John Humphreys @johnpharmd@qoto.org

An analyst at Sequoia Capital estimated companies developing top AI models need to collectively generate ~$600B/year to pay for their AI infrastructure (Anton Shilov/Tom's Hardware)

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-industry-needs-to-earn-dollar600-billion-per-year-to-pay-for-massive-hardware-spend-fears-of-an-ai-bubble-intensify-in-wake-of-sequoia-report
http://www.techmeme.com/240707/p6#a240707p6

Exploit used in mass "Operation Triangulation" iPhone infection campaign targeted secret hardware feature

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/12/exploit-used-in-mass-iphone-infection-campaign-targeted-secret-hardware-feature/

ArmorCode, which consolidates vulnerability data from connected apps and software infrastructure for analysis, raised a $40M Series B led by HighlandX (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/armorcode-raises-40m-to-consolidate-security-data-in-one-place/
http://www.techmeme.com/231204/p32#a231204p32

Researchers studying technological change and employment can't agree on how many jobs AI will affect, but hope that their methodology is directionally correct (Sarah Kessler/New York Times)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/business/ai-jobs-work.html
http://www.techmeme.com/230611/p11#a230611p11

I often see people site Brooks's comments that development can't be sped up by adding people and, in fact, adding people actually slows things down but, in practice, I've generally seen adding people speed things up and, in a twenty year career across multiple engineering fields, I'm not sure I've ever seen an example of adding people slow things down.

Is my experience a total outlier here or is Brooks just mostly off base, as in https://www.patreon.com/posts/46629220 and https://danluu.com/essential-complexity/?

"In the history of modern physics, there has never been a widely accepted theory in which a moving, directional sense of time is fundamental. Many of our most basic descriptions of nature – from the laws of movement to the properties of molecules and matter – seem to exist in a universe where time doesn’t really pass. However, recent research across a variety of fields suggests that the movement of time might be more important than most physicists had once assumed."

https://aeon.co/essays/time-is-not-an-illusion-its-an-object-with-physical-size

Here's the first proof of concept I've seen of a prompt injection attack against ChatGPT Plugins - the successful attack uses Zapier to access the user's email and then exfiltrates the data using WebPilot https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/19/chatgpt-prompt-injection/

If you ever find yourself thinking “would this graph be better in 3D” the answer is always no⁠ ⁠ #Venn #Graph #VennDiagram #Data⁠ #cartoon #cartoons #comic #comics #instacomic #instacartoon ⁠ #academia #science #research ⁠ #errantscience

Last year we announced we would be joining Mastodon to explore an alternative to today's social media. 



We’re excited to announce we’re expanding Mozilla.social to a private beta, with hopes to open to the public soon.

This is just the beginning. Read more about the launch of our instance, including how to join the public waitlist. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-social-mastodon-private-beta-announcement/

Jack Dorsey criticized Elon Musk's leadership of Twitter on Bluesky and refused to take responsibility for the acquisition, claiming "it all went south" (Washington Post)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/29/elon-musk-twitter-jack-dorsey/
http://www.techmeme.com/230429/p3#a230429p3

My Heart Sings
By Jennifer Lommers

#trees #nature #painting #mastoart #AYearForArt #flowers

Ouch. 50% layoffs at Clubhouse. https://blog.clubhouse.com/april-27-2023/

"What if Google starts their own Google-branded Fediverse instance?"

They already did.

Google Buzz used OStatus as part of its protocol stack.

OStatus later evolved into ActivityPub.

As for Google Buzz? Like most Google social media projects, it died -- and was replaced by Google+.

@fediversenews

Absolutely revelatory piece from Yoav Goldberg casting light on an overlooked puzzle about last year: why did we need *reinforcement* learning (RLHF) to unlock the potential of language models? Why wasn’t supervised learning enough? #LLM #AI https://gist.github.com/yoavg/6bff0fecd65950898eba1bb321cfbd81

"The National Institutes of Health hasn’t signed up a single patient to test any potential treatments — despite a clear mandate from Congress to study them. And the few trials it is planning have already drawn a firestorm of criticism, especially one intervention that experts and advocates say may actually make some patients’ long Covid symptoms worse."

https://www.statnews.com/2023/04/20/long-covid-nih-billion/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon_organic

A look at ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol finalized in 2018, as it gains prominence powering Twitter alternatives like Mastodon (David Pierce/The Verge)

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/20/23689570/activitypub-protocol-standard-social-network
http://www.techmeme.com/230420/p23#a230420p23

The most popular way of wiring computers into a network is Ethernet, invented at Xerox PARC in 1973. I looked inside a Fujitsu Ethernet chip from 1984. The silicon die has rows of transistors and metal wiring. Around the edges, bond wires connect the chip to the external pins.