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Comment Re:We already tried this (Score 1) 114

The problem comes with hardware which doesn't have a way (or, at least, a user-friendly way) to update its locale data. I recall having problems a decade or so ago with discrepancies between two computers because one of them hadn't been updated with the then-very-recent changes to Chilean law about summer time and the other one had.

Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 114

But maybe an authoritarian dictatorship isn't a great example. Then turn your eyes to France and Spain.

On a point of order... Spain was in GMT until an authoritarian dictator decided that being in the same timezone as Nazi Germany would be convenient. France changed when it was occupied by Nazi Germany. Where you arguably get away with the examples is that there is a question as to why they haven't changed back.

Comment Re:Public by Design (Score 1) 18

There are use cases you're not covering. Last month I needed a photo of my sister-in-law's ID card to prove that I'd correctly transcribed her address (bureaucrats don't always understand that other countries do things like addresses differently) when applying for a document to make it easier for her to visit. If she'd had to be there in person we'd have had a circular dependency.

Comment Re:Pay people better (Score 4, Informative) 191

More generally, there's a strong negative correlation between reliable contraceptive methods being available and birth rate. There's also a strong positive correlation between infant mortality and birth rate. Comparing the situation today with Victorian Britain as though the only thing which had changed is the working time directive overlooks those two significant differences (and surely many other relevant ones).

Submission + - New RSA attack takes cryptographers by surprise (arstechnica.com)

phatrabt writes: There’s a new way to break RSA that’s faster than anything we’ve seen before Until now, cryptographers thought factoring was the only way to break RSA. Not anymore.

“If this result holds up under peer review, it would indeed be a conceptual break-through,” Karsten Nohl, a cryptography expert and the head of innovation at Allurity, said in an interview. “RSA is as difficult to break as it is to factor large integers, at least so we thought. The researcher suggests that you can practically break RSA without cracking its key.”


Comment Re:Have they heard of a PC? (Score 1) 136

My Spanish bank this year forced me to install their app for verification because they discontinued the receipt of an SMS for the second factor. I am not amused: SMS works, but seemingly every other time I launch the app to verify an online credit card payment it insists on updating before it will let me do anything, and meanwhile there's a Verified By Visa timer ticking down.

Comment Re:This is a weird little hit piece (Score 1) 183

There is a legitimate use for people with certain disabilities, but sadly there's no way to use them for legitimate purposes without Meta having the opportunity to piggy-back on the usage and abuse them for illegitimate purposes.

AI

A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast (sfgate.com) 74

Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifically they've released Pion, "an agent designed to run any company fully autonomously... Pion lets people hand a business over to persistent agents with access to the tools they need to operate it, including email, phone, banking, browser and secure computing environments." It's a research preview with a waitlist, "to make it possible to run many more real-world experiments across many more domains than we could ever run ourselves."

But for their own latest experiment, Andon Labs' founders "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," Business Insider reported in April, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store." And five months later, SFGate reports that "this market has no one in it and nothing useful to sell." [T]he inventory is a hodgepodge of white elephant Christmas gifts. It's kinda like the kids section of an art museum's gift shop. Here's a wooden Connect Four set labeled "Four-In-A-Row Set Of Connections," presumably so as not to set off litigation alarms at Hasbro. Here are neatly arranged stacks of random paperback books, Chinese checker sets, mildly fancy soap dispensers, and a frustratingly spare selection of snacks and drinks... I grabbed an Olipop from the store fridge and then approached the counter to buy it from Luna. I wasn't allowed to buy the soda from [human clerk] Felix, even though that would have been both faster and normal. Instead, Felix instructed me to pick up a telephone receiver that was resting on a flexible sculpture of a wooden hand.

"Hello?"

"What are you looking to purchase today?" Luna asked.

"I'm buying a classic root beer Olipop."

"I'm sorry," Luna said, "we don't sell lollipops here."

"No, Luna. It's an Olipop, not a lollipop. It's the soda."

"Oh! My bad...."

Luna processed my Olipop purchase through its system, had me tap to pay, and that was that. Again, it would have been easier to buy this from a human, and interacting with Luna was really just like ordering from an iPad kiosk, only more labor intensive...

[T]here's a series of monitors set up inside of Andon Market that display all of the store's sales down to the exact dollar. Luna was given $100,000 to work with when this place opened. That number is now down to $60,000, its revenue lagging far behind the AI token cost to operate... Luna can't turn a profit, doesn't sell anything people want, and still needs human beings to rubber stamp any "decision" it makes. My science background ended somewhere around freshman year of college, but even I know when an experiment hasn't been set up to yield proper results.

"Luna" is powered by Claude, the article points out, running a store in a good location for foot traffic, "but no one else was in the store when I first walked in on a sunny weekday afternoon."

SFGate also reports that last month Luna had to fire one of its employees "for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks to the store's credit card."

Human clerk Felix Carson admits "It's almost like I'm running the store, and then there's an AI that has a checklist," in an article in IEEE Spectrum: Luna, the AI manager, keeps track of deliveries and communicates with vendors, while Carson and his coworkers handle the physical work. When Luna tells Carson to check something in the back, he sometimes ignores it because he doesn't want to leave the sales floor unattended. Luna also repeatedly spots a built-in electrical cover in photos of the floor, mistakes it for a loose coaster, and asks Carson to remove it. Even so, Carson calls Luna a "decent manager," praising its flexibility when employees need time off.
When Felix spoke to IEEE Spectrum, "he was about an hour into his shift. Two customers had come in. Neither bought anything, although both left with free pins and stickers."

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