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Wonderful, exuberant stories spill out in these honest tales of lives genuinely transformed by literature – while Queen Camilla has an off-with-their-heads moment
You have to love a documentary in which Queen Camilla reveals that as a teenager one of her favourite books was The Scarlet Pimpernel because “I was sort of obsessed at that time by the guillotine”. ’I’m sorry, what? Could we back up a moment? I have a few more questions I’d like to ask.
Alas, she goes on to refer to the tricoteuses in A Tale of Two Cities as “ghastly women”, so hopes of Camilla’s coronation as the end of a very long seditious play by the Shands are ultimately dashed. But if anyone was ever going to be an aristocratic sleeper agent primed to bring down the monarchy from within, it would be Camilla. Clearly born the very gamest of girls, she has a gleam in her eye as she recalls her younger self that still makes you wonder …
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A YouTuber who’s gained a following for trolling AI interview bots brought his own computing companion to an interview with him. As chaos ensued, viewers learned that having an AI as your interview agent isn't a good idea. Graham Dot Zip is a comedian whose YouTube channel has blown up recently thanks to videos of him demonstrating the absurdity of AI bots used to conduct early-stage interviews with job candidates. AI interviewers have become quite the phenomenon in recent months, and not one that job seekers are fond of, with plenty of videos and social media posts documenting hate for them. Enter Graham and his trolling of various interview bots. Some videos have garnered nearly 2 million views in the past few weeks. In one, he answers every question with gibberish responses that the AI parrots as if they’re cogent responses. In another, he has the bot gushing unnecessary pleasantries and thanks as the two go back and forth trying to be professionally polite. While it’s amusing to watch an AI try to deal with interviewees who are obviously trolling them, Graham’s most recent video is what really merits a mention here. In this instance, Graham pits his own AI representative, which he created to handle the interview for him, against an AI interviewer presented as acting on behalf of a company. Victor, Graham’s “representative,” misstates Graham’s qualifications and misrepresents his participation in a particular project. Then comes the kicker: When asked about salary expectations, Victor claims Graham would be happy to take the job for around $60,000 a year, which Graham vehemently disagrees with, saying he was looking at somewhere between $140K and $150K. The AI recruiter refuses to go above $90K. Graham steps out for a moment, and the two bots decide to schedule a follow-up interview without him. Upon his return, both are stuck in a loop thanking each other for their time and saying goodbye, seemingly without the ability to terminate the call. While funny, there’s a bit of a dystopian nightmare to be found here, too. Although Graham may be trolling the AI interviewer, he's still been essentially cornered by his own AI bot’s poor ability to negotiate and refusal to listen to his instructions not to lie about his qualifications and his desired salary range. It’s a worrying prospect in the era of agentic commerce, where AI companies are trying to create AI agents that can shop for us and undertake other commercial exchanges. Who’s to say those bots are any better at negotiating for a good deal than Victor? If there’s anything to be learned from a growing number of videos of people trolling AI interview bots, convincing them they’re dying, and burning through those valuable AI tokens, it’s that, yet again, there are things AI is good for and things it’s not. Putting on a human mask and talking to human job candidates, frankly, isn’t something they ought to be doing - job seekers don’t think so, at least, despite AI HR departments seemingly becoming the norm. Given Victor’s poor negotiation skills, they probably shouldn’t be engaged in anything to do with trying to get consumers a deal, either. As the AI hellscape grows around us, with seemingly no limit to what a bot-pushing firm will try to sell, all we can do is laugh, it seems. Luckily, there are plenty of dumb bots out there ready to make AI providers and the companies using their services the butt of many an internet joke. ®
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AI company Anthropic is warning that advances in small AI models could soon usher in a new era of self-replicating malware that's capable of infecting smart fridges, vacuum cleaners, and a wide range of other Internet-of-things devices and is more resistant to takedown. By next year, smaller AI models may be able to autonomously self-replicate on all kinds of IoT devices, the company said. Eventually, the capability could enable computer worms, which propagate without requiring human interaction and are capable of infecting unfamiliar IoT devices. An experiment the company performed recently revealed significant challenges in bringing such an AI malware replicator to fruition, so the finding is necessarily tempered. Still, the results do raise concerns about the possibility of new forms of computer worms.
Anthropic further warned not only about the new potential malware, but also that it could be difficult to stop. In its blog post, it wrote that "a replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there's no centralized point to shut off -- though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own." Smaller AI models require much less powerful hardware to run than do frontier models. Anthropic ran small open-weight models on real or simulated low-cost, off-brand Android TV boxes and other types of IoT hardware. Company researchers found that by using quantization to represent the models using fewer bits and splitting the workloads into "shards" running on each device, the models were able to establish inference, meaning that the model weights loaded and could generate output.
[...] This finding was the starting point for further research that asked: Would it be possible for small models to create self-replicating infections that run themselves on IoT devices the way traditional IoT worms, like Mirai, install DDoS code and other payloads? Unlike Mirai, these AI worms could pose a much higher threat, since the models could tailor exploits and payloads dynamically, depending on the target. Once such an infection chain began, it might also be harder for defenders to stop it. "Such an 'AI worm' could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware," Anthropic said. "Effectively, the weights would become part of the malware payload." Further reading: Anthropic Bans Cruelty Toward Claude
Anthropic further warned not only about the new potential malware, but also that it could be difficult to stop. In its blog post, it wrote that "a replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there's no centralized point to shut off -- though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own." Smaller AI models require much less powerful hardware to run than do frontier models. Anthropic ran small open-weight models on real or simulated low-cost, off-brand Android TV boxes and other types of IoT hardware. Company researchers found that by using quantization to represent the models using fewer bits and splitting the workloads into "shards" running on each device, the models were able to establish inference, meaning that the model weights loaded and could generate output.
[...] This finding was the starting point for further research that asked: Would it be possible for small models to create self-replicating infections that run themselves on IoT devices the way traditional IoT worms, like Mirai, install DDoS code and other payloads? Unlike Mirai, these AI worms could pose a much higher threat, since the models could tailor exploits and payloads dynamically, depending on the target. Once such an infection chain began, it might also be harder for defenders to stop it. "Such an 'AI worm' could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware," Anthropic said. "Effectively, the weights would become part of the malware payload." Further reading: Anthropic Bans Cruelty Toward Claude
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
TIRANA (ANP/AFP) - In de Albanese hoofdstad zijn bij grote demonstraties meerdere overheidsgebouwen beschadigd. De demonstranten, veelal studenten, zijn voor de tweede dag op rij op de been om te pleiten voor betere omstandigheden op de universiteiten in het land. Ook eisen ze het vertrek van premier Edi Rama.
Op beelden op sociale media is te zien hoe woensdag brand gesticht is in de hal van het ministerie van Justitie. De politie moest eraan te pas komen om de weg vrij te maken voor de brandweer. Ook winkels in de hoofdstad moesten het ontgelden. De politie zette onder meer waterkanonnen en traangas in om de demonstranten uiteen te drijven. Die lieten zich echter niet zomaar verjagen.
Naast het ministerie van Justitie werden ook panden van Financiën en het kantoor van premier Rama belaagd. De Albanese minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Ervin Demo heeft gezegd zich te herkennen in de wensen van de betogers, maar riep hen eveneens op in te binden "voordat het te laat is".
NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn woensdag met verliezen gesloten. Beleggers reageerden op inflatiecijfers over september, die hoger uitvielen dan verwacht en de sterkste toename sinds april kenden.
De consumentenprijzen in de Verenigde Staten stegen in september met 0,6 procent vergeleken met de maand ervoor. Op jaarbasis ging het om een toename van 3,7 procent. Dat laatste cijfer was iets hoger dan kenners volgens persbureau Bloomberg hadden verwacht.
De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,1 procent lager op 51.621,48 punten. De brede S&P 500-index sloot 1,1 procent lager op 7718,94 punten. Techgraadmeter Nasdaq verloor 1,9 procent en eindigde 26.692,87 punten. Dinsdag waren minnen tot 0,4 procent te zien op Wall Street.
It’s time to de-privatize the US government. “The problem is not just that privatization is often inefficient because it adds a nontransparent layer of profiteering on top of government functions. The problem is that government loses basic capacity.”
Giovanni van Bronckhorst straalde na afloop van Feyenoord - Como 1907. Vooral de mentaliteit en vechtlust van zijn mannen stemden de oefenmeester tevreden. Maar hij had ook persoonlijke complimenten over voor Anis Hadj Moussa, die Feyenoord de overwinning bezorgde.
