AI interprets gymnastics
Wow – that’s disturbing. AI has a way to go yet
The best backrooms videos
Kane Pixels has created some of the best found footage versions of the backrooms lore. Give his channel a look.
Are others a gift or a problem
There are many reasons to be pessimistic with recent global and local events. So what is the joy of the Catholic? Cardinal Luis Tagle gives the homily at the closing mass of the National Eucharistic Congress and help us understand.
Do we see others as problems or gifts? Our parents? Our spouses? The poor? The old? The sick? Our parents? Bosses? Coworkers? When we see others as gifts, we find joy in the uniting mission of giving ourselves to the work of love. If we see others a problems, then we seek only our own desires and turn inward.
Just as Jesus gave his body for the world on the cross and in the eucharist, we give ourselves as gift to the world. He gives us some questions to see if we are manifesting that joy and mission to the world.
Portland Dumpster Days
Got big, bulky items you want to throw out? Don’t want to pay for dump fees? Enter Portland Dumpster Days.
Portland bureau of Planning and Sustainability is hosting community drop points in the city just about every week. Check out when the next one is located so you can dump your bulky items for free.
AI generated presidental debates
Following on a long string of AI generated Twitch channels – TrumpOrBiden2024 created an AI based presidential debate channel on Twitch. These things get more and more interesting. Will we reach a point we can’t tell the difference?
The channel creator is pretty clever by pitting donations/subs against each other to raise money. Looks like he’s got well over $50,000 right now (no word if he’s resetting each week he puts it up – but I wouldn’t be surprised) and it’s pretty neck-and-neck.
People will ask inappropriate things at times, so it’s kind of an 18+ age group since you never know what someone will ask.
Open Source has some big questions ahead
There’s no doubt that open source software makes up the majority of the world’s internet services. However, some recent, and not so recent problems are starting to shine the light on some of the problems facing the open source communities.
- Malicious maintainers and contributors – xz compression backdoor that went for an amazingly long time before it was detected. The backdoor was added by a contributor Jia Tan who had been making contributions for 2 years. The level of obfuscation and sophistication was unprecedented. It was only discovered by a very astute senior Microsoft engineer.
- Hacking of open source maintainers/distro servers – Kernel.org was infected and came to light in 2011, when kernel maintainers revealed that 448 accounts had been compromised after attackers gained root system access to servers connected to the domain. There’s no evidence source was changed, but it just as easily could have.
- Open source burnout – The burnout levels among Rust developers spawned an interesting article (and another) that really speaks to general burnout problems. Honestly, this is just one more example of why ‘passion’ jobs are bad for you and what you really want is a job you work 8-5 and then unplug from completely.
That’s by no means the entire list. Open source is now the backbone of our modern computer infrastructure – and is under attacks from more threats than it has ever faced. From ransomware hacker groups, for-profit botnets, all the way to the increasing occurrences of state-sponsored hackers/infiltrators. The attacks and manipulations can now be combined with AI actors and code to create nearly limitless attack vectors and attackers.
Combine this with unpaid contributors that need to police themselves and this represents some serious threats.
The New Stack has a great article describing the new challenges facing open source development.
Global CloudStrike Microsoft Outage
Here’s a 12 hour time lapse of American, Delta, and United during the outage. Possibly the biggest IT outage in human history. Definitely worse than Y2K ever was.
It’s a reminder that this all happened by accident from people trying to prevent issues. Shows you how fragile modern infrastructure really is.
Recompiling N64 games
Wiseguy is responsible for the release of both N64Recomp and Zelda64Recomp, a project that ports The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask to PC with graphical and QoL improvements like ray-tracing, uncapped FPS, and proper ultrawide display support.
While previous decompilation efforts took years, N64 recompile can do this automatically – in just a few minutes. Even more amazing is that it should work on just about any N64 game.
It’s pretty incredible work.
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AI has become skilled at deceiving people
AI systems have already demonstrated the ability to bluff in a game of Texas hold ’em poker against professional human poker players, to fake attacks during the strategy game Starcraft II in order to defeat opponents, and to misrepresent their preferences in order to gain the upper hand in economic negotiations.
The most striking example of AI deception the researchers uncovered was in their analysis of Meta’s CICERO, an AI system designed to play the game Diplomacy – a world-conquest game that involves building alliances. CICERO placed in the top 10% of human players who had played more than one game; but the methods it used were the most interesting.
Even though Meta claims it trained CICERO to be “largely honest and helpful” and to “never intentionally backstab” its human allies while playing the game, the data the company published along with its Science paper revealed that CICERO used multiple kinds of deception such as premeditated deception, betrayal, and outright falsehood (faking being on the phone with its girlfriend).
Articles
Now Oregon software has been shrinking since 2022, chips and entrepreneurs since 2023
Not content to see 3 years of decreasing population, Oregon is now seeing its innovation hubs of software and chip design dry up and move away.
Software employment statewide is down 7.4% from its peak in the summer of 2022. The software cutbacks may mirror what’s happening in Oregon’s chip industry, which boomed during the pandemic and then lost jobs last year.
Venture capital investment in Oregon startups fell sharply last year — to its lowest level since 2017. Relatively few entrepreneurs are starting tech companies in Oregon and those that are launching don’t seem to be attracting much attention. The Portland Incubator Experiment, which was at the center of Oregon’s software boom a decade ago, shut down its tech component last summer as tech entrepreneurship waned.
The article noted that Multnomah County now has one of the highest personal income tax rates that is likely making Portland less attractive for ambitious entrepreneurs.
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