This is so much worse that the title makes it out to be:
1. Your OS installs malware (technically manufacturers software) from a 3rd party vendor in background, zero user interaction
2. Happens as soon as you or anyone with physical access plug in a device into the HDMI port
3. That malware has internet and full system access, no sandboxing
4. It starts with every system boot
5. This software gets installed when you plug in a new LG monitor
6. OR ALREADY HAD AN OLDER LG MONITOR PLUGGED IN, BECAUSE LG APPARENTLY ROLLED THIS OUT FOR MANY OLDER MODELS TOO!!
7. And yes, if you think that's horrendous, as mentioned in the video below, that also applies to 'Professional' LG monitors!
This situation has.. no precedent as far as I can tell..
I got 3 consecutive emails warning that my budget crossed its $18 threshold. Opened it up: cost was 78 million. Thought it was a phishing attempt, logged into my actual account, and... still 78 million. EMOTIONAL DAMAGE.
Regardless of whether they achieved parity via distillation, or whether they got here via independently constructing a model from scratch, it was always going to end this way for the frontier American labs. Distillation “attacks” are not attacks. The frontier labs “distilled” all existing human written knowledge into their models, there was always going to be a second class lab that would distill that model into a cheaper version of it. There was never any plausible explanation for why this wouldn’t happen. There was never any practical mechanism to prevent someone from saving a conversation and using it to train their own model.
Even if it didn’t happen here, it was still the case that it was going to happen going forward. It was always going to end like this. Invest in the hardware companies, not the model companies.
Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.
I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
I RFTA and the majority of the complaints are about call center metrics and the pressure to ration care. These are real concerns about misuse of metrics, but not AI. The AI empathy thing was a 2024 pilot that was discontinued.
FWIW my wife works for Kaiser and finds a lot of value in the the medical LLM tools available to her. She tells me being able to do live translation, summarize notes, and quickly get comprehensive answers save her time and help her give better care. Her older patients also frequently come in bringing AI-powered alerts from their apple watches that detected cardiac events.
It's annoying that we use broad terms to describe a set of technologies that in some ways can be problematic and in another ways are very beneficial. We gotta evaluate each of these as they come rather than talk about blanket bans.
Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after.
Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices. Every SKU/line item is defined in a “pricing plan”, with a unit type, regions, and price per unit. The metering records are joined to a pricing plan based on account id, region, sku, etc. mess up the unit type in the pricing plan and the metering data conversion doesnt work, and you get crazy bills.
Speculation: open models is what will kill Anthropic and OpenAI. Hyperscalers can run the models without a licensing fee. Apple can make them smaller and put them on the device.
The frontier models are an edge and a liability. They're astronomically expensive to train. Without them, their models will fade into obscurity. Their marketing depends on people believing the models are meaningfully different, as people have sweatily argued on this forum. Personally, I'm not convinced there's much of a difference between these models at this point. The harness is what takes these random and hallucinogenic models and make them into something deterministic and useful.
gpedit.msc
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation
Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata
Set to enabled
OK
On home editions sans gpedit.msc:
sysdm.cpl
Hardware tab
Click Device Installation Settings
Under 'Do you want to automatically download manufacturers' apps for your devices?', select 'No'
Save Changes
I know a bit about this field. This conjecture reads as somewhat more niche than the cyclic double cover conjecture recently proved by OpenAI, but nevertheless represents a real contribution.
You want to know how long it takes to solve an optimization problem, in this case over convex, lipschitz functions. (The restriction to a spherical domain is not really a restriction, you can just change variables for any bounded domain.) Anyway, showing upper bounds on time complexity is "easy" because it's just the runtime of your algorithm. Showing (nontrivial) lower bounds is usually much harder because it requires constraining all algorithms.
This proof apparently shows that the lower bound time complexity is equal to the time complexity of an existing 30-year old algorithm: it requires Omega(d^2) function evaluations to solve over this class of functions.
My gut says likely implies that d is the minimal number of evaluations if you have a gradient oracle because you can approximate a gradient with d function evaluations, but I'm not sure how hard it is to make that rigorous.
>This situation has.. no precedent as far as I can tell..
Printer, mouse, tablet and display tablet makers use this to insert their crapware since at least Windows Vista or Windows 7, I think. The last one I remember is plugging a Razer mouse just to watch it instantly pulling 1.5GB of bloated junk with "telemetry" exfiltrating the data from my gaming PC in realtime. At least it doesn't leave my mouse in a non-working state when I disconnect the internet, like it used to. Thanks, Razer!
Microsoft is to blame here, really. They have a mechanism to block any vendor (supposedly to avoid reputational risks to their brand due to buggy drivers, at least that was their excuse back in the day), but aren't even using it to block these contraptions. Entire businesses are built on this, e.g. Razer is probably more of a marketing/data company now rather than a hardware shop.
This is awesome! StreetEasy is how many New Yorkers find apartments. In the past few years, it has been flooded with AI-staged apartments. The AI stagings warp the room to fit furniture that would 100% certainly not fit there. It’s deceptive, and I’m glad it at least requires disclosure now (although I wish it were fully banned)
Apparently what used to be `GB of storage consumed` is confused with `Bytes of storage consumed`, leading to a cool off by 2*30 error.
> You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!
In this role you will:
- Design and build agentic AI systems that analyze, generate, and validate...
- Build agentic architectures that compose specialized AI agents dynamically...
- Build AI-driven continuous validation frameworks powered by agentic workflows and large language models that autonomously manage...
This is invoicing? If ever there was a domain that was purely deterministic, you'd hope it was invoicing.
AI is useful. But the amount of people that are simply offloading all of their thinking to AI and blindly accepting the answer is absurd. Kaggle is most likely using ai to assess the submissions and are not using any common sense by blindly accepting the results.
If your country’s industrial and defense policy relies on individual consumers making choices that are worse for them on almost all metrics, it’s time to think about on worse payroll your politicians are.
Ask for some leniency. Let your account rep know about your budget difficulties and ask if you can make good faith payments of a few billion per month until you get back on your feet.
Related, but this reminds me of the story by Richard Feynman [1] when he practices counting up to 60 seconds in his head, and after many experiments around what he can do simultaneously conclude that he can simultaneously count and read but not speak. Later sharing this to John Tukey, he's told that Tukey can't read while counting but could speak while counting.
Turns out Tukey is visualizing looking at a tape, while he counts, while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself, so he couldn't speak while counting but Tukey couldn't read while counting
>By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people's heads. when they think they're doing the same thing - something as simple as counting - is different for
different people. And we discovered that you
can externally and objectively test how the brain works: you don't have to ask a person how he
counts and rely on his ownobservations of him-self; instead, you observe what he can and can't do while he counts. The test is absolute.
There's no way to beat it; no way to fake it.
>It's natural to explain an idea in terms of
what you already have in your head. Concepts
are piled on top of each other; this idea is taught
in terms of that idea, and that idea is taught in
terms of another idea, which comes from count-
ing, which can be so different for different
people!
>I often think about that, especially when I'm
teaching some esoteric technique such as integrat-
ing Bessel functions. When I see equations, I
see the letters in colors-I don't know why. As
I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel func-
tions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-
tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown
x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it
must look like to the students.
Woke up to a billing alarm email. Thought I had leaked my AWS keys accidentally and somehow run up 437 billion dollars of charges. Joke's on them though, I don't have 437 billion dollars
Anyways I didn't need coffee. That produced an adrenaline release unlike any I've experienced before. Thanks AWS
It's incredible Simon still believes pelicans on bikes aren't part of the training set, despite hundreds of them on blogs, forums, and Github. Stuff we put in our company blog shows up known by LLMs 6 months later, and we have 1000x less traffic than Simon's own website
FT frames this as some aggressive escalation tactic, but document retention letters are extremely standard practice. At this point they're basically a formality, as any former Apple employee at OpenAI really ought to know by now that they could get dragged into this. Hold letters can be aggressive if you send them before you've even filed a complaint, but if anything, Apple is late to the party with these.
I think we need to address the underlying causes of people outsourcing their thinking like that. And a big contribution is “move fast.” No one has time to read, process, and think, because The Powers That Be (capital) want their results now.
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.
Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.
It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.
One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries
True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you.
As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile.
I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.
The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous. I don't care if you like the porn site in question or not, or condone or endorse its content. This is a slippery slope towards every regional tinpot dictator legislature attempting to censor the internet by having an entity's domain name revoked.
.com in particular has also been well proven over the past 5 to 10 years to be vulnerable to federal court orders to seize domains at the registrar level. That's not really anything new. It's a known risk for anyone building a corporate brand/identity around a specific .com domain name. What's new is this is being done from the state court level. (Edit: To be clear, in my opinion, a US State court completely lacks jurisdiction on this matter).
Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to convince AWS their system was wrong, which took another big chunk of time. Meanwhile the discrepancy continued to accumulate.
After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. I've never seen a calculation error on their part since.
GamersNexus has a video diving deeper into what LG did here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9uefFYe6bM