earthworm

“It’s almost certain” that AI will reach that level eventually, one researcher told Nature.

Semafor doing so much work trying the launder this into a story. “One scientist” in the original article, to multiple scientists in their headline.

This is the first of three waves of AI in science, says Sam Rodriques, chief executive of FutureHouse — a research lab in San Francisco, California, that debuted an LLM designed to do chemistry tasks earlier this year.

And the one “scientist” seems to have switched tracks from doing actual research to doing capitalism.

The Yale researchers’ nothingburger result has precedent. In 2023, a study by the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) concluded that generative AI would probably not replace most workers.

A study of Danish workers published in April determined that generative AI had no material impact on wages or jobs. Another such study published in February found “overall employment effects are modest, as reduced demand in exposed occupations is offset by productivity-driven increases in labor demand at AI-adopting firms.”

There is some contradictory data.

No shit.

If you voted this in, you should be banned from VPNs.

Your search history should be public record.

Google will soon stop you sideloading unverified apps – here’s what that means for you

Signal CEO Whittaker said that in the worst case scenario, they would work with partners and the community to see if they could find ways to circumvent these rules. Signal also did this when the app was blocked in Russia or Iran. “But ultimately, we would leave the market before we had to comply with dangerous laws like these.”

This is why we need the ability to sideload apps.

Any chance this will lead Microsoft to re-evaluate its use of AI?

Launching October 1st, Gemini For Home is a suite of new AI-powered features for Google’s smart home hardware and software.

The biggest change: Gemini is replacing Google Assistant on all of Google’s smart speakers, all the way back to the original Google Home speaker. This LLM-powered upgrade, announced at Google I/O, will be available through an Early Access program at first, with a wider rollout planned for next year.

On smart speakers, Gemini brings an entirely new voice assistant that uses and understands natural language, can interpret context, and can pull in more real-time information. You still activate it with the wake words “hey Google,” but Google Assistant has been evicted.

“Gemini for Home is the intelligence for your entire home,” Anish Kattukaran, head of product at Google Home and Nest, tells The Verge. “It’s not going to just replace Assistant on speakers and displays, but it’s going to upgrade your other devices as well, your cameras and doorbells, where you interact with those devices, and bring those smarts collectively to your entire home.”

I’m not excited for Apple to invent smart homes after this, completing the duopoly of LLMs being in everyone’s homes even harder than before.

Long live Home Assistant

🫡

I downvote because it’s paywalled.

Paywalled links are just ads with extra steps.

How long until parliament decides to push the undo button on this stupid law?

Corporations don’t have stable political identities.

They’ll promote trans people if it makes them money.

And then sell trans people to ICE the next quarter if it makes them even more money.

And then use a shell company to sell trans merch to the people boycotting them.

Jones says that linguists and subtitlers are not necessarily against AI – but at the moment, it’s making practitioners’ lives harder rather than easier. “In every industry, AI is being used to replace all the creative things that bring us joy instead of the boring, tedious tasks we hate doing,” she says.

Those are definitely words.

“We show that by exploiting the physics of specular reflection, an adversary can inject phantom obstacles or erase real ones using only inexpensive mirrors,” the researchers wrote in a paper submitted to the journal Computers & Security.

“Experiments on a full AV platform, with commercial-grade LIDAR and the Autoware stack, demonstrate that these are practical threats capable of triggering critical safety failures, such as abrupt emergency braking and failure to yield.”

I’d be fooled, too, at first - and suspicious (who’s fucking around with mirrors on the road?) - but I’d probably figure it out after a second.

My main concern is people could use these kinds of exploits to “jailbreak” robo-cars (or whatever we’re calling them) to behave in dangerous ways in real traffic.

It will not. The article is nostalgia and hopium-baiting.

Restarting a mass-manufacturing production line for something like once super-common CRT TVs would require a major investment that so far nobody is willing to front.

Meanwhile LCD and OLED technology have hit some serious technological dead-ends, while potential non-organic LED alternatives such as microLED have trouble scaling down to practical pixel densities and yields.

There’s a chance that Sony and others can open some drawers with old ‘thin CRT’ plans, dust off some prototypes and work through the remaining R&D issues with SED and FED for potentially a pittance of what alternative, brand-new technologies like MicroLED or quantum dot displays would cost.

Will it happen? Maybe not. It’s quite possible that we’ll still be trying to fix OLED and LCDs for the next decade and beyond, while waxing nostalgically about how much more beautiful the past was, and the future could have been, if only we hadn’t bothered with those goshdarn twisting liquid crystals.

Apple is one of the few companies whose cult I think could rival MAGA.

Tim Cook gets no brownie points from me for sucking up to 40-whatever-number-he-is.

Their policy to not be evil.

The content was great. The furry art between every paragraph was completely inoffensive and sometimes cute.

Using a picture of your (I assume) furry avatar presenting their ass in my general direction as the header/thumbnail almost made me not click.

It’s not even a furry thing.

It’s a you-look-so-unserious-right-now thing.

Went to the comments to follow up on that URL and had a lesson in the history of unfortunate website names.

This seems like a dumb benchmark.

ClockBench evaluates whether models can read analog clocks - a task that is trivial for humans, but current frontier models struggle with.

What do you mean trivial? Most humans I know can’t read the most basic white-background-big-black-numbers clocks.

Someone rigged the jury to get 90% on this: