Category: News and Articles

current events and topics

Mathematicians stunned by AI

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/inside-the-secret-meeting-where-mathematicians-struggled-to-outsmart-ai


On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world’s most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, Calif., with some coming from as far away as the U.K. The group’s members faced off in a showdown with a “reasoning” chatbot that was tasked with solving problems they had devised to test its mathematical mettle. After throwing professor-level questions at the bot for two days, the researchers were stunned to discover it was capable of answering some of the world’s hardest solvable problems. “I have colleagues who literally said these models are approaching mathematical genius,” says Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia and a leader and judge at the meeting.

Experts Have It Easy

Something that’s painfully understudied is how experts are more efficient than novices while achieving better results. I say understudied and not unstudied, because it’s common knowledge that charging people for their time results in experts being paid less since they work faster, which is why experts charge more for their time.

This effect is understudied in the impact it has on novices entering a field. A Novice will start out being woefully inefficient, putting in incredible amounts of effort and running through all number of mental hoops in order to maintain the growing pile of unmaintainable abstractions they’ve developed. An expert doesn’t have to jump through these hoops. They can more clearly see the actual problem at hand and will more efficiently put their time and effort towards making progress against the problem. In contrast, novices will spend more time battling problems they created for themselves. Let’s explore this idea by looking at two characters entrapped in a maze, and how they go about escaping.
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https://boydkane.com/essays/experts

Memetics – A Growth Industry in US Military Operations (2006) [PDF]

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA507172.pdf

SUMMARY

The document you’ve linked, titled “Memetics: A Growth Industry in U.S. Military Operations” (DTIC Accession Number ADA507172), is a 2006 report by Michael Prosser. It explores how the U.S. military might apply the concept of memetics—the study of how ideas spread and evolve, akin to genes in biology—to influence behavior and shape perceptions in modern warfare.

What Is Memetics?

Memetics is the study of “memes,” which are units of cultural information—like ideas, symbols, or practices—that spread from person to person. Think of how internet memes go viral; similarly, in this context, the military is interested in how ideas can be propagated to influence public opinion or enemy morale.

Key Points of the Report

Countering Adversary Influence: Just as the military can spread its own messages, understanding memetics also aids in recognizing and countering propaganda or misinformation from adversaries.

Information as a Weapon: The report suggests that in today’s digital age, controlling information and influencing narratives can be as crucial as traditional military might.

Strategic Communication: By understanding how ideas spread, the military can craft messages that resonate with target audiences, potentially swaying opinions or behaviors without physical confrontation.

Psychological Operations (PSYOP): Memetics can enhance PSYOP by identifying which messages are more likely to be adopted and shared within specific cultures or groups.

The Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge

Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-data-hoarders-resisting-trumps-purge

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But strangers online had grabbed other directories, and together they were able to complete the backup. “I think we’ll be surprised by how many things have been saved by people we don’t yet know, because they haven’t had a chance to give it to someone,” he told me. When I asked who they were, Majstorovic had a simple answer: “Nerds who care.”

They came, in many cases, from r/DataHoarder, a subreddit with nearly a million members devoted to preserving files. The data hoarders collect zines, manuals, family photos, old television shows, and defunct websites—just about everything digital or digitizable at risk of disappearance. Their tastes run a wide gamut. Among the hoards cited on periodic show-and-tell threads are “1,500 90 minute recordings of church services,” “15000+ hentai mangas and growing,” “a digital collection of Occitan and Piedmontese books,” and “someone’s grandma’s recipes.” But the hoarders speak the same language on the subject of digital permanence, swapping tips on storage and sharing glamour shots of their elaborate server “rigs.” The subreddit’s banner image is a stack of hard drives emblazoned with the words “What do you mean DELETE?!”

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Osiris-REX found Building Blocks for DNA

Alle sechs Jahre kommt uns der Asteroid Bennu besonders nahe – teilweise sogar näher als 300 000 Kilometer. Von dort gelangten im Herbst 2023 mit der Mission OSIRIS-REx erstmals Proben auf die Erde. Nun ergaben Analysen: Auf Bennu gab es einst salzhaltiges Wasser, in dem komplexe Moleküle entstanden. Darunter waren neben zahlreichen Aminosäuren auch die Grundbausteine des Erbmaterials aller irdischen Lebensformen, wie zwei Forschungsteams in den Fachblättern „Nature“ und „Nature Astronomy“ berichten.

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https://www.weltderphysik.de/gebiet/universum/nachrichten/2025/aster…

openAI o3

Better than humans in reasoning benchmark Arc

o3 celebrated a particular success in the reasoning benchmark “Arc AGI”. In a “high-compute” configuration, o3 has now achieved an accuracy of 87.5 percent in the benchmark and has thus achieved human performance of around 85 percent for the first time. This is an important step towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), because passing the ARC-AGI does not mean that AGI has been achieved. In fact, o3 still fails at some very simple tasks, which points to fundamental differences to human intelligence, according to an Arc Prize article.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/OpenAI-s-new-o3-model-aims-to-outperform-humans-in-reasoning-benchmarks-10218087.html

NOT The Onion: The Onion Buys Infowars

Satire Publication the Onion Buys Alex Jones’ Infowars at Auction With Sandy Hook Families’ Backing

A federal bankruptcy judge in Texas has ordered a hearing into how the satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars, after Jones and his lawyers raised questions about how a bankruptcy auction was conducted

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/texas/articles/2024-11-14/satire-slinger-the-onion-buys-alex-jones-infowars-at-auction-with-help-from-sandy-hook-families

Company forced to change name that could be used to hack websites – Guardian (2020)

Software firm’s director thought name using HTML would be ‘fun and playful’

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The original name of the company was ““><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD”. By beginning the name with a quotation mark and chevron, any site which failed to properly handle the HTML code would have mistakenly thought the company name was blank, and then loaded and executed a script from the site XSS Hunter, which helps developers find cross-site scripting errors.

That script would have simply put up a harmless alert – but it serves as proof that a malicious attacker could instead have used the same weakness as a gateway to more damaging ends.

Similar names have been registered in the past, such as “; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;– LTD”, a wry attempt to carry out an attack known as SQL injection, inspired by a famous XKCD webcomic, but this was the first such name to have prompted a response. Companies House has retroactively removed the original name from its data feeds, and all documentation referring to its original moniker now reads simply “Company name available on request”.

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/06/companies-house-forces-business-name-change-to-prevent-security-risk

Singularity Is Coming Soon


Morris sees signals all around that suggest people are at the end of their tolerance of the pace of change today, much less tomorrow, when futurists suggest there will be more change over the next decade alone than during the prior 100 years. “The whole MAGA movement is essentially an expression of millions of people who are experiencing anxiety because of too much change,” Morris says. “They’re afraid, they’re angry, they’re upset, they want to go back to how it was 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. The symptoms that Alvin Toffler describes in his 1970 book, Future Shock are what we’re living out in a very public way in society today.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbtucker/2024/09/27/the-singularity-is-coming-soon-what-will-the-world-look-like-in-2035

Calling All Hackers

A Story about Hackers, Shitcoins, Meme Stocks, Financial Markets and Startups

[…]

My point is, it is not just about computers. It’s about understanding how the world works. The world is made up of people. As much as machines keep society running, those machines are programmed by people–people with managers, spouses, and children; with wants, needs, and dreams. And it is about using that knowledge to bring about the change you want to see. […]

https://phrack.org/issues/71/17.html#article

Discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41306128

Do Quests !

If you were to make a list of what you want to get done this week, it would mostly consist of things you have to do. Get groceries. Book a hair appointment. Get back to so-and-so. Read that health and safety thing for work.

If you were to make a list of things you want to get done in the next two years, it would probably be more personal and more empowering. Learn to record my own music. Double my client base. Set up my dream office. Write my screenplay. The list would contain fewer things you must do –- since, by definition, those things will get done anyway — and more of what you actually want to do with your life.

We usually call these optional aspirations goals, but doing so immediately introduces a few problems that make them less likely to happen.  

The first problem is that goals are things you expect to do later, because they aren’t strictly necessary, and you’re currently busy with the to-do list stuff. You’ll do them, soon, but not quite yet. There must first be a lull in the noise and stress of normal life, in order to make goal-achieving feasible.

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https://www.raptitude.com/2024/08/do-quests-not-goals/

Worldwide UBI paid by carbon tax

Here’s an idea: a worldwide universal basic income paid for by a carbon tax. A study found that it could boost the global GDP by 130%.

A study found that implementing a global universal basic income could boost global GDP by 130%.

Funding a global UBI with a carbon tax would also promote sustainability, the study’s authors say.

https://www.businessinsider.com/universal-basic-income-carbon-taxes-global-gdp-sustainability-2024-6

Internet is good for well-being

Is the Internet bad for you? Huge study reveals surprise effect on well-being

A survey of more than 2.4 million people finds that being online can have a positive effect on welfare.

A global, 16-year study1 of 2.4 million people has found that Internet use might boost measures of well-being, such as life satisfaction and sense of purpose — challenging the commonly held idea that Internet use has negative effects on people’s welfare.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01410-z

Stop Using The Fritz Box Domain Suffix

Fritz.Box Domain is not owned by AVM and Fritz Boxes configure it as a default domain suffix via DHCP. So either don’t allow it to overwrite your resolv.conf or stop using your Fritz Box DHCP. And use alternative DNS Servers.

https://crapts.org/2024/04/21/all-fritz-box-modems-have-been-hijacked/

TL;DR: Every Fritz!Box has been compromised by DNS hijacking and using a Fritz!Box is unsafe. Every user of a Fritz!Box should immediately stop using their Fritz!Box or set up their own DHCP server.

edit: looks like they even redirected it to an NFT site sometime early this year according to heise.de. So it’s even worse than I thought. No idea if they now bought it or who owns it. Just play it safe and make sure you don’t use the suffix anywhere.

xz-utils was compromised

Mit starken Worten und Superlativen gilt es in Fragen Computersicherheit immer sparsam umzugehen, nicht jede schlimm klingende Lücke stellt in der Realität auch eine Bedrohung dar. Bei dem, was nun rund um eine viel genutzte Open-Source-Komponente bekannt wird, können die Worte aber gar nicht stark genug sein. Geht es dabei doch um den jahrelang vorbereiteten Versuch, eine Hintertür auf hunderte Millionen Systeme einzuschmuggeln. Ein Versuch, der nur dank eines einzelnen, besonders aufmerksamen Entwicklers gestoppt werden konnte, bevor es zu größerem Schaden kommen konnte

https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000213960/wie-die-computerwelt-gerade-haarscharf-an-einer-sicherheitskatastrophe-vorbeigeschrammt-ist