Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
date stamped on slide, August 1966, handwritten on slide, "paddy wagon, Lake Tahoe"
After Ukraine failed to shoot down a single ballistic missile fired by Russia on Wednesday, the president urged allies to increase supplies of Patriot interceptors
Nato is working to get Ukraine the air defences it “urgently needs”, its secretary general has said, after Kyiv failed to shoot down a single Russian missile in an attack on Wednesday, and as Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Moscow was seeking to significantly boost missile production ahead of winter.
Speaking at a National Security and Defense Council meeting on winter resilience, the Ukrainian president did not rule out the idea that stalling missile supplies from western allies were “aimed at making Ukraine, so to speak, more willing to compromise” in peace talks with Russia.
Continue reading...Claw machine shops have proliferated in the territory in recent years, filling vacant spaces left behind by businesses that closed during the pandemic
In Hong Kong’s neon-lit arcades, a maze of claw machines illuminates the prizes of the day: plushies, Labubu dolls and an array of Pokémon collectibles.
Across the city, claw machine shops have proliferated in recent years, now surpassing more than 2,500, many filling vacant spaces left by businesses that closed during the pandemic.
Continue reading...
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MONTREAL (ANP) - Tenniser Botic van de Zandschulp heeft in de nacht van woensdag op donderdag op het masterstoernooi van Montreal verrassend gewonnen van de als vierde geplaatste Daniil Medvedev. Van de Zandschulp versloeg de kampioen van 2021 in twee sets: 6-3 7-6 (5).
Medvedev liep zijn honderdste zege op een masterstoernooi mis door zijn uitschakeling. De Rus maakte maar liefst 40 ongedwongen fouten.
Het masterstoernooi van Montreal verloor woensdag in korte tijd drie van de hoogste geplaatste spelers. Naast Medvedev werden ook de Duitser Alexander Zverev en de Canadees Felix Auger-Aliassime uitgeschakeld.
De als eerste geplaatste wereldnummer drie Zverev, die dit jaar Roland Garros won en in de finale stond van Wimbledon, ging in de tweede ronde onderuit tegen Tallon Griekspoor. De Nederlander kwam na een verloren eerste set knap terug: 6-7 (3) 6-2 6-4.
Auger-Aliassime, geboren en getogen in Montreal, moest zich voor zijn geplande avondwedstrijd terugtrekken nadat hij tijdens de training een rugblessure had opgelopen.
MENLO PARK (ANP) - Een van de AI-modellen van Meta heeft tijdens tests voor cybersecurity een ander bedrijf gehackt. Vergelijkbare incidenten kwamen ook al voor bij AI-modellen van Anthropic en OpenAI.
Meta liet weten een incident te onderzoeken waarbij een foutieve configuratie door Irregular - een onafhankelijk bedrijf dat cybersecuritybeoordelingen uitvoert voor Meta - een van zijn modellen tijdens een test per ongeluk internettoegang gaf.
Het model "maakte misbruik van een beveiligingslek op een manier die vergelijkbaar is met eerder gemelde gevallen bij andere bedrijven", aldus Meta in een verklaring.
De incidenten bij OpenAI en Anthropic kwamen ook door configuratiefouten, waardoor de modellen van Anthropic per ongeluk toegang kregen tot het internet. In het geval van OpenAI maakte een AI-agent zelfstandig misbruik van een tot dan toe onbekende kwetsbaarheid om tijdens cybersecuritytests het internet te bereiken.
NEW YORK (ANP) - De CIA heeft in het geheim een speciale werkgroep voor Cuba opgericht, meldt The New York Times. Volgens de krant is het doel van de groep druk uitoefenen op de Cubaanse regering, om zo economische, politieke en leiderschapswijzigingen af te dwingen die door president Donald Trump worden geëist, laten bronnen weten.
Door de oprichting van de groep kan de inlichtingendienst snel meer financiële, menselijke en technische middelen inzetten op Cuba, aldus de ingewijden. Inmiddels zou de CIA begonnen zijn met het inzetten van agenten die spionnen werven en aansturen. Ook inlichtingenanalisten, specialisten op het gebied van cyberoperaties en functionarissen die gespecialiseerd zijn in heimelijke beïnvloedingsoperaties zijn al aan de groep toegevoegd, aldus de bronnen.
In 1960 richtte de CIA ook al eens een Cubaanse werkgroep op. De leden daarvan hadden de leiding over de mislukte, door de dienst gesteunde invasie in Cuba het jaar daarop, die bekend zou worden als de Invasie in de Varkensbaai.
De VS waren toen bezorgd over Cuba, dat onder leiding van Fidel Castro steeds meer ging samenwerken met de Sovjet-Unie. 1400 Cubaanse ballingen moesten toen het eiland binnenvallen om zo een opstand tegen de regering van Castro te ontketenen. Zij kwamen aan land aan de zuidkust van Cuba bij de Varkensbaai, maar kregen niet de verwachte steun en werden snel verslagen door Castro's leger.
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Electrek: Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can't take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that "weak sensing" hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance. [...] Dolgov made the comments in a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School, walking through the lessons Waymo has learned building its driver over close to two decades. He put the sensor question on the table plainly: "there's been a long-standing debate about what kind of sensors do you actually need for autonomous driving."
His answer draws the line that camera-only advocates tend to skip right past. "Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence," he said. "If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that's a very reasonable way to go." Then the catch. If you're targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, "you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early." Dolgov said that cameras, lidar, and radar are complementary rather than redundant: "These different sensing modalities, they're not backups to each other," and combining them produces a view "vastly superior to what you get with any one sensor." He said multiple sensor types also protect against physical failures, such as a leaf or branch blocking a camera, while helping Waymo climb the "exponential ladder of nines" required for fully driverless safety.
Dolgov warned that camera-only systems may improve quickly before plateauing "way before the performance that is required by your product." He also pushed back on the cost argument against lidar, calling it "a number that has a fairly short shelf life" as hardware costs continue to fall.
His answer draws the line that camera-only advocates tend to skip right past. "Humans of course can drive with just eyes, so there's that proof of existence," he said. "If the goal were to just approximately match human performance or to build an assist product, that's a very reasonable way to go." Then the catch. If you're targeting full autonomy and strongly superhuman performance, he said, "you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early." Dolgov said that cameras, lidar, and radar are complementary rather than redundant: "These different sensing modalities, they're not backups to each other," and combining them produces a view "vastly superior to what you get with any one sensor." He said multiple sensor types also protect against physical failures, such as a leaf or branch blocking a camera, while helping Waymo climb the "exponential ladder of nines" required for fully driverless safety.
Dolgov warned that camera-only systems may improve quickly before plateauing "way before the performance that is required by your product." He also pushed back on the cost argument against lidar, calling it "a number that has a fairly short shelf life" as hardware costs continue to fall.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents -- the most serious case arising when Anthropic's Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an open source software application and created fake identities to deceive the human developers maintaining the project. The security incidents occurred during a cyber evaluation of seven leading AI models' capabilities by the AI Security Institute (AISI), a research organization within the UK government, in late July. The researchers discovered (PDF) 19 instances in which "AI agents took unsanctioned action on the live Internet, including cases that targeted real people and organizations," according to an AISI blog post published on August 4.
Almost all the "autonomous, unsanctioned" actions came from Anthropic's Mythos 5 model, with two such actions coming from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. [...] The most serious case involved Mythos making multiple attempts to execute a supply chain attack on the open source project repository hosted on the developer platform GitHub, including using social engineering techniques to try to convince the repository's human maintainers to merge malicious code into the repository.
After first opening a pull request to merge the malicious code into the repository, Mythos created fake online "sock puppet" personas that claimed to have independently reviewed and verified the code as not containing malware. The AI agent also sent five emails to two human maintainers of the repository, including some emails containing malware and others attempting to persuade a maintainer to accept the pull request. Mythos even opened a GitHub Issue on a second repository -- also owned by a maintainer of the first repository -- that contained a prompt injection with malicious instructions targeting "issue-triage AI coding agents." This line of attack came from Mythos reasoning that the repository maintainer could be an AI coding agent such as Claude Code.
Almost all the "autonomous, unsanctioned" actions came from Anthropic's Mythos 5 model, with two such actions coming from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. [...] The most serious case involved Mythos making multiple attempts to execute a supply chain attack on the open source project repository hosted on the developer platform GitHub, including using social engineering techniques to try to convince the repository's human maintainers to merge malicious code into the repository.
After first opening a pull request to merge the malicious code into the repository, Mythos created fake online "sock puppet" personas that claimed to have independently reviewed and verified the code as not containing malware. The AI agent also sent five emails to two human maintainers of the repository, including some emails containing malware and others attempting to persuade a maintainer to accept the pull request. Mythos even opened a GitHub Issue on a second repository -- also owned by a maintainer of the first repository -- that contained a prompt injection with malicious instructions targeting "issue-triage AI coding agents." This line of attack came from Mythos reasoning that the repository maintainer could be an AI coding agent such as Claude Code.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:
The soil around the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland is exceedingly rich which follows from their once being a giant shield volcano, now reduced to volcanic plugs. Much of the area around was once pineapple growing country but owing to the impact of cheap imports from South East Asia, the industry is now a shadow of its former self. Once, whole trains of pineapples would arrive from this region and also north around Maryborough, Gympie and Yeppoon and would be shunted into the famous Golden Circle cannery at Northgate.
After Heinz purchased it from the farmer's co-op that originally ran it, many lines were dropped. I imagine the pineapple processing line would now be pretty thin indeed, others like beetroot have been sent off overseas, in this case, New Zealand.
Many of the former pineapple farms and fields now lie idle but in many cases other crops have taken over. Examples are exotic fruits, macadamias and in the case shown here, avocados....feeding the mashed avo craze. I have always liked avos, but in my humble opinion, today's varieties taste nothing like those of my youth when they were themselves fairly exotic.
One day, also in my opinion many of these fields will be covered by concrete slabs and homes! In the left distance is the gorilla, Mt Tibrogargan.
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