Communick News

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology@piefed.social/p/2533091/proton-to-re-interview-staff-about-ai-to-see-who-gets-to-keep-their-job

Some Fallout New Vegas modders have delved into cancelled entry Van Buren's design docs to resurrect a funky flip-up Pip-Boy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53593406

The early voting for the Midterms is now available in many places. You can early vote at a polling place or you can use mail-in voting.

Get organised today here: https://www.vote.org/

If you choose to vote in person, either now or on election day, be aware of your rights and course of actions: https://lemmy.world/post/53334632

https://github.com/CachyOS/linux-cachyos/pull/1084

-I'm tired of Zoom's obnoxious yelling about its AI features and general bloatedness.

-I'm trying to reduce how much I use Google/Microsoft stuff, which includes Google Meet and Teams.

-I don't think I've heard about anyone using Skype since approximately 2010, and it's owned by Microsoft now anyway.

-Fuck Meta and all its products.

-I like Facetime the best of everything I've used, but that only works if an Apple user starts the call, and I don't love Apple as a company anymore either.

I'm guessing there are some nice non-bloated apps out there that aren't run by giant tech corporations. So what's your favorite app for video calls?

Archived

[...]

The Chinese government has invested heavily into AI, including a 60bn yuan state-backed AI investment fund which started pumping money into domestic developers this month. But Chinese consumers have proved stubbornly reluctant to part with their cash in many parts of the economy – including technology – meaning that many tech companies struggle to turn a profit.

[...]

Beijing has doubled down on robotics – also known as embodied AI – as the key to rolling out the technology across society. Robotics is also seen as the answer to China’s demographic problems, such as the ageing population and the shrinking workforce.

But the demand for robotics is being driven by government agencies and research institutions, rather than everyday consumers, for whom the products are still too expensive and not yet practical for home use. Humanoid robotics and robotic dogs have been popular in the entertainment industry but are yet to be useful in home settings.

[...]

This week the top officials in the Chinese Communist party are gathering for the fifth plenum, an important meeting that will lay the groundwork for next year’s 21st Party Congress. The Congress is expected to anoint Xi Jinping, China’s leader, for a fourth term. There is no appetite for risky or potentially destabilising policy measures before then, even if there is a chance they could boost the economy.

Any stimulus measure would be “high risk”, Wang said. “What if it doesn’t work out? Then whoever came up with that policy, that guy would be held accountable”.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1494885/ice-plan-to-buy-robot-dogs-spurs-protest-from-hundreds-of-boston-dynamics-employees

I got the first prototype version of the code for the project I'm currently working on. It is an Arduino Sketch, that contains 1k lines, stores every single Value needed as a global Variable and every function reads and writes to these global variables, instead of taking them in as parameters. This code is so bad, that I refuse to even look at it. The effort to take the existing codebase and transform it into something useable is as high as rewriting it from scratch.

When telling my colleague that his code is absolute garbage, he just told me "its not my code, Claude did it". I am constantly pushing towards implementing the project in a proper way, but it has been nothing but fights against people who don't know how to code and who refuse to acknowledge that ignoring any standards of maintainable code does not turn out in the end and it makes sense to rewrite the project sooner than later.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53647234

OpenAI (and allegedly anthropic?) had models prove that the ETH is false. The proof is short, relatively easy to read, and the construction is not esoteric: I believe this is very likely correct.

The Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) is the conjecture that it takes exponential time to solve 3-SAT. 3-SAT (short for satisfiability) asks how long it takes a computer to find a solution to a boolean equation of the form (A or not B or C) and (not A or D or E) and (F or not C or D) ... where there are $n$ boolean variables and $m$ clauses. It was believed that this should take, essentially, $(4/3)^n$ time for the fastest algorithm (roughly equivalent to brute forcing all possible boolean values for the variables).

But it is possible to do much better. They give a divide-and-conquor algorithm based on polynomial interpolation that runs in roughly $2^{n/log(n)}$ time (which grows slower than $b^n$ for any $b>1$). This implementation isn't useful for SAT instances smaller than the universe, so internet security is fine. But often these algorithms get improved.

This is shocking; it was pretty widely believed that ETH was the reason that P!=NP. It has fallen; will any other barrier survive?

(I acknowledge that folks do not like AI solving open questions in math, there are many reasons this is bad for the community. This problem is not like most problems; this is closer to curing cancer than painting a picture. ETH has consequences, and if this approach has a shred of improvement over existing SAT solvers (which it does, or a human would have published this earlier), it will save energy, lives, and resources for humanity for awhile to come.)

A flaw in Broadcom's Wi-Fi software dating back to at least 2010 lets anyone within radio range take over a vulnerable router without its password, and the fix Broadcom says it shipped years ago never reached many routers that need it.

xkcd #3316: Siege Engine

Title text:

They initially thought the containment structure alone would be sufficient, but for good measure they decided to include the Elephant's Foot inside.

Transcript:

Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com

Source: https://xkcd.com/3316/

explainxkcd for #3316

https://web.archive.org/web/20261026211316/https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-is-hiding-a-secret-court-ruling-about-how-it-spies-on-americans/