Xi Jinping’s visit heavy on symbolism but no sign closed-door meeting yielded breakthroughs on thorny issues such as AI, trade, Taiwan and Iran

Donald Trump welcomed Xi Jinping to the White House on Thursday, with talks on AI, trade and a growing US-China strategic rivalry expected to feature on an elaborate state visit that critics say went big on style but lacked substance.

Here are the key takeaways from Xi’s first visit to Washington in more than a decade.

Continue reading...

The ⁠Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said the missiles were ⁠aimed at Taif and the Yanbu area on the Red Sea, the main alternative route for Saudi oil

Saudi Arabia says it intercepted six ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis, with the latest attacks pushing oil prices ⁠to a one-week high over fears of spiralling supply disruptions.

The ⁠Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said the missiles were ⁠aimed at Taif in western Saudi ​Arabia and the Yanbu area on the Red Sea, with the Houthis claiming their attacks were aimed at “a sensitive target” in the capital Riyadh and on Saudi Aramco facilities in Tanbu.

Continue reading...

FreeBSD is now available for the desktop, in a roundabout way. Colin Percival, a maintainer and release engineering lead for the open-source OS’s release, announced the desktop distro on Thursday. “Most people think of FreeBSD as being a server OS which is used only via the command line, but as anyone who has attended a BSD conference can attest, it works just fine with a GUI too,” he wrote. He’s not wrong about that, but left unsaid is that FreeBSD doesn’t include a GUI. Users need to install one. The desktop version of the OS therefore includes the KDE desktop. Percival packaged it as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), the image Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud needs to run an instance. “Desktop AMIs are designed to make it easier for new users to discover and start using FreeBSD,” Percival wrote. “You can boot them in EC2, including as part of the AWS Free Tier, and connect to them using the same Remote Desktop Protocol used for connecting to Windows VMs.” “Indeed, I've carefully designed the AMIs to behave as much like Windows images as possible,” he added, “with the exception, of course, that since they run FreeBSD, you don't have to pay for the operating system.” You read that right: One of the more prominent members of the open source community wants the project he works on to behave like Windows! The AMIs include Chromium and LibreOffice pre-installed, a combination Percival rates “a useful starting point.” His post includes detailed installation instructions that mention using an m7i-flex.large instance, a cloudy VM type that run 4th-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, with 2 to 64 vCPUs and 8 to 256 gig of memory. Percival also points out that the AWS Console “doesn't understand that these AMIs support RDP, so if you launch an instance via its ‘Launch an instance’ wizard it will suggest creating a security group with port TCP/22 open rather than port TCP/3389; and the ‘Connect’ wizard will show SSH instructions rather than the RDP instructions which are shown for Windows.” “I've asked Amazon to provide a mechanism for AMIs to be marked as RDP-enabled in order to turn on that missing functionality.” “If you've been thinking of trying out FreeBSD, this is your cue,” Percival’s post urges. “Go launch an instance!” ®

De app van mSpy om kinderen in de gaten te houden, wordt ook gebruikt om partners en exen te bespioneren. Het bedrijf weet dit en maakt er zelfs reclame voor, blijkt uit onderzoek van NRC. Het account van je vriendin hacken? ‘Dat gaan we regelen, volg mijn instructies.’

De conflicten tussen de strijdgroep Houthi's en Saoedi-Arabië zijn na een wapenstilstand weer opgelaaid. Sinds deze zomer worden er over en weer aanvallen gepleegd.

Meta's Muse AI Agent ecosystem has boosted the share price and also generated the usual hype and concerns. Some of the less usual commentary is quite interesting though.

The last link has a user ask very nicely for root and then gets Muse to create a little FOSS seedbox. There's some interesting internal prompt text along the way.

404 Media reports "multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models have been fired for using AI to train the AI:

That's not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI's whole thing is to make people use AI at work... OpenAI declined to comment on its contractors being fired for using AI.

Their article cites internal documents and three contractors working on OpenAI-related projects which can include more than ten thousand contractors:

One contractor said they see people using AI "all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it's pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP." The person said, "in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught...." Two of the sources said people have been fired or offboarded for using AI... One contractor said they used AI while helping to train OpenAI's models and shared what they presented as their termination letter. It said their employer had identified issues with the "authenticity" of their work....

404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models' training. "I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start," they said. "I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I'm not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I'm getting paid to make AI worse."


Two of the contractors worked for Mercor, the article reports, a company which last month Nvidia reportedly discussed funding at a $20 billion valuation.



Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.