Australian chemist and videographer Explosions & Fire argues convincingly that the ongoing recent radioactive-boy-scout scandal should not result in prosecution. For context, a 24-year-old man ordered small samples of radioactive isotopes from the USA, Australia failed to intercept it at the border, and they are prosecuting him in order to avoid embarrassment over incompetence. I don't have a choice sneer; E&F is unwaveringly energized over the topic of radioactive isotopes and injustice, and the whole thing is worth watching.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1777 readers
12 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
AI Overturns Centuries of Forensic Fingerprinting Practice?
Published in Science... Advances
Probably a fair bit to sneer at in the actual study that I'm missing, and the article I first found it in is peak AI Hype. (Big Forensics is trying to keep you from knowing the Truth as found by an undergrad with a GPU) But the part that I found most concerning is that even the whole paper doesn't appear to break down their 77% accuracy index and provide the specific result ratios that go into it. In a field where each false positive represents a step on the road to innocent people being convicted of major crimes I would really like to know that number specifically.
At a <30s glance, I'm going to guess the model is finding correlations in the artefacts of fingerprint taking, digitalisation, presentation and so on instead of fingerprints proper, like every damn time this sort of story comes up.
with a whole 2 Ts!
taking bets on whether that's 2 terminators or whether it's the amount of USD they want to burn to make it into a machine god
Llama 4 Maverick offers a best-in-class performance to cost ratio with an experimental chat version scoring ELO of 1417 on LMArena.
Everything on that page is silly nonsense, but this takes the cake. An Elo rating for chitchat!!!
I bet I could win a conversation against any LLM ant day.
coming up soon: tacticool arena prompt fights, where they get ranked on style and guile
(as was said on whose line is it anyway: "where everything is made up and the points don't matter")
Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in "Llama Four" and it kept saying "2" so they decided to roll with it.
What if America built a Death Star, but it was 50% exhaust ports by surface area?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/how-the-eu-could-target-us-big-tech-with-its-tariff-response.html
Also the big fuckoff wave motion laser cannon thing is aimed through the ship itself.
Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
"We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."
This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off
Holy smokes
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 At least one of the DOGE team has a recent criminal past, which should, in a sensible world, bar him from accessing such data: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/
Of course it's the dweebiest looking one.
Thats the same place the 764 people came out of.
there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones don't work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they don't work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat
the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, it's not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea i'm effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesn't help that thiel's people are swamped in vc money, therefore they don't have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they don't need to work at all. ukrainians don't have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesn't work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.
this is the disruption they're cooking. invest in eastern europe or something
@sailor_sega_saturn I hate how these death cult douchebros appropriate Tolkien to name their companies selling fascism in bulk to the government.
@sailor_sega_saturn getting this in now: "I never thought *my* hed would get cut off," sobs CEO of Cuttin' Off Heds, Inc.
Maximilien Robespierre
I've already depicted you as the virgin Robespierre... and that's the limit of my knowledge wrt figures in the french revolution.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 This has always been how he, and Palantir, think about the world. It's a terrible company, full of terrible people, selling horrifying products to terrible countries and companies.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Peter Thiel könnte einer derjenigen sein, die bei der Revolution ihren Kopf verlieren…
their thesis might be right, their guess as to the subjects of the sentence however...
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
I hear that the rich and powerful are concerned about guillotine and that makes me feel happy. They should fear us.
Banger meme from artist Victoria Ying
description:
It’s a scene from White Lotus. A man and a woman are lying on beach chairs, having a conversation.
Panel 1, Man: ‘Why can’t you just like my generative AI “art?”’
Panel 2, Woman: ‘You have to be vulnerable enough to be bad at something to be good at it, but you’re too much of a coward.’
Panel 3, Woman: ‘Because you’re soulless.”
Panel 4: Man is speechless, visibly shook
view more: next ›