The more niche the subject, the easier it is. That is, if you try to poison the LLM on the works of Taylor Swift, it's likely to be much harder than on (say) the way to kill a process on an operating system. In the TS case, you've got to overcome an awful lot of very popular 'real' content for the LLM to consider your slop to be a likely extension of whatever it's spewing out. In the case of killing processes, there's a lot less of that information around, and so poisoning it is (relatively speaking) easier.

I wonder how long it'll be before the troll farms are able to manipulate AI on 'big' subjects like world leaders, or government records on a variety of hot topics?

Probably all true, but right now, OpenAI is something of a small player because the Microsofts (especially) and the Googles have pushed their own AI products with their other products - keeping OpenAI out of those playgrounds.

If somehow the playing field is levelled and OpenAI get to compete in those spaces, then they'll sure as you like start trying to muscle out other people. Then we go around the same loop all over again but with different players.

My cynical suspicions are that the likes of Google and Microsoft are trying to shoe-horn AI into as much as possible as quickly as possible. That way, they'll be able to claim it'll take longer to unpick it all to let other AI players in later on. They're currently the quick brown fix jumping over the lazy EU regulator dog, and doing as much as they can to make as much money and territory as quickly as possible. When the EU regulators attack dogs wake up and start biting the fox, then they're all hoping to be the most complex, most AI-in-everything that they can be so that they get longer to unpick it all than anyone else and so they get hurt by it less than anyone else. I can't imagine any of these companies think they'll get away with what they're doing forever, they've all been burned enough times. They're just trying to cause everyone else to spend too much money on it, and to end up less burned by it when it all comes tumbling down.

Yeah +1 for Home Assistant. I wasn't familiar with these Pop buttons, but something similar is trivially easy with an ESP32 (and ESPHome), some bits of wire and a push button switch. Indeed, now I know there (was) a market for these sorts of things, maybe I'll spend some time making such a thing.

(FWIW, I have a zwave 'scene button', which has 5 buttons on it and is rechargeable (about the size of a car key fob). It's a great little thing, and works great with HA - I can't remember what it cost, but it sure wasn't $100, and it can't be bricked by anyone - likely doesn't sell well because it says "hub required", which I personally take as a positive, but most people don't)

We brits aren't great at rooftop solar - we're getting better, but there's a long, long way to go. The square kilometres of untapped space are many, and if we get to using it, then the demand for grid electricity changes dramatically. Sure, cloudy days aren't as good as sunny ones, but I'll bet a lot of houses are just consuming "power vampires" right now, all of which could be powered by some solar, even on a cloudy day.

Say nothing about our pretty terrible record on insulating our houses - if we do that, then the use of gas drops off a lot, and for those with electrical heating, things improve there too. The government is stuck in a rut of raising taxes until productivity improves, but if they ever get to doing some sort of incentives for domestic rooftop solar and (probably more importantly) thermal performance of our houses, then we could shift our whole grid and carbon discussion by quite a distance.

But yes, our dependence on gas is far too great.

Domestic fees are capped (by the government) in some attempt to make going to university affordable for British people. The fees are already higher than just about anyone can afford, so students need to take loans to pay them. Despite this, the fees are below the cost of the course, and the price caps haven't kept up with inflation (which of course has been high lately).

There are no caps on fees to foreign students, so they've been something of a cash cow for universities for years. The relative number of foreign students you're allowed compares to domestic students is limited by the government.

However, of late they're not filling the foreign student quotas they're allowed. This could be for a number of reasons:
1) Brexit means it's harder for any students to come to the UK. Everyone needs to get visas and paperwork, which has likely become trickier for just about everyone. Europeans used to just be able to come here, but they now have all that paperwork to do as well. I guess if you have a hard-to-get-into-country and an easier one, then there's some value to go to the easier one.
2) Cost of living. The UK's always been pretty expensive, but that's only got worse in recent times. Just your average living expenses are now higher than they were, so as a student, you've got to carefully consider if you're going to be able to afford it. Given visa restrictions, "getting a job on the side" (as most brits now have to) is maybe not an option.

That last point also applies to domestic students. University is, for many people pretty unaffordable, and so they're turning to other choices such as apprenticeships and other vocational options. Some of those are really really good, and of course mean you earn money while you're learning, rather than charging you money to learn. Contrast to the government mantra some 20 odd years ago that "everyone should go to university" (which was ridiculous, by the way) - useless courses filled with students, all contributing to the costs of the university, but likely not costing much to run (and then likely not being of use in the workplace).

A lot of the cheaper-to-run courses are now less attended than they once were (see my last point). They likely subsidised the more expensive courses, which now isn't so much the case, and so departments are having to find ways to balance their books.

Lastly, research grants are harder to get, and perhaps not as lucrative as they once were. Aside from International competition, a lot of research is now done privately, where once almost none was done that way. Some universities have some utterly stupid terms and conditions on their research, which makes them less attractive to the private sector than alternatives, but that can't surely be true for all of them.

So all in all, there are lots of reasons why universities are in trouble. Truthfully, we've probably got too many universities and some consolidation is probably appropriate, but even still, it will have a dramatic effect on the future prospects of the nation if any of the good ones just aren't that great at the business side and end up closing down.

Maybe, but at least a few packages have been infected by an actual maintainer. That is, they obtain maintainer status, do some nice things for a while then submit an obfuscated patch to something, which is actually malware - and then the damage is done. No MFA is going to fix that.

As for signatures... a given project's CI is just going to sign the package and send it to the repo. In the above example, that's just going to sign the malware.

IMHO, the only way is for repos to compile the packages themselves, having (presumably) verified the source is acceptable. That needs source code inspection, and it needs quite a bit of compute to do the compilation too. Then the repo signs the package.

I suspect some 'premium' repos will appear that need a subscription to use, but in return do the due-diligence on the packages they hand out.

Here in the UK, I checked mine, it says:

Carbon emissions: 0 g/kWh (uk average 171 g/kWh
Renewables: 84.8% (uk average 43.2%)
Nuclear: 15.2% (uk average 12.7%)
Gas: 0% (uk average 35%)
Coal: 0% (uk average 6.3%)

I probably do pay a bit more for my day time electricity than other suppliers, but no one beats my off peak (night time) rate, and I often get a few "bursts" of off-peak rate during the day, all my EV changing is at the off peak rate and sometimes they do a hour of free electricity (so it's not definitely more expensive).

I've been with a couple of different suppliers over the last 20+ years, all of them "green first". I probably haven't had the absolute cheapest electricity as a result, but I'm fine with that. The table above makes me feel pretty good about my energy usage.

The one thing that's absolutely bent about the UK though... the price of my electricity *still* tracks the gas price. That's crazy, and needs to stop.

Huh? Did you (not) read a different TFS from me?

> While the new findings do not show that there is life on Enceladus,

The researcher's own words were:

> "When there is complexity happening, that means that the habitable potential of Enceladus is increasing right now,"

I believe the thinking goes like this...

1) You observe a planet or moon. So far, zero evidence of life.
2) You observe water on said body. Now you have a tiny chance of life.
3) You observe movement of that water, plumes, or ice, or tides or whatever else - now you have a slight chance of life
4) You observe 'organic compounds' - chances of life go up a bit more ... and so on.

With all of this, you start to justify the billions of euros in spend for a probe to go there (as opposed to sending it anywhere else) and have a proper look. Which leads to the researcher saying...

> The results, he added, support plans by the European Space Agency (ESA) to investigate the moon for signs of life.

Seems pretty reasonable to me. In 2047, we'll be able to determine directly if there's life there or not. Roll on 2047 - finding actual life anywhere except Earth would change humanity forever.

We mainly use our Amazon stick to load up Netflix and occasionally Kodi. If they're going to lock out Kodi, then I'll need to find another way to do that bit. Ideally I'd get Netflix on that other thing too, then I don't really need to look at Amazon for anything. Netflix aren't completely against running on open source projects, although it'll take a lot of convincing it's worth their time to do it.

Amazon Prime video is "for free" - and it shows. I just watched Reacher (which is average at best, but he does get his shirt off a lot, if that's your bag). The thing is, they insist on putting in ads - but they're the same 3 ads every time. I didn't want a new mop the first time, and I sure as hell don't after the 10th time. If I could "do telly" without ever having to see Amazon promoting something or other, then I'd consider that a 'win'. As for the games, photos and other fluff they have on there... yeah, not doing that.

So all in all, this could be the end of Amazon Prime Video (or at least, a considerable reduction in its utility).

We own a car (one), and yet I've used the local car club a few times. It's great, I book it, walk maybe 5 minutes to get to it and then just drive it away. I put it back a while later, lock it and forget about it. There are 3 cars all within 10 minutes walk, so if one is booked, I can probably use another. There have been times where they're all booked though - particularly at short notice.

So no, the car club hasn't made car ownership redundant, but it sure has saved us from having two cars.

I could imagine a service like this - provided it was properly resourced could indeed encroach into us needing a car at all. The remote driving thing is just getting around the lack of self-driving cars, and you can imagine they're going to get rid of the remote driving as soon as they can. When they do, then I won't need to drive either, as it'll do all of that for me too - but even being generous, we're not getting to that stage for 10 more years.

Other commenters talk about child seats and the like - okay, yeah, won't work well for that. Buy a car for 5 years. The rest of us with older kids (or no kids) can get along with no car. It doesn't need to solve every problem to solve a decent number of problems.

The key thing is how many cars do they have? If it's not enough, then it will get frustrating really quick. If it's not outside my house in a few minutes, it's probably not resourced well enough.

Prices will continue to rise until subscriptions increase!

I suspect Disney are realising Netflix wasn't such a bad deal after all. At least when they were on there, people might see *some* of their content, now we all have a handy no-Disney filter attached to our TVs and never have to accidentally watch something owned by the Disney Corporation.

FWIW, Netflix recently got Star Trek. I just finished watching Voyager (I last saw that on linear TV back in the late 90s). Had they kept it on Paramount+, I'd wouldn't have seen it, and whilst I'm sure Netfix have passed along a pittance for my watching it all, at least it was a pittance - at no particular cost or risk to Paramount.

This sounds like the (niche) example given in TFS about the blind guy getting refused taxi service. It's great that there's a way to record such incidents, but I'd imagine you could do so for a lot less than the $800 price. It strikes me that a small camera, with an SD card or similar attached to some glasses (or some other worn item, I guess) would solve for both use-cases quite happily. I dare say the Chinese could manufacture something like that for about $20.

So as I say, it's great someone's found their niche, but as yet, we've yet to see an actual use for these glasses that isn't something you could do better for less if a suitable product existed, is unique to the capabilities of these glasses, and is genuinely useful.

I wonder what they paid for it? I'd like to think maybe it was $100 or something, but Fyre presumably still owes people money, so maybe it had to be a bit more?

Either way, Limewire was a pretty toxic brand until those blokes bought it. Now it's pretty much unheard of. Fyre is about as toxic as it comes, so one wonders what they're going to do with it.

> Why is the UK suddenly attractive now when it wasn't a few years ago?

We're pals with your new king, that's why. We're a place that US companies can sell their wares and go to get the things they need - but we don't encroach on the US's own abilities to do things. We're not going to do manufacturing, we're not doing espionage on US companies, we're not a security threat, etc etc. In fact, we're easily coerced in times of need, perhaps even an occasional proxy for US power projection abroad. Whilst we won't go into a "forever war" on our own at the behest of the US, we'll certainly throw in some help when the US wants to do such a thing - thus reducing US exposure.

Mostly though, we're a "safe" offshore talent pool and we're (in general) quite happy to buy american crap.

You're right - and yes, there are plenty of decent windows admins in the world, so I'm sorry to have lumped you in with the less talented. But I'll bet you're well beyond what any school could afford.