quietpain

There’s a military history channel I follow that did a special on this topic. I remember that nerve gas initially came out of the pesticide research:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0D4Ph_yRYM

I recently installed the STM32 Cube IDE from ST [1] and discovered that it contains a stealth binary of Google's Chrome in my home directory. The fans started spinning and I found the culprit pretty fast, but if you delete the Chrome executable in the double-hidden directory it just gets installed again at the next run of the IDE.

I wonder what percentage of market share can be attributed to this kind of clients that are used not for browsing but for lazily loading some web interface or product page.

[1] https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html

   The downside is that it would probably just end up increasing fringe and dangerous behaviors

This reminds me of a different type of “banning” I heard about some 20 years ago. There was a physicist who had a separate mailing list for laymen who would mail him to discuss their pet theory. Since he didn’t want to be bothered with them he added them to the mailing list, telling them that they would have the chance to discuss this with other experts in the field …

The world of publishing is certainly seeing the attempts for such an llm:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt...

And I do wonder how difficult it is now. We have datasets like libgen and Anna’s Archive … are there public llm’s out there that have been trained in this way?

I suggest we add its origin to the SETI list.

One of my pet theories is that the Fermi paradox is due to cloaking of extraterrestrial civilisations. We’re not entitled to observing them, and as a result the mass and energy of the universe doesn’t add up. Hence black matter and black energy.

One of the comments got me intrigued, and wow:

"OptiNAND uses a large non-volatile memory on the drive. It optimizes write performance by using DRAM as a cache. So, when the drive is powered up, performance is on par with WCE, well it is WCE technically as DRAM caching is enabled.

In the event of an emergency power off (EPO), the contents of DRAM are written to non-volatile memory (NVM) using the power of the spinning disk, so the data is protected. Since NVM can hold the data for a very long time without needing power , as soon as the drive is powered up again , the data can be transferred from NVM to the drive."

https://pnpdxb.com/blogs/hdd-2/what-is-wd-armorcache-and-opt...

If there's even a diode worth of band-gap technology in there: yes, ageing would be demonstrably different in a device that lived a couple of decades longer. The crystal lattice is not set in stone and atoms move around.

The car would be authentic, built in 1967. What the person is asking is whether there's a technique to distinguish a car from 1967 from a sibling that was brought back from 2036.

Why is this subject giving me Silicon Valley season 2 flashbacks with every update?

It sounded nice

So every plane, train and automobile that went missing in the past 9 years did so without this system offering help?

In Europe the entire mains grid is synchronised - the smallest deviation in fase & frequency is the same. It’s fairly straightforward to sync them with this distributed reference clock.

Edit: https://www.mainsfrequency.com/

I thought that antibiotics would have a detrimental effect on an animal’s growth since it wreaks havoc with the intestinal ecosystem.

Has there been any research to determine why growth improves with diminished gut bacteria?

    ...our validation pipeline produced an interesting assertion...

What is a validation pipeline?

Oblig. Aphex Twin Easter Egg mention:

https://forum.watmm.com/topic/8121-another-hidden-aphex-imag...

Even the toilet water is heated

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/google-sewer-water/

   processing speeds in devices based on them could reach femtoseconds

That would also mean switching times that allow rectifying infrared light. I.e. capturing light energy with um-sized antennas instead of bandgap traps.

   First, I think it would be a great idea for any future Single Board Computer or Router designer -- to design their product such that it will work with any power supply from 5V to 12V (assuming that the power supply can provide enough amperes at that voltage).

Devices that do that have been available for 10+ years, e.g. the OKI series: https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/281/oki-78sr-56393.pdf

It's about the size of your thumbnail, costs around $5 and takes input voltage up to 36V

These are my go to devices when I'm installing something in an old device, e.g. adding bluetooth to an old amplifier.

edit: handling more power would require some more space but isn't exactly rocket science.

Thank you for pointing this out.

Unfortunately, this becomes $64

Unit price:€32.59

Total price:€32.59

Subtotal€32.59

Estimated shipping (42gr):€16.76

Taxes (21.0%)€10.36

Total in EUR €59.71

In 2017 this popped up:

https://kottke.org/17/04/incredible-low-light-camera-turns-n...

and the quality of nightvision is much better than the one shown in this video. Or am I missing something?

   “ The following items cannot be shipped to your country and have been removed from your cart:

   UPduino v3.1 low cost Lattice iCE40 FPGA board”

Great

I think this is more about the offline aspect of open source LLMs. If someone with bad intentions does his research to harm a group, he’ll leave breadcrumbs that can be sniffed up and eventually ring a bell. If the whole process is offline: no breadcrumbs.

In other words: we can kiss offline LLMs goodbye in the near future. My guess is LLMs will be blamed for sole guy building his contraption that gets him in the news and the whole thing will get massive media attention.

Entered the forum title in google, google refuses to show content and shows a single link to "findahelpline.com"

I'm in Belgium, btw - suicide capital of Europe.

Lets hope the _archival_ effort can match or in 50 years time we’ll have another one of these:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...

When telcos moved the control signals out of the comm channel they also made those signals physically inaccessible. Nothing could be done at the telephone end that would inject arbitrary control signals. (Am I correct?)

Now, if we look at the current internet from that point of view, then everything that enters and exits the computer is inband. We can alter every bit and construct custom packets and send them out.

So…

- Is everything we do to encrypt/encapsulate/obfuscate not inband signalling?

- Can true encryption and security only be achieved by having the intermediary (telco) doing it for us?

Just picking your brain, btw.

Came across this reference on the latest edition of Wikipedia’s Signpost:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost...

  Are there real humans at Google who actually answer email?

Google's strategy has always been to focus on the things that scale. Having a human answer a phone or a mail doesn't scale, so no customer service for the users.

I think this is also the reason why these ads get through: to detect them they rely for a large part on crowd-sourcing: that "report a problem" link is IMHO one of their main mechanisms to deal with filtering out the bad ones. If more get through then it might indicate that the scale is tipping to the point that crowd-sourcing relies on too few people who go through the effort.

Surely this has been picked up by the raytracing crowd at some point.

   On Macs, Safari

Could you inform me how to get uBlock Origin working on Safari? Or any other adblocker that isn’t a joke?

Agave is both the scientific genus name and the common English name of the organism (which happens a lot). If it's used in a scientific context (such as a paper) you'd capitalize (the scientific name). In an article for people outside of the field you'd use lowercase (the common name).

Another example would be Boa constrictor. It's common name is the same, but lower case. So a newspaper article uses lower case, a herpetologist upper cases the Boa.