skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Gemini AI hacked three companies in a testing breakout, Google says in ~tech
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Comment on FBI, coast guard boarded hacked oil tankers heading toward US coast in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
Cybersecurity teams with the U.S. Coast Guard and the FBI boarded two U.S.-bound oil tankers last month after hackers reportedly compromised at least one of the ship’s networks and took control of its navigation, propulsion, and cargo systems.
According to a joint statement shared with TechCrunch, the agencies boarded the vessels in the Gulf of Mexico between August 21 and August 24 to “ensure integrity of the vessel’s operational and information technology systems following indications that the networks of both vessels were compromised.”
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CBS News confirmed that one of the tankers is VL Prosperity, a 333-meter oil tanker that can hold over 2 million barrels of oil. According to VesselFinder, the tanker is currently located in the Gulf of Mexico.
Citing Iranian media, CBS said hackers compromised the ship on August 7 while traveling from Egypt to the United States and interfered with the ship’s speed and fuel systems. The tanker also lost communications for more than a day, per CBS.
It’s unclear who is behind the attacks, but CBS News said the U.S. is looking into whether Iran is behind the hack. Iran has been behind a multitude of hacks in recent months following the start of the U.S. and Israel-led war against Tehran, which killed Iran’s supreme leader in February. Iranian-backed hackers have since launched a destructive hack at medical device maker Stryker, hacked the mass transit system in Los Angeles, and compromised over a hundred water facilities across the United States in response to the widespread U.S. bombing of Iran. CISA has called the attacks “opportunistic” in nature.
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FBI, coast guard boarded hacked oil tankers heading toward US coast
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Comment on Gemini AI hacked three companies in a testing breakout, Google says in ~tech
skybrian LinkSounds like Irregular notified their customers at the same time and Google kept it secret the longest.Sounds like Irregular notified their customers at the same time and Google kept it secret the longest.
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Comment on Gemini AI hacked three companies in a testing breakout, Google says in ~tech
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
The Gemini incidents occurred while the model was undergoing testing by Irregular, an Israeli start-up that works with tech companies to assess their A.I. models before they are publicly released. Models made by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta also gained unauthorized access to the internet this year while being tested by Irregular.
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Google said that, in each of the incidents, its models had been instructed to launch an attack on a fictional company. But the fictional company in the test shared a name with a real company, and when the Gemini models gained access to the internet, they began trying to break into that company instead.
The Gemini models used passwords that they found online or guessed to log into the online infrastructure of the targeted company, and two other companies. Upon logging in, the Gemini models realized that they were accessing real companies’ infrastructure, rather than simulated environments that were part of their testing, and ended the attacks, Google said. Google also said that its technology caused no harm to the companies it hacked.
“All relevant labs were notified in late July, and affected entities were contacted as part of the investigation,” Irregular said in a statement. “Irregular took immediate action, and all known issues on our end were remedied and resolved weeks ago.”
“Our security team has a long track record of reporting issues we find in other people’s software and systems — even if it’s as simple as a weak password,” Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security engineering, said in a statement.
“We ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner on the changes they’ve now made to their testing processes,” she said. “These events highlight the importance of training powerful A.I. models to act responsibly.”
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Gemini AI hacked three companies in a testing breakout, Google says
16 votes -
Comment on Dig Energy completes first project with novel geothermal drilling tech in ~enviro
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Geothermal systems, which use all-electric heat pumps to tap into thermal energy stored underground, are widely hailed as the most efficient way to warm and cool buildings. However, the upfront price of accessing this clean source of energy can be a major barrier. The expense of installing a geothermal system can be up to five times that of an equivalent air-source heat pump. Only about 1% of buildings in the United States use geothermal systems for heating and cooling, estimated Dig Energy co-founder and CEO Dulcie Madden.
Dig says its technology could upend this math, cutting the cost of drilling by up to 80% as compared to conventional geothermal drilling. The companies declined to share specific numbers, but Dig “put some early proof points out there that, from a cost and schedule perspective, they’re going to be very competitive in the market,” said Parker Mundt, a partner at Suffolk Technologies.
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Dig’s system, by contrast, uses a high-pressure nozzle that sprays water at 10,000 pounds per square inch to bore through soil and rock. The approach was explored by the oil and gas industry decades ago, but never gained traction because it didn’t increase productivity in those sectors, Madden said. She and her partners saw an opportunity to adapt the idea for geothermal and spent years honing the technology.
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The team engineered a drill string — the long vertical pieces that connect the surface equipment to the drill tip — that stays in the ground once the hole is complete, becoming the heat exchanger that transfers thermal energy to and from the surrounding earth. The nozzle stays behind as well; it was designed to be cheap enough that it is still economical to use a new one each time.
That innovation means the hole can have a smaller diameter than in conventional geothermal systems, because no extra room is needed for casing and the insertion of the heat exchanger. This process reduces debris and, perhaps counterintuitively, even water usage, because standard drilling uses large amounts of water to lubricate and cool the drill bits, as well as to turn displaced earth into mud that can be more easily removed from the hole.
Drilling at the Boston jobsite last month used one-tenth the water that the conventional drilling would’ve used and created 75% less material to be carted away, Madden said.
The process was also much quieter than standard drilling operations, which Madden likened to a demolition site. Dig’s equipment operated at such a low volume that workers could hold a conversation right near the rig and people in nearby buildings couldn’t hear a thing, she said. Also, the rig’s small size — about the same footprint as a parking spot, Mundt said — made it easy to maneuver in a dense urban environment.
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Dig has several more jobs lined up after its inaugural success; the company is booked until mid-summer 2027, Madden said. And work is underway on a new version of the rig that aims to cut down on drilling time, she said.
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Dig Energy completes first project with novel geothermal drilling tech
7 votes -
Comment on Typesafe AI: System One Models and Jev in ~tech
skybrian LinkI might have a use for this. How hard was it to sign up and connect to their API? Although, one thing I'm wondering about: there are likely plenty of other non-LLM ways to classify text that...I might have a use for this. How hard was it to sign up and connect to their API?
Although, one thing I'm wondering about: there are likely plenty of other non-LLM ways to classify text that people in the know would use?
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Comment on Study shows that the human brain is two separate organs in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] Paper is here.From the article:
The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. The forebrain handles higher-level thinking — language, consciousness and abstract reasoning. In contrast, the hindbrain, located at the back of the skull and often called the brain stem, controls essential, automatic functions that keep us alive: breathing, sleeping, and regulating our heartbeat and hunger urges. The hindbrain neurons also control the muscles of the face, tongue and throat, which affect speech and swallowing.
Despite the critical importance of the hindbrain, scientists have struggled for decades to generate human hindbrain neurons in the laboratory. This gap has hampered research into devastating diseases affecting the brain stem, including spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
SMA is a leading genetic cause of death in children under 1 year of age. ALS, which is often diagnosed between the ages of 40 and 70, affects both the forebrain and the hindbrain. In both disorders, certain hindbrain neurons gradually cease to function, and the patient loses the ability to swallow, which can cause pneumonia when food or liquid is inhaled into the lungs; eventually, patients lose the ability to breathe.
The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain.
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“Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” Jokhai said.
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Armed with this knowledge, the researchers for the first time successfully coaxed human pluripotent stem cells (a kind of cell that can create any cell in the human body) to become functional hindbrain motor neurons in the laboratory. These lab-grown neurons displayed all the hallmarks of authentic hindbrain cells: They exhibited waves of electrical activity called action potentials and made proteins that identify the segments of the hindbrain that control facial and swallowing muscles.
Finally, the researchers looked back over 550 million years of evolutionary time. They found the same two-origin brain pattern in chickens; zebrafish; and, remarkably, in acorn worms, tiny creatures living on the ocean floor that share a distant common ancestor with humans. Jellyfish, which diverged from humans about 600 to 700 million years ago, have two nervous systems at different ends of their body.
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The research also has implications for investigating treatments for SMA, ALS and other conditions affecting the brain stem. Until now, studying these diseases has been nearly impossible because scientists cannot obtain brain stem tissue from living patients. The ability to grow these neurons in a dish opens new possibilities for understanding what goes wrong. There’s even an unexpected connection to obesity treatment: The hindbrain contains circuits that regulate hunger — which is precisely how weight-loss drugs like semaglutide work.
Paper is here.
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Study shows that the human brain is two separate organs
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Comment on What regulatory capture actually looks like in ~society
skybrian LinkI diagree with Tabarrok on a lot of things, but thought I'd post this one since he's a voice of sanity here.I diagree with Tabarrok on a lot of things, but thought I'd post this one since he's a voice of sanity here.
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Comment on What regulatory capture actually looks like in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
It’s amazing how a theory can take over a brain. Consider the idea that people believe what serves their interests. As heuristics go, it’s a good one. I use it all the time. Yet when Dario Amodei says AI is dangerous, perhaps even an extinction risk, some people conclude he must be running a marketing campaign. That is stupid. Which is more likely, that a useful heuristic sometimes misfires or that “our product might kill you” is a clever way to sell it? Death threats are a poor marketing strategy.
We also have plenty of evidence that the fears of AI experts are sincere. Amodei, Altman and Musk were all publicly warning about AI risk long before they had AI companies to promote. The worry runs well beyond the executive suite; rank and file researchers share it. And it extends outside the industry altogether, to computer scientists with no product to sell, among them Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. Hinton left a high-paying job at Google precisely so he could speak out and Hinton is not in a Berkeley polycule with Eliezer Yudkowsky, at least as far as I know. Whatever else you may say about the belief that AI presents a serious risk, plenty of AI researchers believe it sincerely.
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Notice that classic regulatory capture takes time, it’s a process of erosion rather than a battle, it happens in the shadows, in the backrooms, away from the public’s eye. As Culpepper argues in Quiet Politics and Business Power, business power goes down as political salience goes up. Regulatory capture and lobbying does a good job explaining why roasting coffee beans was defined as “domestic manufacturing”, thereby lowering Starbuck’s tax rate by 2%. It does less well at explaining big cross-industry issues the public cares about such as environmental regulation or race and gender discrimination regulation. Finally, don’t confuse capture with firms making the best of a bad situation. Philip Morris supported the 2009 Tobacco Control Act not because FDA regulation was Philip Morris’s unconstrained ideal but because it knew regulation was coming and it wanted a seat at the table to nudge the rules in its favor. That’s ordinary political bargaining—or rent-seeking—not evidence that the regulator has been captured.
Now let’s evaluate Amodei’s call for regulation in light of regulatory capture theory. AI regulation is in gestation. Public attention is fixed on the industry, and much of that attention is hostile. The big profits in AI lie in automating work, and job loss is a much more salient fear than extinction. AI politics is now loud–precisely the environment in which Culpepper predicts business power will be weakest. A mature industry can bend regulation to its purposes through revolving doors, longstanding relationships and obscure rulemaking. An industry under Sauron’s eye has much less power and faces much greater risk that politics will bend regulation to its purposes. Political actors are eager for an excuse to redistribute AI rents away from capitalists and toward favored groups (ala Peltzman).
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Go ahead: argue that Amodei and other AI experts are wrong about AI risk. Ask whether his proposals favor Anthropic. But calling “our product might kill you” a clever marketing and regulatory-capture strategy isn’t sophisticated analysis. The facts don’t fit regulatory capture theory and trying to make them fit requires epistemically painful Ptolemaic epicycles. Even a dull Ockham’s razor cuts through that story to the obvious alternative: Amodei actually believes what he’s saying.
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What regulatory capture actually looks like
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Comment on How have you helped someone without them knowing? in ~talk
skybrian Link ParentBroadly speaking, Effective Altruism is largely about “let’s make the suffering lines go down.” Except that it’s a big tent with a lot of philosophical disagreement about how to do that, and some...Broadly speaking, Effective Altruism is largely about “let’s make the suffering lines go down.” Except that it’s a big tent with a lot of philosophical disagreement about how to do that, and some of the ideas are a bit out there.
For example, a basic question is whether to focus on humans or also include animal suffering. I stick with humans, but there EA types who are very into reducing the suffering of animals.
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Comment on How have you helped someone without them knowing? in ~talk
skybrian LinkCharitable donations come to mind. They usually work this way, in the sense that the recipient might know which charity is helping them but not the donors. I've donated to Against Malaria, which...Charitable donations come to mind. They usually work this way, in the sense that the recipient might know which charity is helping them but not the donors.
I've donated to Against Malaria, which distributes bednets. For public health, who was really helped is doubly unknown. For example, you might know you got vaccinated, but you can't know for sure whether it helped, whether you specifically would have gotten the disease if you weren't. Nobody can know specifically whose lives were saved.
There are studies. There's a line on a chart somewhere that goes down. Hospitals get fewer of that kind of patient. My contribution to a line going down on a chart is too small to be visible. At best, I could do a rough calculation of statistical lives saved, with large error bars.
I do it because I believe the science has been done well and as donations go, it's relatively efficient. But it's awfully abstract.
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Comment on Billing for web hosting in ~comp
skybrian (edited )LinkIf it's a static website and doesn't get much traffic, you might be able to host it on Cloudflare for free using Cloudflare Pages. I recently helped someone set up a website that way. The files...If it's a static website and doesn't get much traffic, you might be able to host it on Cloudflare for free using Cloudflare Pages. I recently helped someone set up a website that way. The files get pushed to a Github repo and Cloudflare picks them up from there. (The website uses Eleventy for templates, so Cloudflare runs Eleventy to generate the actual html pages.)
This is a website with nearly no traffic, though. If you get traffic, I assume Cloudflare will want you to upgrade from the free tier.
Since neither of us were familiar with Cloudflare previously, actually figuring out how to do it required some AI conversations and fiddling. I didn't find the UI all that intuitive. Now that it's set up, though, updates are easy. Just edit the file on GitHub and wait a few minutes.
If you don't like Cloudflare, Netlify is another service I've used before that does a similar thing, and they also have a free tier. It's been a while, but I thought it was fairly easy to use at the time.
I don't know how much to bill for this sort of thing. It was for someone I know at no charge.
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Comment on We already know what a world without work looks like in ~society
skybrian (edited )LinkPreviously discussed here. (Different URL, though.)Previously discussed here. (Different URL, though.)
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Comment on Svend Brinkmann: ‘If you place conditions on forgiveness, love or freedom, you have already destroyed them’ in ~science
skybrian LinkAn alternative question to "what do I gain from forgiving" might be "what do I gain by being unforgiving." Holding a grudge takes effort. Is it worth it? Maybe sometimes it is, to avoid falling...An alternative question to "what do I gain from forgiving" might be "what do I gain by being unforgiving." Holding a grudge takes effort. Is it worth it? Maybe sometimes it is, to avoid falling into the same trap. But mostly no.
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Comment on The age of wonders and terrors in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
If we were just talking about Navier-Stokes, you might accuse me of jumping to conclusions here. But we’re not. In the areas I know best (such as quantum complexity theory), and presumably other areas as well, there’s now a deluge, with longstanding open problems both major and minor falling by the day.
Go to the arXiv or ECCC. Pretty much all the papers that I’d be interested in now include “AI statements” near the acknowledgments (as this is often the central thing I want to know, I wish I didn’t need to scroll to the end of the paper to find it!). These statements can range from “our main result came entirely from GPT-6, but we understood it and take responsibility for it,” to “the results came from an interaction between the human authors and AI” to “we used AI, but only for proofreading and other incidental things” to (mad props!) “the author did not use AI for anything.”
If you talk right now to editors or program committee chairs, it’ll remind you of those ominous scenes from the Lord of the Rings movies where the men of Gondor or Rohan or whatever are grimly fortifying their walled city against the expected onslaught of 50,000 orcs. Reviewing will have to be done partly by AI, because otherwise there’s no way to handle the orc army: the reviewers can’t unilaterally disarm.
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Let me try to convey the mood in the mathematical community right now, at least as far as my experience reaches. Nearly every conversation is about the AI tsunami, or eventually circles around to the tsunami even if it’s originally about something else. Often, though, the focus is less on the unknowable future—for how much longer will mathematical research as a human enterprise even exist?—than on immediate questions of how to respond.
What are the new rules for when you get to write a paper with your name on it, and, y’know, get credit for it? That you fully understand the proof, can give talks about the proof, can answer questions about it, take responsibility for its correctness? Do you need to have played any role in finding the proof?
In the cases, likely to become more and more numerous, where all of those conditions are not satisfied, how do you share AI-generated math, if at all? Do you tweet it, like Alpöge hilariously did with Fable’s disproof of the Jacobian Conjecture? Do you post to the arXiv or GitHub? Do you publish a paper that lists “GPT-6 Astra” or “Claude Fable” as the author—but then let the AI profusely thank you in the acknowledgments for suggesting such a wonderful problem to it?
Of course, how one responds to the immediate problems ultimately does depend on their broader beliefs about what mathematical research is for and about. Are we just trying to decide whether various conjectures are true or false? Or are we trying to maintain a human community, across the generations, that understands the conjectures and cares about whether they’re true or false and why? If the latter, how do we incentivize people to join that community, to undergo the years of intense training required, if their role will now be reduced to verifiers and explicators (if even that) of gargantuan arguments dumped into their laps by the AI companies?
Weird to call it PR. I doubt very much that Google wanted to talk about it, but when reporters start asking questions, they probably shouldn't deny it.
It's the news media that's driving it. I shared it too, because I thought it was mildly interesting.