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consumer-grade hardware can run an LLM that hacks the planet. we can stop it, but we don't have much time.

When I talked about the rise of Cancer Capital, I mentioned that it represents a massive shift from how venture capital has worked over the years. But my conversations in recent years with people in tech, and especially with those outside the industry, reveal that most folks...

Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web researc...

Discovering and supporting all of the wild semantics for local variables in Ruby was so interesting that the ZJIT team decided to write a paper about it: Support Local Variables (PDF). It’s also the first bit of academic literature that documents and explains ZJIT. It’s pub...

Quite simply, they can no longer be trusted.

Every second, open source shapes our software, yet our view of this ecosystem is surprisingly opaque. How much can you really trust OSS data?

Suppose you want to know the rank of an n × n matrix A, the number of linearly independent rows of A, or equivalently the number of linearly independent columns. There are at least three difficulties. Difficulties in computing rank First of all, rank is not a continuous function of a matrix. Since rank is an […]

The post Computing a lower bound on matrix rank first appeared on John D. Cook.

In June I purchased this TrueTime XL-AK time server, so I could learn more of the history of GPS-based time.

I received it on June 22, and just 16 days later a similar GPS time server took down Australia's cell service for 12 hours! I made a short video about it but put off digging into the TrueTime... until now.

Over the past couple weeks, I've 'restomodded' this device with a Raspberry Pi, to build a stratum 1 NTP Time server, which I'd like to eventually add to the NTP Pool. I found a way to drop in a Pi 5 and GNSS HAT, display the time and GPS status on the built-in 16x2 LCD, show the status on the bicolor LED, and make this box useful again.

We’re now 33 years into Eternal September. You have to be older than about 52 to know what I’m talking about. But if you started college before the fall of 1993, especially if you were studying computer science, you know

The post The September that Never Ended appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

A lot of people think that good leadership requires radical responsibility. Conscious Leadership defines it like this: Taking full responsibility for one’s circumstances (physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually) is the foundation of true personal and relational tr...

Today's links Amazon achieves enshittification inception: Cheating on your fraud is a hell of a thing. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Electrolite is back; Mafia rules; Aaronsw on Wikipedia; Proctorio's memory hole. Upcoming appearances: Dąbrowa Gó...

The August edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.

This month:

• We got more details on OpenAl's accidental cyberattacks
• One-shotting Raccoon Heist games with Fable 5 and Sol 5.6
• Claude auto mode
• Understanding ChatGPT Work
• Model releases
• Miscellaneous bits and bobs
• My projects
• What I'm using at the moment

Here's a copy of the July newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

Are you talking to the right guy?

The post The case of the progress callback that never got called when progress happened appeared first on The Old New Thing.

NVIDIA has offered by buy Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000. 129303 is the Unicode code point for the Hugging Face emoj (U+1F917), which you can verify with the following Python code. >>> import unicodedata >>> 129303 == 0x1F917 True >>> unicodedata.name(chr(0x1F917)) 'HUGGING FACE' Related posts Prevent characters from displaying as emoji Unicode, Tolkien, and Privacy Unicode […]

The post Hugging Face Easter Egg first appeared on John D. Cook.

An impressive system that can (to some unknown extent) build symbolic world models

GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is "rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS" - I've not tried it yet myself, so I don't have...

This is my third and final essay looking at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and how it’s likely to affect housing supply.

There’s a lot to like here, but the proposal clearly goes too far.

Eric Lu announced on X today that he has factored RSA-260, a number N with 260 digits (862 bits) that is the product of two large primes [1]. RSA numbers are challenge problems posed to gauge the security of RSA encryption, which rests on the difficulty of factoring large numbers [2]. The naming scheme is […]

The post New RSA number factored first appeared on John D. Cook.

I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to 99.9% is just as hard again. This stood out, as I’ve been experiencing m...