Science and Technology

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Hopefully, It will be good riddance.

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Couldn’t find a link in English - Story about a journalist, former court reporter, who typed in his own name in Microsofts AI Copilot and it made up a whole eleborate fake story about him being a convicted pedophile, he escaped a mental institution, had illegal weapons and other crimes - complete with google maps to his home adress and phone number. Apparently AI scientists refer to this as the AI having ‘halucinations’.
Of course Microsoft can’t be bothered, because they have no legal liability for any content it produces.

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This is a great series about the current landscape with the basic perspective that Tech today feels shit because the top companies are no longer run by engineers with a focus on product, but business people and former McKinsey consultants.

This is a great roundtable on the real state of generative AI

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Really? That ought to change, and quick. More and more people will start using AI on a regular basis. That technology having ‘hallucinations’ is unacceptable, and very dangerous.

Sounds like accelerated ‘enshitification’

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That’s basically the entire theme of the series. But it’s bigger than that when it refers to the entire tech economy rather than a single product or company. He refers to it as a the tech rot economy.

Doubt it. Although I know there are a couple of interesting lawsuits coming related to other uses of AI, e.g. major music labels.
I guess much more important would be people not blindly trusting these chat AI. But then social media has confirmed that a lot of people won’t question anything and will always chose conveniance.

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Any recommendations on decent free (or cheap) anti-virus software?

I took my computer off the company’s network last week and assumed my free McAfee would do the job. I really dont use it for much, dont visit any dubious sites and have very good hygiene on clicking links, but Im already seeing issues with redirects and freezes so looking for something to do a bit of a clean up and protect it better moving forward

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Have you just tried Microsoft Defender?

Is that part of Windows or an additional program? Whatever native security windows is running is up to date and has not picked up anything

I don’t think it will run if you have a third party antivirus installed. I personally don’t trust Mcafee. The only time I have had problems with viruses is when that was installed.

This seem’s big
https://x.com/CadeMetz/status/1849113110323532144

This guy’s argument linked below appears pretty solid, if it true, and enforced, would require every generative AI company to throw away their data and start again from scratch. With the money that has been pumped in already to get us here and growing sense that it has been a boondoggle, I think the rebuilding would look very different than the boom of the past few years.

https://x.com/edzitron/status/1849161738845049212

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AVG free is as good as you need. I have to use Sophos on all the school networks which is “fine” but AVG on all my work stuff. Recommended just avoid the upgrades and cursed AVG browser extension.

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HBO recently premiered a new documentary from Cullen Hoback (the guy who did the Q series a few years ago and is popularly credited as the guy who outed Ron Watkins as being Q) digging into who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. If for nothing else it is a fairly good primer for people on the history of bitcoin but he does end it with a fairly credible argument for it being Peter Todd.

Todd when confronted with the accusation had a bit of fun with it and I didnt take it too seriously, and while the argument seemed credible, I didnt leave it convinced Todd was the singular guy (lots of theories that Satochi is a collection of people). But people seem to be taking the argument very seriously and it now seems to be approaching conventional wisdom that it is Todd. He claims he has had to go into hiding now because of the film, which if remotely true and not all part of an elaborate game calls into question the ethics of the film existing in the first place. If the Q film made Watkins’ life hell then fuck him as he deserved it for what he did as Q. Regardless of what you think about Crypto, whomever Satoshi really is has never done anything like that to justify his life being exploded.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/08/bitcoin-hbo-documentary-satoshi-nakamoto-identity/

https://cointelegraph.com/news/peter-todd-forced-hiding-hbo-doc-claims-invented-bitcoin

Fascinating video that got me thinking that if i were a multi billionaire this is kind if stuff i think I’d like to invest my efforts in.

Screw the Mars rockets, let’s look at power generation. I concede you need rockets for some of it.