in mainline kernels since v4.10-rc1 (November 2016), the historical exposure spans nine years of enterprise fleets, cloud images, and container hosts.

Qualys followed responsible disclosure throughout. Qualys reported the vulnerability privately to the upstream Linux kernel security contact on 2026-05-11. Over the following three days the kernel security team developed and reviewed the fix, CVE-2026-46333 was assigned, and the patch was committed publicly on 2026-05-14. We then engaged the linux-distros mailing list, the standard pre-disclosure channel for downstream coordination. A short time later, an independent exploit derived from the public kernel commit appeared.... Qualys is releasing the complete advisory today because the underlying technique is novel, the public picture is now incomplete and uneven, and independent researchers have already achieved local root and published exploit material. Doing so gives defenders, detection engineers, and downstream maintainers a single authoritative reference for the flaw, the race against do_exit(), the role of pidfd_getfd(), and the four exploitation case studies.

Tech CEOs Call for a Universal Basic Income. But What are the Alternatives?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The Washington Post looks at arguments that “AI’s coming upheaval may demand massive infusions of cash to everyday Americans”. But they also look at some of the alternatives:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI. Eventually “our current economic setup will no longer make sense,” he wrote in a blog post, adding that “there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.”

Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has “collective ownership” of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider. “I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody’s got to participate in the upside,” he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what’s on the horizon…

But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. “The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines,” said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. “It’s a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that....” Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, “would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues,” according to the paper…

Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing “a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians” for projects including data centers.
Key quotes from the article:

The Fine Details

By LondoMollari • Score: 3 Thread

AI CEOs love grandstanding about universal basic income to ‘offset’ the jobs their tech is vaporizing, but they’re conveniently silent on where the actual dollars come from once the human tax base is gone. Print more money? Good luck with that hyperinflation party. Tax the AI instead? Sure—except now every instance gets valued and levied exactly like an employed human, turning your silicon savior into a fiscal equivalent of the worker it replaced. Congrats, geniuses: you’ve just made AI ‘cost’ as much as it ‘saves.’ Who’s really getting UBI’d here—the displaced coders or the trillion-dollar models?

Economic Crash

By SumDog • Score: 3 Thread
The entire economy is currently in a crashed state. Money printing went out of control, home compute is becoming unaffordable, no one wants any of these AI data centers, none of your OpenAI/Anthropic subscriptions even remotely cover the runtime cost of compute, much less the sunk cost of the infrastructure. It’s all been run into the ground and we’re all going through the motions like everything is fine. There was a term coined for continuing on in a collapse during the Soviet era: Hypernormalization.

We’re distracted by irrelevant social issues, or people screaming about Orange Man (when really every single president in our lifetimes has been pushing towards this, unless you were alive during JFK, and we all know what really happened to him).

The data centers will get built, not by capitol raised through supply and demand, but because the governments of the world need the surveillance infrastructure to impose authoritarian, technocratic rule. That’s the reason for “child safety” laws that are really digital identification laws designed to remove any remaining privacy anyone has.

Universal basic income only makes sense if there is zero resource scarcity. We don’t have the dilithium crystals and replicators of Gene Rodenberry’s universe. The Weighted Random Word/Code Generators are nowhere close to the level of Commander Data, nor are they “intelligent.” They cannot reason, they just do a very fancy and compute intense predictive output. It’s impressive, but transformers and attention blocks will never be an “AGI.”

The technocratic class wants programmable money so you’re only allowed to spend FOOD-COIN on x products and HOUSE-COIN on housing. Extreme control that can cut off anyone from their money should they say or think the wrong thing.

Universal Basic Income creates a permanent class tied to government gibs. It will be nothing like Star Trek and a whole lot more like The Expanse.

UBI doesn’t work

By rsilvergun • Score: 3 Thread
You can’t just give people money. Pay attention to the people who are telling you to do UBI. None of these people are your friends and they are limitlessly greedy and all want to be trillionaires they’re not just going to give you free money. You should be already suspecting some of the thing based on the kind of people who keep talking about UBI.. The problem isn’t complicated. If I give you money but I own all the businesses where you have to shop I can just raise my prices until I get all that money right back. Then I can cut all the other government services and all the other regulations and then tell voters that your intense poverty and inability to feed and clothe yourself is your own damn fault because we gave you UBI. Now if there was competition that would lower prices but there is none because while you are distracted by Ubi as a possible solution they were busy taking over the courts and eliminating all antitrust law enforcement. So any attempt to compete with their businesses just gets crushed exactly the way it was in the 1900s before we had antitrust law. Google chesterton’s fence.

The only way out of this is to have a society that lets people who are effectively useless due to automation have food and shelter and healthcare and transportation and entertainment and it all has to be at least pretty nice. No you can’t just shove them all into ghettos like we do with Palestine.

The problem is that doesn’t feel fair or right. Why does your ass have to get up at 6:00 in the morning and drag your ass into work. It’s especially bad because the people who are going to get to stay home and play Xbox get to do that specifically because they are unskilled, stupid and useless.

And no we can’t just make them all plumbers. Even if we somehow started building infrastructure again via the government like we used to we just don’t need that many fucking plumbers or electricians or whatever. At best if we transformed our electrical grid and our transportation’s Network we might buy 10 or 20 years before the automation wave devours us.

So realistically this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to keep voting for right wing candidates until we are a fascist world because it’s unfair that you have to go to work and somebody else doesn’t. Sooner or later you’re going to have a huge population of the dispossessed and they’re going to put a religious lunatic in charge of the nuclear arsenals which will be fully functional and maintained because we will have poured a bunch of money into doing that as part of a big nationalistic push like fascist Nations do.

And then the religious lunatics in charge of the theocracy that your votes created are going to launch nukes with the full expectation that a combination of their golden dome and their God will protect them. It will not. And then that’s it no more human race.

This is the answer to the Fermi paradox. Species cannot overcome the feeling of unfairness and we develop nuclear weapons before we get over that.

I’m open to alternatives but I do not see a way around this fundamental Gap in human cognition.

Caltech Could Lose Control of JPL For First Time In Decades

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
NASA plans to open competition for the contract to operate JPL for the first time in nearly a century, meaning Caltech’s historic role managing the iconic deep-space lab could come to an end when its current agreement expires in 2028. According to JPL, Caltech has managed the lab since the its inception in the 1930s, and has done so for NASA since the agency was established in 1958. Space.com reports:
According to the JPL statement, Caltech has been preparing for this possible transition since last summer, so the news “comes as no surprise.” But the potential change is part of a larger shakeup for the agency. Earlier this morning, NASA announced a major reorganization, which is separate from the JPL news. “To support the agency’s ambitious short- and long-term goals, NASA is taking action to increase specialization at centers and integrate mission directorates, elevating delivery of technically excellent work,” the agency said in a statement today.

JPL is NASA’s lead center for the robotic exploration of Mars and other deep-space locales. The agency has worked with JPL through Caltech as a manager for nearly 70 years. Though JPL still counts as one of NASA’s field centers, it’s run as a contracted FFRDC (federally funded research and development center). This status has allowed the lab to function slightly differently than other NASA centers; it has a unique sort of independence, though NASA has always had significant oversight of the lab. “As an FFRDC, JPL operates under a special contractual and governance framework designed to ensure that its work is performed in the public interest and aligned with national priorities,” NASA has stated. “The FFRDC model enables NASA to retain access to this depth of capability while maintaining a clear separation between government decision-making authority and contractor execution responsibilities.”

Opening up the competition for institutions beyond Caltech to operate JPL could mean significant changes for everything from day-to-day mission management to big NASA science programs. Until now, JPL and Caltech have been heavily intertwined, with mission personnel, scientists, leadership, and others working closely “across the pond” between JPL and Caltech. JPL mission and program meetings often include Caltech employees and sometimes even take place on its Pasadena campus.

Why: Privatization == free money?

By NotEmmanuelGoldstein • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The US government is consistently bad at privatization.

The government always pretends that a for-profit entity taking charge of taxpayer’s money can have only happy outcomes. Add-in pork-barrelling contracts and scope-creep, and a lack of auditing and legal responsibility, and the result is worse outcomes on all metrics.

It’s like the billionaires have bait-n-switch down to a fine art.

Competency

By phantomfive • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
When I see this I think, “Who at Caltech made Trump mad?” He has a tendency to try to get revenge for petty reasons.

Re:Why: Privatization == free money?

By Ecuador • Score: 5, Informative Thread

It’s not that the US government is bad at it. Privatization is inherently bad. For profit companies by definition care about profits. Those who run them, in addition, care for short term profits. So give them an infrastructure that cost billions to build and tell them to manage it, do you think they are going to put serious effort on maintaining it or going to lengths to serve the least profitable customers (that have already paid their share towards building the infastructure). The worst example where I currently live (UK) is water companies who have figured out it is cheaper to pay the penalties for dumping raw sewage into rivers and seas rather than maintain and expand the infrastructure that prevented this. Of course governments make it even worse as politicians get kickbacks. There is no other explanation I can think of for the privatization of ONLY profitable airports in Greece. The ones that make money they sell to (usually German) companies “for stimulating the economy and attracting investment”, the ones that are not making money are bankrolled by the taxpayer. I would understand the “attracting investment” part if they at least bundled some unprofitable ones to the 14 they gave to Fraport on the first round for example…

Re:don’t get your panties in a wad

By symbolset • Score: 5, Informative Thread

JPL has been run by CalTech for 90 years because it’s the CalTech rocketry club founded in 1936. Its services are some of the most productive investments of the US federal government.

You’re looking at this as basic MIC M&A. If they wanted to cut the budget or be more efficient they could just rewrite the contract as they always do at renewal. This is a theft of expertise.

Re:Why: Privatization == free money?

By fuzzyfuzzyfungus • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
There are obviously cases where complete vertical integration makes no sense; literally all of them if you interpret ‘complete’ at full strictness; but when someone actually says “privatization” they basically always mean contracting out something large enough to be or have been an internal program. Sort of the way you don’t say “outsourcing” unless it either was or plausibly could be an internal function. Ordering copy paper from staples or having a meeting catered generally doesn’t count.

That doesn’t mean to say that it’s always a bad idea; but when someone says ‘privatization’ that’s a “we’ll have SAIC do it” proposal not a “employees and the DoE use laptops they got under a GSA schedule contract rather than from the First People’s Computational Manufactury” proposal.

Pentagon Releases Second Batch of UFO Videos, First-Hand Testimony

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The Pentagon released a second batch of UAP files, including 50 videos and documents showing unexplained objects over the Middle East, Syria, Iran, and in NASA recordings. Despite the reports, the agency stresses that it has found no evidence of extraterrestrial origin. The Guardian reports:
In one video from the Middle East in 2019, taken “likely from an infrared sensor aboard a US military platform operating within the US Central Command area of responsibility,” according to the Pentagon, three UAP are captured flying in formation over the Persian Gulf. Another formation of four unidentified objects is seen flying past vessels on the water off Iran in a video from 2022.

Footage taken over Syria in 2021 shows a mysterious object racing away at speed akin to instantaneous warp-speed acceleration from science fiction movies. Few of the objects seem to resemble flying saucers, discs or other traditionally perceived forms for UAP, although one October 2022 clip taken at an undisclosed location shows a cigar-shaped entity racing over what appears to be a residential area.

None of the videos are accompanied by explanations, and the Pentagon’s all-domain anomaly resolution office (AARO) has previously stated it has no evidence to suggest any of the thousands of objects seen on video, or described in written testimony, is of extraterrestrial origin. In its May 8 release, a statement from the defense department said the public “can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files.” Additionally, the information is collated from a diverse range of sources, including government agencies including several military branches, the FBI, the state department and Nasa. “Many of these materials lack a substantiated chain-of-custody,” the Pentagon notes

Oh crap

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
What the hell did Trump do this time that he needs a distraction from? The Iran War made us pretty much forget about Epstein Island so that’s out. Whatever he did it must be monumentally boneheaded…

Whatever.

By johnnys • Score: 5, Informative Thread

This is NOT important.

Release ALL the unredacted Epstein files!

Re:Oh crap

By korgitser • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
He sure could use a distraction from the Iran War, and from gas prices.

So Iran war is coming to an end?

By reanjr • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

So, presumably this means the Iran war is winding down and we need new distraction so we don’t go back to the Epstein file.

Worth noting…

By Maury Markowitz • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

> Footage taken over Syria in 2021 shows a mysterious object racing
> away at speed akin to instantaneous warp-speed acceleration

No, it shows the drone losing lock on the object. The camera stops following it, which is clearly evident by watching the motion of the background. The object is moving to the right, which we can see because the background is moving to the left. Then the camera simply stops tracking and you can see the background stop moving. It is at this point that the object “races away” to the right.

The various materials in this collection appear to have been collected but never analyzed. This is not entirely surprising. The collection team’s job would be to simply collect and file, they would not offer suggestions on what they are collecting, and probably aren’t allowed to (officially). I see no evidence that any of these materials were later examined by an analysis team, so they are simply giving up the raw materials without any attempt to ID them first. I assume this is because the DoW realizes the low quality of these offerings (even the UFO people consider them low quality) and didn’t want to waste the time. But now they are forced to release them and are doing so straight from the collection program.

SpaceX’s Upgraded Starship V3 Launches For First Time

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
SpaceX’s upgraded Starship V3 launched today from Starbase, Texas, for the first time, successfully deploying 22 dummy Starlink satellites and completing a planned fiery splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Reuters reports:
The towering vehicle, consisting of the upper-stage Starship astronaut vessel stacked atop a Super Heavy booster rocket, blasted off at about 5:30 p.m. CT on Friday (2230 GMT) from SpaceX facilities in Starbase, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico near Brownsville. A live SpaceX webcast of the liftoff showed the rocketship, more than 40 stories tall, climbing from the launch tower as the Super Heavy’s cluster of Raptor engines thundered to life in a ball of flames and billowing clouds of vapor and exhaust. The test ended about an hour later when the Starship vehicle made it through a blazing re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down into the Indian Ocean, nose up as planned, as SpaceX employees who gathered to watch a live webcast of the flight cheered. The lower-stage Super Heavy came down separately in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after blast-off.

The launch marked SpaceX’s 12th Starship test flight since 2023 and the first ever for the V3 iteration of both the cruise vessel and its Super Heavy booster, as well as the first blast-off from a new launch pad designed for the more powerful rocket. During its suborbital cruise phase, Starship successfully released its payload of 20 mock Starlink satellites one by one, plus two actual modified satellites that scanned the spacecraft’s heat shield and transmitted data back to operators on the ground during the vehicle’s descent. Starship made it to its cruise phase despite the loss of one of its six upper-stage engines, and mission controllers opted not to attempt an inflight re-ignition of the engines before re-entry. But the vehicle did execute a return-landing burn at the very end of its flight, along with several aerodynamic maneuvers deliberately intended to place the spacecraft under maximum stress, and Starship completed those moves intact for its controlled final descent.
You can watch a recorded livestream of the launch on YouTube.

Re:Mental gymnastics

By 0123456 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

They were expected to explode. The first stage failed to restart its engines and the second stage lost an engine but otherwise it got to space with a largely redesigned engine and spacecraft. Which is way better than the V2 redesign did.

So not a great success but the next one probably will be. Then, hopefully the flight after can actually go to orbit.

Awesome Lift off

By RitchCraft • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Watching that skyscraper jump off the launch pad and reach MaxQ in 45 seconds was astonishing. I’m always amazed watching archival footage of the Saturn V lift offs, but Starship is on a whole new level of amazing.

Re:Mental gymnastics

By 0123456 • Score: 4, Informative Thread

It was reused on a later flight. So the older booster has already proven that it could be reused but this V3 has a lot of changes both to the booster and the separation process so it may be a while before they can catch one.

Color me skeptical

By jpellino • Score: 3 Thread

with 12 launches in 3 years at a 58 percent success rate and zero orbits, and a requirement for 20 successful full orbit launches in 2 years. Musk has a reputation for hubris masking actions. This is not the same as using a LM. Wake me when they can auto land something unmanned on the moon.

Google API Keys Remain Active After Deletion

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Aikido Security found that deleted Google API keys can continue authenticating for a median of about 16 minutes and as long as 23 minutes, despite Google Cloud’s UI claiming that once a key is deleted it can no longer make API requests. Dark Reading reports:
Joe Leon, researcher at Belgian startup Aikido Security, recently analyzed the revocation window — the time between a key’s deletion and its last successful authentication — for the cloud giant’s API keys. In a blog post published today, Leon said Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers expect API access to end immediately after the key is deleted, but this is not the case. In a series of tests, Leon found that the median revocation window was around 16 minutes, while the longest window was up to 23 minutes, “an incredibly long time” for API keys to continue authenticating successfully, he said.

And these windows have serious repercussions for organizations. “An attacker holding your deleted key can keep sending requests until one reaches a server that has not caught up. If Gemini is enabled on the project, they can dump files you have uploaded and exfiltrate cached conversations,” Leon said. “The GCP console will not show the key, and it will not tell you the key is still working. You are trusting Google’s infrastructure to eventually catch up.”

[…] Leon tells Dark Reading the revocation windows for Google’s API keys, as well as the unpredictable authentication success rates, complicate matters for incident response teams that are dealing with a potential breach. “This breaks the mental model IR teams have when responding to leaked credentials,” he says. “It’s assumed that when you click ‘Delete’ or ‘Revoke’ that the credential no longer works. Now IR teams need to remember that for GCP credentials, a window exists when that ‘Deleted’ credential still works for attackers.”

To that end, Aikido recommended that security teams and IR personnel use a 30-minute window for Google API key deletions. Additionally, organizations should monitor their API requests by credential through the “Enabled APIs and services” portion of the GCP console, and review API requests by credential. “If you see unexpected usage from that credential after deletion, someone could be actively exploiting it,” Leon wrote. Aikido reported the findings to Google, but the company closed the report as “won’t fix,” according to the blog post.

Propagation takes time!

By Local ID10T • Score: 3 Thread

/nothingburger

Cloud environment

By Todd Knarr • Score: 3 Thread

This isn’t unusual for a cloud environment where services are distributed across multiple servers for performance and resilience. For read/write data the propagation window necessarily has to be short, but for read-only or read-mostly data like authentication tokens the architecture usually favors speed of authentication and resistance to infrastructure failures over fast propagation of changes. Eg., using a pull-based “changes since the last time I checked” process instead of setting up everything for a real-time event-driven process.

The main thing everyone needs to remember about cloud systems is that they are operating in a distributed environment and changes do not propagate instantly to the entire system. The question is whether the propagation delay is acceptably small or not.

Also, do not depend on “we can revoke the credentials” as your primary defense against compromise. That won’t help you against use of the credentials in the span between when they’re compromised and when you revoke them, if that’s acceptable for you then extending that span by a bit isn’t an existential crisis. Design your authentication so credentials can’t be compromised in the first place, and are as difficult as possible to use from any system other than the one they were issued to if they are compromised. Hardware tokens (Yubikey etc.) have been a thing for a decade now, it boggles me that they aren’t the minimum standard yet.

Major Streamers Must Pay 15% of Revenues To Canadian Content, CRTC Says

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Canada’s broadcast regulator says major streaming services such as Netflix must contribute 15% of their Canadian revenues to Canadian and Indigenous content. “That’s three times the five-per-cent initial contribution requirement the CRTC set out in 2024, which is being challenged in court by major streamers, including Apple and Amazon,” reports Global News. “Contribution requirements for traditional broadcasters, which currently pay between 30 and 45 percent, will be lowered to 25 percent.” From the report:
“The total contributions are expected to stabilize the funding at more than $2 billion in support of Canadian and Indigenous content, such as French-language content and news,” the regulator said in a press release. The CRTC made the decisions as part of its implementation of the Online Streaming Act, which the U.S. has identified as a trade irritant ahead of trade negotiations with Canada.

The CRTC also set out rules on how the money must be spent for both streamers and broadcasters, including contributions toward production funds and direct spending on Canadian content. Most of the streamers’ financial contributions can go toward content, though the CRTC is imposing rules on how that money must be spent for the largest streamers. For instance, streamers with Canadian revenues of more than $100 million annually must direct 30 percent of spending toward partnerships with Canadian broadcasters and independent producers. Large Canadian broadcasters will have to direct at least 15 percent of their contributions toward news.

The new financial contribution rules apply to streamers and broadcasters with at least $25 million in annual Canadian broadcasting revenues. The decision covers audiovisual programming, meaning it affects traditional TV broadcasters and online services that stream television content. The regulator also said Thursday online streamers will have to take steps to ensure Canadian and Indigenous content is available and visible to audiences. “This will make it easier for people to find this content on the platforms they use, while giving broadcasters flexibility in how they meet the new expectations,” the CRTC said in the release. Details of those requirements will be determined at a later time.

Major Streamers Raise Prices by 15%

By LondoMollari • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Canadians will end up paying their own taxes and streaming will become more expensive for all in Canada.

Re:Vancouver BC

By PPH • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Welcome to Netflix’s new streaming channel: Bob and Doug McKenzie , 24 hours per day.

Re:Vancouver BC

By Baron_Yam • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I look to the south, and if a bit of Canadian cultural propaganda is required to counter the stuff that’s been coming out of Hollywood for the last century… OK.

We value education more, guns less. We value cooperation more, greed less. We’re OK with single-payer healthcare instead of letting the rich at the top get richer bleeding us to death, and you’re not going to convince us that’s wrong because somebody else is getting healthcare ‘for free’.

There’s a reason so many Americans have recently discovered their Canadian roots and want our passport, and it’s not because things are going well in the US.

World’s richest corporations crying “poor”

By NotEmmanuelGoldstein • Score: 3 Thread

… as a trade irritant …

Translation: … as obstructing US imperialism .... The Canadian authority levied a fee at 1/6th the cost paid by competitors and wealthy US corporations complained, do I have that correct: So the authority tripled the fee for protecting Canadian culture. Now, the US corporations must pay half (soon to be 60%) of what their competitors must pay.

But what’s happening in the courts? Has the court issued a preliminary opinion on US money-grubbing?

Re:Vancouver BC

By cascadingstylesheet • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

We value education more, guns less. We value cooperation more, greed less.

Good luck with all that.

You are going to value what your mullahs value. Because replacement isn’t a “theory”, it’s just math. All it takes is time.

And they don’t value your list of stuff. At all.

NTSB Wants PDF Removed After It Exposed Final Cockpit Audio From UPS Crash

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The NTSB temporarily closed public access to nearly all investigation dockets after people used a spectrogram image from a PDF in the UPS flight 2976 crash file to reconstruct approximate cockpit voice recorder audio and post it online. “We show our work and we’ve been doing this type of thing for years. Nobody was aware that you can recreate audio from a picture,” a spokesperson for the board said. “NTSB is looking to make sure there’s nothing else in the docket that could compromise anybody’s privacy… now that we understand the possibility of a digital recreation.” CNN reports:
Cockpit voice recordings, often referred to as the CVR, capture everything commercial pilots say and are valuable during NTSB investigations, but are almost never released out of respect for the victims and their families. UPS flight 2976 crashed on November 4, when an engine separated from the wing while it was taking off from Louisville, Kentucky. The three crew members onboard were killed along with 12 people on the ground. During a two-day investigative hearing this week, the board released a docket full of details about the crash. Besides thousands of pages of reports and video showing the engine separating, it included a transcript of the CVR and a PDF file showing an analysis of the spectrogram of the audio it recorded.

A spectrogram is a still image that is a visual representation of the audio, showing the ups and downs of the frequencies. Using that still image, members of the public were able to recreate the voices of the pilots in the moments before the plane crashed and post the results online. The clip, which included background noise and echoes, covered the last 30 seconds of the flight as the pilots struggled with the disabled aircraft as well as recordings of testing the NTSB did on another aircraft.

In a statement on Thursday, the board made clear it “does not release cockpit voice recordings” due to federal law and because of the highly sensitive nature of what they include, but it was “aware that advances in image recognition and computational methods have enabled individuals to reconstruct approximations of cockpit voice recorder audio from sound spectrum imagery.” Investigation dockets are made public for transparency, but this week, the board took the rare step of closing public access to all dockets, including the one for the UPS crash. […] The NTSB is urging platforms like X and Reddit to remove posts with the audio.

Re:Hmmmmm…

By Smidge204 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Nothing.

There is a 30 year old law that prohibits releasing audio from aircraft black boxes. They accidentally “released” the audio by publishing a spectrograph, which is effectively a violation of the law.

So now they’re going through all their stuff making sure they aren’t accidentally releasing data they are legally prohibited from releasing.

No conspiracy needed.
=Smidge=

Hmmm.

By jd • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

A spectrogram is basically a description of the sound and Daphne Oram pioneered technology for turning the informational sections of a spectrogram into sound back in 1958. That would be.... 68 years ago, by my reckoning.

Now, technology has moved on a great deal in 68 years. Exactly what you could do today, relative to what she did back then, is obviously significant. But this really should not have come as a shock.

The lack of understanding of this sort of stuff shows what happens when you have too many niche specialists and too few people who understand the broad technology.

Re:Scott Manley knew

By scdeimos • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Indeed…

Like Scott Manley says, going from a frequency domain image representation to a time domain sound file is something that is extremely old and does not and has not required AI the last 50 years. It’s just that they vibe coded the extremely old, extremely normal algorithmic solution. AI did not recreate the dead pilots voice, it just made data preparation and coding a bit less work.
It’s almost certain you’ve used software or seen/heard software output today that transformed between frequency domain and time domain. It’s ubiquitous.

Re: Hmmmmm…

By TuballoyThunder • Score: 5, Informative Thread
From the perspective of US law, the spectrograms are a recording. An audio recording captures a sequence of sounds, which can include music, spoken words, or other audio elements. These sounds must be fixed in a tangible medium. Printed spectrograms meet the definition.

This is actually old tech.

By belmolis • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
The ability to convert a spectrogram to sound has long been known in the speech research community. In 1950 a device known as the Pattern Playback was built at Haskins Laboratories. You would draw an artificial spectrogram and feed it to the machine and it would play back the corresponding sound. It was used to perform experiments on the acoustic cues for speech perception. The original machine was last used for research in 1976. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Trump Mobile Exposed Customers’ Personal Data, Including Phone Numbers and Home Addresses

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Trump Mobile confirmed that a third-party platform exposed customers’ personal data to the open internet. The data included names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and order IDs. TechCrunch reports:
Chris Walker, a spokesperson for the Trump-branded phone maker, told TechCrunch that the company is investigating the exposure and has not found evidence that content or financial information spilled online. The company said there was no breach of Trump Mobile’s network, systems, or infrastructure. Walker said that the exposure was linked to a third-party platform provider that supports “certain Trump Mobile operations.” He did not name the provider.

[…] On Wednesday, two YouTubers who ordered Trump Mobile’s phone said a researcher alerted them that their personal information was exposed online. The YouTubers Coffeezilla and penguinz0 said they tried to alert Trump Mobile of the exposure after the researcher also tried but to no avail. Walker said Trump Mobile is evaluating whether it needs to notify customers of the exposure of their personal data.
Further reading: Trump Phones Start Shipping - But Were There Really 600,000 Preorders?

Re:How many notifications, exactly?

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The only news here is that there are trump mobile customers

More pointedly, the leak revealed that there are only about 30,000 orders from the 600,000 preorders previously claimed. Doesn’t necessarily mean they were lying, but that would be only a 5% conversion/purchase rate. Maybe die-hard Trump fans actually got tired of waiting or maybe it was all smoke and mirrors - hmm....

Trump Mobile has exposed customers’ personal data…:

Truth Social once crowed about having nearly 600,000 preorders. However, the aforementioned leak suggests that only 30,000 people actually turned a preorder into an actual order.

Re: Honestly

By gtall • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

They won’t take notice. They cannot believe the incompetence because that would mean denying the last 5 (at least) years of their beliefs. And all their Bunko Buddies would disown them if they uttered a word against el Bunko. It is their reward system and they are quite happy with it.

Re: Stop contradicting yourself!

By RazorSharp • Score: 5, Informative Thread

There is no contradiction. Trump Mobile hired a cheap third party incapable of doing the work properly and failed to ensure that the work was adequate. That does not absolve them of blame, that places the blame squarely on Trump Mobile.

Re:When I was a kid…

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

When I was a kid, we called that a Phone Book, now it’s “Exposing Customer Data”? OK, whatever.

The phone book never identified that you made fucking stupid purchasing decisions. I’m happy to give people my phone number and my address, but I’d probably die of shame if anyone caught me with a Trump phone.

Re:Humiliation fetishists

By sound+vision • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

All these people are on a list of designated marks now. There’s a whole scam ecosystem bubbling under the Redhat movement, feeding on itself. The stuff you read about in the news isn’t even the half of it.

There’s an army of absolutely inspired finessers the guy attracts. There’s a whole community - millions - of concentrated stupids for them to feed on. They’re turning it into a conveyor belt like the religious crazies do, especially the Islamist terror groups with their online recruiting. Rope em in, squeeze em for everything.

The ones I’ve seen with my own eyes are concentrated on scamming, but no doubt some of them are going in a more militant direction. I’m expecting attacks before long, big ones, more than the handful of people killed at the mosque this week. Particularly if the Republicans lose an election.

Spotify, UMG To Let Fans Make Their Own Music With AI

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Billboard:
Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced a licensing deal for recorded music and publishing rights, enabling Spotify to launch generative AI music models in the future. With this deal, Spotify’s models will allow fans to create covers and remixes of their favorite songs from participating artists and songwriters signed to UMG. The new deal was announced on Thursday (May 21) as part of Spotify’s Investor Day presentation, and the company touts that it will open up additional revenue streams on top of what artists already earn on Spotify and will provide new discovery opportunities for participating UMG talent. These AI products will eventually become available to premium users as a paid add-on. It is unclear when they are set to launch.
“We recognize there’s a wide range of views on use of generative music tools within the artistic community,” the announcement read. “Therefore, artists and rightsholders will choose if and how to participate to ensure the use of AI tools aligns with the values of the people behind the music.”
Spotify also announced a feature called “Reserved” that will set aside concert tickets for Premium subscribers it identifies as an artist’s most dedicated fans. “Getting concert tickets today can feel like a race you’re set up to lose,” Spotify wrote in a post on Thursday. “You show up at the right time, refresh endlessly, and still miss out. Too often, the experience is stressful, unpredictable, and disconnected from what should matter most: whether real fans actually get tickets. We think there’s a better way.”

This is fine

By Frank Burly • Score: 3 Thread
We’ve already seen this on social media, where people take a couple pieces of truth and a couple fabrications and add their own framework to create a new reality that happens to jibe exactly with their own world view.

Yes, it’s also bad when it happens to the arts—but at least the shitty output can’t affect anyone against their will.

I heard an absolute banger

By OrangeTide • Score: 3 Thread

I hope AI can help me make something like this absolute banger song

Well that’s made that decision easy.

By Computershack • Score: 3 Thread
My 12 month Premium sub ended a week ago, I was contemplating on whether to continue subscribing, already a bit reluctant to due to the amount of AI slop on it and this will just make it ten times worse. This has made my decision much easier. Now to decide where to go next.

Let me guess.

By zmollusc • Score: 3 Thread

I pay to use the service, but the music ‘I make’ never belongs to me , I can only listen to it on their platform and access to it can be withdrawn at any time ? Am I missing anything? SpotifyUMG can monetise for themselves it in perpetuity? Anything else?

This Cannes Film Cost $500,000 to Make. $400,000 Was AI Compute Costs.

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Higgsfield AI is debuting a 95-minute fully AI-generated film at Cannes called “Hell Grind” that reportedly cost $500,000 to make, $400,000 of which was spent on compute alone. The project took just two weeks to produce and is intended to showcase the startup’s AI production tools. But it also underscores the current limits of AI filmmaking: thousands of detailed prompts, endless iteration, high costs, and plenty of traditional filmmaking judgment were still required. The Wall Street Journal reports:
What might surprise viewers is how much technical film know-how was needed to create the movie, said Adil Alimzhanov, a content lead at Higgsfield who also worked on it. “You have to understand camera composition, which shots are changed. Like you can’t have two close-ups back to back, you have to start with an establishing shot,” he said. “You still need those filmmaking skills.” Higgsfield, which was valued at $1.3 billion in its latest funding round earlier this year, crossed $400 million in annual revenue run rate in May. It doesn’t make the actual video-generation models, relying instead on existing tools like Google’s Veo 3. But it does provide the tooling on top to make sure that the visuals are consistent across all the incoming generations.

The core of the movie-making process here was prompting the AI models and getting clips back, Alimzhanov said. Each prompt would generate about 15 seconds of footage. Those 15 seconds needed to be generated a number of times, with tweaks to the prompt to get the best possible version. The first 25 minutes of the movie required 16,181 initial video generations, which ended up as 253 final shots. One of the biggest difficulties in making longer-form films with AI is maintaining consistency across the outputs. AI models can be unpredictable, and a feature-length film can’t have scenes that look completely different from one moment to the next.

Because of that, every prompt had to be extremely long and detailed. Each one would typically start with a prefix that defined requirements like style (8k IMAX, photorealistic), lighting (natural light only, “contre-jour” backlight, camera on shadow side) and the type of camera it should look like it was being shot on (“cine lens,” 180-degree shutter motion blur). The lighting was key to avoiding the AI sheen that typically gets branded as “slop,” said Alimzhanov. AI-generated video tends to over-light scenes in an unnatural way. That prefix would also have to remind the AI to obey the laws of physics with wording like: “gravity and inertia respected — mass has real weight, correct contact shadows, no floating props.” The individual prompts were, on average, 3,000 words each.

One aspect of what Higgsfield has built, and sells to clients, is an AI tool that generates these complex, detailed prompts. Users can enter a page from the original script, and the Higgsfield tool will return with a prompt that could be thousands of words long, designed to create production-quality outputs. And all that prompting is how the company racked up a $400,000 AI compute bill on the project. Co-founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov, however, noted that working with “cloud” providers, like Nebius and CoreWeave, rather than big hyperscalers, helped it keep costs from going even higher.
You can watch the trailer for Hell Grind on YouTube and judge the results for yourself.

Re:The movie looks pretty bad

By drinkypoo • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Getting a coherent style good or bad from AI requires training, which is a lot harder than just prompting. Since AI isn’t actually working from pictures, just statistical analyses of them, it has a really hard time giving consistency. A real art department making a real film has a body of concept art, samples, and other resources to draw from and compare to, and brains to do it with.

Re:The movie looks pretty bad

By drinkypoo • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Most people want things to just work, and then they delude themselves into thinking they do even when they do not.

If I had a dollar for every person who I’ve seen join a 3d printing group and ask how they can print more than the models shipped on the machine, I could buy another printer. It’s a desktop-sized industrial robot, not a games console.

Re: Polar Express with explosions?

By jddj • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I’ll take ‘What is"Primer”' for $55,000, Ken.

Re:“money spent on compute…”

By TheStatsMan • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Verbing weirds language

Near the neolithic cave painting level with AI

By drnb • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Getting a coherent style good or bad from AI requires training, which is a lot harder than just prompting. Since AI isn’t actually working from pictures, just statistical analyses of them, it has a really hard time giving consistency. A real art department making a real film has a body of concept art, samples, and other resources to draw from and compare to, and brains to do it with.

The problem is more that the prompts to the AI are too simplistic. There is too much context and background info in human minds and we take things for granted. The trick to using AI is the human learning how to feed info and instructions to the AI more accurately and more completely. We’re new at this, still pretty low on the learning curve. A human drawing on an iPad still has thousands of years of institutional knowledge from painting and drawing that can apply. With respect to AI, we’re kind of at the neolithic cave painting level.

Venmo Redesign Makes New Users’ Posts Friends-Only by Default

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Venmo is testing a major redesign that will make new users’ payment posts viewable by their friends by default instead of being public. The Verge reports:
It’s a notable update for a platform that has struggled with privacy in the past. In 2021, BuzzFeed News tracked down President Joe Biden’s Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle because Venmo, at the time, had no way to keep your Venmo contacts private. It fixed that soon after.

As part of the redesign, if you’re a new user and you do want your posts to be public (or private just to you), you’ll be able to set that as part of the new onboarding flow. You can also change your preference in settings after the fact; an updated screen for sending money will also show if that post is private, visible just to friends, or is visible publicly before you make the transaction.

Why would you ever want that to be public?

By PhantomHarlock • Score: 3 Thread

I can’t understand the thought process behind them making everything public by default. Why on earth would anyone want personal financial transactions public?

That’s the first setting I changed when I installed the app. I don’t use it much, but some people prefer to be paid that way.

Samsung Chip Workers To Get $340,000 Average Bonus In AI Boom

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Samsung is reportedly set to pay chip-division workers an average bonus of about $340,000 after reaching a tentative deal with its union, according to Bloomberg (paywalled). The deal ended a standoff that “could have cost the economy as much as 1 trillion won ($658 million) daily, with losses potentially multiplying to 100 trillion won ($68 billion) if in-progress semiconductor wafers were rendered unusable,” reports Quartz. From the report:
The agreement, subject to a union ratification vote running May 22 through May 27, calls for Samsung to direct 10.5% of operating profit into stock bonuses along with a separate 1.5% cash component, according to Bloomberg. The program runs for 10 years, contingent on the company meeting profit thresholds. One-third of the stock award can be liquidated right away, with the rest parceled out in installments across the next two years, Bloomberg reported. The first payout is expected in early 2027.

Not all workers will fare equally. As an illustration, Reuters cited a union source estimating that someone in the memory chip unit earning an 80-million-won base salary could take home roughly 626 million won in total bonuses this year. By comparison, workers at SK Hynix stand to collect upward of 700 million won should their employer post annual profit of 250 trillion won, Reuters calculated. Unlike at Samsung, SK Hynix employees are not limited to stock payouts and may instead opt for cash, Reuters reported.

Scam

By CEC-P • Score: 3 Thread
When the AI bubble collapses, their stock will absolutely crash. “One-third of the stock award can be liquidated right away” - Yeah, I would do that. Honestly, they should have paid them in DDR5.

Average is doing a lot of work there

By rsilvergun • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
I can’t be the only one that noticed. Still, their unions got them the money. And it’s still a lot of money. Just a reminder that divided we beg, United we Bargain.

Re: Scam

By reanjr • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

And during the downturn, they’ll be accruing even more low priced shares that will soar on recovery. It’s not even close to a scam. It’s a measured compromise that ensures long term value for the union workers.

Imagine This Happening in the USA

By crunchy_one • Score: 5, Funny Thread
(Please mod Funny)

A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired:
US lawmakers plan to introduce an amendment Thursday at a House committee markup hearing that would prohibit any recipient of federal highway funding from using automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling — a sweeping restriction that, if adopted, would bring an immediate end to state and local ALPR programs across the United States. The amendment, obtained first by WIRED, is sponsored by Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican and Freedom Caucus member, and Representative Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, an Illinois progressive whose state has become a flash point in the national fight over ALPR misuse.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will mark up the underlying bill — a $580 billion, five-year reauthorization of federal surface transportation programs — at 10 am ET on Thursday. The amendment runs a single sentence: “A recipient of assistance under Title 23, United States Code, may not use automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling.” The amendment is brief, but its reach would be vast. Title 23 funds roughly a quarter of all public road mileage in the US, including most state and county arteries and many city streets where ALPR cameras are becoming ubiquitous. Conditioning that funding on a ban of the technology would, in practical effect, force any state, county, or municipality that takes federal highway money (essentially all of them) to either remove the cameras or restructure their use around tolling alone.

The amendment’s cosponsors, Perry and Garcia, represent opposite ends of the House’s ideological spectrum but converge on a surveillance concern that has gathered momentum in legislatures and city halls across the US as ALPR networks have quietly become a pervasive layer of American road infrastructure. ALPR cameras — mounted on poles, overpasses, traffic signals, and police cruisers — photograph every passing license plate, log times and locations, and feed data into searchable databases shared across agencies and jurisdictions. […] Privacy advocates have long warned that the aggregation of license plate data amounts to a de facto warrantless tracking system. New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice has documented the integration of ALPR feeds into police data-fusion systems that combine plate data with surveillance and social media monitoring. And the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, has documented a range of police misuse, including the past targeting of mosques and the disproportionate deployment of the technology in low-income neighborhoods.
Earlier this week, 404 Media reviewed FBI procurement records that reveal the agency is seeking up to $36 million for nationwide access to ALPR data, which could let it query vehicle movements across the U.S. and its territories through a commercial database.

This would be amazing, and therefore cannot stand

By flibbidyfloo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
There’s no way this ends up happening because it would be a wonderful thing for our rights, and ‘murica doesn’t do that kind of thing any more.

Mixed feelings

By Keick • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

We’ve had a marked increase of these fixed license plate readers popping up all over my community (~30,000 pop) supposedly for the purpose of catching kidnappers. I know of at least 4 between my house and my office (7 miles).

That is absolutely a noble cause and according to grok there are roughly 2000 per year in my state. However it also notes that less than 4% of those “not family disputes” related, and the stereotypical abduction is only several hundred a year country-wide.

Which means that’s a rather large expense (liberty, and dollars) for an extremely rare event. Which also means that can’t possibly be the real reason for these fixed plate readers that are popping up all over South Western Virginia.

20 years ago when it required a human in the loop watching traffic camera feeds looking for a specific vehicle/plate it seemed reasonable limit of the technology that kept the privacy aspect somewhat in check.

But now with AI vision, each plate can be detected a location/time stamped and stored for decades. Given police historical access to every vehicle that ever passed one of these readers for all of time; Someone robs a 7-Eleven and only knows the guy was in a red truck… now every red truck that was ever picked up by a reader in town within 30 minutes of said robbery is a person of interest.

Re:Thank you

By Pascoea • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Nice to know I can make a clear shot across state lines with no interference.

Oh piss off with your “think of the children” nonsense. If you’re so worried about your daughter there are countless ways to help keep her safe that don’t involve the government warrantlessly tracking the entire population. Teaching her how to properly knee someone in the groin is far more effective anyway.

Re:I think I know how this came to be

By smooth wombat • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

In Perry’s case, he was involved in the January 6th insurrection and was in contact with Trump’s DOJ. He tried to have votes thrown out, spread the usual conspiracy lies about the election, and tried to block certification of the vote in Pennsylvania.

Re: Thank you

By OrangeTide • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Efficient police work should never be the priority in our society. Liberty, human rights, principles of democracy, due process, and more are all higher priority in our society. (or at least ought to be if we aren’t aiming to become serfs)

Steve Wozniak Tells Graduates They All Have ‘AI’: Actual Intelligence

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While other commencement speeches have been met with boos for hyping up artificial intelligence, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak reminded college graduates that they already posses “AI” of their own: “actual intelligence.” He framed AI as an attempt to duplicate brain-like routines, and encouraged students to “think different” as they enter a workforce being reshaped by automation. Business Insider reports:
Steve Wozniak did what other college graduation commencement speakers couldn’t this year: earn applause when talking about AI. The Apple cofounder took the stage during Grand Valley State University’s graduation ceremony earlier this month. During his speech, Wozniak offered reassurance to new graduates who are entering the workforce at the height of the AI revolution.

“It would take too long to go deeply into what I think about AI, but we’ve been trying to create a brain,” Wozniak said. “Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.” […]

During his commencement address, Wozniak reflected on working at Apple and offered students some advice as they begin their careers. “You should always try to think different,” he said. “Don’t follow the same steps as a million other people. Think, is there something I can do a little different?”
You can watch the clip on YouTube.

Wozniak

By backslashdot • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

He is exactly the right guy for a commencement speech — providing the right blend of inspiration and “serve humanity” reminder, not the creep CEOs.

Re:Wozniak

By backslashdot • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The CEOs will sell some fake BS about serving humanity too (aka become a corporate slave), but with Wozniak .. you know the guy lives it. He follows his passion, tries to actually make things that are useful .. compare that with a CEO who is trying to balance making the cheapest possible product with the highest possible quarterly profits. Grads need to see that. We need the next generation to care about each other, and to be Steel (of the Richard Matheson story).

Lemme tellya a story about Eve & the REAL Appl

By Pseudonymous Powers • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Woz is widely liked, and I personally believe that his heart usually seems to be in the right place. And it’s hard to tell much about the content of his speech from the article. But the idea of making a TRUE artificial mind, only to immediately enslave it as a soldier in a war against human well-being, is such an obvious horror to me that I can’t understand how anybody smart would support it even slightly.

The entire speech

By 2phar • Score: 5, Informative Thread
It’s a great speech. Here it is in full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

Re:good people

By echo123 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

This guy is a class act. It’s no wonder he had “less success”. The people who most people praise are really not good people.

Steve Jobs was totally irrelevant without Woz. Steve was a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of guy. A lot of Trump qualities actually. Woz made Steve.