A couple of days ago, there was a super urgent bulletin that went out to fix a severe PHP vulnerability that could cause remote execution. So severe that many sites were taken down to avoid problems while a fix was being implemented. But what was little known was that the job for putting together a readily installable patch fell to one guy, Ondřej Surý, a Czechian geek, who was not actually paid to do this. I doubt he'll get recognition for this, but hats off to the guy who secured much of the important parts of the Internet, as exploits were started to appear rapidly as the vulnerability was made known. 🎉 He's appreciated by the people that matter.
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we provide causal evidence for two key consequences of AI assistance: reduced persistence and impairment of unassisted performance. Across a variety of tasks, including mathematical reasoning and reading comprehension, we find that although AI assistance improves performance in the short-term, people perform significantly worse without AI and are more likely to give up.Yeah, that's why we're not going to stop building datacenters. People are too dependent. They need their cognitive crutch.
COVID's over. Work from Home should be cut back now. Civil servant who juggled five jobs says he was 'surprised' to be charged with fraud. So much abuse and fraud in the news lately.
DOJ announces $1.8 BILLION healthcare fraud crackdown in California, says rehab clinics drugged patients to keep billing insurers. The federal government just cannot monitor fraud. It's costing us so much money.
Here's a great article on how the Americal healthcare insurance model needs to be reformed. I fully agree, and am surprised it came from The Hill. The fix is not single-payer healthcare run by the government. It's leverage competitive forces to cut bloat and lower prices sensibly. Only the Trump administration has the courage to revamp healthcare like this and stand up to the insurance lobby, but so far, they aren't doing anything. I'm afraid that if the Dems take over, we're going to follow the socialist model, and medical care in the U.S. will become so bloated and crappy. But it'll be free!
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Easter egg. Someone found out that if you go to a non-existent page on Apple Music's site, you'll get directed to a page that has a working iPod. Cool.
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While Nitter still is wrangling through legal issues, the app has forked to shitter. It works, but it has so much bot protection and limited instances that it's barely usable.
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Google is stepping up control of the Android platform. Some folks don't like it and maybe there will be greater interest in jailbreak OSs. I'm in the Apple universe, so this doesn't affect me.
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A South Korean scientist thinks that the date of the starry scene in Starry Night by Van Gogh can be identified by how the stars are depicted, and thinks that Van Gogh was painting the Hyades. I disagree. The Hyades is small, and wouldn't fill the sky like the five stars in the painting. It's more likely that Van Gogh was just placing the stars to satisfy his sense of composition, and that any resemblance to the Hyades is coincidental. Nice theory, though.
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The Latest Anthropic Claude Models Contain AI Text Watermarks. So Anthropic is going to use SynthID to watermark their text. This is why I use Gemini when I want to find the right phrasing for my work. Gemini will give you three different versions of what you are trying to say, and you can use part of one and part of another. Sometimes, you're just looking for a certain word, and you don't need the whole thing rewritten. SynthID is based on setting a probability distribution of word choices that appear in the text. So if you use words from some AI output, and something else from another suggestion, you'll mess up the probability distributions and foil SynthID.
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Homelessness is no longer the top-most worry for Oregonians. It's not that they've fixed it. It's just that the people who really were impacted by it moved away. So the issues that matter are the economy, government ineptitude, taxes, etc. The rest of Oregonians probably just gave up. It's not going away, and the politicians aren't going to fix it, and as long as you avoid going downtown, you can largely ignore it.
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The datacenter moratorium is costing Eastern Oregonians a lot of money. Sad to read that Amazon has canceled plans to invest in Hermiston because of this. Umatilla will probably suffer, too. Oh well.
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92 undelivered ballots in stolen mail found in dumpster at Golden Gardens Park. The response from officials? Call King County Elections at 206-296-8683 to request replacement ballots. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. They're still all for mail-in ballots, yes sirree. Trump is going to send DOJ observers to the PNW to monitor the election system, And so, Oregon is going to monitor the monitors. What insanity.
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