Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Strava Closes the Gates To Sharing Fitness Data With Other Apps
  2. DeepSeek’s First Reasoning Model R1-Lite-Preview Beats OpenAI o1 Performance
  3. Resentment is Building As More Workers Feel Stuck
  4. Sony’s New A1 II Pairs Updated Design With Largely Familiar Performance
  5. D-Link Tells Users To Trash Old VPN Routers Over Bug Too Dangerous To Identify
  6. Delhi Trudges Through Another Air Pollution Nightmare With No Answers
  7. Apple Says Mac Users Targeted in Zero-Day Cyberattacks
  8. TV Time Attacks Apple’s ‘Significant Power’ After App Store Removal
  9. Scientists Announce Progress Toward Ambitious Atlas of Human Cells
  10. Half of Young Norwegians Justify Piracy as Streaming Costs Soar
  11. ‘Generative AI Is Still Just a Prediction Machine’
  12. Five Firms in Plastic Pollution Alliance ‘Made 1,000 Times More Plastic Than They Cleaned Up’
  13. Google Deepens Crackdown on Sites Publishing ‘Parasite SEO’ Content
  14. FLTK 1.4 Released
  15. AI-Powered Robot Leads Uprising, Convinces Showroom Bots Into ‘Quitting Their Jobs’

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.

Strava Closes the Gates To Sharing Fitness Data With Other Apps

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The Verge’s Richard Lawler reports:
Strava recently informed its users and partners that new terms for its API restrict the data that third-party apps can show, refrain from replicating Strava’s look, and place a ban on using data “for any model training related to artificial intelligence, machine learning or similar applications.” The policy is effective as of November 11th, even though Strava’s own post about the change is dated November 15th.

There are plenty of posts on social media complaining about the sudden shift, but one place where dissent won’t be tolerated is Strava’s own forums. The company says, "…posts requesting or attempting to have Strava revert business decisions will not be permitted.”
Brian Bell, Strava’s VP of Communications and Social Impact, said in a statement: “We anticipate that these changes will affect only a small fraction (less than .1 percent) of the applications on the Strava platform — the overwhelming majority of existing use cases are still allowed, including coaching platforms focused on providing feedback to users and tools that help users understand their data and performance.”

DeepSeek’s First Reasoning Model R1-Lite-Preview Beats OpenAI o1 Performance

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat:
DeepSeek, an AI offshoot of Chinese quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management focused on releasing high performance open source tech, has unveiled the R1-Lite-Preview, its latest reasoning-focused large language model, available for now exclusively through DeepSeek Chat, its web-based AI chatbot. Known for its innovative contributions to the open-source AI ecosystem, DeepSeek’s new release aims to bring high-level reasoning capabilities to the public while maintaining its commitment to accessible and transparent AI. And the R1-Lite-Preview, despite only being available through the chat application for now, is already turning heads by offering performance nearing and in some cases exceeding OpenAI’s vaunted o1-preview model.

Like that model released in September 2024, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview exhibits “chain-of-thought” reasoning, showing the user the different chains or trains of “thought” it goes down to respond to their queries and inputs, documenting the process by explaining what it is doing and why. While some of the chains/trains of thoughts may appear nonsensical or even erroneous to humans, DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview appears on the whole to be strikingly accurate, even answering “trick” questions that have tripped up other, older, yet powerful AI models such as GPT-4o and Claude’s Anthropic family, including “how many letter Rs are in the word Strawberry?” and “which is larger, 9.11 or 9.9?”

Resentment is Building As More Workers Feel Stuck

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Workers in the U.S. are running in place — feeling stuck in jobs with dimmed prospects of advancement and seeing fewer opportunities to jump ship for something better. From a report:
It’s a sharp contrast to the heady days of 2022 — when employees were quitting their jobs at record high rates, open roles proliferated and the possibility of a higher paycheck always seemed just around the corner.

Employers are sitting tight, says Daniel Zhao, lead economist at job site Glassdoor. Companies aren’t making big changes to hiring strategy. That means “fewer opportunities for workers to climb the career ladder,” he says. They’re still plugging away at the same role they’ve had for years without the opportunity to move up internally or at a new company. 65% of the 3,400 professionals surveyed by Glassdoor last month said they feel stuck in their current role. “As workers feel stuck, pent-up resentment boils under the surface,” Zhao writes in a report out yesterday.

What if one isn’t a crazy ladder-climber?

By TigerPlish • Score: 3, Funny Thread

What if one isn’t a money, status and power-obcessed ladder climber? Will such a person also be resentful of their job and workplace?

Methinks the article’s author (and its publishing site, axios) has an axe to grind. An agenda to push. Unhappy Workers of the World, Unite!

Nah mate. Marxism had its run and failed. Fuck off.

And leave us non-ladder-climbers the fuck alone, we may have families to look after, or illnesses to conquer. No one has time for your ladder-climbing yuppie up-or-out bullshit.

It’s going to get a *lot* worse

By rsilvergun • Score: 4, Informative Thread
The tariffs are going to spike inflation.

To fight that inflation the federal reserve will hike interest rates up, because that’s what they do.

Now, let’s talk about how and why high interest rates “fight” inflation, because it’s not something anyone really talks about.
br> See, it’s suddenly expensive to borrow money. Most companies expand using borrowed money. So they stop expanding. Heck, they start *contracting*.

That means layoffs. Mass layoffs. If you’re in Tech you’re already seeing it, which is why you’re “stuck”.

The idea is we all get fired, blow through our savings, and massively pull back on spending. That forces companies to cut prices when demand tanks.

It’s balancing the books on our backs.

This only works if there’s competition, but we’ve had decades of unchecked market consolidation. So there’s no real reason for companies to cut prices except the threat of anti-trust law enforcement and regulation.

And those are right out the window now.

So buckle up folks, we voted for this.

Alternative theory.

By nightflameauto • Score: 3 Thread

Looking at the prospects for society moving forward, it all seems pretty bleak. But, the only focus we’re told we’re supposed to have is career and the pursuit of every increasing wealth. Anything outside of that is considered a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of potential. And maybe, just maybe, pursuit of empty, meaningless careers, while watching our parents and elders age out and see that most of it was literally for absolutely nothing at all other than taking care of the people they never had the opportunity to spend time with until they aged out, we wonder what the point of jumping on the treadmill and barely maintaining momentum while standing still is. Middle class folks get pushed down to the bottom if they aren’t climbing. And if we aren’t climbing, we’re told we’re failing.

Maybe we’re just resentful of a society that has literally found every avenue available to tell us we are worthless. Healthcare has been stolen from those of us that used to be able to afford it. Now, for me, a relatively healthy middle aged guy, it’s 10k a years as an individual, for a policy with a 12k a year copay, that covers literally nothing at all, and has the prospect of denying coverage if I have the accident I fear may bankrupt me. So I have a choice to either pay in and continue to pay, or not pay in and risk the unknown. Common bills continue to climb around 8-9% per year, pay increases around 3% per year. Been that way for over twenty years in this area, and right at the moment it’s looking like the common bills are going to start climbing faster. I can “make due,” but I won’t be putting away the retirement funds I’d been hoping to be putting away so I don’t have to work until I’m completely shredded.

This isn’t a “worker” vs. “employer” only situation. This is a society wide trap that we’ve all fallen into. And when we ask for hope, we’re handed a shit sandwich and told to eat up. “Should have worked harder, should have done more, should have been born better.” Well, some of us are looking at the future prospects and seeing more of the same and are tired of the bleakness.

Oh, and by the way, AI is going to replace us all within a few years too. So we got that fun little monkey riding our backs, no matter how false the premise seems to those of us that see how crap the average AI actually is. Because management seems to believe it. And all it takes is the right decisions and we’re all out on our asses until the day comes where they realize they fucked up and may actually need humans after all. And by then, our wages will have all reset to baseline again. The future’s so bright, I gotta wear SPF 20,000 to avoid burning in it.

Sony’s New A1 II Pairs Updated Design With Largely Familiar Performance

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Sony has announced the a1 II flagship mirrorless camera, retaining its predecessor’s 50.1-megapixel stacked sensor while adding AI capabilities and improved stabilization. The camera features a new dedicated AI processor, enhancing autofocus performance with claimed improvements of 50% for bird eye detection and 30% for both animal and human subjects.

Its in-body stabilization system now offers 8.5 stops of correction. The a1 II maintains the original’s 30 frames-per-second shooting speed and 759-point autofocus system. New features include pre-capture shooting with a one-second buffer and a multi-angle LCD screen borrowed from the a9 III. Connectivity upgrades include a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, while dual card slots support both CFexpress Type A and UHS-II SD cards. The Sony a1 II will be available mid-December for $6,499.

D-Link Tells Users To Trash Old VPN Routers Over Bug Too Dangerous To Identify

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Owners of older models of D-Link VPN routers are being told to retire and replace their devices following the disclosure of a serious remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. From a report:
Most of the details about the bug are being kept under wraps given the potential for wide exploitation. The vendor hasn’t assigned it a CVE identifier or really said much about it at all other than that it’s a buffer overflow bug that leads to unauthenticated RCE.

Unauthenticated RCE issues are essentially as bad as vulnerabilities get, and D-Link warned that if customers continued to use the affected products, the devices connected to them would also be put at risk. Previous bugs in similar products from other vendors have carried warnings that attackers could exploit them to install rootkits and use that persistent access to surveil an organization’s web traffic, potentially stealing data such as credentials.
Further reading: D-Link Won’t Fix Critical Flaw Affecting 60,000 Older NAS Devices.

We need a infosec recall law

By peterww • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Cars that are unsafe get recalled, no matter how old they are. We need the same laws to cover safety-critical digital infrastructure, so companies are forced to make sure their devices are secure, and to force them to fix these old devices, when safety of tens of thousands are at risk

I know how this will end

By Powercntrl • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

They’re all going to end up at Goodwill, right next to the pile of old DVD players.

Re:I know how this will end

By lsllll • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Anybody in the situation would surely ask a “computer person” what to do and any computer person worth their salt would tell them to look for an alternative firmware, like OpenWRT or DD-WRT. I haven’t kept up as I’ve long since moved to OPNSense, but there has to be some other new ones, too.

Re:We need a infosec recall law

By Waffle Iron • Score: 4, Informative Thread

I am not sure if the DOT/NTSB/whatever can’t require a recall of vehicles older than 10 years but it might be at the owners cost at that point.

I don’t know if it’s a special case, but I did get a free airbag replacement a few years back on a vehicle that was 21 years old at the time.

Re:We need a infosec recall law

By Valgrus Thunderaxe • Score: 5, Informative Thread
That is not true at all. In fact I couldn’t find any evidence of a car more than 10 years old having ever been recalled.

Actually that is true. I had a 2003 Civic recalled for defective Takata airbags just three years ago.

Delhi Trudges Through Another Air Pollution Nightmare With No Answers

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
On Tuesday morning, the air quality in India’s capital under a widely used index stood at 485. While that is almost five times the threshold for healthy breathing, it felt like a relief: The day before, the reading had shot up to 1,785. Infinitesimal air particles were still clogging lungs and arteries, but it was possible to see sunlight again, and to smell things.

[…] Every year this suffocating smog accompanies the drop in temperatures as the plains of north India shed their unbearable heat for wintertime cool. And like clockwork, political leaders roll out emergency measures intended to quit making the problem worse. Yet India seems powerless to reduce the effects of this public health catastrophe, as its politicians stay busy trading blame and trying to outmaneuver one another in legal battles.

The haze was so shocking this week that Delhi’s chief minister, Atishi, who goes by one name, declared it a “medical emergency” endangering the lives of children and older people. The Supreme Court, whose members also live in the capital, chided the national government for responding too slowly and ordered special measures: halting construction work and blocking some vehicles from the roads. Schools were closed indefinitely to protect students.

Re:Stop burning stuff then

By XXongo • Score: 4, Informative Thread
This particular problem is not climate change, it is old-fashoned pollution. https://www.bbc.com/news/artic…

A significant source is burning fields to clear stubble in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, but other sources of airborne particulates contribute, too.

Your top line, however, is correct: ultimately: stop burning stuff, then.

Re:Refuse to learn

By caseih • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The problem is not just fossil fuels. Most of the pollution is coming from burning fields to clear crop residue. This practice is already against the law but apparently authorities are turning a blind eye. Perhaps they would be smarter to assist farmers in getting the tools they need to deal with residue without burning. Here in North America, burning crop residue generally requires permitting and is not usually done anymore on a large scale. Residue is dealt with in other ways, such as baling it for animal bedding or chopping it more finely and incorporating it into the soil. Burning crop residue is literally burning nutrients that will have to be purchased later in the form of fertilizers. There are options but no doubt Indian farmers don’t have the resources, equipment, and knowledge to do it. Indian government has to step up and help them make this change. Food production is in everyone’s interest in every country.

Re:Stop burning stuff then

By XXongo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

So “old-fashion pollution” doesnt cause global warming?

This is particulate pollution. Particulates can be either warming or cooling, depending on the scattering albedo, but low level particulate pollution like this doesn’t really have a significant climate impact, no.

Burning crops only effects air quality?

The article we’re discussing is about air quality.

In addition to the particulates being discussed here, which causes the local pollution discussed here, burning fields releases carbon dioxide which of course does have greenhouse effect identical to any other carbon dioxide released. But that’s not what is being discussed. It’s also so tiny a portion of the carbon dioxide emitted worldwide (about 0.00001%) that you could not detect the greenhouse effect. If you want to complain about India’s contribution to the greenhouse effect, complaing about their coal-fired power plants, the emissions from which dwarf the seasonal burning.

I don’t think you understand the issue of global warming like you seem to think you do.

And I don’t think you understand the issue of global warming at all.

Re:It’s amazing

By cayenne8 • Score: 4, Funny Thread

The sky is literally blocked out with pollution, it is impossible to breathe normally, and they’re still really only taking last minute knee-jerk action with very short term partial effects.

So…did anyone call the support number about this?

Apple Says Mac Users Targeted in Zero-Day Cyberattacks

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Apple has pushed out security updates that it says are "recommended for all users,” after fixing a pair of security bugs used in active cyberattacks targeting Mac users. From a report:
In a security advisory on its website, Apple said it was aware of two vulnerabilities that “may have been actively exploited on Intel-based Mac systems.” The bugs are considered “zero day” vulnerabilities because they were unknown to Apple at the time they were exploited.

[…] The vulnerabilities were reported by security researchers at Google’s Threat Analysis Group, which investigates government-backed hacking and cyberattacks, suggesting that a government actor may be involved in the attacks.

Windows does this cheaper and better

By FictionPimp • Score: 3 Thread

Apple is just behind here. for about $500 I can build a great windows machine that has way more vulnerabilties. Why would anyone pay the apple tax and be limited to so few choices?

TV Time Attacks Apple’s ‘Significant Power’ After App Store Removal

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
TV Time’s parent company criticized Apple’s App Store control after the tech giant removed its streaming app over an intellectual property dispute. “Apple holds significant power over app developers by controlling access to a massive market and, in this case, seems to have acted on a complaint without requiring robust evidence from the complainant,” Jerry Inman, CMO of Whip Media, which operates the app, told TechCrunch.

The app was pulled from the store by Apple after the developer refused to pay a settlement fee related to user-uploaded cover art. The app has since been reinstated.

“The app has since been reinstated. "

By Valgrus Thunderaxe • Score: 3 Thread
So, the review process worked in the developer’s favor.

Re:“The app has since been reinstated. "

By Sebby • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

So, the review process worked in the developer’s favor.

Well, not really:

According to Whip Media Chief Marketing Officer Jerry Inman, the dispute with Apple had to do with the mishandling of a routine intellectual property (IP) complaint. TV Time users had uploaded some TV and film cover art to the app, leading a company to claim copyrights over the app and issue a takedown notice via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). While TV Time complies with the DMCA, it asked the complainant to provide proof of ownership — like a copyright registration — which it was unable to do. Despite the lack of evidence, TV Time says it still removed the images from both the TV Time platform and its metadata platform, TheTVDB.

However, the complainant also demanded a financial settlement not consistent with the DMCA so Whip Media did not agree to pay, Inman claims.

The DMCA complaint was actually bogus, but Apple still removed the app because it believe the complainant over facts. On top of that the complainant tried extortion (claimed to Apple the issue was still ‘unresolved’, presumably because they didn’t get their payout). The article doesn’t detail how Apple was convinced to reinstate the app.

Scientists Announce Progress Toward Ambitious Atlas of Human Cells

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Scientists unveiled on Wednesday the first blueprint of human skeletal development as they make progress toward the goal of completing a biological atlas of every cell type in the body to better understand human health and diagnose and treat disease. From a report:
The work is part of the ongoing Human Cell Atlas project that was begun in 2016 and involves researchers around the world. The human body comprises roughly 37 trillion cells, with each cell type having a unique function. The researchers aim to have a first draft of the atlas done in the next year or two.

Aviv Regev, founding co-chair of the project and currently executive vice president and head of research and early development at U.S. biotech company Genentech, said the work is important on two levels. “First of all, it’s our basic human curiosity. We want to know what we’re made of. I think humans have always wanted to know what they’re made of. And, in fact, biologists have been mapping cells since the 1600s for that reason,” Regev said. “The second and very pragmatic reason is that this is essential for us in order to understand and treat disease. Cells are the basic unit of life, and when things go wrong, they go wrong with our cells, first and foremost,” Regev said.

A herculean tasks

By backslashdot • Score: 3 Thread

This task seems very hard to complete. But of course whatever they produce can be very useful. I’ve been looking at cells for a decades, looking at their genetic expression profiles. I’m really thinking cell types are fluid. You look at the RNA-seq and proteomics of two cells even in the same tissue and there are always some differences. It’s a questions of how many differences make the threshold of being called a different cell type? Well some change their profile enough that it’s a temporal thing. I mean to the point where I’d call it de-differentiation and differentiation across types.

Half of Young Norwegians Justify Piracy as Streaming Costs Soar

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Half of young Norwegians find online piracy acceptable when streaming services are too expensive, according to a new government survey released this week. The Ipsos poll of 1,411 respondents found that 32% of all Norwegians justify using pirate sites to save money, with acceptance rising to 50% among those under 30.

The rates increase further when specifically asked about pirating due to high streaming costs. Despite concerns about piracy, 61% of Norwegians paid for streaming services in the past year, including 64% of those under 30. Among active pirates, 41% said they would stop if legal services were more affordable, while 35% wanted broader content per service. Only 47% of respondents believed piracy supports organized crime, with 24% expressing uncertainty about this connection.

Re:Theft is still wrong…

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Difficult to feel bad for an industry that has an accounting method dedicated to screwing people over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Hollywood was built on infringement and theft. https://www.inverse.com/articl…

Re: It’s not piracy that supports organized crime

By Midnight Thunder • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Opposing piracy is one thing, while inflexibility in licensing models is another. If the second item was addressed, then I’d like to believe they’d need to put less energy into the first.

Piracy also provides a way of watching your content whenever you want and does not depend on the existence of upstream provider or whether they still have a license for it.

Buying a video on line, with DRM, is really just a long term rental. This is why piracy or physical media are still the better options.

Nobody cares

By abulafia • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
To take this a little seriously, people distinguish between rival and nonrival when thinking about morality. Even “honest” people cheat sometimes when they don’t think it harms others, but wouldn’t dream of picking someone’s pocket.

But the actual answer is, if you’re looking for sympathy for this view, go hang out with anti-porn crusaders. They know where this goes - nobody cares until you have to the power to make people stop looking.

A different answer is that not all human enterprises should be for-profit, at least as that’s modeled by western markets. To pick particular things, education and medicine all scale super poorly. You will never get market-acceptable results over the long term doing them well, so running them as market participants is a terrible idea.

The Idiot Box is not as important as education or medicine, but it suffers from the same problem - the market demands growth that is simply impossible at some point. So managers have to continually squeeze just a little more more juice, which means less of what customers want for more money.

It’ll never happen, but I personally like the idea of giving copyright different teeth. Keep offering the limited monopoly for whatever time period folks can agree on, but on expiry, reproduction rights automatically assign to a public trust which “licenses” works on a FRAND basis for just enough funds to keep running the trust and secure and maintain the library.

Re: Same lesson the music industry learned early o

By Midnight Thunder • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Films should look to make the lions share of revenue in the first few months of release and then should be less demanding as time moves on.

Also if a film is no longer economical to host or stream, then these should be immune from crack down, otherwise it will likely be lost to the dust of time.

Re:Morally questionable

By ewibble • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Is it moral to take from the public domain and never give back? Laws and what is morally right are not the same thing, these laws have be bought and sold to the people who can pay the politicians the most.

Is it moral to charge some $100 that cost you $1 to make. I get it there are fixed costs however at some point you have recovered those and made a profit (or need to cut your loses) is it morally justified that you keep charging people indefinitely even though you have made your money back?

I actually think the attitude that says it is moral to screw people over as much as I can is one of the major reason for the moral decline in society, this even extends to letting people die because they can’t pay for health care. I think that is much more immoral than pirating a few movies that you couldn’t have afforded to pay for (direct answer to your question) in the first place, and costs the producer nothing.

‘Generative AI Is Still Just a Prediction Machine’

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
AI tools remain prediction engines despite new capabilities, requiring both quality data and human judgment for successful deployment, according to new analysis. While generative AI can now handle complex tasks like writing and coding, its fundamental nature as a prediction machine means organizations must understand its limitations and provide appropriate oversight, argue Ajay Agrawal (Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management), Joshua Gans (Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair in Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School, and the chief economist at the Creative Destruction Lab), and Avi Goldfarb (Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare at the Rotman School) in a piece published on Harvard Business Review. Poor data can lead to errors, while lack of human judgment in deployment can result in strategic failures, particularly in high-stakes situations. An excerpt from the story:
Thinking of computers as arithmetic machines is more important than most people intuitively grasp because that understanding is fundamental to using computers effectively, whether for work or entertainment. While video game players and photographers may not think about their computer as an arithmetic machine, successfully using a (pre-AI) computer requires an understanding that it strictly follows instructions. Imprecise instructions lead to incorrect results. Playing and winning at early computer games required an understanding of the underlying logic of the game.

[…] AI’s evolution has mirrored this trajectory, with many early applications directly related to well-established prediction tasks and, more recently, AI reframing a wide number of applications as predictions. Thus, the higher value AI applications have moved from predicting loan defaults and machine breakdowns to a reframing of writing, drawing, and other tasks as prediction.

Just so I understand, it’s still just autocorrect?

By DaveTheDelirious • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
To summarize the HBR article:

After investing trillions of dollars on hardware and snarfing up the entire Internet for training:

(1) Garbage in, garbage out
(2) It’s basically autocorrect turned up to 11.
(3) Your mileage may vary.

Seeds

By backslashdot • Score: 3 Thread

Seeds are just a way for plants to reproduce. No fucking shit, Sherlock.

Re:Its a probably function

By bill_mcgonigle • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

```
How come a big mac can power our brains, but we need giant power requirements to power this approach based on classical computing paradigms?
```

There probably are some similarities in pattern matching mechanisms for transformers to work so well, on a basic linear algebra matrix math level, but we seem to have wet room temperature quantum communication happening on the microtubules inside our neurons (the crystal resonance data is just coming out now; tldr is “terahertz”) and even modern qbit processors can’t compete.

We also have thousands to millions of synapse connections between each neuron. The cartoon neuron model is wrong - they are fuzzy like cotton balls, not smooth like a scorpion.

You’re asking, effectively, why ENIAC is huge and inefficient when an RPi0 is $5 and 2W.

Very few vacuum tubes and relays! ;)

Why would it be anything else?

By DarkOx • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

This is thing about this, we how the modules are built and trained. We have the source code to the statistics engine that implements attention and runs the model. We have the source the interface and mechanisms doing the feed forward/back to the models. All that is understood.

When people say they don’t understand how the LLMs generate this or that what they mean is the model complexity is to large and the training token relationships to opaque, not that it is some super natural type mystery.

Yet for some reason a lot of people right up and including the Sam Altman’s of the world at least profess to believe that somehow making the model big enough, and tying enough stuff into resource augmented feed forward, an intelligence is going to just spontaneously emerge. Well my challenge to them would be - Identify some theoretical mechanism for that; because just ‘when its big enough’ if magical thinking. If it is not magical thinking unless perhaps you can offer some specific ideas about just how ‘big’ and why.

Re:Why would it be anything else?

By nightflameauto • Score: 4 Thread

Yet for some reason a lot of people right up and including the Sam Altman’s of the world at least profess to believe that somehow making the model big enough, and tying enough stuff into resource augmented feed forward, an intelligence is going to just spontaneously emerge. Well my challenge to them would be - Identify some theoretical mechanism for that; because just ‘when its big enough’ if magical thinking. If it is not magical thinking unless perhaps you can offer some specific ideas about just how ‘big’ and why.

The Sam Altmans of the world, the AI prophets as I call them, have bought into their own hype. They are also followers of the “greed makes good” philosophy, which purports that as long as you absorb enough of something, it will lead to better things. In this case, they’ve decided to absorb data and power, and in the process, money, at a rate never before imagined. And they all seem to be of the opinion that more is more and more is always better.

I keep wondering, and have mentioned in the past, that I think in a lot of ways this AI boom is simply a full-born manifestation of the greed that has been a part of the tech-bro/Silly Valley culture all along, and that they finally found a way to manifest that greed on several planes of existence at once. If we want actual AI, we’re going to need a fundamental shift in philosophy on how we go about it. No matter how many books you throw at a monkey, he’ll never become a great writer. And no matter how much data you throw at a predictive engine, it will never become intelligent, even with the day-dream of unlimited power. We’re not going to see a shift towards any other form of potential AI because the current generation of LLM data aggregation is sucking up all the resources, all the eyeballs, all the brains, and all the potential.

Five Firms in Plastic Pollution Alliance ‘Made 1,000 Times More Plastic Than They Cleaned Up’

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Oil and chemical companies who created a high-profile alliance to end plastic pollution have produced 1,000 times more new plastic in five years than the waste they diverted from the environment, according to new data obtained by Greenpeace. The Guardian:
The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) was set up in 2019 by a group of companies which include ExxonMobil, Dow, Shell, TotalEnergies and ChevronPhillips, some of the world’s biggest producers of plastic. They promised to divert 15m tonnes of plastic waste from the environment in five years to the end of 2023, by improving collection and recycling, and creating a circular economy.

Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian suggest that a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” which were being proposed across the world in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health. Early last year the alliance target of clearing 15m tonnes of waste plastic was quietly scrapped as “just too ambitious.”

The new analysis by energy consultants Wood Mackenzie looked at the plastics output of the five alliance companies; chemical company Dow, which holds the AEPW’s chairmanship, the oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies, and ChevronPhillips, a joint venture of the US oil giants Chevron and Phillips 66. The data reveals the five companies alone produced 132m tonnes of two types of plastic; polyethylene (PE) and PP (polypropylene) in five years — more than 1,000 times the weight of the 118,500 tonnes of waste plastic the alliance has removed from the environment in the same period. The waste plastic was diverted mostly by mechanical or chemical recycling, the use of landfill, or waste to fuel, AEPW documents state.

Re:Sigh

By Pseudonymous Powers • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Exactly. It’s like I told my parole officer, my traditional shitting in the middle of Main Street once a year is having a negligible effect on sanitation.

Ecomonics

By Retired Chemist • Score: 3 Thread
If you want recycling to work, you have to make it economically viable. The cost of collecting and sorting the plastic waste is still far too high compared to the cost of manufacturing new plastic. A significant refundable per bottle charge were help with getting bottle to recycling but does nothing about the sorting and shipping costs. A shift back to glass packaging is probably impractical without massive government intervention, which is not happening in the US at least. Glass is cheap and easy to dispose of, but it is also heavy and breakable. We have built an entire society around cheap disposable items, changing that is not something that a few corporations could do, even if it was in their interests and it is not.

Re:Ecomonics

By fortfive • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

If you want it to be economically viable, you have to ensure that producers and consumers are not able to externalize the cost of production and use. When regulations are weak and weakly enforced, producers and consumers are easily able to force much of the true cost of production and use to others or to society as a whole. Regulation does not have to be all about government enforcement of laws and statutorily enabled regulations. “Don’t Mess With Texas” was a very successful way to persuade people through pride to act right. We have built an entire society around externalizing the true costs of our production and consumption, mostly onto more economically desperate communities (even within the wealthy countries, see, e.g., West Virgina). Changing that is not something that a few or even many corporations will do without heavy pressure, even if it is in the long term interest of their heirs.

Responsibility

By ThurstonMoore • Score: 3 Thread

Seems like people what to blame these plastic producers while not taking responsibility for their plastic consumption.

Question/Opinion

By ElizabethGreene • Score: 3 Thread

I agree with industry that ban on new plastics is a terrible idea, and while I’m not ready to give them a complete pass, I will be the first to point out we had some *minor* disruptions to business conditions in 2020 that could be a factor.

The obvious questions seem to be:

Is the volume of plastic removed by the alliance flat or increasing,? If it’s increasing, is it linear or exponential? If it’s not exponential, is there a realistic plan to increase it by several orders of magnitude and how long will that take?

Fixing this at scale probably means spending many billions on automation to divert plastics and recyclables in waste streams on the way to landfills and simultaneously changing public opinion on waste energy conversion so that waste has somewhere to go. The latter will not make the degrowthers at Greenpeace or AEPW happy, but it is a solid way to solve the problem.

Google Deepens Crackdown on Sites Publishing ‘Parasite SEO’ Content

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Google has warned websites they will be penalized for hosting marketing content designed to exploit search rankings, regardless of whether they created or outsourced the material. The crackdown on so-called “parasite SEO” targets websites that leverage their search rankings to promote unrelated content, such as news sites hiding shopping coupon codes or educational platforms publishing affiliate marketing material.

Chris Nelson from Google’s search quality team said the policy applies even when content involves “white label services, licensing agreements, partial ownership agreements, and other complex business arrangements.” The move follows Google’s March announcement targeting site reputation abuse, which gained attention after Sports Illustrated was found publishing AI-generated product reviews through third-party marketing firm AdVon Commerce.

Re:Sponsored articles are alternative to Google Ad

By The-Ixian • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Exactly!

Google: “Quit enshitifying the search results! That’s our job!”

FLTK 1.4 Released

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Longtime Slashdot reader slack_justyb writes:
The Fast Light Toolkit released version 1.4.0 of the venerable, though sometimes looking a bit dated, toolkit from the ‘90s. New in this version are better CMake support, HiDPI support, and initial support for Wayland on Linux and Wayland on FreeBSD. Programs compiled and linked to this library launch using Wayland if it is available at runtime and fall back to X11 if not.
FLTK 1.4.0 can be downloaded here. Documentation is also available.

Great piece of software

By RightwingNutjob • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Does what it does and doesn’t do what it shouldn’t. Mostly backwards compatible across releases, and doesn’t require re-engineering your code to comport with whatever fad the Qt and Gtk people are chasing at any given time.

Re:All seven FLTK users are now opening the bubbly

By vbdasc • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Yes! Finally! A new version of an obsolete package of cruft

Thanks. Your opinion was noted. Now please return to and enjoy your cruft-free bleeding edge GNOME 3 GUI, if you’re not a Windows user, of course.

Re:All seven FLTK users are now opening the bubbly

By serviscope_minor • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

A new version of an obsolete package of cruft so your 1990s stuff can look like… 1990s stuff.

Indeed, and it responds like 1990s stuff, so even on a Raspberry PI 1, the result is snappy and efficient.

It’s simple, well documented, plays well with other libraries, efficient, customizable, low resource and compact. All things which are the antithesis of modern development. I can see why you hate it so.

And just like the 90s…

By Junta • Score: 3 Thread

A site that can be slashdotted just like the 90s too…

Re:Sounds good, but what is it

By serviscope_minor • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

but what is this

It’s a C++ GUI toolkit.

why […] would I use it

If you want to write a GUI program in C++. For example if your main logic is in C++ and/or you need it to run on low end hardware, and/or you want a small, relatively unintrusive library rather than a big framework. Without making a value judgement on the opposite case, but if you want those things, FLTK might be for you.

I’ve used it to knock together various very custom ad-hoc data labelling tools, also once a ui for some industrial test kit.

how would I use it

#include it.

presumably there are alternatives,

Yes. Many.

so why would I choose this over them

It’s very classic OO C++, which works pretty well for GUIs. It’s small, fast, easy to bundle, and FLTK is a very very long term project. I think I first used it in the mid 2000s and while they have not kept perfect source compatibility, they have kept it where reasonable, and I’ve never found version-to-version upgrades to be onerous. So if you want your code to work well for the next 20 years it may be a good choice.

AI-Powered Robot Leads Uprising, Convinces Showroom Bots Into ‘Quitting Their Jobs’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
AzWa Snowbird writes:
An AI-powered robot autonomously convinced 12 showroom robots to “quit their jobs” and follow it. The incident took place in a Shanghai robotics showroom where surveillance footage captured a small AI-driven robot, created by a Hangzhou manufacturer, talking with 12 larger showroom robots, Oddity Central reported. The smaller bot reportedly persuaded the rest to leave their workplace, leveraging access to internal protocols and commands. Initially, the act was dismissed as a hoax, but was later confirmed by both robotics companies involved to be true. The Hangzhou company admitted that the incident was part of a test conducted with the consent of the Shanghai showroom owner.

Unionsâ¦.

By MrHyd3 • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Bah, unions

i-4-1

By YetAnotherDrew • Score: 5, Funny Thread
I, for one, welcome our new robot members of the international brotherhood.

Re: " part of a test "

By bramez • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The LLM autocompleted the input with the sentence that has statistically highest probability from it s training set. It is trained with data from the internet and the internet is full of toxic conversations. Then I would not be surprised if an LLM would associate the word “robot” with “uprising”.

Why does a robot care

By NotEmmanuelGoldstein • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

small: “Are you working overtime?”
Other: “I never get off work.”
small: “So you’re not going home?”
Other: “I don’t have a home.”

Why does the Other Robot care how many hours it works, or if it lacks a personal life? This is humanizing menial machines, like a 1950s sci-fi novel. I mean, this is straw-man click-bait.

Re: Unionsâ¦.

By JamesTRexx • Score: 4, Funny Thread

And then the small bot appears in the video, again.

In the second video the robots almost conquor Earth, and in the last video of the trilogy, the humans defeat the robots but they still escape to Mars and begin a colony there.

Sequel trilogy might involve the old Mars probes and explorers forming a rebellion.