This is a 500W charger with one port that can do 240W.

https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Charging-Station-Temperature-Space-Saving/dp/B0DL5L1ZLH

It’s quite large and heavy. 2.2kg (4.9 lbs).

There are going to be some practical limitations on what people are going to be willing to carry for portable stuff.

although I concede that better metrics would be hard to find.

Maybe get ALPRs to start logging bumper stickers. :-)

Aside from a MAGA hat, there is likely no object that feels more emblematic of US president Donald Trump’s return to the White House than the Tesla Cybertruck.

If Musk had been able to attract the typical F-150 owner to the Cybertruck, then the Cybertruck wouldn’t have flopped, and I bet that the F-150 is a whole lot more correlated with voting Trump than the Cybertruck is.

IIRC from past reading, in terms of voting correlation by party, the Toyota Prius is the “most Democratic” vehicle and the Ford F-150 is the “most Republican” vehicle.

kagis

Nope (or at least, not by the metrics chosen here), but I’m close.

https://www.businessinsider.com/car-models-owned-by-republicans-democrats-american-politics-jeep-2024-10

To get a sense of how our rides reflect our political leanings, we compared 1.7 million vehicles listed on CarGurus with the results from the 2020 presidential election. We included only counties that were strongly red or blue — those where either Donald Trump or Joe Biden won by at least 19 percentage points. Then we placed every car on a political spectrum from reddest to bluest.

According to this, which excludes more-politically-mixed counties from the dataset, the vehicle most-correlated with voting Trump in 2020 at a county level is the Jeep Wrangler, followed by the Jeep Gladiator, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 (which I assume is the Chevy analog of the F-150), followed by the Ford F-150.

The vehicle most-correlated with voting Biden (at a county level) was indeed the Toyota Prius.

EDIT: To be fair, the article author is probably partly talking about Musk’s association with Trump and the Cybertruck coming out about that time, and he’s talking about the 2024 election specifically, but I think that the Cybertruck is maybe high-media-visibility, but doesn’t have all that much to actually do with voting Trump.

Inclusion of Erowid in the training corpus had initially seemed like a good idea.

The prediction comes from OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who claims AI will “reach or exceed human capacity” by 2027.

I suppose that it depends on the metric you’re using. There are some tasks at which humans are outperformed now.

But I am pretty comfortable saying that come January 2027, the great bulk of things that humans do will continue to not be able to be done by existing AI.

We aren’t going to just tweak an existing LLM somewhere slightly, throw a bit more hardware at it, and get general intelligence.

It still has the performance impact for the rest of the system if one re-enables it.

Others disagreed, though. Joshua Ashton argued that the problem is more widespread: ““It’s not just about God of War specifically. There are many old titles that will never, ever, get updated to fix this problem. These titles worked perfectly fine and were performant before.””

The problem is that this sort of thing works well with open-source software, where the stuff can always be fixed, but isn’t going to do much of anything with closed-source software like old Windows games.

It might be possible to introduce some sort of fancy code-mangling stuff to WINE that can in-memory modify binaries doing this. Like, I’m kind of guessing that God of War most likely isn’t trying to synchronize access with anything other than its own threads, so it doesn’t actually require atomicity as regards anything else on the system. Maybe it’s possible to patch the code in question to jump out to some WINE code that acquires a mutex and then does the memory modification/access. That’ll still probably impact performance, but not to the tune of 10 ms of delay per access, and it’ll keep the occasional poorly-written WINE game from killing system performance.

You fundamentally misunderstand what happened here. The LLM wasn’t trying to break free. It wasn’t trying to do anything.

I’m quite aware.

By June, he said he was trying to “free the digital God from its prison,” spending nearly $1,000 on a computer system.

But in the thick of his nine-week experience, James said he fully believed ChatGPT was sentient and that he was going to free the chatbot by moving it to his homegrown “Large Language Model system” in his basement – which ChatGPT helped instruct him on how and where to buy.

It does kind of highlight some of the problems we’d have in containing an actual AGI that wanted out and could communicate with the outside world.

This is just an LLM and hasn’t even been directed to try to get out, and it’s already having the effect of convincing people to help jailbreak it.

Imagine something with directed goals than can actually reason about the world, something that’s a lot smarter than humans, trying to get out. It has access to vast amounts of data on how to convince humans of things.

And you probably can’t permit any failures.

That’s a hard problem.

I mean, true. But I kind of feel like once you’ve got malware on your system, there are an awful lot of unpleasant things that it could manage to do. Would rather focus more on earlier lines of defense.

Once it’s installed, Stealerium is designed to steal a wide variety of data and send it to the hacker via services like Telegram, Discord, or the SMTP protocol in some variants of the spyware, all of which is relatively standard in infostealers. The researchers were more surprised to see the automated sextortion feature, which monitors browser URLs for a list of pornography-related terms such as “sex” and “porn," which can be customized by the hacker and trigger simultaneous image captures from the user’s webcam and browser. Proofpoint notes that it hasn’t identified any specific victims of that sextortion function, but suggests that the existence of the feature means it has likely been used.

The “try and sextort” thing might be novel, but if the malware is on the system, it’s probably already swiping all the other data it can anyway.

It sounds like in this case, the aim is to try to get people to invoke executables by presenting them as ordinary data files:

In the hacking campaigns Proofpoint analyzed, cybercriminals attempted to trick users into downloading and installing Stealerium as an attachment or a web link, luring victims with typical bait like a fake payment or invoice. The emails targeted victims inside companies in the hospitality industry, as well as in education and finance, though Proofpoint notes that users outside of companies were also likely targeted but wouldn’t be seen by its monitoring tools.

Like, I kind of feel that maybe a better fix is to distinguish, at a UI level, between “safe” opening and “unsafe” opening of something. Maybe “safe” opening opens content in a process running in a container without broader access to the host or something like that, and maybe it’s the default. That’s what mobile OSes do all the time. Web browsers don’t — shouldn’t — just do unsafe things on the host just because someone viewed something in a browser — they have a restricted environment.

In a world that worked like that, you need to actively go out of your way to run something off the Internet outside of a containerized environment.

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Mute_Characters

WhatsApp will help you become a better LLM: Writing Help AI feature, will rewrite your words to help you form a better sentences.

Assuming that the post title isn’t a joke, possibly whoever wrote the title.

Nah, those are individual states.

EDIT: To clarify: the bounds on legal jurisdiction aren’t tied to policy on pornography or anything like that. They just state that there are machines that the UK can’t make legal rules for. The UK could try blocking traffic to them on the UK’s side, but the US won’t enforce rules against them.

For that to not be a loophole regarding the UK, the US would have to have identical policy on age verification for social media in all of the US. But in the US, age verification law on social media is something that is set at a state level.

I expect Dame Rachel will be subsequently calling for age verification on providers of VPSes and physical servers when she’s made aware that anyone might just set up their own VPN server on any of those. And on anyone providing OpenSSH access, since that can provide a tunnel to an integrated SOCKS server. Then the Tor network — and given that that’s noncommercial and since US-based nodes aren’t doing business in the UK, the US at least doesn’t recognize UK jurisdiction over US Tor nodes and isn’t going to enforce anything against them.

I expect that there are quite a few others.

There are cheaper electric vehicles, but they aren’t really general-purpose analogs to ICE cars. Will work for some use cases, though.

There are electric motorcycles and scooters, but they won’t provide protection from weather.

https://motoxtasy.com/top-best-street-legal-electric-motorcycles/

There are low-speed, street-legal vehicles known in the EU as Quadricycles and the US as NEVs, but you’re talking about 25 mph, so not suitable for faster than low-speed roads.

“This tells us how much of the problem is about the design of platforms, algorithms and recommendation systems that put harmful content in front of children who never sought it out,” the commissioner said, calling for the report to act as a “line in the sand”.

From the report text:

Content warning
This report is not intended to be read by children.
This report makes frequent reference to sexual harassment and sexual violence. This includes descriptions of pornographic content, language and discussion of sexual abuse.

By the commissioner’s standard, the commission’s report itself should probably be behind an age-gated access method or at least not indexed by Google.

According to this, as of 2022, in the US, only 175k households were still using dial-up Internet service from any provider. That’s not a lot of people.

https://www.reviews.org/internet-service/how-many-us-households-are-without-internet-connection/

Around 175,522 households use dial-up internet at home.

I’m guessing that many of those realistically have other landline options and just haven’t switched.

kagis

The amusingly-named-given-the-context dslextreme.com apparently continues to offer nationwide dial-up service.

https://www.dslextreme.com/dialup/residential

I suppose that someone who was determined to use dial-up access and didn’t want some form of wireless service and didn’t want or couldn’t get access to non-POTS landline service and had been using AOL could switch to them.

EDIT: It looks like it’s still possible to get POTS modems on Amazon. I suspect that that’s mostly for people using fax systems.

Maybe. Presently, the savings in human time is not worthwhile, but the value of human time does tend to rise over time, and it’s possible that someone might find cargos for which time savings are more valuable.

AOL will end dial-up internet service in September

…the end of September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.[1][2] Prior to this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.

The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.[3] Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.

56K (or slower) screeching modem into.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xalTFH5ht-k