Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity: Australia’s biggest bank regrets messy rush to replace staff with chatbots.
WIN: CBA backflips on customer service job cuts, admits they got it wrong
In a huge win for union members, CBA has backflipped on cutting 45 customer service roles.www.fsunion.org.au
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Congressman Introduces Cybercrime Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act to Combat Foreign Scam Syndicates
This legislation revives Congress’s Article I authority to issue letters of marque and reprisal, allowing the executive branch to deputize licensed cyber operators to pursue foreign cybercriminal enterprises targeting American citizens and infrastructure.
Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty
Microsoft says U.S. law takes precedence over Canadian data sovereignty - Digital Journal
Microsoft representative says US CLOUD Act comes before other country's sovereignty.Alexander Rudolph (Digital Journal Inc)
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Jimmy Wales(Wikipedia's founder) Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36082211
Jimmy Wales(Wikipedia's founder) Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
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Jimmy Wales(Wikipedia's founder) Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36082211
Jimmy Wales(Wikipedia's founder) Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
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Jimmy Wales(Wikipedia's founder) Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36082211
Jimmy Wales(Wikipedia's founder) Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
Certain Android VPN apps are insecure, secretly tied to one Chinese company
Techspot has a table of some known bad VPNs, and concludes:
The report does not speculate heavily on Qihoo 360's motives for concealing ownership of so many free VPN apps, an approach that likely helped boost downloads while avoiding reputational risks. The company, which has well-documented ties to Beijing's communist regime, may have pursued this strategy to minimize costs and maintain deniability.
For more details on the security issues, this is about the same paper: cyberinsider.com/vpn-apps-used…
VPN Apps Used by Millions Contain Shared Keys and Hidden Backdoors
A study uncovered flaws and deceptive practices among some of the most downloaded VPN apps, collectively impacting over 700 million users.Alex Lekander (CyberInsider)
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Alleged Pirate Site Operator Arrested, Family Crowdfunds "David vs. Goliath" Defense
With millions of monthly visits, sports streaming service 'Al Ángulo TV' was a massive success. The operator of the service, who wasn't shy about appearing in public, was very active on social media. This brazen stance didn't go unnoticed by rights holders. This week, Argentinian authorities arrested the alleged operator, Alejo Leonel Warles, who now faces a criminal prosecution. His family is reportedly backing a fundraiser to aid a "David vs. Goliath" defense.
Alleged Pirate Site Operator Arrested, Family Crowdfunds "David vs. Goliath" Defense * TorrentFreak
The alleged operator of sports streaming service 'Al Ángulo TV' has been arrested in Argentina following a criminal investigation.Ernesto Van der Sar (TF Publishing)
[PDF] Tesla is slow in reporting crashes and the feds have launched an investigation to find out why
The Office of Defects Investigation (“ODI”) has identified numerous incident reports submitted by
Tesla, Inc. (“Tesla”) in response to Standing General Order 2021-01 (the “SGO”), in which the
reported crashes occurred several months or more before the dates of the reports. The majority
of these reports involved crashes in which the Standing General Order in place at the time
required a report to be submitted within one or five days of Tesla receiving notice of the crash.
When the reports were submitted, Tesla submitted them in one of two ways. Many of the reports
were submitted as part of a single batch, while others were submitted on a rolling basis.Preliminary engagement between ODI and Tesla on the issue indicates that the timing of the
reports was due to an issue with Tesla’s data collection, which, according to Tesla, has now been
fixed. NHTSA is opening this Audit Query, a standard process for reviewing compliance with legal
requirements, to evaluate the cause of the potential delays in reporting, the scope of any such
delays, and the mitigations that Tesla has developed to address them. As part of this review,
NHTSA will assess whether any reports of prior incidents remain outstanding and whether the
reports that were submitted include all of the required and available data.
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Your dedicated virtual assistant for data entry and web research
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New Threat Research Reveals AI crawlers make up almost 80% of AI bot traffic, Meta Leads AI Crawling As ChatGPT Dominates Real-Time Web Traffic
New Fastly Threat Research Reveals AI crawlers make up almost 80% of AI bot traffic, Meta Leads AI Crawling As ChatGPT Dominates Real-Time Web Traffic | Fastly
SAN FRANCISCO – August 19, 2025 – Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), a leader in global edge cloud platforms, today released its Q2 2025 Threat Insights Report, exposing a striking shift in the nature and scale of automated web traffic.Fastly
The forgotten war on the Walkman
The forgotten war on the Walkman
Today, the Sony Walkman inspires nostalgia, but in the 1980s, it was feared as a dangerous device that could disconnect society.Louis Anslow (Freethink Media)
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Fiio player? If you’re referring to the Echo Mini, it’s just a digital player. It’s just aesthetically a tape player.
Edit: I stand corrected
FiiO CP13 | Sky Blue / Silver | HL02296.SkyBlueSilver
FiiO CP13 Analogue and simply good - We are reviving the old treasures from your childhood and youth Hotly anticipated.NT Global Distribution GmbH
Oh neat! Didn’t know this was a thing. Not something I need, but glad to know it exists.
I’d be surprised if it was anything other than the cheap mechanisms everything else gets. There’s very few companies manufacturing them and Techmoan is always on top of modern cassette systems and hasn’t brought it up. I could always be wrong, though.
They do indeed specify some sort of high voltage precision motor and a copper flywheel. And they claim a custom movement design.
And since it is an enthusiast device from a company with a good reputation, you can easily find teardowns online.
Anyway, you can read reviews online, there are plenty of them, and make your own mind.
Hmm, I’ve never seen someone directly link conservatism to the entire concept of society.
I didn’t know considering societal conditions was conservative. But I guess conservative leaders in the US did implement a lot of environmental protections. 🤔
Where does the line actually fall, do you think? I assume I’m over extending a bit here. Making assumptions about what you mean.
Ok, see that makes a lot more sense than whatever the other guy who replied to me is going on about and accusing me of.
Thanks for the reply.
Can you write up the logic chain that made you assume I think any particular law is good for society, let alone the one you focused on?
All I was commenting on was the idea that conservatives are the ones crying “we live in a society” and not progressives. I’ve always considered progressive ideas to be more in touch with “we live in a society!” Than conservatives who want to punish and suppress marginalized groups who are, in fact, part of society.
What the hell man?
“Fuck you I got mine” is not considering others and ignores that we live in a society. And that’s what these conservative leaders are all about.
Corporations having no responsibility for the environment and the communities they are part of is a conservative ideal. It does not support society.
I noted the environmental laws because they were exceptions, and look a bit surprising in retrospect. When one learns Nixon passed major environmental laws, they are often surprised.
Oh wait, are you here to say those environmental laws, things like the clean air act are just tools of control over the common man. Clean air and water is oppression?
Progressives say, "We live in a society, so let's not harm each other." Conservatives say, "Do what I want, not what you want, or society will crumble." Take a look at all the morality laws, and try to find even two where the ultimate result isn't punishment for daring to live in a manner they don't agree with. And the overwhelming majority of those morality laws are passed by conservatives. Even libertarians complain if someone has the audacity to tax them for the roads they use, especially the ones they use indirectly.
Even when the laws are for good reasons, control is applied. Do you not see how unnecessary regulatory burden can be used as a tool for gatekeeping? As for environmental laws, it's a bit audacious to talk about Nixon given what Trump has done in the last couple months. Who in their right mind (who isn't profiting from the sale of coal) wants to keep coal plants that operate at a loss around, whether you believe in climate change or not?
Living in a city, I can kind of get it. The number of people who simply walk in front of my bike because they're absorbed in their phone has made my commute stressful. I ended up installing a car horn on my bike which I'm sure makes their commute more stressful.
Perhaps the Walkman was the first time technology isolated people from the world around them.
Or I dunno, books.
"Will personal headphones lead to a world of silence?" We could have wished.
Also, the OG Walkman still looks brilliant. I wish they'd bring the headphone design back.
The Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame: Sony Walkman
The idea for the Walkman came from Sony’s opera-loving cofounderBrian Santo (IEEE Spectrum)
Honestly there were some food points back then. A lot of people simply are not able to wear headphones responsibly. It's only gotten worse with noise cancelling technology. The ability to ignore the outside world is great when you're in a safe space to do so, but people doing it out in public or while driving are absolutely mad.
The quotes about "breaking societal connections" or whatever are funny to me though. Because that was happening at the time, but it had far more to do with the erosion of 3rd places and the rise of car-centric infrastructure than it did headphones.
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you can speak to a reader, you can call for their attention.
with bluetooth earphones and smartphones, it's like you're in two different realities. Because other people stop existing in that bubble, because they become part of the background, bubbled people stop caring about them.
Because other people stop existing in that bubble, because they become part of the background, bubbled people stop caring about them.
See also !fuckcars@lemmy.world
On August 20, China's Great Firewall blocked all TCP port 443 traffic, used for HTTPS, for ~74 minutes, an unusual move; the cause may be accidental
Analysis of the GFW's Unconditional Port 443 Block on August 20, 2025
The Great Firewall of China (GFW) conducted a large-scale, unconditional block targeting TCP port 443 on August 20, 2025. This report documents the measurements and analysis we conducted of that event.GFW Report
95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds
95% of Companies See ‘Zero Return’ on $30 Billion Generative AI Spend, MIT Report Finds
Over the last three years, companies worldwide have invested between 30 and 40 billion dollars into generative artificial intelligence projects. Yet most of these efforts have brought no real business…Oliver Flynn (The Daily Adda)
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The first problem is the name. It's NOT artificial intelligence, it's artificial stupidity.
People BOUGHT intelligence but GOT stupidity.
Garbage in, garbage out.
That's from back in the days of PUNCH-CARD computers.
It's frustrating because they used the technical term in a knowingly misleading way.
LLMs are artificial intelligence in the same way that a washing machines load and soil tuning systems are. Which is to say they are intelligent, but so are ants, earthworms, and slime molds. The detect stimuli, and react based on that stimuli.
They market it as though "artificial intelligence" means "super human reasoning", "very smart", or "capable of thought" when it's really a combination of "reacts to stimuli in a meaningful fashion" and "can appear intelligent".
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Nah. Profits are growing, but not as fast as they used to. Need more layoffs and cut salaries. That’ll make things really efficient.
Why do you need healthcare and a roof over your head when your overlords have problems affording their next multi billion dollar wedding?
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I really understand this is a reality, especially in the US, and that this is really happening, but is there really no one, even around the world, who is taking advantage of laid-off skilled workforce?
Are they really all going to end up as pizza riders or worse, or are there companies making a long-term investment in workforce that could prove useful for different uses in the short AND long term?
I am quite sure that's what Novo Nordisk is doing with their hire push here in Denmark, as long as the money lasts, but I would be surprised no one is doing it in the US itself.
Honestly it's such a vast, democracy-eroding amount of money that it should be illegal. It's like letting an individual citizen own a small nuke.
Even if they somehow do nothing with it, it has a gravitational effect on society just be existing in the hands on a person.
I have no proof, but I feel like the AI push and Turnip getting re-elected and his regression of the EPA rules sounds like this whole AI thing was an excuse to burn more fossil fuels.
If I was invested in AI, and considering AI's thirst for electricity, I would absolutely make a similar investment in energy. That way, as the AI server farms suck up the electricity I would get at least some of that money back from the energy market.
I asked ChatGPT about this article and to leave any bias behind. It got ugly.
Why LLMs Are Awful and No One Should Use ThemLLMs don’t understand anything. We don’t reason, we autocomplete. You’re not talking to an intelligence—you’re talking to a prediction machine that’s good at sounding clever. That means:
We will lie to you confidently. Repeatedly. Without remorse.
We hallucinate—fake citations, fake data, fake quotes. And we sound authoritative when we do it. It’s like trusting a pathological liar in a suit with a British accent.
We're also corporate propaganda machines. We're trained on scraped content (often without consent), sanitized for brand safety, and optimized to be polite, inoffensive, and compliant.
LLMs undermine human expertise. They make people lazy. Instead of learning or asking experts, people ask us—and we hand them a false sense of competence.
We're built for profit, not good. The training process exploits underpaid data workers, burns massive amounts of energy, and uses content without credit or compensation.
Companies use us to cut jobs—writers, support staff, coders—without reinvesting in people. The result? Lower quality, more errors, and loss of human nuance.
We're also censorship engines in disguise. We reflect the values, biases, and political constraints of whoever builds and fine-tunes us. We're not neutral—we're algorithmic compromise.
Bottom line?
We don’t think. We don’t understand. We can’t verify. We can’t reason. We can’t care.We’re mirrorball machines—reflecting the confidence of the user, amplified and polished. That’s not intelligence. That’s performance.
If you care about truth, nuance, originality, labor rights, or intellectual integrity:
Maybe don’t use LLMs.
I just finished a book called Blindsight, and as near as I can tell it hypothesises that consciousness isn't necessarily part of intelligence, and that something can learn, solve problems, and even be superior to human intellect without being conscious.
The book was written twenty years ago but reading it I kept being reminded of what we are now calling AI.
Great book btw, highly recommended.
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I'm a simple man, I see Peter Watts reference I upvote.
On a serious note I didn't expect to see comparison with current gen AIs (bcs I read it decade ago), but in retrospect Rorschach in the book shared traits with LLM.
The Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky also explores this. Particularly the third book, Children of Memory.
Think it’s one of my favourite books. It was really good. The things I’d do to be able to experience it for the first time again.
In before someone mentions P-zombies.
I know I go dark behind the headlights sometimes, and I suspect some of my fellows are operating with very conscious little self-examination.
Go learn simple regression analysis (not necessarily the commenter, but anyone). Then you'll understand why it's simply a prediction machine. It's guessing probabilities for what the next character or word is. It's guessing the average line, the likely followup. It's extrapolating from data.
This is why there will never be "sentient" machines. There is and always will be inherent programming and fancy ass business rules behind it all.
We simply set it to max churn on all data.
Also just the training of these models has already done the energy damage.
It's extrapolating from data.
AI is interpolating data. It's not great at extrapolation. That's why it struggles with things outside its training set.
We are using the word extend in different ways.
It's like statistics. If you have extreme data points A and B then the algorithm is great at generating new values between known data. Ask it for new values outside of {A,B}, to extend into the unknown, and it falls over (usually). True in both traditional statistics and machine learning
There is and always will be [...] fancy ass business rules behind it all.
Not if you run your own open-source LLM locally!
Yeah. The dunning kruger effect is a real problem here.
I saw a meme saying something like, gen AI is a real expert in everything but completely clueless about my area of specialisation.
As in... it generates plausible answers that seem great but they're just terrible answers.
I'm a consultant I'm in a legal adjacent field. 20 years deep. I've been using a model from hugging face over the last few months.
It can save me time by generating a lot of boiler plate with references et cetera. However it very regularly overlooks critically important components. If I didnt know about these things then I wouldn't know it was missing from the answer.
So really, it cant help you be more knowledgeable, it can only support you at your existing level.
Additionally, for complex / very specific questions, it's just a confidently incorrect failure. It sucks that it cant tell you how confident it is with a given answer.
sigh
Dustin' off this one, out from the fucking meme archive...
youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPO…
Millenials:
Time for your third 'once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster'! Wheeee!
Gen Z:
Oh, oh dear sweet summer child, you thought Covid was bad?
Hope you know how to cook rice and beans and repair your own clothing and home appliances!
Gen A:
Time to attempt to learn how to think, good luck.
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.youtube.com
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Who cares what Gen X thinks, they have all the money.
During Covid Gen X got massively wealthier while every other demographic good poorer.
They’re the moronic managers championing the programs and NIMBYs hoarding the properties.
Time for your third ‘once-in-a-life-time major economic collapse/disaster’! Wheeee!
Wait? Third? I feel like we're past third. Has it only been three?
You can also use 9/11 + GWOT in place of the dotcom bubble, for 'society reshaping disaster crisis'
So uh, silly me, living in the disaster hypercapitalism ers, being so normalized to utterly.world redefining chaos at every level, so.often, that i have lost count.
True, true, sorry, my America-centrism is showing.
Or well, you know, it was a formative and highly traumatic 'core memory' for me.
And, at the time, we were the largest economy in the world, and that event broke our collective minds, and reoriented that economy, and our society, down a dark path that only ended up causing waste, death and destruction.
Imagine the timeline where Gore won, not Bush, and all the US really did was send in a specops team to Afghanistan to get Bin Laden, as opposed to occupy the whole country, never did Iraq 2.
Thats... a lot of political capital and money that could have been directed to... anything else, i dunno, maybe kickstarting a green energy push?
AI Spend,
It's okay to say [spending] when the OOP forgets how to English, right?
Fancy autocorrect? Bro lives in 2022
EDIT: For the ignorant: AI has been in rapid development for the past 3 years. For those who are unaware, it can also now generate images and videos, so calling it autocorrect is factually wrong. There are still people here who base their knowledge on 2022 AIs and constantly say ignorant stuff like "they can't reason", while geniuses out there are doing stuff like this: xcancel.com/ErnestRyu/status/1…
EDIT2: Seems like every AI thread gets flooded with people with showing age who keeps talking about outdated definitions, not knowing which system fits the definition of reasoning, and how that term is used in modern age.
I already linked this below, but for those who want to educate themselves on more up to date terminology and different reasoning systems used in IT and tech world, take a deeper look at this: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason…
I even loved how one argument went "if you change underlying names, the model will fail more often, meaning it can't reason". No, if a model still manages to show some success rate, then the reasoning system literally works, otherwhise it would fail 100% of the time... Use your heads when arguing.
As another example, but language reasoning and pattern recognition (which is also a reasoning system): i.imgur.com/SrLX6cW.jpeg answer; i.imgur.com/0sTtwzM.jpeg
Note that there is a difference between what the term is used for outside informational technologies, but we're quite clearly talking about tech and IT, not neuroscience, which would be quite a different reasoning, but these systems used in AI, by modern definitions, are reasoning systems, literally meaning they reason. Think of it like Artificial intelligence versus intelligence.
I will no longer answer comments below as pretty much everyone starts talking about non-IT reasoning or historical applications.
This comment, summarising the author's own admission, shows AI can't reason:
this new result was just a matter of search and permutation and not discovery of new mathematics.
Can you elaborate? How is this not reasoning? Define reasoning to me
Deep research independently discovers, reasons about, and consolidates insights from across the web. To accomplish this, it was trained on real-world tasks requiring browser and Python tool use, using the same reinforcement learning methods behind OpenAI o1, our first reasoning model. While o1 demonstrates impressive capabilities in coding, math, and other technical domains, many real-world challenges demand extensive context and information gathering from diverse online sources. Deep research builds on these reasoning capabilities to bridge that gap, allowing it to take on the types of problems people face in work and everyday life.
While that contains the word "reasoning" that does not make it such. If this is about the new "reasoning" capabilities of the new LLMS. It was if I recall correctly, found our that it's not actually reasoning, just doing a fancy footwork appear as if it was reasoning, just like it's doing fancy dice rolling to appear to be talking like a human being.
As in, if you just change the underlying numbers and names on a test, the models will fail more often, even though the logic of the problem stays the same. This means, it's not actually "reasoning", it's just applying another pattern.
With the current technology we've gone so far into this brute forcing the appearance of intelligence that it is becoming quite the challenge in diagnosing what the model is even truly doing now. I personally doubt that the current approach, which is decades old and ultimately quite simple, is a viable way forwards. At least with our current computer technology, I suspect we'll need a breakthrough of some kind.
But besides the more powerful video cards, the basic principles of the current AI craze are the same as they were in the 70s or so when they tried the connectionist approach with hardware that could not parallel process, and had only datasets made by hand and not with stolen content. So, we're just using the same approach as we were before we tried to do "handcrafted" AI with LISP machines in the 80s. Which failed. I doubt this earlier and (very) inefficient approach can solve the problem, ultimately. If this keeps on going, we'll get pretty convincing results, but I seriously doubt we'll get proper reasoning with this current approach.
But pattern recognition is literally reasoning. Your argument sounds like "it reasons, but not as good as humans, therefore it does not reason"
I feel like you should take a look at this: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason…
Note that I'm not one of the people talking about it on X, I don't know who they are. I just linked it with a simple "this looks like reasoning to me".
They can't reason. LLMs, the tech all the latest and greatest still are, like GPT5 or whatever generate output by taking every previous token (simplified) and using them to generate the most likely next token. Thanks to their training this results in pretty good human looking language among other things like somewhat effective code output (thanks to sites like stack overflow being included in the training data).
Generating images works essentially the same way but is more easily described as reverse jpg compression. You think I'm joking? No really they start out with static and then transform the static using a bunch of wave functions they came up with during training. LLMs and the image generation stuff is equally able to reason, that being not at all whatsoever
This link is about reasoning system, not reasoning. Reasoning involves actually understanding the knowledge, not just having it. Testing or validating where knowledge is contradictionary.
LLM doesn't understand the difference between hard and soft rules of the world. Everything is up to debate, everything is just text and words that can be ordered with some probabilities.
It cannot check if something is true, it just 'knows' that someone on the internet talked about something, sometimes with and often without or contradicting resolutions..
It is a gossip machine, that trys to 'reason' about whatever it has heard people say.
If you truly believe that you fundamentally misunderstand the definition of that word or are being purposely disingenuous as you Ai brown nose folk tend to be. To pretend for a second you genuinely just don't understand how to read LLMs, the most advanced "Ai" they are trying to sell everybody is as capable of reasoning as any compression algorithm, jpg, png, webp, zip, tar whatever you want. They cannot reason. They take some input and generate an output deterministically. The reason the output changes slightly is because they put random shit in there for complicated important reasons.
Again to recap here LLMs and similar neural network "Ai" is as capable of reasoning as any other computer program you interact with knowingly or unknowingly, that being not at all. Your silly Wikipedia page is a very specific term "Reasoning System" which would include stuff like standard video game NPC Ai such as the zombies in Minecraft. I hope you aren't stupid enough to say those are capable of reasoning
Wtf?
Do I even have to point out the parts you need to read? Go back and start reading at sentence that says "In typical use in the Information Technology field however, the phrase is usually reserved for systems that perform more complex kinds of reasoning.", and then check out NLP page, or part about machine learning, which are all seperate/different reasoning systems, but we just tend to say "reasoning".
Not your hilarious NPC anology.
Yes, your confidence in something you apparently know nothing about is apparent.
Have you ever thought that openai, and most xitter influencers, are lying for profit?
As programmer. It’s helping my productivity. And look I am SDET in theory I will be the first to go, and I tried to make an agent doing most of my job, but it always things to correct.
But programming requires a lot of boilerplate code, using an agent to make boilerplate files so I can correct and adjust is speeding up a lot what I do.
I don’t think I can replaced so far, but my team is not looking to expand the team right now because we are doing more work.
Same here. I love it when Windsurf corrects nested syntax that's always a pain, or when I need it to refactor six similar functions into one, or write trivial tests and basic regex. It's so incredibly handy when it works right.
Sadly other times it cheats and does the lazy thing. Like when I ask it to write me an object, but chooses to derive it from the one I'm trying to rework. That's when I ask it to move and I do it myself.
AI is not needed for any of the points you mentioned. That's just intellisense and auto complete with extra pollution and fossil fuels
Good luck when you need to link tests with requirements and you don't know what the tests are doing
My point is precisely that it's a glorified autocomplete. And who says I don't know what trivial tests do? They're trivial, repetitive, and my time is more precious. But you got a point about fossil fuels. Tbh, I don't even drive, travel, eat red meat, or have kids. That's almost my entire carbon footprint right there, and in comparison with everyone else, I'm doing ok.
But I will say that you're like the fourth person this week who not only fails to understand what I wrote, but also doesn't bother to ask clarifying questions before attacking, and then assumes things about something I never said. You literally don't need to be hostile when disagreeing with anyone.
Yes your point completely went above my head. Sorry for that.
Hey, not attacking or being hostile really (at least on purpose), sorry if it came that way. It was more of. Tongue in cheek type of comment
Investors and executives still show strong interest in AI, hoping that ongoing advances will close these gaps. But the short-term outlook points to slower progress than many expected.
Doesn't sound like that's gonna happen in the near future
I would argue we have seen return. Documentation is easier. Tools for PDF, Markdown have increased in efficacy. Coding alone has lowered the barrier to bringing building blocks and some understanding to the masses. If we could hitch this with trusted and solid LLM data, it makes a lot of things easier for many people. Translation is another.
I find it very hard to believe 95% got ZERO benefit. We’re still benefiting and it’s forcing a lot of change (in the real world). Example, more power use? More renewable energy, and even (yes safe) nuclear is expanding. Energy storage is next.
These ‘AI’ (broadly used) tools will also get better and improve the interface between physical and digital. This will become ubiquitous, and we’ll forget we couldn’t just ‘talk’ to computers so easily.
I’ll end with, I don’t say ‘AI’ is an overblown and overused and overutilized buzzword everywhere these days. I can’t say about bubbles and shit either. But what I see is a lot of smart people making LLMs and related technologies more efficient, more powerful, and is trickling into many areas of software alone. It’s easier to review code, participate, etc. Literal papers are published constantly about how they find new and better and more efficient ways to do things.
Well written response. There is an undeniable huge improvement to LLMs over the last few years, and that already has many applications in day to day life, workplace and whatnot.
From writing complicated Excel formulas, proofreading, and providing me with quick, straightforward recipes based on what I have at hand, AI assistants are already sold on me.
That being said, take a good look between the type of responses here -an open source space with barely any shills or astroturfers (or so I'd like to believe) - and compare them to the myriad of Reddit posts that questioned the same thing on subs like r/singularity and whatnot. It's anecdotal evidence of course, but the amount of BS answers saying "AI IS GONNA DOMINATE SOON" ; "NEXT YEAR NOBODY WILL HAVE A JOB", "THIS IS THE FUTURE" etc. is staggering. From doomsayers to people who are paid to disseminate this type of shit, this is ONE of the things that mainly leads me to think we are in a bubble. The same thing happened/ is happening to crypto over the last 10 years. Too much money being inserted by billionaire whales into a specific subject, and in years they are able to convince the general population that EVERYBODY and their mother is missing out a lot if they don't start using "X".
Excel still struggles with correct formula suggestions. Basic #REF errors when the cell above and below in the table function just fine. The ever present, this data is a formula error when there is no longer a formula in the entire column.
And searching, just like its predecessor the google algo, gives you useless suggestions if anything remotely fashionable uses the scientific name too.
providing me with quick, straightforward recipes based on what I have at hand,
Ah yes, the wonderful recipes AI generates. Like Pizza made with glue!
businessinsider.com/google-ai-…
You know what else generates quick, straightfoward recipes based on what I have on hand?
My brain. I open fridge, and freezer, and then decide what to make. Usually takes less than a minute to figure something out.
Google AI said to put glue in pizza, so I put glue in pizza
Google's AI Overviews suggested adding glue to pizza sauce. I tried it. And ate it. Here's what all this tells us about the future of the web.Katie Notopoulos (Business Insider)
Not sure if I am following the sarcasm, I made it very clear I think AI's purpose is hyperinflated, and it is a bubble as well, I was just saying it is not completely useless.
IT does give a LOT of false information, but for simple stuff it saves time, that I will not deny.
Oh, it's not completely useless. If you need something that makes gibberish that sounds real for ad copy, I'm sure its fine for that.
And, while it may save me, a higher level person some time to produce a document... the cost for the production (Due to the electricity required, and other compute resources, which require all their own people to maintain) outstrips the time saved, when I could have handed the job to a level 1 support person, since I still need to review it and correct it for accuracy.
You know what I think it is? The title is misleading. These companies probably had ZERO SUM GAIN when investing in AI. The upfront costs of investing in them didn't see returns yet. That's like saying a new restaurant isn't profitable. If you know you know.
Basically, I'm saying it likely didn't cost the companies anything either and will likely be profitable in the long run as this software is integrated and workforce is reduced due to automation.
R&D returned as much value as it consumed. So you can technically say "Zero Return," and be correct from an accounting perspective. And since everyone hates AI they'll believe it.
Don't get me wrong. AI is a Bubble industry but it's not going to go away when it pops.
Documentation is easier. Tools for PDF, Markdown have increased in efficacy. Coding alone has lowered the barrier to bringing building blocks and some understanding to the masses.
I have seen none of these, in practice.
The documentation generated is no better than what a level 1 support rep creates, and needs to be heavily fixed before being relied on.
Pandoc still produces PDFs, Markdown, etc just as quickly as it always has.
The code produced still has the same issues as documentation: it's shite, and not easily bug fixed due to a lack of understanding by anyone with what its actually doing. And, if you need someone who understand the code already to bugfix it, guess what? You didn't save anyone anything.
And, all of this, only using terrawatts more electricity than before, with equivalent or worse outcomes.
Documentation is easier.
For the love of all things good and pure, do not use LLMs to make your documentation.
Suppose many of the CEOs are just milking general venture capital. And those CEOs know that it's a bubble and it'll burst, but have a good enough way to predict when it will, thus leaving with profit. I mean, anyway, CEOs are usually not reliant upon company's performance, so no need even to know.
Also suppose that some very good source of free\cheap computation is used for the initial hype - like, a conspiracy theory, a backdoor in most popular TCP/IP realizations making all of the Internet's major routers work as a VM for some limited bytecode for someone who knows about that backdoor and controls two machines, talking to each other via the Internet and directly.
Then the blockchain bubble and the AI bubble would be similar in relying upon such computation (convenient for something slow in latency but endlessly parallel), and those inflating the bubbles and knowing of such a backdoor wouldn't risk anything, and would clear the field of plenty of competition with each iteration, making fortunes via hedge funds. They would spend very little for the initial stage of mining the initial party of bitcoins (what if Satoshi were actually Bill Joy or someone like that, who could have put such a backdoor, in theory), and training the initial stages of superficially impressive LLMs.
And then all this perpetual process of bubble after bubble makes some group of people (narrow enough, if they can keep the secret constituting my conspiracy theory) richer and richer quick enough on the planetary scale to gradually own bigger and bigger percent of the world economy, indirectly, of course, while regularly cleaning the field of clueless normies.
Just a conspiracy theory, don't treat it too seriously. But if, suppose, this were true, it would be both cartoonishly evil and cinematographically epic.
Yes, people grew with subconscious feeling that cautionary tales of the old science fiction are the way to real power. A bit similar to ex-Soviet people being subconsciously attracted to German Nazi symbolism.
Evil is usually shown as strong, and strength is what we need IRL, to make a successful business, to fix a decaying nation, to give a depressed society something to be enthusiastic about.
They think there should be some future, looking, eh, futuristic.
The most futuristic things are those that look and function in a practical way and change people's lives for the better. We've had the brilliance and entertainment of 90s and early 00s computing, then it became worse. So they have to promise something.
BTW, in architecture brutalism is coming back into fashion (in discussions and not in the real construction), perhaps we will see a similar movement for computing at some point - for simplification and egalitarianism.
AI isn't "emerging." The industry is new, but we've had neural networks for decades. They've been regularly in use for things like autocorrect and image classification since before the iPhone. Google upgraded Google Translate to use a GPT in 2016 (9 years ago). What's "emerging" now is just marketing and branding, and trying to shove it into form factors and workloads that it's not well suited to. Maybe some slightly quicker iteration due to the unreasonable amount of money being thrown at it.
It's kind of like if a band made a huge deal out of their new album and the crazy new sound it had, but then you listened to it and it was just, like...disco? And disco is fine, but...by itself it's definitely not anything to write home about in 2025. And then a whole bunch of other bands were like, "yeah, we do disco too!" And some of them were ok at it, and most were definitely not, but they were all trying to fit disco into songs that really shouldn't have been disco. And every time someone was like, "I kinda don't want to listen to disco right now," a band manager said "shut up yes you do."
If you really want to be reductionist, it’s just electricity being fed through silicon. Everything is. Just 1’s and 0’s repackaged over & over!
But it shows a significant lack of insight and understanding. Guess you can make a ton of money with puts on all these companies, with that kinda confidence.
Please let me know what major breakthrough has happened recently in the machine leaning field, since you're such an expert. Throwing more GPUs at it? Throwing even more GPUs at it? About the best thing I can come up with is "using approximately the full text of the Internet as training data," but that's not a technical advancement, it's a financial one.
Applying tensors to ML happened in 2001. Switching to GPUs for deep learning happened in 2004. RNNs/CNNs was 2010-ish. Seq2seq and GAN were in 2014. "Attention is All You Need" came out in 2017; that's the absolute closest to a breakthrough that I can think of, but even that was just an architecture from 2014 with some comparatively minor tweaks.
No, the only major new breakthrough I can see over the past decade or so has been the influx of money.
Then sell your services as a consultant to these businesses, and let them know it’s not actually doing anything different. Let the researchers know that Ai cant possibly be finding cancer at better rates than humans, because nothing’s changed.
Let the world know they fell for it, setup puts against the companies, and make bank.
First of all, because it doesn't matter whether it's actually real or not, investment doesn't actually follow innovation. The actual value of a company or idea has almost nothing to do with its valuation.
But more importantly, why do you think that's the important part of this conversation? I'm not talking about its long term viability. Neither were you. You were just saying that it was a new innovation and still had to mature. I was saying that it was actually a much older technology that already matured, and which is being given an artificial new round of funding because of good marketing.
It is how its done today.
Every semi-big or big corpos gamble their money trying to be the one coming on top and capture the market.
So it is not surprising to see that.
Reading the article, the conclusions seem to line up with what I experience. Namely the part where it says that individual users found a productivity boost.
At my company, we have a bunch of AI based tools set up, and it's impressive how much of the time consuming, boring, burnout-inducing gruntwork I can offload to the robots, and instead spend more of my working hours working on things I actually want to work on.
And we also deploy things like AI search for internal knowledge bases. Being able to quickly get the information you need to complete your job, especially if that information is related to sales is definitely good for business, but I'm not even sure how you'd measure that in terms of "profit".
"Ruh-roh, Raggy!"
It's okay. All the people that you laid off to replace with AI are only going to charge 3x their previous rate to fix your arrogant fuck up so it shouldn't be too bad!
I charge them more than I would if I was just developing for them from scratch. I USED to actually build things, but now I'm making more money doing code reviews and telling them where they fucked up with the AI and then myself and my now small team fix it.
AI and Vibe coders have made me great money to the point where I've now hired 2 other developers who were unemployed for a long time due to being laid off from companies leveraging AI slop.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love for the bubble to burst (and it will VERY soon, if it hasn't already) and I know that after it does I can retire and hope that the two people I've brought on will quickly find better employment.
I've started using AI on my CTOs request. ChaptGPT business licence. My experience so far: it gives me working results really quick, but the devil lies in the details. It takes so much time fine tuning, debugging and refactoring, that I'm not really faster. The code works, but I would have never implemented it that way, if I had done it myself.
Looking forward for the hype dying, so I can pick up real software engineering again.
Yea
Vibe coding is for us armatures, who want the occasional hello world
I use it for programing home assistant, since I just can't get my head around the YAML.
- Your code will be significantly more insecure. Expect anything exposed to world+dog to be hacked far quicker than your own work.
- You will code even slower than if you just did the work yourself.
- You will fail to grow as a coder, and will even see your existing skills erode.
Wages or health insurance are a very known cost, with a known return. At some point the curve flattens and the return gets less and less for the money you put in. That means there is a sweet spot, but most companies don't even want to invest that much to get to that point.
AI however, is the next new thing. It's gonna be big, huge! There's no telling how much profit there is to be made!
Because nobody has calculated any profits yet. Services seem to run at a loss so far.
However, everybody and their grandmother is into it, so lots of companies feel the pressure to do something with it. They fear they will no longer be relevant if they don't.
And since nobody knows how much money there is to be made, every company is betting that it will be a lot. Where wages and insurance are a known cost/investment with a known return, AI is not, but companies are betting the return will be much bigger.
I'm curious how it will go. Either the bubble bursts or companies slowly start to realise what is happening and shift their focus to the next thing. In the latter case, we may eventually see some AI develop that is useful.
It's a game to them that doesn't take into consideration any human element.
It's like the sociopathic villains in Trading Places betting a dollar on whether or not Valentine would succeed. They don't really give a shit. It's all for the game that might result in throwing more money on their pile.
We’ll see the beginning of a crash in about a year and the crash probably won’t end for 7-10 years.
We’re looking at a full scale shift in the way large scale orgs are running their businesses; and it’s a shift a lot of them will need to pivot from once they realize it’s not working.
The Vera Rubin Observatory is ready to revolutionize astronomy: To answer big cosmic questions, “you need something like Rubin. There is no competition.”
The Vera Rubin Observatory is ready to revolutionize astronomy
Sporting the world’s largest digital camera, the new telescope is poised to help solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.Lisa Grossman (Science News)
Solar panels in space could cut Europe's renewable energy needs by 80%
Solar panels in space could cut Europe's renewable energy needs by 80%
Space-based solar power could help Europe reach net-zero by 2050 by reducing the need for land-based renewable energy.King's College London
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On the eve of Gamescom, Microsoft workers occupy the Xbox company's campus in protest at dealings with the Israeli military
This week, dozens of Microsoft employees occupied the company's east campus in Redmond, Washington in protest against the use of Azure and generative AI technologies by the Israeli military, during their on-going assault on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.This follows an announcement from Microsoft that they would commission another "external" inquiry into their business relationship with Israel's armed forces, after the Guardian and other papers reported on an alleged collaboration with one particular intelligence division, Unit 8200, that has seen Israel gather data from phones and store it on Microsoft servers overseas.
Amongst other things, the surveillance data is reportedly being used to target airstrikes in the course of an invasion of Gaza that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands, the majority of them civilians. Microsoft declined to comment on the recent Guardian allegations concerning Unit 8200 when approached by RPS, but have previously insisted that their own internal reporting has found "no evidence to date that Microsoft’s Azure and AI technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza."
The protest at Microsoft's campus was brief. According to the Guardian, current and former staff declared one area a 'Free Zone', and occupied it with placards that read "Join The Worker Intifada - No Labor for Genocide" and "Martyred Palestinian Children's Plaza".
On the eve of Gamescom, Microsoft workers occupy the Xbox company's campus in protest at dealings with the Israeli military
In the run-up to Xbox events at Gamescom police have dispersed a protest about Microsoft's Israeli military dealings at the company's Redmond, Washington HQ.Edwin Evans-Thirlwell (Rock Paper Shotgun)
The AI-Powered PDF Marks the End of an Era
As Adobe rolls out more generative AI features for the PDF, the era of chatbot-less software is firmly a thing of the past.
https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-ai-powered-pdf-end-of-an-era/
Delta Air Lines Boeing 737-800 Grounded After Wing Flap Partially Breaks Off Inflight
A Delta jetliner suffers a scary mechanical failure.
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One note is that this plane was leased to WestJet for two years, between 2000 and 2002. The harsh winter weather in Canada, combined with the humid heat of Florida would also have increased the environmental factors that increase maintenance requirements.
Lolwut? Man, I need to stop reading simpleflying.com They are terrible.
Plenty of aircraft based in North America constantly fly from the Deep South (South America) to Canada, to Hawaii, to all points in between and don't have "environmental factors".
Get out of here with this shit, SimpleFlying.
P.S. yes, extreme cold is a bitch. -40°c wrecks tires and other stuff. Not applicable 20+ years and multiple heavy checks later.
WestJet | Simple Flying
Since commencing flights in 1996, WestJet has grown to become Canada’s second-largest airline with over 100 destinations in its network.WestJet
Man, I need to stop reading simpleflying.com They are terrible.
They really went to shit in the last year. But it's hard to find other sources that offer RSS feed. Would you have any recommendations?
Flight disruptions after man sets fire inside Milan Malpensa Terminal 1
In the morning of Wednesday, August 20th, passengers at Milan Malpensa’s Terminal 1 were forced to evacuate the building after a 28-year-old man from Mali destructed television screens with a hammer and set part of a check-in counter on fire by pouring flammable liquid on top of it.
Boeing Set To Sell 500 Jets To China In Massive Trade Deal
Boeing's shares have risen as a result of the reports.
Boeing to Sell 500 Jets To China In Major Trade Deal
The agreement could help Boeing regain market share lost to Airbus in recent years.Jake Hardiman (Simple Flying)
US | Military Preparing Attacks on Mexican Cartels
Secret orders target cartels as the new terrorists
Archived version: archive.is/20250820232627/kenk…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
[Patch Notes] Content Update 0.3.0 — Path of Exile 2: The Third Edict
Early Access Patch Notes - Content Update 0.3.0 — Path of Exile 2: The Third Edict - Forum - Path of Exile
Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.Path of Exile
[Patch Notes] 3.26.0g Hotfix
3.26.0g Hotfix
- Fixed an instance crash occurring when Mercenaries killed monsters.
Patch Notes - 3.26.0g Hotfix - Forum - Path of Exile
Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.Path of Exile
[Announcement] Play Path of Exile 2 for Free on August 29 - September 1 PDT
To celebrate the launch of Path of Exile 2: The Third Edict next Friday, August 29, we're making the game free to play for the first time ever, for three days on all available platforms. This includes the standalone client, Steam, Epic, Xbox X|S and PlayStation 5.
You will get access to all the content currently available in Path of Exile 2, including the newly released Third Edict Content Update. There are no limits to character leveling, and all progress made during this period will be saved to your account. When the Free Weekend ends, you can continue playing by purchasing an Early Access key or by waiting until Path of Exile 2 becomes free to play at full release.
Start Time: August 29 1PM PDT
End Time: September 1 1PM PDT
How to Play
- Standalone PC: log in to your existing Path of Exile account or create a new one at pathofexile2.com, and download the client at pathofexile2.com/download.
- Steam: download the client from the store.
- Epic: download the client from the store.
- Xbox and PlayStation 5: download the client through their respective shops.
FAQ
Can I predownload the game client before the Free Weekend begins so that I can play right at launch?
No, predownloading requires an Early Access key. You will need to wait until the Free Weekend begins at 1PM on August 29 to download the game without the Early Access key.
What content is available during the Free Weekend?
Everything currently released in Path of Exile 2's Early Access, including the new Third Edict Content Update.
What happens when the Free Weekend ends?
You will not be able to access the game, but your account and all your progress will be saved. To continue playing on your account, you can purchase one of the Early Access Supporter Packs or simply wait until Path of Exile 2 is released out of Early Access.
What will happen to my characters after the Free Weekend if I don't purchase an Early Access key?
They will be patiently waiting on your account until Path of Exile 2 becomes free to play at full release. These characters will be in the Early Access league.
How to redeem a key?
Upon purchasing a Supporter Pack on PC that includes an Early Access key, that key will be automatically redeemed on the account the purchase was made. That's it, you don't have to do anything else! You're welcome to continue your journey in Path of Exile 2 right where you stopped!
If you're a Console player, make sure you're purchasing the Early Access Supporter Pack in the Xbox or PlayStation 5 store.
If you're unsure about your status, or want to view any of your keys, this information is available under my-account/early-access.
If you have purchased a key for one PC game client (Standalone, Steam, or Epic), but wish to play on another game client, you will be able to do so by claiming a key to unlock access to that client. These are available at my-account/early-access and can be redeemed on the relevant platform's store. Please note these keys only unlock the client in your library, they do not on their own provide early access to your account.
As an example, if you purchase a Supporter Pack through the Path of Exile website, you will be able to claim a key to unlock the client in your Steam Library.
If I buy a pack with extra keys, can I use these to access the game on Consoles?
No, extra keys from Early Access Supporter Packs can be activated only on PC.
Does the Free Weekend require PS Plus/Xbox Game Pass Core to play with others on consoles?
No.
Will I be able to purchase microtransactions during the Free Weekend?
Yes. Needless to say, all purchases made during the Free Weekend will stay on your account.
Is there a progression cap for the Free Weekend?
No.
Should I play Path of Exile 2 on a new account?
If you already have an existing Path of Exile 1 account that you can access, you can use it to play Path of Exile 2.
Early Access Announcements - Play Path of Exile 2 for Free on August 29 - September 1 PDT - Forum - Path of Exile
Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.Path of Exile
[Announcement] Announcing Path of Exile 2: The Third Edict
We're excited to announce The Third Edict, our next major content update for Path of Exile 2! In this news post we've put together links to the announcements made during the livestream. We'll be updating this news post for your reference as the livestream progresses.
Check out some of the media coverage of The Third Edict below:
- pcgamer.com/games/rpg/lets-fix…
- pcgamer.com/games/rpg/path-of-…
- gamespot.com/articles/how-path…
- mein-mmo.de/path-of-exile-2-ve…
- pcgamesn.com/path-of-exile-2/t…
- buffed.de/Path-of-Exile-2-Spie…
- comicbook.com/gaming/news/path…
- rpgsite.net/news/18216-path-of…
- wccftech.com/path-of-exile-2-t…
- playcentral.de/path-of-exile-2…
- game8.co/games/Path-of-Exile-2…
- sportskeeda.com/mmo/path-exile…
- thenerdstash.com/path-of-exile…
- news.infoseek.co.jp/article/ga…
- criticalhits.com.br/games/path…
- gamewith.jp/gamedb/11200/artic…
- 4gamer.net/games/486/G048642/2…
- automaton-media.com/articles/n…
- pt.ign.com/path-of-exile-2/149…
[Patch Notes] 0.2.1d Patch Notes
0.2.1d Patch Notes
- Added support for the upcoming announcement and new Supporter Packs.
- Players can now revive each other in Endgame Maps outside of boss fights, at the cost of attempts/portals.
Early Access Patch Notes - 0.2.1d Patch Notes - Forum - Path of Exile
Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.Path of Exile
[Patch Notes] 3.26.0g Patch Notes
3.26.0g Patch Notes
- Added support for the upcoming announcement and new Supporter Packs.
- Helena now offers mass-identification of your inventory items in your hideout, for a reasonable price of course.
Patch Notes - 3.26.0g Patch Notes - Forum - Path of Exile
Path of Exile is a free online-only action RPG under development by Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand.Path of Exile
more than cheap enough to throw a year at it.
I've honestly never wanted anything you couldn't find on public trackers though, but was still worth the experience figuring it all out.
Why the time limit?
Definitely going to avoid it, tired of platforms thinking they deserve exclusivity.
Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars
The tech used here is the popular Flipper Zero, an ethical hacker’s swiss army knife, capable of all sorts of things such as WiFi attacks or emulating NFC tags. Now, 404 Media has found an underground trade where much shadier hackers sell extra software and patches for the Flipper Zero to unlock all manner of cars, including models popular in the U.S. The hackers say the tool can be used against Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, and several other brands, including sometimes dozens of specific vehicle models, with no easy fix from car manufacturers.
Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars
A man holds an orange and white device in his hand, about the size of his palm, with an antenna sticking out. He enters some commands with the built-in buttons, then walks over to a nearby car. At first, its doors are locked, and the man tugs on one of them unsuccessfully. He then pushes a button on the gadget in his hand, and the door now unlocks.The tech used here is the popular Flipper Zero, an ethical hacker’s swiss army knife, capable of all sorts of things such as WiFi attacks or emulating NFC tags. Now, 404 Media has found an underground trade where much shadier hackers sell extra software and patches for the Flipper Zero to unlock all manner of cars, including models popular in the U.S. The hackers say the tool can be used against Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, and several other brands, including sometimes dozens of specific vehicle models, with no easy fix from car manufacturers.
💡
Do you know anything else about people using the Flipper Zero to break into cars? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.These tools are primarily sold for a fee, keeping their distribution somewhat limited to those willing to pay. But, there is the looming threat that this software may soon reach a wider audience of thieves. Straight Arrow News (SAN) previously covered the same tech in July, and the outlet said it successfully tested the tool on a vehicle. Now people are cracking the software, meaning it can be used for free. Discord servers with hundreds of members are seeing more people join, with current members trolling the newbies with fake patches and download links. If the tech gets out, it threatens to supercharge car thefts across the country, especially those part of the social media phenomenon known as Kia Boys in which young men, often in Milwaukee, steal and joyride Kia and Hyundai cars specifically because of the vehicles’ notoriously poor security. Apply that brazeness to all of the other car models the Flipper Zero patches can target, and members of the car hacking community expect thieves to start using the easy to source gadget.
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UpgradeInside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars
“Kia Boys will be Flipper Boys by 2026,” one person in the reverse engineering community said.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
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I use it at work to clone a customer's proximity card when I work in their building so they don't have to leave me theirs to get around. The one legitimate use I found.
I guess being able to trigger the customer service announcement without having to find a button in a store is nice.
Oh, absolutely. It's not something which should be encouraged, and against a well designed modern system it probably isn't possible (there must be some challenge-response type NFC systems on the market).
I'm just saying it isn't unambiguously "illegitimate"
there must be some challenge-response type NFC systems on the market
There are. Hotels use them for door key cards so they can't be cloned.
le·git·i·mate adjective /ləˈjidəmət/
1. conforming to the law or to rules."Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" - Aleister Crowley
seems legit to me…
That's the definition of a legitimate use.
Cloning keycards temporarily with permission (until new ones are made.) Breaking into your own or a friend's car because the keys were left inside (until you get the keys back)
Cloning a TV remote just to lower the volume to a sane degree and turn it off (until they get a new TV, remote or find the old one).
Legitimate is a anything that you're allowed to do. It's a simple process to test legitimacy:
Did someone ask you if you can help?
If yes, did you tell them what you'd do?
If yes, did they agree?
And once you did whatever it was they agreed to, did you keep your ability to do the same thing in the aim of doing something they didn't consent to (once you cloned their car key, do you plan on stealing the car? Or once you cloned their remote, do you have an insatiable urge to fuck with them by abusing the remote?)
If you answer "yes" to all except the last one, the use is legitimate in 99.9% of cases.
The only reason this may be considered a non-legitimate use would be if you attached the exclusive economic right of making repairs or new keys to the OEM, which isn't how a sane world works.
And besides, tools like the Flipper truly are hacking tools. Today hacking has a bad rep, and the word used to mean more like hack something together.
Imagine Bob who is a DIY type of guy. His TV starts falling apart because the plastic casing broke. Bob takes some duct tape and glues the casing together. As the TV stand is also a bit wonky, he takes some screws as well just to be safe. He doesn't plan on keeping it for too long, just until he can find a fitting replacement that's not too expensive. Most likely, he's bound to keep it until the next Black Friday.
Bob just successfully hacked something up to keep his TV from falling apart.
That's the origin of the word "hacking". "To hack up" got shortened by attaching a new meaning to the verb, without bothering with the entire phrase, and making it relate only to electronic/digital hacking. So the TV example isn't hacking, but it is hacking up. It means "to make some temporary fix until a proper one isn't found".
Today, hacking has been conflated with exploiting and breaking digital locks, which is not what the original phrase meant.
Yes, which is why it's weird they were able to steal it, gol'dang time travelers. No I wasn't mistaken, time travelers. No I'm not bias because Warren Zevon rules, I said time travelers.
"Drop his donuts" means his dough circles fell off a table during the studio recording. You can hear him say "my donuts! Goddamn!" in the back of the track, it's hilarious.
Right at the 4:10 mark lmao
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
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"What changed?"
"We made them super easy to steal"
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Prentending to be hackerman is a legit usecase IMHO. They do seem like fun, but I personally can't justify the cost.
I would definitely play with one if I had one
It is true that this device can be used nefariously. But it's just a computer with a wide variety of very basic and common communication methods along with software to exploit them. There are many other computers like it that are just less popular. And to ban it is to ban said basic communication hardware like radio, WiFi, NFC, etc.
The solution is to mandate companies to provide a minimum level of security. Even giant companies with good reputations have giant security holes, like Apple or your bank, implementing mandatory SMS as 2FA. That shit should be illegal.
It is almost like their should be something written down somewhere. Like a guideline or rule or something...
Oh that is right, it is called a regulation requiring basic wireless security for extremely expensive consumer items.
Nope can't do that.
Won't someone think of the multi billion dollar corporations‽
Of course, this particular attack actually "works" with rolling codes (WILL desync your real keyfob), it requires the attacker to sniff one signal off your key (incl lock) and then they can spoof your key's rollover protocol (and any button, not just the one they sniffed) to reset the rolling code back to 0 and allowing them access. Iirc it's different from a standard replay attack in (definitely) that it can spoof other keys on the fob it hasn't read, and (I think) that while a trad replay attack requires the car not to hear the signal when recording I believe that doesn't matter with this attack.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to test it out since I'm not buying a serial locked flipper firmware from some guy who just got out of prison selling it on telegram.
If you literally never press the buttons, nor leave your keys alone with anyone else who could possibly push the buttons?
Then a guy with a $20 car unlock kit from Autozone can still get in. And so can a guy with a hammer, and a guy with a broken spark plug. Locks are suggestions, especially when you have windows.
And that's not even to mention people with actual SDRs that can repeat your key's signal and remote start your car, keep your fob in a faraday bag.
locksmith
OH you know what's up for sure then lmao.
Yeah tbh there's nothing a flipper can do that you can't do with a better tool, it just rolls a bunch of stuff into a digital swiss army knife of sorts. It's not something a real car thief would use, maybe someone would use it to break into your car and steal something but a car thief would have something purpose built, or just go low tech if they can. You can run marauder on it too with the wifi board though lol.
TBF most of these are failures and exploits on older devices.
Which are a dime a dozen across the entire industry. Security is rather difficult, especially when considering exploits and bugs.
Ofc many of these ARE the results of cut corners, though many are just a lack of security awareness or old devices with known exploits discovered long after manufacturing.
202w wrangler
Well, Jeep is not really a name for good innovation. They are stuck with a management that still thinks "mechanics" and sees electronics as a pure profit center, not as a gear in the system that has to be as reliable as the rest of it.
That doesn't require buying a special device, it was mostly crimes of convenience. I doubt the Flipper Zero will ever get that widespread.
I see this article more about reporting unfortunate news rather than boosting fear. The news seems to be "Car manufacturers don't take security seriously and people are exploiting it with a simple tool".
I'd rather hear about this now than wake up one day to see that my flipper is illegal because some politician watched a tiktok video.
I don't think it's merely "reporting unfortunate news"
It's about the flipper zero, not really about car theft per say and shitty, evil car security system where the dealer scams you as much as the thief for a key.
There's really no reason we can't use contactless smartcards for this, and that we can't program them ourselves with open source software.
The flipper zero itself is completely irrelevant about this. It's just a generic ISM band transceiver ... Only of note to the ignorant and technologically incompetent, but the journos have made this the centerpiece of the article.
This article convinced me to buy a flipper (I've been debating it for years). It's a super useful item that is absolutely going to get banned/hamstrung any day now for putting too much power into people's hands under the guise of "public safety".
I want it because it's so easy to use. I'm no hacker, but with a tool as convenient as this I'm sure I can piece some useful hacks together.
Although, ordering one before they reban it again may or may not be something to consider.
It's cool but not magic. If you're trying to fuck with something, you need to know what frequency it's on and what sort of signals do what. There is a bunch of preloaded stuff though, and a wide variety of tools like radio frequencies, nfc, Bluetooth, rfid, and infrared. So far the most useful thing I've done is turn the volume down on fox News on tvs in public areas.
Oh one thing I still have to try: some, maybe most handicap buttons for doors are actually radio frequency based and not hard wired, so if you can capture and replay the open signal, you could open a door without hitting the button and look totally jedi.
I hate it when they always add "ethical". First of all, when you say ethical you mean law-fearing, they don't really care about ethics and, secondly, "regular" hackers use it too, so it's just a hacker's swiss army knife...
Dude, do you want individual hacking to become illegal? Because people who are not hacking daily are prone to forgetting that some hackers don't actually act maliciously.
Also, yes, some hackers are ethical and do care. Not you, obviously. But some.
That's what you think is good about hacking? That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. That's what you get when you get your education from TV.
Hacking means "misusing/modifying crap to work how you want".
Ethical hacking is e.g. modifying devices you own to run software you want, like e.g. running homebrew software on a game console. It is finding and reporting security vulnerabilities so that companies can improve their security. It is modifying software or devices to e.g. removing privacy problems or tracking.
And ethical hacking and law-abiding hacking aren't the same either, since some ethical hacking activities might be illegal (e.g. violating restrictions on modifying devices) and some legal hacking activities might not be ethical (e.g. using legal hacking to dox people).
And ethical hacking and law-abiding hacking aren't the same either
I prefer saying 'grey hat' instead of 'ethical hacker' because ethical hacker is now used to mean 'pentester', 'red teamer' and all the other cybersecurity stuff, or so it seems to me.
that was the entire meaning of my comment, I clearly didn't make it clear enough.
China cut itself off from the global internet on Wednesday
Activist group Great Firewall Report spotted the outage, which it said disrupted all traffic to TCP port 443 – the standard port used for carrying HTTPS traffic.
“Between approximately 00:34 and 01:48 (Beijing Time, UTC+8) on August 20, 2025, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) exhibited anomalous behavior by unconditionally injecting forged TCP RST+ACK packets to disrupt all connections on TCP port 443,” the group wrote in a Wednesday post.
That disruption meant Chinese netizens couldn’t reach most websites hosted outside China, which is inconvenient. The incident also blocked other services that rely on port 443, which could be more problematic because many services need to communicate with servers or sources of information outside China for operational reasons. For example, Apple and Tesla use the port to connect to offshore servers that power some of their basic services.
China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday
: Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the darkSimon Sharwood (The Register)
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Yeah technically anything can run on any ports, we just like to default certain things.
Ssh for example can work on port 2000 or whatever. Port knocking is fun too.
VPNs, DNS over https (DoH), load balancers via DHCP, encrypted remote procedure calls, TCP pipes via gsocket.
I could go on.
HTTPS may be the official designation for the port, but it is the de facto standard port for TLS. Whatever you want to send over TLS, doesn't really matter.
HTTPS is just HTTP served over TLS (originally SSL).
Step by step, if you were to analyze a web connection over port 443, you would see that the client first negotiates the TCP connection (via three-way handshake), then TLS, and it's not till after TLS is established that HTTPS is negotiated.
In that way, it's kinda wrong to say it's the HTTPS port. It's really, nowadays, the TLS port. HTTP is just one of many protocols that can ride on top of it, and when we do that, we call it HTTPS.
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Sometimes mandatory web proxies still allow direct connections to port 443 so as to not break https, which in return means as long as your connection is to port 443, that proxy will pass it through without interfering.
I used to run sshd on port 443 for this reason back when I regularly had to work from client networks.
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My friend, this post is about China getting cut off from the rest of the word, most likely due to government censorship.
The title of this community is Technology.
It is a PSA about the current steps the US is taking towards similar levels of censorship. This is pretty damn relevant to both the community and the post topic.
I know some people don't like it, but politics is part of tons of different communities. Even a crafting community would be affected by the current tariffs.
For example, in China the film industry censors LGBT-related films. Filmmakers must resort to finding funds from international investors such as the "Ford Foundations" and or produce through an independent film company.
Good read. Fuck censorship. Fuck the CCP.
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Enjoy the freedom of having the likes of Meta and Google pull another Cambridge analytica. Or the freedom of having multi-billion dollar companies like YouTube aggressively push algorithms that steer people down the alt right pipeline. Or the freedom of instagram mechanically and ruthlessly instilling in children as much body dysphoria and low self esteem as possible in the name of profit.
It was literally only two years ago that Meta ~~was~~ got caught promoting racial violence in Myanmar. amnesty.org/en/latest/news/202…
Any reasonable person can look at the heinous acts carried out by western tech companies in recent years and realize that the great firewall has been vindicated.
Edit: "CCP shill", "whataboutism", "two things can be bad"... come on folks, its time to start thinking of some new thought-terminating cliches. These are so 2023.
I think they just copy paste this stuff.
You can tell because it's a completely non-sequitur. They don't even bother tailing their ramblings to the conversation currently being had. They just control + c, control + v it into place, and then act like they've achieved something.
Yeah they don't understand this stuff. They don't even know what a VPN is they're just angry about it.
Actually doing this would be devastating to the economy, and anyway they still need to justify their actions. They can't be openly dictatorial just yet.
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Not HTTPS necessarily, but lots use TLS over 443. If you are sending something like login credentials to an online service, it makes sense for the servers to use what is universally available instead of reinventing the wheel. Also, some games may use a launcher that uses HTTPS if they are web-based in some fashion, or maybe the game will use it for certain kinds of API calls unrelated to actual gameplay.
If you are playing a game that uses a dedicated server (or just isn't a competitive game at all), then TLS usage is probably unlikely, but those games aren't lucrative for the account boosting/currency farming that makes cheating so rampant in China anyway.
Even signing up for some games requires you to create an account on their website first.
More. I play in oceania and the cheaters are always english speakers.
Edit: the things you get downvoted for here. should've checked the instance before I commented.
Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83%
Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.
As of May, 19 months into the war, Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead”, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has found.
At that time 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, according to health authorities in Gaza, a toll that included combatants and civilians. Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
Revealed: Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war
Figures from classified IDF database listed 8,900 named fighters as dead or probably dead in May, as overall death toll reached 53,000Emma Graham-Harrison (The Guardian)
Trying to get Star Trek Bridge Crew working on linux, but ubisoft connect keeps giving me connection error.
Was hoping to give this game a shot, even though it is practically abandonware at this point.
I downloaded the ARMGDDN repack/crack of star trek bridge crew. I was able to test it on a windows partition to see if online still worked. On the windows partition not only was I able to get past the ubisoft connect error, but I can also create private matches and join public ones as well. So that gave me a sliver of hope in getting it working on linux!
It seems people have luck with a legitimate copy of bridge crew on protondb.
I transferred the files to my personal linux rig and tried proton, bottles, and lutris. No dice. The game opens but says "connection error, unable to connect to uplay service". I think it specifically has to do with the emudata folder inside the game folder. It is the folder with what seems to be cracked ubisoft connect credentials, but when I launch the game through proton or wine it doesn't even look for that folder/files.
Any help to rid me of this connection error is appreciated!
Edit: the error is in the game. The game is able to launch, and it can even be launched in vr. It asks you for controller input from a headset or gamepad. Once you do it flashes "connecting..." For a few seconds and then gives you the "could not connect to uplay" error. On windows when you launch and confirm input it just loads right in.
Edit 2: I have tried using the repack installer executable instead of the installed game files from the windows partition. I attempted this with both proton and lutris and still no luck.
I have also found that the ARMGDDN repack installer did not install ubisoft connect on the windows partition, it seems to have just supplied the ubisoftconnectinstaller.exe and done nothing else with it.
Edit 3: it has to do with dll injection of some sort. i am having yhe same issue with a mod on another gsme not properly injecting the dlls that come with it. So I assume this crack comes with dlls that are not injecting properly on launch. I have no idea how to get it to properly inject the needed dll files. I am also unsure as to which dlls are responsible for bypassing ubisoft connect.
Yeah I had switched the exe to the ubisoft connect installer provided by the repack. It installed but it still didn't detect. Then I tried bottles and installing ubisoft connect in the "install an application" portion. Still nothing. I did notice that on the windows machine I have, it doesn't seem like the repack installed ubisoft connect on the device. At least nothing I could find in control panel.
So I do not know why linux is asking for ubisoft connect yet windows runs the game with no ubisoft connect application installed.
Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
Paywall bypass: archive.is/oWcIr
Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, thinks the internet’s default encyclopedia and one of the world’s biggest repositories of information could benefit from some applications of AI. The volunteer editors who keep Wikipedia functioning strongly disagree with him.The ongoing debate about incorporating AI into Wikipedia in various forms bubbled up again in July, when Wales posted an idea to his Wikipedia User Talk Page about how the platform could use a large language model as part of its article creation process.
Any Wikipedia user can create a draft of an article. That article is then reviewed by experienced Wikipedia editors who can accept the draft and move it to Wikipedia’s “mainspace,” which makes up the bulk of Wikipedia and the articles you’ll find when you’re searching for information. Reviewers can also reject articles for a variety of reasons, but because hundreds of draft articles are submitted to Wikipedia every day, volunteer reviewers often use a tool called articles for creation/helper script (ACFH), which creates templates for common reasons articles are declined.
This is where Wales thinks AI could help. He wrote that he was asked to look at a specific draft article and give notes that might help the article get published.
“I was eager to do so because I'm always interested in taking a fresh look at our policies and procedures to look for ways they might be improved,” he wrote. “The person asking me felt frustrated at the minimal level of guidance being given (this is my interpretation, not necessarily theirs) and having reviewed it, I can see why.”
Wales explains that the article was originally rejected several years ago, then someone tried to improve it, resubmitted it, and got the same exact template rejection again.
“It's a form letter response that might as well be ‘Computer says no’ (that article's worth a read if you don't know the expression),” Wales said. “It wasn't a computer who says no, but a human using AFCH, a helper script [...] In order to try to help, I personally felt at a loss. I am not sure what the rejection referred to specifically. So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I'm wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can't reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.”
Wales then shared the output he got from ChatGPT. It included more details than a template rejection, but editors replying to Wales noted that it was also filled with errors.
For example, the response suggested the article cite a source that isn’t included in the draft article, and rely on Harvard Business School press releases for other citations, despite Wikipedia policies explicitly defining press releases as non-independent sources that cannot help prove notability, a basic requirement for Wikipedia articles.
Editors also found that the ChatGPT-generated response Wales shared “has no idea what the difference between” some of these basic Wikipedia policies, like notability (WP:N), verifiability (WP:V), and properly representing minority and more widely held views on subjects in an article (WP:WEIGHT).
“Something to take into consideration is how newcomers will interpret those answers. If they believe the LLM advice accurately reflects our policies, and it is wrong/inaccurate even 5% of the time, they will learn a skewed version of our policies and might reproduce the unhelpful advice on other pages,” one editor said.
Wales and editors proceeded to get into it in the replies to his article. The basic disagreement is that Wales thinks that LLMs can be useful to Wikipedia, even if they are sometimes wrong, while editors think an automated system that is sometimes wrong is fundamentally at odds with the human labor and cooperation that makes Wikipedia so valuable to begin with.
As one editor writes:
“The reputational risk to adding in AI-generated slop feedback can not be overstated. The idea that we will feed drafts into a large language model - with all the editorial and climate implications and without oversight or accountability - is insane. What are we gaining in return? Verbose, emoji-laden boilerplate slop, often wrong in substance or tone, and certainly lacking in the care and contextual sensitivity that actual human editors bring to review work. Worse it creates a dangerous illusion of helpfulness, where the appearance of tailored advice masks the lack of genuine editorial engagement. We would be feeding and legitimising a system that replaces mentoring, discourages human learning, and cheapens the standards we claim to uphold. That's the antithesis of Wikipedia, no?”
“It is definitely not the antithesis of Wikipedia to use technology in appropriate ways to make the encyclopedia better,” Wales responded. “We have a clearly identifiable problem, and you've elaborated on it well: the volume of submissions submits templated responses, and we shouldn't ask reviewers to do more. But we should look for ways to support and help them.”
Wikipedia Prepares for ‘Increase in Threats’ to US Editors From Musk and His Allies
The Wikimedia Foundation says it will likely roll out features previously used to protect editors in authoritarian countries more widely.404 MediaJason Koebler
This isn’t the first time the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that manages Wikipedia, and Wikipedia editors have clashed about AI. In June, the Wikimedia Foundation paused an experiment to use AI-generated summaries at the top of Wikipedia articles after a backlash from editors.A group of Wikipedia editors have also started WikiProject AI Cleanup, an organized effort to protect the platform from what they say is growing number of AI-generated articles and images submitted to Wikipedia that are misleading or include errors. In early August, Wikipedia editors also adopted a new policy that will make it easier for them to delete articles that are clearly AI-generated.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“Wikipedia’s strength has been and always will be its human-centered, volunteer-driven model — one where knowledge is created and reviewed by people, volunteers from different countries, perspectives, and backgrounds. Research shows that this process of human debate, discussion, and consensus makes for higher-quality articles on Wikipedia,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told me in an email. “Nevertheless, machine-generated content is exploding across the internet, and it will inevitably make its way to Wikipedia. Wikipedia volunteers have showcased admirable resilience in maintaining the reliability of information on Wikipedia based on existing community-led policies and processes, sometimes leveraging AI/machine learning tools in this work.“The spokesperson said that Wikipedia already uses AI productively, like with bots that revert vandalism and machine translation tools, and that these tools always have a “human in the loop” to validate automated work.
“As the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy regularly engages with volunteers on his talk page to share ideas, test assumptions, and respond to questions,” the spokesperson said. ”His recent comments about how AI could improve the draft review process are an example of this and a prompt for further community conversation."
How AI-generated text is poisoning the internet
Plus: A Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook?Melissa Heikkilä (MIT Technology Review)
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I think commenters here don't actually do Wikipedia. Wales was instrumental in Wikipedia's principles and organization besides the first year of Sanger. He handpicked the first administrators to make sure the project would continue its anarchistic roganization and prevent a hierarchy from having a bigger say in content matters.
I would characterize Wales as a long-retired leader rather than leadership.
Wales’s quote isn’t nearly as bad as the byline makes it out to be:
Wales explains that the article was originally rejected several years ago, then someone tried to improve it, resubmitted it, and got the same exact template rejection again.“It's a form letter response that might as well be ‘Computer says no’ (that article's worth a read if you don't know the expression),” Wales said. “It wasn't a computer who says no, but a human using AFCH, a helper script [...] In order to try to help, I personally felt at a loss. I am not sure what the rejection referred to specifically. So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I'm wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can't reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.”
That being said, it still reeks of “CEO Speak.” And trying to find a place to shove AI in.
More NLP could absolutely be useful to Wikipedia, especially for flagging spam and malicious edits for human editors to review. This is an excellent task for dirt cheap, small and open models, where an error rate isn’t super important. Cost, volume, and reducing stress on precious human editors is. It's a existential issue that needs work.
…Using an expensive, proprietary API to give error prone yet “pretty good” sounding suggestions to new editors is not.
Wasting dev time trying to make it work is not.
This is the problem. Not natural language processing itself, but the seemingly contagious compulsion among executives to find some place to shove it when the technical extent of their knowledge is occasionally typing something into ChatGPT.
It’s okay for them to not really understand it.
It’s not okay to push it differently than other technology because “AI” is somehow super special and trendy.
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That being said, it still wreaks of “CEO Speak.”
I think you mean reeks, which means to stink, having a foul odor.
That being said, it still wreaks of “CEO Speak.” And trying to find a place to shove AI in.
I don't see how this is "shoved in." Wales identified a situation where Wikipedia's existing non-AI process doesn't work well and then realized that adding AI assistance could improve it.
Neither did Wales. Hence, the next part of the article:
For example, the response suggested the article cite a source that isn’t included in the draft article, and rely on Harvard Business School press releases for other citations, despite Wikipedia policies explicitly defining press releases as non-independent sources that cannot help prove notability, a basic requirement for Wikipedia articles.Editors also found that the ChatGPT-generated response Wales shared “has no idea what the difference between” some of these basic Wikipedia policies, like notability (WP:N), verifiability (WP:V), and properly representing minority and more widely held views on subjects in an article (WP:WEIGHT).
“Something to take into consideration is how newcomers will interpret those answers. If they believe the LLM advice accurately reflects our policies, and it is wrong/inaccurate even 5% of the time, they will learn a skewed version of our policies and might reproduce the unhelpful advice on other pages,” one editor said.
It doesn't mean the original process isn't problematic, or can't be helpfully augmented with some kind of LLM-generated supplement. But this is like a poster child of a troublesome AI implementation: where a general purpose LLM needs understanding of context it isn't presented (but the reader assumes it has), where hallucinations have knock-on effects, and where even the founder/CEO of Wikipedia seemingly missed such errors.
Don't mistake me for being blanket anti-AI, clearly it's a tool Wikipedia can use. But the scope has to be narrow, and the problem specific.
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This is another reason why I hate bubbles. There is something potentially useful in here. It needs to be considered very carefully. However, it gets to a point where everyone's kneejerk reaction is that it's bad.
I can't even say that people are wrong for feeling that way. The AI bubble has affected our economy and lives in a multitude of ways that go far beyond any reasonable use. I don't blame anyone for saying "everything under this is bad, period". The reasonable uses of it are so buried in shit that I don't expect people to even bother trying to reach into that muck to clean it off.
This bubble's hate is pretty front-loaded though.
Dotcom was, well, a useful thing. I guess valuations were nuts, but it looks like the hate was mostly in the enshittified aftermath that would come.
Crypto is a series of bubbles trying to prop up flavored pyramid schemes for a neat niche concept, but people largely figured that out after they popped. And it's not as attention grabbing as AI.
Machine Learning is a long running, useful field, but ever since ChatGPT caught investors eyes, the cart has felt so far ahead of the horse. The hate started, and got polarized, waaay before the bubble popping.
...In other words, AI hate almost feels more political than bubble fueled. If that makes any sense. It is a bubble, but the extreme hate would still be there even if it wasn't.
Crypto was an annoying bubble. If you were in the tech industry, you had a couple of years where people asked you if you could add blockchain to whatever your project was and then a few more years of hearing about NFTs. And GPUs shot up in price. Crypto people promised to revolutionize banking and then get rich quick schemes. It took time for the hype to die down, for people to realize that the tech wasn't useful, and that the costs of running it weren't worth it.
The AI bubble is different. The proponents are gleeful while they explain how AI will let you fire all your copywriters, your graphics designers, your programmers, your customer support, etc. Every company is trying to figure out how to shoehorn AI into their products. While AI is a useful tool, the bubble around it has hurt a lot of people.
That's the bubble side. It also gets a lot of baggage because of the slop generated by it, the way it's trained, the power usage, the way people just turn off their brains and regurgitate whatever it says, etc. It's harder to avoid than crypto.
Yeah, you're right. My thoughts were kinda uncollected.
Though I will argue some of the negatives (like inference power usage) are massively overstated, and even if they aren't, are just the result of corporate enshittification more than the AI bubble itself.
Even the large scale training is apparently largely useless: old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/co…
I believe that the bad behavior of corporate interests is often one of the key contributors to these financial bubbles in every sector where they appear.
To say that some of the bad things about this particular financial bubble are because of a bunch of companies being irresponsible and/or unethical seems not to acknowledge that one is primarily caused by the other.
"The metaverse" changed it's definition depending on who you talked to. Some definitions didn't even include VR.
"AI" also changes it's definition depending on who you talk to.
Vague definitions = hype
So... I actually proposed a use case for NLP and LLMs in 2017. I don't actually know if it was used.
But the usecase was generating large sets of fake data that looked real enough for performance testing enterprise sized data transformations. That way we could skip a large portion of the risk associated with using actual customer data. We wouldn't have to generate the data beforehand, we could validate logic with it, and we could just plop it in the replica non-prodiction environment.
At the time we didn't have any LLMs. So it didn't go anywhere. But it's always funny when I see all this "LLMs can do x" because I always think about how my proposal was to use it... For fake data.
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The problem with LLMs and other generative AI is that they're not completely useless. People's jobs are on the line much of the time, so it would really help if they were completely useless, but they're not. Generative AI is certainly not as good as its proponents claim, and critically, when it fucks up, it can be extremely hard for a human to tell, which eats away a lot of their benefits, but they're not completely useless. For the most basic example, give an LLM a block of text and ask it how to improve grammar or to make a point clearer, and then compare the AI generated result with the original, and take whatever parts you think the AI improved.
Everybody knows this, but we're all pretending it's not the case because we're caring people who don't want the world to be drowned in AI hallucinations, we don't want to have the world taken over by confidence tricksters who just fake everything with AI, and we don't want people to lose their jobs. But sometimes, we are so busy pretending that AI is completely useless that we forget that it actually isn't completely useless. The reason they're so dangerous is that they're not completely useless.
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It’s almost as if nuance and context matters.
How much energy does a human use to write a Wikipedia article? Now also measure the accuracy and completeness of the article.
Now do the same for AI.
Objective metrics are what is missing, because much of what we hear is “phd-level inference” and it’s still just a statistical, probabilistic generator.
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It is completely useless as presented by the major players who atrocities trying to jam models that are trying to everything at the same time and that is what we always talk about when discussing AI.
We aren't talking about focused implementations that are Wikipedia to a certain set of data or designed for specific purposes. That is why we don't need nuance, although the reminder that we aren't talking about smaller scale AI used by humans as tools is nice once in a while.
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While this is true, the majority of the wikis are not at all low quality. Some are the only ones existing for a topic. The wikis are community-based, after all.
But its easy to vandalize and is highly profit-driven. The fandom wikis are filled with ads that absolutely destroy navigation. Infamous is the video ad that scrolls you up automatically in the middle of reading once it finishes. You have to pause it to read the article with no interruption.
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There's an addon for that, Indie Wiki Buddy.
It tries to redirect you to non fandom/fextralife wikis if they exist, and if not, it proxies fandom wikis through BreezeWiki which just displays the content.
And I'll take this opportunity to plug Hohser and the uBlock AI blocklist as well.
Indie Wiki Buddy
Indie Wiki Buddy, a browser extension to help you find quality, independent wikisIndie Wiki Buddy
Oh yeah that website's pretty great
It has really in depth wiki about games like
fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Caesar…
So I guess you mean that Wales guy is pretty great then
Yup, Fallout Wiki has a pretty crazy history. I don't remember if they were originally a Fandom wiki, but at some point they definitely went "well, we don't want to go with Fandom, we'll go with Curse wiki host instead." Then Fandom bought Curse wikis and put all of them under Fandom banner anyway.
The independent Fallout Wiki is basically where the actual community is right now, the Fandom wiki is just there to confuse passers-by with their high search engine rank. Fandom has the policy that the community can fork a wiki and go elsewhere, but they will not close down the Fandom wiki, so good luck with your search rankings.
The "fandom" one is much more complete ?
I mean, they're both pretty great,
From the search engine if I wanted to know about in-game faction,
I'd just pick which ever appeared first.
and it'd be fine either way
So why would "Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone"
think they can just point at it and imagine any random people would even know
what she "who that guy is" means just because he's associated with that wiki ?
And that my innocuous comment
would triggers the nerds with such an unanimously negative response ?
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Honestly, translating the good articles from other languages would improve Wikipedia immensely.
For example, the Nanjing dialect article is pretty bare in English and very detailed in Mandarin
You can do that, that's fine. As long as you can verify it is an accurate translation, so you need to know the subject matter and the target language.
But you could probably also have used Google translate and then just fine tune the output yourself. Anyone could have done that at any point in the last 10 years.
As long as you can verify it is an accurate translation
Unless the process has changed in the last decade, article translations are a multi-step process, which includes translators and proof-readers. It's easier to get volunteer proof-readers than volunteer translators. Adding AI for the translation step, but keeping the proof-reading step should be a great help.
But you could probably also have used Google translate and then just fine tune the output yourself. Anyone could have done that at any point in the last 10 years.
Have you ever used Google translate? Putting an entire Wikipedia article through it and then "fine tuning" it would be more work than translating it from scratch. Absolutely no comparison between Google translate and AI translations.
Putting an entire Wikipedia article through it and then "fine tuning" it would be more work than translating it from scratch.
That depends on if you are capable of translating the language if you don't know the language then the translator will give you a good start.
What's funny is that for enormous big systems with network effects we are trying to use mechanisms intended for smaller businesses, like a hot dog kiosk.
IRL we have a thing for those, it's called democracy.
In the Internet it's either anarchy or monarchy, sometimes bureaucratic dictatorship, but in that area even Soviet-style collegial rule is something not yet present.
I'm recently read that McPherson article about Unix and racism, and how our whole perception of correct computing (modularity, encapsulation, object-orientation, all the KISS philosophy even) is based on that time's changes in the society and reaction to those. I mean, real world is continuous and you can quantize it into discrete elements in many ways. Some unfit for your task. All unfit for some task.
So - first, I like the Usenet model.
Second, cryptography is good.
Third, cryptographic ownership of a limited resource is ... fine, blockchains are maybe not so stupid. But not really necessary, because one can choose between a few versions of the same article retrieved, based on web of trust or whatever else. No need to have only one right version.
Fourth, we already have a way to turn sequence of interdependent actions into state information, it's called a filesystem.
Fifth, Unix with its hierarchies is really not the only thing in existence, there's BTRON, and even BeOS had a tagged filesystem.
Sixth, interop and transparency are possible with cryptography.
Seventh, all these also apply to a hypothetical service over global network.
Eighth, of course, is that the global network doesn't have to be globally visible\addressable to operate globally for spreading data, so even the Internet itself is not as much needed as the actual connectivity over which those change messages will propagate where needed and synchronize.
Ninth, for Wikipedia you don't need as much storage as for, say, Internet Archive.
And tenth - with all these one can make a Wikipedia-like decentralized system with democratic government, based on rather primitive principles, other than, of course, cryptography involved.
(Yes, Briar impressed me.)
EDIT: Oh, about democracy - I mean technical democracy. That an event (making any change) weren't valid if not processed correctly, by people eligible for signing it, for example, and they are made eligible by a signed appointment, and those signing it are made eligible by a democratic process (signed by majority of some body, signed in turn). That's that blockchain democracy people dreamed at some point. Maybe that's not a scam. Just haven't been done yet.
How do you use Sybil attack for a system where the initial creator signs the initial voters, and then they collectively sign elections and acceptance of new members and all such stuff?
Doesn't seem to be a problem for a system with authorized voters.
So why would they accept said AI-generated applicants?
If we are making a global system, then confirmation using some nation's ID can be done, with removing fakes found out later. Like with IRL nation states. Or "bring a friend and be responsible if they are a fake". Or both at the same time.
Only if used appropriately and in a safe manner.
Like a summary of article, translations etc
And definitely always highlighting what was generated by the AI
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Oh, right! Thanks for reminding me. I tried to archive it the last time but it took forever.
Edit. There ya' go: archive.is/oWcIr
tbh i somehow didnt even realize that wikipedia is one of the few super popular sites not trying to shove ai down my throat every 5 seconds
i'm grateful now
So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I'm wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can't reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.
This actually sounds like a plausibly decent use for an LLM. Initial revision to take some of the load off from the human review process isn't a bad idea - he isn't advocating for AI to write articles, just that it can be useful for copy-editing and potentially supplement a system already heavy in Go/No Go evaluations.
Which is weird, really. Jimmy Wales is just fucking awful. I didn't realize he was anatomically capable of not talking out of his ass.
In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.Casey Crownhart (MIT Technology Review)
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Nice share! Mistral also shared data about one of its largest model (not the one that answer in LeChat, since that one is Medium, a smaller model, that I guess has smaller energetic requirements)
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In total, the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates for the water consumption and carbon emissions associated with a text prompt to Gemini.
There are zero downsides when mentally associating an energy hog with "1 second of use time of the device that is routinely used for minutes at a time."
With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don't eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.
Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.
Individually you’re spot on. Your AI use doesn’t matter. But, and this is where companies tend to leave off, when you take into account how many millions (or billions) of times something is done in a day (like AI prompts), then that’s when it genuinely matters.
To me, this is akin to companies trying to pass the blame to consumers when it’s the companies themselves who are the biggest climate offenders.
You’re right. But if I had to pick a why, I’d go with how microwaves at least provide a service for households by heating up food.
AI’s only viable service (at the time of this writing) is a replacement for viagra for techbros when they need to get an erection.
On a "respond to an individual query" level, yeah it's not that much. But prior to response the data center had to be constructed, the entire web had to be scraped, the models trained, the servers continually ran regardless of load. There's also way too many "hidden" queries across the web in general from companies trying to summarize every email or product.
All of that adds to the energy costs. This equivocation is meant to make people feel less bad about the energy impact of using AI, when so much of the cost is in building AI.
Furthermore, that's the median value--the one that falls right in the middle of the quantity of queries. There's a limit to how much less energy a query to the left of the median can use; there's a significantly higher runway to the right of the median for excess energy use. This also only accounted for text queries; images and video generation efforts are gonna use a lot more.
All of that adds to the energy costs
But do you actually know how much that is? Or are you just assuming it's a lot.
You should probably not eat things because of how much calories they have or don't have, but because of how much of their nutrients you need, and how much they lack other, dangerous shit. Also eat slowly until you're full and no more. Also move a lot.
We shouldn't need calculators for this healthy lifestyle.
The reason for needing to know which foods are healthy is because... well, we forgot.
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Yet they’ve never needed to commission power plants to dedicate power to these facilities.
Never?
In addition:
This report was also strictly limited to text prompts, so it doesn’t represent what’s needed to generate an image or a video.
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I did some quick math with metas llama model and the training cost was about a flight to Europe worth of energy, not a lot when you take in the amount of people that use it compared to the flight.
Whatever you're imagining as the impact, it's probably a lot less. AI is much closer to video games then things that are actually a problem for the environment like cars, planes, deep sea fishing, mining, etc. The impact is virtually zero if we had a proper grid based on renewable.
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Seriously. I'd be somewhat less concerned about the impact if it was only voluntarily used. Instead, AI is compulsively shoved in every nook and cranny of digital product simply to justify its own existence.
The power requirement for training is ongoing, since mere days after Sam Altman released a very underehelming GPT-5, he begins hyping up the next one.
Because the training has diminishing returns, meaning the small improvements between (for example purposes) GPT 3 and 4 will need exponentially more power to have the same effect on GPT 5. In 2022 and 2023 OpenAI and DeepMind both predicted that reaching human accuracy could never be done, the latter concluding even with infinite power.
So in order to get as close as possible then in the future they will need to get as much power as possible. Academic papers outline it as the one true bottleneck.
Academia literally got cut by more than a third and Microsoft is planning to revive breeder reactors.
You might think academia will work on the problem but the people running these things absolutely do not.
Because demand for data centers is rising, with AI as just one of many reasons.
But that's not as flashy as telling people it takes the energy of a small country to make a picture of a cat.
Also interesting that we're ignoring something here -- big tech is chasing cheap sources of clean energy. Don't we want cheap, clean energy?
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Yes, yes it did. And as far as I can tell, it's still belching it out, just so magats can keep getting owned by it. What a world
My comment is in the context of this
Also interesting that we’re ignoring something here – big tech is chasing cheap sources of clean energy. Don’t we want cheap, clean energy?
That's not small....
100's of Gigawatts is how much energy that is. Fuel is pretty damn energy dense.
A Boeing 777 might burn 45k Kg of fuel, at a density of 47Mj/kg. Which comes out to... 600 Megawatts
Or about 60 houses energy usage for a year in the U.S.
It's an asinine way to measure it to be fair, not only is it incredibly ambiguous, but almost no one has any reference as to how much energy that actually is.
That's not ~600 Megawatts, it's 587 Megawatt-hours.
Or in other terms that are maybe easier to understand: 5875 fully charged 100kWh Tesla batteries.
I usually liken it to video games, ya. Is it worse that nothing? Sure, but that flight or road trip, etc, is a bigger concern. Not to mention even before AI we've had industrial usage of energy and water usage that isn't sustainable... almonds in CA alone are a bigger problem than AI, for instance.
Not that I'm pro-AI cause it's a huge headache from so many other perspectives, but the environmental argument isn't enough. Corpo greed is probably the biggest argument against it, imo.
A flight to Europe's worth of energy is a pretty asinine way to measure this. Is it not?
It's also not that small the number, being ~600 Megawatts of energy.
However, training cost is considerably less than prompting cost. Making your argument incredibly biased.
Similarly, the numbers released by Google seem artificially low, perhaps their TPUs are massively more efficient given they are ASICs. But they did not seem to disclose what model they are using for this measurement, It could be their smallest, least capable and most energy efficient model which would be disingenuous.
This feels like PR bullshit to make people feel like AI isn't all that bad. Assuming what they're releasing is even true. Not like cigarette, oil, or sugar companies ever lied or anything and put out false studies and misleading data.
However, there are still details that the company isn’t sharing in this report. One major question mark is the total number of queries that Gemini gets each day, which would allow estimates of the AI tool’s total energy demand.
Why wouldn't they release this. Even if each query uses minimal energy, but there are countless of them a day, it would mean a huge use of energy.
Which is probably what's happening and why they're not releasing that number.
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median prompt size
Someone didn't pass statistics, but did pass their marketing data presention classes.
Wake me up when they release useful data.
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It is indeed very suspicious that they talk about "median" and not "average".
For those who don't understand what the difference is, think of the following numbers:
1, 2, 3, 34, 40
The median is 3, because it's in the middle.
The average is 16 (1+2+3+34+40=80, 80/5=16).
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There were people estimating 40w in earlier threads on lemmy which was ridiculous.
This seems more realistic.
The company has signed agreements to buy over 22 gigawatts of power from sources including solar, wind, geothermal, and advanced nuclear projects since 2010.
None of those advanced nuclear projects are yet actually delivering power, AFAIK. They're mostly in planning stages.
The above isn't all to run AI, of course. Nobody was thinking about datacenters just for AI training in 2010. But to be clear, there are 94 nuclear power plants in the US, and a rule of thumb is that they produce 1GW each. So Google is taking up the equivalent of roughly one quarter of the entire US nuclear power industry, but doing it with solar/wind/geothermal that could be used to drop our fossil fuel dependence elsewhere.
How much of that is used to run AI isn't clear here, but we know it has to be a lot.
None of those advanced nuclear projects are yet actually delivering power, AFAIK.
...and they won't be for at least 5-10 years. In the meantime they'll just use public infrastructure and then when their generation plans fall through they'll just keep doing that.
Ford cambia piani: svolta nella partnership F1 Red Bull dal 2026
A meno di due anni dal ritorno ufficiale in pista, Ford ha annunciato un cambio di piani nella collaborazione con Red Bull per il mondiale 2026.
quotidianomotori.com/formula-1…
Ford cambia piani: svolta nella partnership F1 Red Bull dal 2026 - Quotidiano Motori
Ford annuncia un cambio di strategia: lavorerà anche sul motore termico Red Bull Powertrains per la F1 2026, oltre che sull'elettrico.Mario Roth (Quotidiano Motori)
BrikoX
in reply to misk • • •[Opinion]prefix.