Sigh.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@krnlg @solitha Therac-25[1] predated most of the problems: the problem is that Therac-25 isn't universally taught in CS classes!

[1] the accidents happened from 1985, but the Therac-25 dates to 1975 and the software was written by one dude using PDP-11 assembler who may well not have understood race conditions.

[dymaxion@infosec.exchange]

@cstross
Huh. Pity they don't talk about the compute required.

[solitha@mastodon.social]

@krnlg I would reply that the only way we *can* mature as a civilization, and figure out how to handle this power ethically, is through practice and self-reflection.

And that maturing is helped immensely by those like you with a strong sense of the inherent worth of all life. It drives us to honor the sacrifices we make, and to seek advances that no longer require such sacrifice.

@cstross

[pwassonchat@eldritch.cafe]

@annehargreaves @rachel @cstross @mwl I'm French and to me it sounds like someone tried to translate "[veuillez] faire le nécessaire" too literally/word to word. Maybe that's where the old English got it from ?

[taatm@mathstodon.xyz]

@cstross @stevegis_ssg
You knew this instinctively.
It was hardwired into your brain.

[mark@mastodon.fixermark.com]

@cstross

kinda-sorta validates the key premise of the SF novel I just handed in last month

That must feel good. I'm reminded of a forward to one of Zelazny's collections about The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth where he commented on the sudden realization he had to get the thing published because he was spinning a tale of hunting alien whales on the vast oceans of Venus and the Soviets were about to launch a probe that was going to confirm or deny that there were oceans at all.

I'm not a writer, but it seems to me the nice thing about past-fantasy is that you can decide to finish a story about dragons and castles at more-or-less any time and it won't be invalidated or rendered too fantastical for the reader to accept. Science fiction doesn't always have that luxury since the future keeps rushing at us.

[a@girllich.link]

Please don't forget the LGBT in LGBTESCREAL

[pare@kamu.social]

@VATVSLPR @cstross Thouh for the genral good, shouldn’t we start by dissecting the most brilliant brains available now? No need to dissect the unwashed masses, but to make lives better for the hypothetical trillions, dissect all the billoinaire brains!

Sarcasm, obviously. I’m not advocating dissecting anyone. It’s just that for some reason TESCREAL types propose things which get them, and just them, money and power right now.

[ansuz@gts.cryptography.dog]

@rachel @cstross @mwl @pwassonchat "prepone" as an opposite of "postpone" is one of my favourite quirks of Indian English

[speakertomanagers@wandering.shop]

@cstross
This is a major milestone in understanding the operation; I am seriously impressed.

But doesn’t some small part of your rmind, thinking back to the cockrroches they turned into robots go:

NEXT UP: Zombie Drosophila controlled by LLMs!!!

[annehargreaves@ioc.exchange]

@pwassonchat @rachel @cstross @mwl Could be!

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@dymaxion Indeed. But I suspect as an academic project with no immediate avenues for commercial exploitation they probably didn't build any new data centres for it.

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@SpeakerToManagers No, it goes to DARPA, at Pete Hegseth's instruction, funding research into LLM-controlled murder hornets loaded with tetrodotoxin in their stingers and aimed at targets identified as being insufficiently Christian Nationalist.

[beecycling@wandering.shop]

@rachel @cstross @mwl @pwassonchat It's fun how lots of phrases in other English speaking places, and that we Brits sneer at as being "not proper English", turn out to be older than what we now use in the UK. Fall is older than Autumn, that kind of thing.

[dymaxion@infosec.exchange]

@cstross
Of course. But "we did this on a laptop" and "we did this on a 64-card H200 cluster" imply very different things about the work.

[whvholst@eupolicy.social]

@dymaxion @cstross The resulting model sounds small-ish, with 127.4k neurons and 50 million synapses, as in, not out of reach to be put on an ASIC. Would make for an interesting drone mind...

[dymaxion@infosec.exchange]

@whvholst
@cstross It depends how much detail they needed to stimulate them to get the system to actually work, and at what frequency. Doesn't actually tell us anything.

[rachel@transitory.social]

@ansuz@gts.cryptography.dog @cstross@wandering.shop @mwl@io.mwl.io @pwassonchat@eldritch.cafe I also saw people ask for "Updation and Deletion" of records and honestly yeah that works

[ansuz@gts.cryptography.dog]

@rachel @cstross @mwl @pwassonchat yes! I used to work on collaborative editing software in France, and heard "edition" quite often to describe the process of editing.

It still sounds a little weird to me, but it's perfectly logical.

[landley@mstdn.jp]

@shovemedia @cstross @Antiqueight Back around 2008 people thought you could just saturate cells with trehalose to survive dessication (by preserving the internal structure), but tardigrades use it in conjunction with special proteins: https://research.ucdavis.edu/research-inspired-by-water-bears-leads-to-innovations-in-medicine-food-preservation-and-blood-storage/