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Comment A Different Recent Experience (Score 1) 120

Scene: a queue of customers in a shop. Customer at the head of the queue with a total of $19.10, hands the cashier a $20 note to pay. There is no till just an electronic card reader and a cash drawer.

A frown appears on the cashier's face as the sudden realization that skills learned in their "advanced" maths class will now be called on after years of neglect. They reach for the calculator only to remember that the batteries died this morning and nobody has had a chance to replace them. Concentrating hard finally an epiphany - $19 is just $1 less than $20 so they quickly hand the customer a dollar.

But no, the customer hands it back saying this is too much change. Panic sets in as the cashier realizes that they had forgotten the decimal place! How can they be expected to do university-level maths? They don't have a maths degree! Faint wisps of steam rise from their ears as mathematical machinery deep in their brain rumbles into action straining against the buildup of forgotten Tiktok videos and What's App messages. Finally, seemingly from nowhere comes the answer - it's 90 cents! With a flash of relief the cashier opens the cash draw only to be confronted with 25, 10 and 5 cent coins and a new seemingly impossible puzzle of how to choose the right coins to make up 90 cents....

My takeaway is that given the wonerful level fo maths education we now seem to have, sadly even cash transactions require working technology today.
News

VP.net Promises "Cryptographically Verifiable Privacy" (torrentfreak.com) 30

TorrentFreak spotlights VP.net, a brand-new service from Private Internet Access founder Andrew Lee (the guy who gifted Linux Journal to Slashdot) that eliminates the classic "just trust your VPN" problem by locking identity-mapping and traffic-handling inside Intel SGX enclaves. The company promises 'cryptographically verifiable privacy' by using special hardware 'safes' (Intel SGX), so even the provider can't track what its users are up to.

The design goal is that no one, not even the VPN company, can link "User X" to "Website Y."

Lee frames it as enabling agency over one's privacy:

"Our zero trust solution does not require you to trust us - and that's how it should be. Your privacy should be up to your choice - not up to some random VPN provider in some random foreign country."

The team behind VP.net includes CEO Matt Kim as well as arguably the first Bitcoin veterans Roger Ver and Mark Karpeles.

Ask Slashdot: Now that there's a VPN where you don't have to "just trust the provider" - arguably the first real zero-trust VPN - are trust based VPNs obsolete?

Comment Re:Bullying... (Score 1) 124

They didn't get anything in exchange for this action in addition to what they already had. All they got was americans agreeing that they will continue negotiations Trump stopped two days ago in response to this law. And Americans likely added a few more points to the agenda limiting taxation capabilities of Canadian state.

So all that happened is that Trump just called another bluff. This was a Canadian mistake similar to one Trump made when he stated memeing about annexing Canada, getting a much less friendly government elected there.

Some things you need to actually hold back on until ink is on the paper.

Comment Re:I see more and more products marketed as AI-fre (Score 2) 47

Porn industry embraced it wholeheartedly.

What you found is a one of a tiny handful of accounts that is trying to differentiate by saying "look I'm not doing what everyone else is doing". This is why it emphasizes "this creator". The entire selling point is that everyone has already gone for AI.

Comment Re:Backlash or opinion drifting towards the scienc (Score 0) 128

There is actually a relatively simple proof for that: LLMs are fully deterministic. Yes, many do include "randomization", but that is by PRNG and does only add the appearance of non-determinism.

This is a silly argument. If the source were thermal noise which is inherently nondeterministic it would make no difference.

First, by current Physics, thermal noise is deterministic. And second, it makes a difference for the mechanism of the proof. Hence your argument is nonsense.
And as a side-note, nobody actually knows whether putting in true randomness (by currently known Physics reserved for quantum effects) would make a difference or not. My proof would certainly not work for that scenario though.

Hence there is no mechanism for consciousness. Because consciousness can influence physical reality (we talk about it) even though it is completely unclear as to how that happens. But a deterministic computation always behaves the same, there is no outside influence. Hence it cannot have consciousness.

This is a meandering series of non sequiturs.

Nope. I guess you lack experience with proof theory or are not smart enoug to see what the claim actually is.

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