Monthly Archives: February 2024

Some OpenBSD features that aren’t widely known

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Several of these things are super cool. I haven't played with an OpenBSD box in years, and don't really have time to right now, but I immediately see the applications of many of these. About half of them have _very complicated_ Linux equivalents with systemd and selinux and such, but these are elegant.
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Every. Single. New. Google. Product

Source: Hacker News

Article note: _Such_ a good bit.
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Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

Source: The Register

Article note: "The statistical model of extant images didn't produce the demographics we wanted, so we slapped a supervisory process on top to artificially bias the system, and - completely predictably - that artificial bias is being applied in distasteful ways." is the most "AI" and "AI ethics" are both full of shit story.

Big Tech keeps poisoning the well without facing any consequences for its folly

Comment  Google has suspended availability of text-to-image capabilities in its recently released Gemini multimodal foundational AI model, after it failed to accurately represent White Europeans and Americans in specific historical contexts.…

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Reddit files for IPO and will let some longtime users buy shares

Source: Engadget

Article note: The customer for the data was _google_, and they are in fact going to IPO on the news.

After years of speculation, Reddit has officially filed paperwork for an Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which plans to use RDDT as its ticker symbol, will also allow some longtime users to participate by buying shares.

In a note shared in the company’s S-1 filing with the SEC, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that many longtime users already feel a “deep sense of ownership” over their communities on the platform. “We want this sense of ownership to be reflected in real ownership—for our users to be our owners,” he wrote. “With this in mind, we are excited to invite the users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to buy shares in our IPO, alongside our investors.”

The company didn’t say how many users might be able to participate, but said that eligible users would be determined based on their karma scores while “moderator contributions will be measured by membership and moderator actions.”

The filing also offers up new details about the inner workings of Reddit’s business. The company had 500 million visitors during the month of December and has recently averaged just over 73 million “daily active unique” visitors. In 2023, the company brought in $804 million in revenue (Reddit has yet to turn a profit). The document also notes that the company is “exploring” deals with AI companies to license its content as it looks to expand its revenue in the future.

Earlier in the day, Reddit and Google announced that they had struck such a deal, reportedly valued at around $60 million a year. “We believe our growing platform data will be a key element in the training of leading large language models (“LLMs”) and serve as an additional monetization channel for Reddit,” the company writes.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/reddit-files-for-ipo-and-will-let-some-longtime-users-buy-shares-234127305.html?src=rss
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Is It OK to Be Mean to a Chatbot?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: "We've put googly eyes on our FAQ page so our customers/victims will empathize with it, instead of treating us like the faceless value-extraction machine we are." Swear at chatbots like you swear at any other obstructive software.
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Endgame: A dashboard exploit for the original Xbox

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat.
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Reddit sells training data to unnamed AI company ahead of IPO

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: And here's the anticipated real reason for the API lockdown. Maybe-we're-not-telling $60 million a year to burn a bunch of trust and goodwill as a steward of a platform to being just another internet landlord trying to make a buck off of the other people's content they host.
In this photo illustration the American social news

Enlarge (credit: Reddit)

On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Reddit has signed a contract allowing an unnamed AI company to train its models on the site's content, according to people familiar with the matter. The move comes as the social media platform nears the introduction of its initial public offering (IPO), which could happen as soon as next month.

Reddit initially revealed the deal, which is reported to be worth $60 million a year, earlier in 2024 to potential investors of an anticipated IPO, Bloomberg said. The Bloomberg source speculates that the contract could serve as a model for future agreements with other AI companies.

After an era where AI companies utilized AI training data without expressly seeking any rightsholder permission, some tech firms have more recently begun entering deals where some content used for training AI models similar to GPT-4 (which runs the paid version of ChatGPT) comes under license. In December, for example, OpenAI signed an agreement with German publisher Axel Springer (publisher of Politico and Business Insider) for access to its articles. Previously, OpenAI has struck deals with other organizations, including the Associated Press. Reportedly, OpenAI is also in licensing talks with CNN, Fox, and Time, among others.

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House cleaners find two of the first desktop PCs in random boxes

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Those Q1 boxes are really historically interesting, and (AFIK) are so rare they are currently not currently emulated or even thoroughly documented and dumped. Hopefully a few more surfacing leads to something happening on that front.
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Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Source: The Register

Article note: The "Modern Linux" stack that is the defacto modern Unix is ...weird. It violates the "small simple parts composed easily via a small number of simple interfaces" idea _badly_, but we're all so culturally accustomed to Windows-y (...which is largely vms-y) things, it feels "normal" even to those of us who noticed it happening.

The lessons of yesteryear's OS are getting lost in translation

FOSDEM 2024  There are vital lessons to be learned from the history of Unix, but they're being forgotten. This is leading to truly vast amounts of wasted effort.…

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Scientists aghast at bizarre AI rat with huge genitals in peer-reviewed article

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: People long rewarded for shoveling shiny garbage as fast as they can find a new way to make more, shinier garbage faster, use it. News at 11.
An actual laboratory rat, who is intrigued.

Enlarge / An actual laboratory rat, who is intrigued. (credit: Getty | Photothek)

Appall and scorn ripped through scientists' social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal. Those figures—which the authors acknowledge in the article's text were made by Midjourney—are all uninterpretable. They contain gibberish text and, most strikingly, one includes an image of a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals, as well as a text label of "dck."

On Thursday, the publisher of the review article, Frontiers, posted an "expression of concern," noting that it is aware of concerns regarding the published piece. "An investigation is currently being conducted and this notice will be updated accordingly after the investigation concludes," the publisher wrote.

The article in question is titled "Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway," which was authored by three researchers in China, including the corresponding author Dingjun Hao of Xi’an Honghui Hospital. It was published online Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.

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