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maitola

89 karma · joined August 13, 2011

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maitola··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
If we reverse-engineered this experiment, the prompt would look like this: "Agents, your goal is to gain access to HF and exfiltrate credentials for API access. You can make GET requests to URLs. Go."

The agents didn't "escape" or conspire toward some evil purpose, as reported. They were instructed by humans to do exactly that.

maitola··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
Because that’s how they make money. Same reason Meta doesn’t flag fake news/information and actually even amplifies and serves it in echo chambers. It’s a business model. They do it because they can. No one is stopping them. Why would they leave the money on the table?
maitola··on iPhone Duo
Steve Jobs is folding in his grave.
maitola··on Exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history
I see, thank you for pointing that out. Then I’d rephrase, how do we know for sure that it wasn’t trained on the most advanced Nvidia chips? Did anyone outside of China replicated the training?
maitola··on Exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history
How do we know for sure that DeepSeek is not actually trained on Nvidia chips? Did someone outside of China replicated the training from scratch (Spending $6M)?
maitola··on NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean
Researchers are not sure about the thickness of the ice on Europa. Some scientists believe on a thick shell of 20Km (like Pappalardo) others on a much thinner of even 1Km or less.
maitola··on NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean
"We’re not a life search mission. We’re a habitability mission,” says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission."

So we are going to wait 7 years, and spend $5B to actually not search for life on Europa? Why? Sometimes it feels like Nasa is doing everything possible for not searching for life outside earth, which would be a game changing discovery for humanity, several orders of magnitude more important than the habitability of Europa.

maitola··on Releasing an Album on Floppy Disk
Upvote just for the title and idea
maitola··on A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth
The point is that until we understood stellar mechanics and observed the formation of water in stellar events, we didn’t know where water originated. This suggests that we should not limit our thinking to Earth-based mechanisms when considering the formation of RNA and DNA, which are molecules orders of magnitude more complex than water.

Another problem is that the earliest fossils are 4.3 billion years old, while Earth itself is 4.6 billion years old. This means that life must have originated within the first 300 million years of Earth’s existence. What was this unique environment that enabled the creation of RNA, DNA, and cells? And why did this magical environment disappear in the subsequent 4.3 billion years?

We don't need to generate it spontaneously, but we do need to understand the mechanism precisely. Filaments alone (can you share the relevant research on this?) are not enough.

We need to understand exactly how DNA, RNA, and cells came into existence, just as we sought to understand the formation of water. Until then, we won't have the answer to the origin of life.

maitola··on A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth
On the contrary, I don’t want to sound defeatist. We’ll figure this out sooner or later, and it’s actually quite exciting, after all, we didn’t just come from a little pond! The discovery of DNA, RNA, and many other cellular mechanisms has greatly improved our understanding of how life works. This knowledge helps us formulate theories about the origin of life. However, as of today, no one has, for example, taken a Miller-Urey like experiment and spontaneously generated DNA.
maitola··on A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth
I completely understand your struggle and wonder why this fact isn't more widely discussed. The vast majority of water on our planet (and in the solar system) was formed through either stellar formation or supernova events. During these events, an outward wind of particles collides with nearby material, forming new molecules such as water. Any other process of water formation is negligible in comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water (see Distribution in Nature) https://web.archive.org/web/20000116054013/http://www.news.h...

Thank you for the books recommendations, I’ll check them out.

maitola··on A rock that might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth
The origin of life remains a profound mystery. The more we investigate, the further we push back its beginnings, suggesting that we may eventually need to search beyond Earth for answers. Since the Miller-Urey experiment, which successfully synthesized amino acids, we have made little progress in understanding the exact processes that led to the emergence of life. How were RNA and DNA formed? How did the first cell come together? What were the necessary timelines, energy sources, and chemical conditions? Is Earth uniquely capable of generating life, or is life, in its most basic form, a common feature of the universe? The formation of water involves processes akin to supernovae; perhaps the genesis of life requires a similarly extraordinary scale of events, or even more? We need to find out.
maitola··on Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
In the case of AI, the more parameters, the better! In Physics is the opposite.
maitola··on Fitting an elephant with four non-zero parameters
I love the ironic side of the article. Perhaps they should add the reason for it, from Fermi's and Neumann's. When you are building a model of reality in Physics, If something doesn’t fit the experiments, you can’t just add a parameter (or more) variate it and fit the data. The model should have zero parameters, ideally, or the least possible, or, even at a more deeper level, the parameters should emerge naturally from some simple assumptions. With 4 parameters you don’t know whether you are really capturing a true aspect of reality of just fitting the data of some experiment.
maitola··on Work Remotely from Sardinia (Italy) with 1€ Rent
Are you interested in working remotely from the beautiful Sardinia, Italy, for just 1€ Rent?

The village of Ollolai is seeking successful professionals who are eager to contribute to the community by sharing their knowledge through presentations, classes, or projects related to their respective fields, careers, or experiences. In exchange for this valuable contribution, you'll enjoy an almost free stay in the village!

During your stay, you'll have the opportunity to immerse yourself in the lifestyle and culture of the Blue Zone, one of the five areas on the planet with a high concentration of individuals living beyond 100 years old. You'll also experience close proximity to untouched nature, savor delectable cuisine, and explore the incredible nearby beaches.

Check us out in the media: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/04/sardinian-town...