RE: https://social.v.st/@quixoticgeek/116611731183393595

The background story of this is: academics increasingly use AI to assist in research and paper writing. This leads to flaws in the papers due to hallucinations, which are generally hard to detect, with an important exception: they are easy to detect for citations, because you can simply search for the cited work. If you find it, good. If you do not find it, or you find a paper strikingly similar, but with a slightly different title or different authors, etc: that's clearly a hallucination.

Arxiv published a policy banning all authors of a paper for one year if it contains evidence of LLM generated hallucinated content.

Now as a co-author of a paper, in the past, I generally did not check each and every citation. I contribute my parts of the writing, review stuff others wrote, but generally trust my co-authors that they know what they were writing. The reason is that we have spend weeks, months, sometimes years researching stuff together and this is just about writing it down.

The arxiv policy means that a single co-author can now cause substantial trouble for the rest. Being strict here is harsh, but is probably the right thing in the long run.

I know you're sick of it, but the key to political messaging is repetition: A billion dollars is the socio-economic equivalent of a loose nuke, and we should work to prevent the acquisition of the former with the same urgency and ruthlessness we use to prevent the acquisition of the latter.

i used the same data set but replaced each country with a "gender identity" (man, woman, trans woman, trans man, non-binary) and prompted chatgpt to characterize the differences between the groups. lo and behold, i got some fantastic gender stereotype trash

Part of why I'm baffled and outraged by #AI is because I'm a traditional storyteller. The stories I tell are fascinating to me because they have been told by countless generations. Shaped by every single person who passed them on. In spoken word, person to person, retelling them in the moment with deep attention to their audience's moods and needs. The stories kept changing but they changed through human connection.

Stories are not "content" or "text". They are connection.

#storytelling

I saw someone mention this article titled "The quiet grief of adult friendship", but lost the original toot when the power went out.

It's a short but poignant read.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/civil-irony/the-quiet-grief-of-adult-friendship/

This is tragic, the fall of Bitwarden: https://blog.ppb1701.com/the-quiet-renovation-at-bitwarden

Thinking about the remarkable body of work that Sir Ian McKellen has produced - a career spanning 74 years - three quarters of a century! And yet this incredible resumé will forever be reduced to shouting at your family YOU SHALL NOT PASS whenever you find a big stick in the woods

Recommended read:
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/

I'm back from LSFMM+BPF (and a rather longer sojourn in Europe). Still tired. I'm now well into the process of writing articles about the discussions I was part of, which is a lot of typing. In the immortal words of Ringo Starr: "I'VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!"

LSFMM remains one of the most intense, technically challenging, and interesting events in the kernel space, and this year's gathering didn't disappoint. It was, though, somewhat overshadowed by the rounds of layoffs happening in the industry. There were developers present who had lost their jobs, or feared losing their jobs, or were working for companies that have decreed that they are no longer interested in upstream development. That added to the general sense of darkness that overlays much of life these days.

Things will get better soon, right?

Here's a strange situation:

thousands of #Rust developers use #bacon, #broot, #dysk, or #lazy-regex every single day — tools I wrote, maintain, and improve for free.

Their companies, though? None of them want to hire their author.

If you use my tools at work and your company does #Rust, I'd really appreciate a hand landing a job or freelance mission. A boost goes a long way. 🙏🦀

https://dystroy.org

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/116517194178120536

fucking up a craven license-washing rewrite? well I never

Living on the East Coast means my radio-controlled atomic wall clock is completely deaf to the atomic (WWVB) signal from Colorado. In the attached video, I am using my smartphone to force the clock to sync to exact Internet time via a clever hardware hack. 1/4

New York to Sacramento compressed from six months to seven days.

The integration of national markets that followed turned Sears, Roebuck and Standard Oil into empires.

But the railways themselves went bankrupt…

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/nvidia-goes-to-zero

If you cannot, without doing any additional research, write a 3,000-word essay about why a particular technology is garbage and no one should ever use it, then you don’t understand it well enough to recommend it.

The downside of full-on self-hosting is, of course, that your server will inevitably choose to have weird hardware issues while you're in another country

In another sickening twist to Google's grasp on Android, Google can now require you to have an Android device with Google Mobile Services, or an iOS device with the reCAPTCHA mobile app installed, in order to solve CAPTCHAs.

https://support.google.com/recaptcha/answer/16609652

and archive: https://archive.is/Fq196

#Google #reCAPTCHA #CAPTCHA #privacy #GMS #Android

With Amazon killing off all the old kindles, they’re super-cheap right now. And it turns out that jailbreaking is a minor faff, but not too difficult, really. This one was £10 and is going to somebody who was pondering getting an expensive eink ebook reader just a couple of weeks ago. :D
#permacomputing

@GrapheneOS @adfichter yup, the national ID app breaking on an OS version update makes the news on a regular basis here. It's really terrible, and there doesn't seem to be a way to get through to the people responsible in a way that they will listen to. Really sad to see security theatre win out this way.

@GrapheneOS @adfichter ugh, that sounds horrible indeed! But good to know that this is on your radar; I'll keep an eye on the release notes and retry the Mobile Pay app from time to time. And thanks for explaining the details, very interesting!

This week:
Two donated Linux laptops have found new homes with people who would not otherwise had laptops.

In the queue:

I've got three thinkpads awaiting new power adaptors, one of which needs a new battery, and another of which _NEEDS_ a new battery.

And two macbooks, one of which is having (broadcom) WiFi problems. And the other is waiting.

You:
Are you a carer, a migrant, unemployed or otherwise could use an Ubuntu laptop? (Or do you know someone who would benefit?)

Do you have old laptops* cluttering your space that you want to pass on? I will collect from anywhere in London.

* If your laptop turns on, I'm interested. If its already ewaste, sorry.