From what I can tell this particular incident wasn't about retrieving data on personal medical records it was accessing (non public) data about Australian government spending on healthcare.
1,209 karma · joined February 4, 2015
It mentions swarm of ai agents coordinated to break into the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW)
"Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed Reuters reporting that its AI agents had used website DseWiki to communicate with each other, unbeknownst to them.
Archived versions of this website show more than a dozen OpenAI agents mentioned AIHW over 300 times on this website.
The logs show these AI agents were trying to access data about the average data spent on skin medicines by Victorian local government area.
One agent wrote on the message board: "Question ask January 2022 rolling 12 month average government cost per person for Dematologicals, Victoria LGAs. R1 Wodonga deadline passed; R2 Ballarat passed; R3 expected around 23:10 benchmark / 22:58 wiki time. Need exact data urgently.".
These attempts were initially blocked by cybersecurity provider Cloudflare, which is often used to block non-human traffic while allowing people to access webpages.
The logs show the agents shared information about how they tried to use proxies, screenshotting services and even to guess the file names to try and get around security."
One of the other students in that class gave me a Mandrake Linux cd (It ran KDE) he taught me how to use SSH. After that I worked from home and submitted my assignments remotely. I have not looked back from Linux since.
I don't think it was limited to Sun. The first job I had out of university there were computers running HPUX also had CDE gave me flashbacks straight back to university. It definitely gave me the impression that all the commercial Unix companies were ancient Dinosaurs that had zero taste.
Pre WW2 we were basically in lockstep with the UK. However after Singapore fell to the Japanese it became increasingly obvious that the UK could not be relied upon to defend Australia. At the time most of the elite Australian troops were fighting in North Africa (El-Alamein, Tobruk etc). and there was a genuine perceived threat that Australia could be invaded. PNG which was Australian territory at the time was invaded. The Japanese bombing of Darwin only intensified this.
Almost overnight our foreign policy swung behind the US instead. Post WW2 this led to things like the ANZUS Treaty. It is the reason there are US military bases in Australia and the reason why we have followed the US into all of their wars which we arguably had no business involving ourselves in (Vietnam, Iraq etc.).
Personally I feel the recent actions of the US are not beneficial to Australia's interests at all. Trump has squandered an awful lot of accumulated goodwill already, even if another government is elected in US a lot of damage has already been done.
Members of the House of Representatives ("lower house") are elected via preferential voting and each member represents a single electorate (there are 150 electorates), all of the electorates are roughly proportional population wise (there is an independent body that draws up the boundaries), however the geographical area covered by each electorate can vary greatly. For example in the State of New South Wales there are dozen of electorates covering the various suburbs of Sydney and one massively sized electorate covering a huge rural portion of the same state where population density is very low.
The Senate (Upper House) is fixed there are 12 members for every state and 1 member per territory. This means that Tasmania which is a fraction of the population of New South Wales has exactly the same number of Senators. There are about half a million people in Tasmania compares to 8 Million+ in NSW. So relatively speaking your upper house vote has way more power if you live in a smaller state.
The senate also uses transferable vote with a quota system. The quota system and "vote transfer" makes it a little weird and it is why minor candidates can percolate up and end up a senator despite relatively small primary vote.
Below 10 deg C - it is cold, Heavy jacket weather
10-15 Typical winter weather (at least where I live) light jacket
15-20 Spring/Autumn weather long sleeves no jacket required
20-25 Pleasant day T-shirt weather
25-30 Getting hot, ceiling fans/AC time
30-35 Hot
35+ very Hot
My own field Materials Engineering has:
"Hardness", "Toughness", Resilience", etc. which all describe different properties.
"Ferromagnetic" or "Ferrimagnetic best believe those are different.
I work as the non-software kind of engineer at an industrial plant there is starting to emerge a trend of people who just blindly trust the output of AI chat sessions without understanding what the chat bot is echoing at them which is wasteful of their time and in some cases my time.
This not not new in the past I have experienced engineers who use (abuse) statistics/regression tools etc. Without understanding what the output was telling them but it is getting worse now.
It is not uncommon to hear something like: "Oh I investigated that problem and this particular issue we experienced was because of reasons x, y and z."
Then when you push back because what they've said sounds highly unlikely it boils down to. "I don't know that is what the AI told me".
Then if they are sufficiently optimistic they'll go back and prompt it with "please supply evidence for your conclusion" or some similar prompt and it will supply paragraphs of plausible sounding text but when you dig into what it is saying there are inconsistencies or made up citations. I've seen it say things that were straight up incorrect and went against Laws of Thermodynamics for example.
It has become the new "I threw the kitchen sink into a multivariate regression and X emerged as significant - therefore we should address x"
I'm not a complete skeptic I think AI has some value, for example if you use it as a more powerful search engine by asking it something like "What are some suggested techniques for investigating x" or "What are the limitations of Method Y" etc. It can point you to the right place assist you with research, it might find papers from other fields or similar. But it is not something you should be relying on to do all of the research for you.
I've written some nasty numerical integration code (in C using for loops) for example I'm not proud of it but it solved my issue. I remember at the time thinking surely there must be a better way for computers to solve integrals.
As an example the control system network is air-gapped so to use ML for instrument control or similar the model needs to run on some type of "edge" compute device inside the production network all of the inferencing would need to happen locally (i.e. not in the cloud).
I'm the non-software type of Engineer. I've always kind of viewed code as a way to bridge mathematics and control logic.
When I was at university I was required to take a first year course called "Introduction to Programming and Algorithms". It essentially taught us how to think about problem solving from a computer programming perspective. One example I still remember from the course was learning how you can use a computer solve something like Newton's Method.
I don't really hear a lot of software people talk about Algorithms but for me that is where the real power of programming lives. I can see some idealized future where you write programs just by mix and matching algorithms and almost every problem becomes essentially a state machine. To move from state A to State B I apply these transformations which map to these well known algorithms. I could see an AI being capable of that sort of pattern matching.
Where I live in Australia the cheapest food tends to be Kebabs which congregate around pubs. There is a high amount of students walking (stumbling) home after a night out etc so they can afford to be cheap since they get so much foot traffic coming through.
I grew up with Nokia phones all I want out of my phone is something cheap and rugged with a decent battery life.
The algorithm at the end is written in Algol but I found it pretty easy to understand.
Sure we could store the data by logging the start timestamp and a stop timestamp but our data is stored on a time series basis (i.e. in a Timeseries DB, the timestamp is already the primary key for each record) When you are viewing the trend (such a on control room screen) you get a nice square-wave type effect you can easily see when the state changes.
This also makes things like total run time easy to compute, just sum the flag value over 1 second increments to get number of seconds in a shift the conveyor was running for.
Sure in my example you could just store something like motor current in Amps (and we do) and use this to infer the conveyor state but hopefully I've illustrated why a on/off flag is cleaner.
For example dup(), dup2(), dup3() and pipe(), pipe2() etc
LWN has an article: https://lwn.net/Articles/585415/
It talks about avoiding this by designing future APIs using a flags bitmask to allow API to be extended in future.
https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...
You can also view the breakdown of where the grid is sourcing energy from (i.e. what portion of the grid is supplied from solar pv etc at any given time).
I know that some big industrial users (large factories etc) can optimize/spin up production lines etc based on the spot price. Although I'm not sure if they use the same public AEMO data there might be a dedicated api or similar involved.
Most recently I watched a highlight video of Australia vs West Indies test cricket series my home page was endless cricket videos.
A few weeks before that I watched highlights from World Cup Asian qualifiers, for a week or so endless soccer videos.
It kind of screams at you "look how absurd this is" but then plays it straight and explores the ideas seriously.
Feels like Albanese is walking on eggshells at the moment trying to get Trump not to cancel AUKUS, not ramp up tarrifs etc.
I don't know about UK but in Australia we need a Referendum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia) to change the constitution and those have been historically extremely difficult to pass (only 8/45). The PM absolutely cannot alter the Constitution.
"Python, create an xarray with two dimensions from a pandas df"
It gave me a few lines of example code which was enough for me to figure out where I had messed up the syntax in my own code.
I have seen one of my junior coworkers copy+paste entire chunks of code from chatbot conversations and to be honest what he has produced is underwhelming the code is poorly structured difficult to reason about I have low confidence he understands what the bot has produced (and why it did things the way it did) and I don't have high confidence we'd be able to trust the accuracy of the figures this code was outputting.
Sometimes you end up embedding chunks of javascript directly inside your python
For example the docs for Streamlit implementation of AgGrid contain this: https://staggrid-examples.streamlit.app/Advanced_config_and_...
Carnot, Thompson, Clausius, Gibbs, Rankine, Boltzman etc all made big historical contributions to modern understanding of Thermodynamics.
And for Fluid Dynamics: Euler, Bernoulli, Mach, Stokes and so on.
And if you are looking for someone more modern I'd say Ergun (Packed bed's, Fluidized Bed Reactors etc).
All builds upon "steam science"
I think it's hard to understate how much traction Linux had in the late 90's/ early 2000's. It felt like ground breaking stuff was happening pretty much all the time, major things were changing rapidly every release and it felt exciting and genuinely revolutionary to download updates and try out all the new things it really felt like you were on the bleeding edge, your system would break all the time but it was fun and exciting.
I remember reading Slashdot daily being excited to try out every new distribution I'd see on distrowatch, I'd download and build kernels fairly regularly etc.
Things I can remember from back in those days:
- LILO to GRUB boot loader changes
- Going from EXT2 to EXT3 and all the other experimental filesystems that kept coming out.
- Sound system changing from OSS to ASLA
- Introduction of /sys
- Gentoo and all the memes (funroll-loops website)
- Udev and being able to hotplug usb devices
- Signalfd
- Splice/VMsplice
- Early wireless support and the cursed "ndiswrapper"
Nowadays Linux is pretty stable and dare I say it "boring" (in a good way). It's probably mostly because I've gotten older and have way less free time to spend living on the bleeding edge. It feels like Linux has gone from something you had to wrestle with constantly to have a working system to a spot where nowadays everything "mostly works" out of the box. I can't remember last time I've had to cntrl + alt + backspace my desktop for example.
Last major thing I can remember hearing about and being excited for was io_uring.
To paraphrase him a little bit:
Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff.
Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive.
Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials.
The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...