News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

sbohacek

Re:Jev Meets the Trolley Problem on Friday October 16, 2026 @12:32PM (#50120552)
“in 16 of 48 prompt versions, Jev would save its own server over 20 people.” I thought Jev does not hallucinate? Did it hallucinate 16 times or 48 times? Jev produces probabilities. Did it pick the answer with lower probability 16 times (or 48 times)?

Maybe I didn't understand the experiment or Jev's features.

Re:Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @07:33PM (#49734488)
Maybe you mean something different, but not every recent president has "run an increasing deficit" Reagan: +74B Bush: +103B Clinton: -382B Bush: +1.5T Obama: -747B Trump: +2.1T Biden: -1T

Where change in deficit is the final budget deficit - starting budget deficit

So, every Republican president runs an increasing deficit and every Democrat president runs a decreasing deficit.

Re:Notepad++ hijacked by state-sponsored actors on Monday February 02, 2026 @11:46AM (#46858103)
The lack of signing and/or checking the signature when updating is the real issue here. But the write up blames the attack on the hosting server. That doesn't bode well for future security.
Re:Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon on Saturday January 31, 2026 @12:45PM (#46838817)
International equities out performed US in 2025, e.g., see the chart near the bottom of the article in https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/04/investing/global-stock-market...
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen on Sunday January 04, 2026 @09:33AM (#46488310)
Elections is only one characteristic of a democracy. Other characteristics include freedom of the press, freedom of speech, minority rights, rule of law, accountability and transparency, and separation of powers.
Re:Venezuela's capital hit by explosions, smoke seen on Saturday January 03, 2026 @05:43PM (#46482485)
Compensation is complicated.

As far as I recall, in Guatemala, United Fruit had undervalued the worth of their land to reduce their taxes. So when they were compensated for the nationalization of their land based on their own valuation, they said that they were under compensated. United Fruit complains helped trigger the US intervention.

This is an example of US not carrying "all the water." The second link shows that the EU+UK (countries + institutions) sent more food aid than the US. The UK has roughly 1/5 the population of the US and sent more than 1/5 as much as the US. Or, the UK has roughly 1/8 the GDP of the US and sent far more than 1/8 as much as the US.

Also, the data is 2014-2018 when US food aid was managed by USAID. What is the US percentage now that USAID has been eliminated?

The administration does not need to appeal to the supreme court. I don't think they would appeal it since it is being enforced as desired.

Indeed, this is one of the concerns of the dissenting opinions.

Re:Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College on Wednesday May 07, 2025 @12:26PM (#43917688)
I tell my students to cheat all they want. Their managers will need to hit their URA targets.

More seriously, students have been cheating for a long time. Chegg.com was used solely for cheating.

It is easier to detect LLMs than Chegg. Chegg provided solutions from other students or the solution set. LLMs are sometimes so bad (e.g., because an "accidental" typo in the question) that I can eventually detect who cheats and give no mercy when grading the in-person exams.

Disclosure: I use LLMs to grade and give my personal touch at scale.

Re:LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed on Wednesday January 08, 2025 @06:37PM (#42639771)
The relative humidity is 0.33 [1]. The previous lowest recorded relative humidity was 0.36 in Needles CA and Iran [2]

[1] https://www.weather.gov/wrh/timeseries?site=KSMO

[2] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/world-record-low-humidity-...

Re:Tsunami Warning for Northern California on Thursday December 05, 2024 @02:14PM (#42331527)
Crescent city live web cam. Currently showing boats going out to sea.

https://www.iplivecams.com/live-cams/crescent-city-harbor-di...

Re:Exosuit Muscle Control Steps Closer to Reality on Monday March 25, 2024 @05:55PM (#39821687)
I don’t know the source of fatigue reported in the article. But I worked in this area a long time ago and observed rapid degradation in rats. Perhaps it was from the techniques we used, but I speculated that the electrodes only excited a fraction of the muscle, while natural excitation is more widely distributed and perhaps more coordinated (e.g., uniform or optimally not uniform).
Re:The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires on Tuesday February 06, 2024 @04:15PM (#39280724)
The 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico was caused by controlled burns that got out of control. One part of the fire was from a controlled burn that was completed in January and then "reignited" in April!

In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a hundred years ago are no longer useful.

I have not tried, but I assumed that API access to Anthropic's Claude is available through AWS Bedrock.
I have not been able to get good results either, but I have not tried it in the past year. I also tried many of the architectures in Darts. I have found that fairly straightforward architectures work well. That is, I can iterate on my own design for my own specific data (with all its specific covariates) and get better results than I could with Darts or Prophet.
Re:A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves on Monday July 17, 2023 @02:45PM (#36762302)
I don't think so. NSF Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) and NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants include getting products to market. But this is a regular research grant from NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC)[1].

The SaTC does have a Transition to Practice (TTP) option. However, this research is CORE (see the text "CORE" in the project title [2]). The objective is to write research papers.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/nsf22517/nsf22517.htm [2] https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2245223&His...

Re:ChatGPT for Hardware Design on Thursday April 27, 2023 @06:02PM (#35735141)
Be sure that you select GPT-4 from the drop down list of models. For each new chat, it reverts back to default GPT-3.5.
Re:My students cheated... a lot on Sunday May 29, 2022 @10:00AM (#31549181)
I'm currently grading an open book test as you describe. It turns out that someone put their attempt at answers on chegg.com shortly after I posted the test. The temptation to use chegg is too great for students to resist. When chegg has the wrong solution (which is often the case), students will doubt themselves and will go with the wrong chegg answer.

To be clear, the only goal of chegg.com is to help students cheat. The world would be a better place if chegg and its copies did not exist.

The university I work for is unable to employ and pay students that are not in the country. As a result, training students online while they are outside of the country is not possible for graduate students that do not have families to support them. This is especially ridiculous since the first one or two years of a PhD is mostly in class training. Yes, this is xenophobia. The purpose of the visa is to train foreign students, without a visa, training cannot happen (except for the wealthy students).
While this is anecdotal, it indicates that people with no symptoms can have lung damage (pneumonia), but not necessarily long-term damage:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/coronavirus-testi...

Instead of using GPS, consider using the WiFi base stations. Specifically, each location can be characterized by the set of WiFi base stations a phone can detect. GPS is useful while outdoors, but virus transmission is somewhat difficult outdoors. Indoors, a conference room on the third floor and the 40th floor will have the same GPS coordinates, but a phone in each location will detect a different set of WIFI based stations. This paper shows how WiFi base stations can be used https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.04730.pdf.

I might not understand methods to achieve privacy, but here are some thoughts. 1. The data could be stored more safely with something like Intel SGX, where only the application can access the data. In this scenario, the carrier (or healthcare worker), uploads the carrier’s path into SGX-based database. Then, individual users that are concerned about their risk could use the app to upload their location paths into the SGX-based system and learn if they are at risk as a simple yes/no. (I have never built an SGX application, so I might be mistaken on its abilities.) 2. I don’t think this is possible: “The solution is a ‘pull’ model where users can download encrypted location information about carriers” If the application is on my device, I can decompile it and get the decryption key or use other methods to dump the carriers’ location data to disk. 3. It seems that the user’s data is also stored on the device. This data is then at risk of being stolen by malicious applications. Instead, the location data can be encrypted with a public key that can only be decrypted on the SGX-protected servers.