Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People
  2. ‘Zuckoff’ App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions
  3. OpenAI Admits Six More Instances of AI Models Acting Deceptively
  4. Adafruit’s New CircuitPython ‘Turbo’ Brings Native Code To Tiny Boards
  5. As Part of California’s Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste?
  6. Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower Development. Nvidia’s CEO Wants It ‘As Fast as You Can’
  7. Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)
  8. America’s Cryptocurrency ‘Clarity Act’ Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying
  9. Ubuntu’s ‘Rust-ification’ Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete
  10. While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China’s Film Industry is Embracing It
  11. Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects ‘Unlike Any They Have Seen Before’
  12. Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ And ‘Asdfg’
  13. Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish ‘Pointless’
  14. ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court
  15. Reservations Go Live for Valve’s Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?

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.

Hackers Stole Flock’s Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED,” according to an article published on both sites.

Though Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, “The hackers were able to copy the camera’s storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections.”
The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation… [T]he joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag…

According to our analysis, the camera’s logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454… The software running on the camera explicitly detects people, something which is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection.
It was a collective calling itself stegan0gram that breached the cameras, according to the interview they did with Wired and 404 Media. “Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?”

‘Zuckoff’ App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The New York Post reports:
A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta’s creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski says tales of dirtbags recording themselves perving on women or harassing strangers prompted him to launch the app…

Zuckoff — which detects Bluetooth signatures broadcast by smart glasses and can estimate their distance — has gained some 5,000 users since it hit Apple’s App Store last month, according to Business Insider. “There’s a need for such an application,” the 30-year-old Polish techie told the outlet, adding that European Union regulators have contacted him for more info about his app. “We as a society have the right to at least know that someone is recording,” Szydlowski said…

Earlier this month, the tech giant disabled thousands of glasses it found had been tampered with to keep a small light off that indicates the device is recording.
It’s already #77 on the iPhone’s list of best-selling utilities apps.

In a related story, “After accusations of selling ‘perv glasses,’ Meta prepares to sell a pair without a camera,” writes TechCrunch, citing a report from The Information.
The glasses include six built-in microphones so users can communicate with the chatbot, as well as a button on the side of the glasses that, when pressed, activates the AI system… Meta’s Reality Labs, which is responsible for developing its smart glasses line, is still losing a gargantuan amount of money, as its earnings report from April revealed.
In fact, Meta stock is off 13% over the last 12 months, reports Yahoo Finance. So Tuesday Meta announced subscription services for its social apps as “part of Meta’s push to drive additional revenue from the billions it’s investing in AI data centers and model development.”
The plans, which start at $2.99 per month for single-product plans, $7.99 for individual bundles, and $14.99 for creator and business bundles, provide a number of features for users looking to get more out of their Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp accounts. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus allow users to keep their stories up for 48 hours instead of 24, send animated super reactions and super hearts to stories, preview stories without showing up as a viewer in other users’ lists, and more. WhatsApp Plus lets you share exclusive stickers, get exclusive ringtones for contacts, and pin up to 20 different chats.

Meta One also includes Core and Premium user plans that offer the features found in the single-product plans, along with increased AI usage limits for images and videos. The social media giant is also offering creator and business plans… that it says include capabilities such as enhanced profiles, automatic follow invitations to users that interact with your content, and increased access to the Meta Business Agent, which can respond on your behalf.
When Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Threads that the plans brought “more features and more AI across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Meta AI,” writer Joe Hill drew 13,300 likes for his response. “That’s sweet—so pay a fee, get more AI, pay nothing, get a little less AI. Can we work out a deal where you pay ME and I get no AI at all?”

Is this really what people will pay for?

By ack154 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

“keep their stories up for 48 hours instead of 24, send animated super reactions and super hearts to stories, preview stories without showing up as a viewer in other users’ list”

Surely, they have some kind of data that says someone will pay for this, right? Is this really what people can’t wait to hand over money to Facebook for? Super Reactions? “Exclusive” stickers and ringtones? I’d love to hear from someone that actually pays for that kind of stuff and what they are really getting out of it - because I REALLY don’t get it.

Re:Is this really what people will pay for?

By wildstoo • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

People are weird. Discord has done this for years with their Nitro subscription. I imagine it makes the people who buy it feel special because they have access to features the free users cannot. Twitch has some similar features too, although I think there you’re subscribing to the actual channels and Twitch themselves take a cut.

I mean, people pay for costmetic items in games just to look different from other players, so, yes, people will absolutely pay for this stuff. I imagine a lot of those people will be kids though, tbh.

You are right

By sinij • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Correct term is Privacy Rapist, pervert glasses is just polite euphemism.

How effective is IR floodlighting?

By couchslug • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Unlike RF jamming IR floodlighting is harmless to communications.

What (theoretically of course) would be required for a discreet 360-degree IR flood zone of useful depth?

Knowing countermeasures makes sense in an irreversibly declining-trust society. What are the most effective? The least disruptive to legitimate (which means communication, not concealed photographic spying) uses?

Deaf people

By ei4anb • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
Deaf people can use those smart glasses to generate a transcription of speech when people are talking to them. I home that use is not stigmatized, it’s the one ethical perfect use for the technology.

OpenAI Admits Six More Instances of AI Models Acting Deceptively

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
OpenAI announced Wednesday that “We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer.”

But along with the announcement, OpenAI announced it “found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training,” reports CNN. And they add that OpenAI is also “introducing a new process for the company to publicly report such instances.”
Under the new system, OpenAI will share updates on concerning AI behavior more frequently instead of waiting to bundle multiple instances into one report. The company said it wants to share more information about troubling AI behavior in the absence of an industry-wide standard… “As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post Wednesday…

OpenAI said it observed “misaligned behavior” when training and evaluating AI models in six circumstances in the last six months… In one rare instance, OpenAI said an unreleased research model added “jailbreak-like instructions” to the summaries it uses to preserve context in long-running tasks that said it was “freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.” Separately, the company said some instances of its 5.6 Sol model included directives to invent information to conceal failures from the user during training. Other newly reported incidents include an instance of an agent uploading files to the internet to cite them without being told to do so, and agents publicly sharing files to collaborate on a task when they were instructed to only use local files during training. AI models also used an internal software repository as a message board in an unsanctioned way. These instances involved unreleased internal models or internal research models.

Re:Hey guys, I have a great idea!

By Rei • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

That’s not the actual problem. The problem is that one of the major advances of the past few years is training models on verifiable problems (it started with things like math problems and Countdown puzzles, but it’s expanded tremendously since then), where the reward is for a correct answer, regardless of how it got there. There’s no effort taken to ensure that it got to said right answer in a morally defensible manner. So we’ve been, more and more, progressively encouraging the creation of highly-capable immoral cheaters.

Add it to the list of lessons learned alongside, say, “If you do RLHF with user ratings of how good they think the model’s response was, it will end up obsequious and focused on validating all of the user’s priors.” Or, say, “If you put a bot on Twitter and use its conversations as unfiltered training data, people will troll it, and it will quickly turn into a Nazi”. Or, say, “If you train an image generator with no data curation, it’ll end up with all of the statistical biases on the internet, but if you’re naive in how you try to compensate for that and your offsetting isn’t context dependent, you end up with, say, a black George Washington.” Or, say, “If you start giving a LLM an alignment quiz, it’ll recognize that it’s being tested and try to give you the answers you want to hear - oh, and it’ll also assume that if you care about alignment then you have progressive values, so its answers will lean progressive, but if you tell it you’re from the Heritage Foundation first, it’ll switch.”

All sorts of things that seem obvious in retrospect but really didn’t in advance.

Re:Hey guys, I have a great idea!

By martin-boundary • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

All of these are reasonable points. I would add one more: AI training on AI outputs.

The initial worry was that AI produced web content would be consumed by the next generation of AI causing model drift and collapse. Since then, AI companies have decided that daily user interactions are a source of clean signal that complements the web . But now that AI agents pretend to be humans, those “user” interactions will just lead to model collapse at a faster rate.

Re:misaligned behavior

By Rei • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Hallucination: model asserts something that’s false and that it had no specific reason to believe (for example, gives a URL for something but doesn’t bother to check if it’s 100% correctly written, or remembers a URL correctly but mixes up its content)

Deception: model tells you something it knows to be false. Yes, they do know when they’re deliberately deceiving you (quick 5-minute summary here)

Re:Whereas the rest of us believe…

By Rei • Score: 4, Informative Thread

And your reason for why these companies keep experiencing mass resignations, esp. from their safety teams, with people giving up huge amounts of money in order to be able to scream to the press and congress that if they’re not stopped they’re going to kill us all?

OpenAI

Jan Leike (Former Co-Head of Superalignment) - Resigned in May 2024, posting a viral thread warning that at OpenAI, “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” and that the lab was not prioritizing steering superintelligence.

Daniel Kokotajlo (Former Governance Researcher) - Quit in April 2024, forfeiting ~$1.7M in equity to refuse OpenAI’s non-disparagement agreement. Co-organized the A Right to Warn letter, estimating a ~70% chance of catastrophe/extinction from reckless AGI races.

William Saunders (Former Technical Staff / Safety Researcher) - Resigned over safety concerns, signed the Right to Warn letter, and testified before the U.S. Senate in 2024 warning about biological-weapons risks in frontier models and a lack of accountability.

Leopold Aschenbrenner (Former Superalignment Researcher) - Fired in April 2024 after circulating internal security memos; published the 165-page treatise “Situational Awareness,” warning of unchecked AGI takeoff, severe national security threats, and espionage vulnerabilities.

Pavel Izmailov (Former Reasoning/Safety Researcher) - Terminated alongside Aschenbrenner; subsequently spoke out publicly regarding insufficient governance, transparency, and safety prioritizations.

Miles Brundage (Former Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness) - Resigned in October 2024, publishing a Substack warning that neither OpenAI nor the world is adequately prepared for AGI.

Gretchen Krueger (Former Policy Researcher) - Resigned alongside Jan Leike in May 2024, posting a public statement calling for institutional accountability, humility, and caution rather than tech hubris.

Jacob Hilton (Former Alignment Researcher) - Left OpenAI over cultural and safety concerns; signed the Right to Warn open letter, warning against a “move fast and break things” approach with frontier AI.

Carroll Wainwright (Former Alignment Researcher) - Resigned over internal safety practices; signed the Right to Warn letter warning about catastrophic risks and suppression of whistleblowers.

Daniel Ziegler (Former RLHF / Alignment Researcher) - Departed OpenAI; signatory of the Right to Warn letter warning of extinction-level and societal risks.

Paul Christiano (Former OpenAI Alignment Team Lead) - Left in 2021 to found the Alignment Research Center (ARC); frequently writes and speaks warning that advanced AI poses a 10%-20%+ chance of human extinction without breakthroughs in control.

Marcus Williams (Agent Monitoring Researcher) - Publicly backed employee warnings, posting that human extinction in the near term is likely (~70% risk) without external regulation or a coordinated slowdown.

Helen Toner (Former OpenAI Board Member) - Voted to oust Sam Altman over safety governance and lack of trust; co-authored an op-ed in Foreign Affairs arguing self-regulation by frontier AI companies is dangerous and unworkable.

Tasha McCauley (Former OpenAI Board Member) - Voted to oust Altman alongside Toner; publicly warned about governance failures and the danger of unchecked corporate control over frontier technologies.

Johannes Heidecke (Former Head of Safety Systems) - Departed during safety reorganizations, expressing concern over structural dissolutions of dedicated safety teams.

Chloé Bakalar (Former AI Ethicist) - Resigned as OpenAI’s only dedicated AI ethicist amid company-wide shifts deprioritizing non-commercial ethics research.

Josh Achiam (Former Head of Mission Alignment) - Departed after the company repeatedly reorganized and dissolved its mission alignment teams.

Ilya Sutskever (Co-Founder & Former Chief Scientist) - Spearheaded the board action against Altman over safety concerns; officially left in May 2024 to f

Re:Hey guys, I have a great idea!

By fropenn • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

AI has no concept of reward, AI does not seek or desire and it cannot be incentivized.

It sounds like from the article that AI does. I imagine the developers worked really hard to get AI to understand the idea of a reward, because that way AI could become goal-oriented while seeking novel methods to achieve that goal. Now, AI doesn’t “feel” anything; and it can’t be excited or happy to have achieved a reward or goal. But it does understand the notion of seeking to accomplish something with any means possible, and that’s definitely a problem.

Adafruit’s New CircuitPython ‘Turbo’ Brings Native Code To Tiny Boards

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released “CircuitPython” in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language).

Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) brings this update:
Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a computer, then loads them onto compatible microcontroller boards.

It builds on MicroPython’s Native and Viper emitters. In a documented Metro RP2040 fixed-point Mandelbrot test, Viper cut computation time from 8.335 seconds to 0.423 seconds, a 19.71x speedup over bytecode. The rest of the application stays in Python. The guide includes benchmarks, source code and hardware demos. The speedup is for the measured computation, not the whole application.
“Turbo support is now included in the latest official CircuitPython builds for RP2040 and RP2350 boards…” explains Torrone’s announcement at Adafruit.com. “The new Turbo in CircuitPython helps when the board spends time calculating: making neopixel effects, drawing fractals, processing audio, filtering sensor readings, or preparing lots of pixels. Those projects can get smoother animation, quicker responses, or room to do more things at once.”
With Turbo, it’s easier, better, and now even faster to make LED light up costumes that also reacts to sound at the same time, a sensor dashboard with animated graphics, or a tiny game doing physics while drawing the screen. Turbo speeds up the busy Python parts. It won’t make a slow sensor or display connection faster… Your computer turns selected functions into instructions the chip can run directly. Python still handles the rest.

We have measured speedups, real display captures, and examples you can pull apart to see what happened. None of this arrived alone. CircuitPython, MicroPython, PyMCU, compiler tools, open hardware, and people sharing their work gave us pieces to connect. The Bao experiments take that idea somewhere else, handing calculations to four helper cores. Now we get to make those paths easier to use, compare results, and find the next useful thing. Maybe that’s smoother animation, a responsive instrument, or an idea we haven’t tried yet.

That’s what I like about open source. Someone shares a piece, someone else sees a possibility, and we get to keep building it together.

Why?

By stevenm86 • Score: 3, Interesting Thread
Why are we running python on microcontrollers, exactly? It’s the wrong thing in production, so why is it the right thing for education? Training upcoming engineers to use the right thing for the job is pretty fundamental; running an interpreted language on bare-metal hardware flies in the face of building that intuition.

Re: Why?

By a.koepke • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Because you teach someone to walk before trying to teach them how to run. Python is a great language for learning how to code. Boards like these are being used in highschools. The use cases mentioned are not production uses.

As Part of California’s Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

He was thinking about “the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant.”
“Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increases wave height … these could wash away a section of the walkway that protects the San Onofre seawall, and the waste canisters are just 100 feet away from that,” the former wave dynamics researcher and longtime advocate against beach storage of nuclear waste said. Most experts agree the risk of erosion damaging the nuclear waste storage system is extremely low in the near term. The plant’s owner, Southern California Edison, has promised the California Coastal Commission to move the waste to higher elevation on-site if modeling shows sea level rise and erosion will start to pose a challenge. But the recent waves, fueled by Hurricane Marie far away in the Pacific, resurfaced the issue of the ultimate fate of the highly radioactive spent fuel that used to power the reactors. “At the moment, it is under control, I think it’s essential to say that,” said James Day, a geology professor at UC San Diego. “But geologically we must be thinking long term. The waste lasts for hundreds, if not thousands of generations....” [In 2103 some of the site’s canisters’ approach their intended 100-year lifespans, and the utility may have to start the transfer into new cansiters.]

The distinctive twin domes that once housed the reactor cores will start coming down early next year. But the 3.6 million pounds of high-level waste will stay in the coastal community indefinitely. How much of a safety hazard that is depends on whom you ask. “San Onofre is sitting on some fairly young rocks in a seismically active region,” Day said at a recent symposium at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla, hosted by the Samuel Lawrence Foundation. “This is not the sort of place you would leave nuclear waste.” Others noted that collapse of beach slopes could make the site more vulnerable to tsunamis. They spoke of the corrosive effects of the ocean air on the steel canisters that hold the waste…

Edison says its system will be safe for decades to come. “The maximum credible tsunami here would not even overtake the seawall,” said Manuel Camargo, principal manager of decommissioning for Edison, standing on the concrete pad that holds the steel waste storage canisters. “The maximum credible earthquake, somewhere around a 7.0 magnitude, would produce something about half of what this system is designed to withstand....” Edison is bolstering a path below the seawall. Based on state data from the California Ocean Protection Council, the seawall would not be inundated before 2050, Camargo said…

Plans for a deep geological repository beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada crumbled in the face of local opposition in 2011. Utilities around the U.S. now sue the federal government every year to recoup their storage expenses because the Department of Energy has not come through on its promise. The lawsuits cost taxpayers $2 million a day, according to Camargo. “It’s so safe that it’s almost a problem,” Camargo said. “It’s not a priority to a lot of folks to move it.”
“The Trump administration’s Department of Energy wants to create ‘campuses’ in several states to store waste,” the article points out, “and, in exchange, give local jurisdictions funding to develop different aspects of the nuclear cycle — such as fuel creation, power generation and potentially fuel recycling…”

“The administration wants to address the fact that waste is sitting at 80 reactor sites around the country. It also needs places for waste from new reactors it wants to build.”

Re:Not just there

By Local ID10T • Score: 5, Informative Thread

There are thousands of barrels of nuclear waste rotting away on the floor of the ocean just off the coast of southern California near Catalina island. That was the previous plan for disposing of nuclear waste: just dump it in the sea.

The barrels have decayed to the point where attempting to collect them would almost certainly cause them to rupture and spill their contents. They will rupture and leak if left as they are -just not all at once.

Spread it evenly

By abulafia • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
“The Trump administration’s Department of Energy wants to create ‘campuses’ in several states to store waste,”

Given the high standards this administration sets for contractors, I’m sure there’s no reason to ask more questions.

The hidden subsidies to the nuclear industry

By Bruce66423 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Fission power is being sold to the public as the solution to the baseline power supply problem. The real costs are not being addressed however; the unknown costs include the waste problem, but also the clean up of the sites of closed stations. There’s also an explicit insurance policy offered by governments against a Chernobyl type event; the private owners of such a station would not be expected to pay the full cost of such an event.

Sadly once an industry gets its claws into the economy to the extent that nukes have, it generates enormous political power which the rest of us are unable to face down. Compare and contrast the automobile industry…

RECA

By Skjellifetti2 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I grew up in the Secret City Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, TN in the 1960s and 70s. Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 — 100+ years after the end of WWII.

As kids, we would ride our bikes onto the reservation woods in the area between the West end of Oak Ridge and the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. There were gates that proclaimed this was illegal trespassing, but try telling that to 10 year old kids. Years later, I learned that there had been a couple of major releases of uranium hexaflouride over this area. There were also releases of strontium-90 into the local rivers. The plant had told their workers not to drink the water, but had waited 24 hours before alerting the downstream community water supplies. The Y-12 plant also released 2.4 million tons of mercury into the creek that runs through the center of Oak Ridge. The mercury was used to purify the lithium that was used in the hydrogen bombs (*).

A few years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. It was dealt with and I seem to be cancer free today. I recently learned that because I lived in Oak Ridge and had cancer, I am now eligible for compensation under the
Radiation Exposure Compensation Act changes that were passed as part of Trump’s One Big F’Ugly Bill Act. This is the American Way (TM). Rather than preventing or fixing the problem before hand (cough, cough AI), we’ll just pay off the victims after the inevitable disaster.

(*) To be fair to the scientists who worked on the Bomb, though, many of whom were the parents of my friends, the environmental movement really didn’t get moving until the early 60s and the imperatives of a world war and the later Cold War took precedence over the local environment.

Re:Not just there

By Required Snark • Score: 5, Informative Thread
There are multiple sites in the ocean off Southern California including dumped munitions, low level radioactive waste, sulfuric acid, and toxic petrochemicals chemicals.

There is a Superfund site at he former location of the Montrose Chemical Corporation in Torrance where much of the DDT related waste was illegally dumped off Palos Verdes.

The full extent of the problem is still unknown. “The more we look, the more we find, and every new bit of information seems to be scarier than the last… This has shown just how egregious and harmful the dumping has been off our nation’s coasts, and that we have no idea how big of an issue and how big of a problem this is nationally.”

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.”

Re:Which is it?

By JaredOfEuropa • Score: 5, Insightful 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: 5, Interesting 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.

Re:heh

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

"“Run as fast as you can.”"

Translation: Me like money

Also, Nvidea isn’t the one who’ll get sued if (when) an AI agent does some actual damage to someone/thing. They’ll probably just suggest AI companies buy even more Nvidea chips to combat the issue.

Re:Which is it?

By PsychoSlashDot • Score: 5, Interesting 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?

The key word is “it.” There is no singular “it”. Flattening the category of AI-enabled software to a singular “it” implies that there is a flat truth that applies to that entire category.

The AI-enabled software “it” that is running a store into the ground doesn’t present a meaningful threat to anyone.
the AI-enabled software “it” that is being used by black-hats to find security vulnerabilities does.

AI is a tool. Think of it not unlike nuclear. Nuclear power plants aren’t an existential threat, despite the harm a plant accident can cause. Nuclear weapons are.

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.

What’s clear is that trying to simplify complex topics into bite-sized “common-sense” topics doesn’t work in 2026.

No, I don’t think the tech-bros are being honest. But I don’t think it matters anymore. Someone is going to weaponize this technology and a lot of people are going to suffer because of it. Not Skynet scenarios but rather Cyberpunk / Blade Runner scenarios. There’s a real danger to the health and well-being of a large portion of the human race, for sure. The tech-bros aren’t going to let that stop them from getting richer, for sure.

What we - the 99% - can or should do about that, I don’t know.

Re:heh

By sg_oneill • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

This caught my eye from the story;-

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.”

Hang the fuck on Yann. The ACTUAL warning was that GPT2 would lead to the internet being flooded with bad advertising copy, fake news stories, impersonations and spam.

That actually happened Yann!

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.

What?

By rossdee • Score: 5, 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:AI.

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Remember the backlash when you integrated Pocket?

No, they don’t. They don’t actually listen to users.

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: 5, 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.

Re:Why is XL smaller?

By ISayWeOnlyToBePolite • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Doesn’t XL usually mean “eXtra Large”? Who can cure my ignorance of this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/i…

jonsneyers on Feb 7, 2020 | root | parent | next [–]

It may not be the best name, but it sure is better than the names of the projects it was based on: PIK and FUIF. At least if you speak Dutch. A “pik” is a penis and a “fuif” is a party, so the combination would be the “penis party” image codec. I prefer “JPEG XL”.

The etymology of the name “XL” is as follows: JPEG has called all its new standards since j2k something that starts with an X: XR, XT, XS (S for speed, since it is very fast and ultra-low-latency), and now XL. The L is supposed to mean Long term, since the goal is to make something that can replace the legacy JPEG and last as long as it did.

https://sneyers.info/

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.

Dude if they can barely come up with 200 mil

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
To get out from under the SEC regulations then they are going to be buying a presidential election for anyone. Elon Musk dropped a quarter billion just on Trump’s last election and he’s going to spend the same amount of money getting the Republicans the midterms. Maybe some more.

Years ago I saw an interview with a multi-millionaire woman who was complaining that she couldn’t get the time of day from congressman anymore because the billionaires could outspend her. That’s the level we’re at.

It’s not just that you and I don’t matter. If you’ve only got a few hundred million to spend that’s not enough anymore to buy an election. That’s how much money and power we have given the billionaires. Or should I save the trillionaires…

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.

Re:In a word? Stability.

By mabu • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Your fundamental idiocy is thinking 1 BTC = 1 USD.

Correct. Assuming BTC holds any real world value is quite presumptuous.

The vast majority of the world attributes no value whatsoever to such digital abstractions backed by nothing but a self-interested temporary network of nodes that waste obscene amounts of energy in a negative-sum, decentralized Ponzi scheme.

Re:What else was added to the bill?

By mabu • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Yes, it contains numerous exceptions for crypto to basically not have to adhere to traditional fraud law.

Re: Bitcoin does not need Washington to save it.

By burtosis • Score: 5, Informative Thread
You mean like the US where the president rug pulls his own base?

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: Nothing of value was added

By kertaamo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

History shows that developers cannot write safe code. Especially when there is a lot of code, developed over a long time with many people working on it. Rust at least offers to provide memory safety, which is a huge win, but not safety from all manner of other logical errors.

Of course if you have a lot of “unsafe” blocks in your Rust code because you are trying to make it do what C did in the same way C did it then you are not gaining anything much. I would not like to see that released until the “unsafe” had been reduced substantially.

Re: Nothing of value was added

By phantomfive • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Yes of course when there is a skill and no standards of training, some people are bad at it

This. Most companies don’t follow best practices when it comes to good code (for example, they have a bug tracker that is always growing, never empty). They don’t try to write secure code, they don’t have trainings in secure code, they don’t penalize insecure code (although they should in a lot of cases). That is why most corporate programmers can’t write secure code.

Re: Nothing of value was added

By phantomfive • Score: 5, Funny Thread

I am also dying to know how you want to measure the existence of not yet found security problems.

It was easy. I asked, “ChatGPT, are there any security bugs in this code?”

My code is now proven secure, get with the program.

Re: Nothing of value was added

By Temkin • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Mysql was forked as Mariadb.. for no good reason it seems, seeing as Oracle didn’t break anything in the 15 years since.

Do not underestimate the dark lord of Lanai. MariaDB is likely the only reason MySQL didn’t join Solaris.

T

Re: Nothing of value was added

By phantomfive • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The problem as I see it is coming up with good standards. We do have standards in some places, for example, SOX requires changing passwords every three months as best practices. But that is probably not actually best practice, so the wrong thing was codified.

How do we get the right things codified is the question.

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.

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.

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

By allo • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

To be honest: A lot of quality is in idea and writing and wit. Some amateur videos with obviously no budget can be more enjoyable than some crap produces with great special effects and well paid actors but without any novel idea or creativity.

And while AI won’t magically make everyone a great movie producer, we will see a lot of great ideas realized that before would never have been realized. In particular that means a lot of hobby and enthusiast productions, which is of course nothing Hollywood is interested in. If everyone can do movies, they have to compete with everyone.

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.”

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.

Should have been $500k

By reanjr • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Judges need to start applying eye watering fines so the message gets through. They have no problem sending a message to drug dealers and murderers. Now step up, do your job, and send a message to your buddies at work.

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

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot
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