skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Japan to announce Tokyo, Washington took joint action on yen in ~finance
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Comment on Japan to announce Tokyo, Washington took joint action on yen in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama will announce on Monday that Tokyo and Washington took joint action in the currency market to arrest the yen’s slide to 40-year lows, two Japanese government officials told Reuters.
Katayama is likely to stress the two countries’ determination to combat what they consider excessive yen declines, said the sources familiar with the matter, on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
One source, asked if Katayama would announce “joint action”, said yes, adding, “The operation is still ongoing.”
[...]
The expected announcement follows what market sources say were rounds of yen-buying in the market by the Japanese and U.S. authorities, the first joint intervention since 2011, seeking to boost the Japanese currency from its lowest levels against the dollar since 1986.
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Tokyo’s initial intervention came hours before the BOJ decided on Friday to keep monetary policy steady while signalling a strong chance it would raise interest rates soon. A widening rate differential with the U.S., where the Federal Reserve has dramatically shifted to a more hawkish stance, has been a key factor in the dollar’s rise against the yen.
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Critics have said Japan could face constraints to continued yen-buying intervention, as selling down its huge Treasury holdings to fund such action could trigger a selloff in U.S. debt and cause an unwelcome spike in U.S. yields.
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Japan to announce Tokyo, Washington took joint action on yen
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Comment on How Mexico became a surprise cornerstone of America’s AI boom in ~society
skybrian Linkhttps://archive.is/IJd41 From the article: [...]From the article:
Mexico has quietly become a cornerstone of the AI boom, providing 40 per cent of US imports this year of the computer servers that are widely used in the data centres powering artificial intelligence.
Taiwanese manufacturers are rapidly expanding factories in Mexico to assemble servers, which are now the country’s top US export, overtaking autos that dominated its trade for decades.
Mexico is the second-largest provider of enterprise servers to the US so far this year, with sales reaching $46.9bn, behind Taiwan, which sold $53.5bn, though Mexico became the largest on a monthly basis in May.
The phenomenon is helping prop up Mexico’s limp economy, pushing the country’s exports to record levels. Servers and related hardware made up almost one-fifth of the $317bn of goods Mexico exported between January and May, more than double the same period a year earlier.
Taiwan, in turn, is now Mexico’s third-largest trading partner, up from eighth place in 2022. Taiwanese companies have spent more than $1.6bn since 2020 on Mexican factories that offer geographic proximity and tariff-free access to US tech giants spending hundreds of billions on data centres.
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AI servers offer a “paradigm shift” because the high value of each server rack means you can export higher dollar amounts per load, said Fernando Alba, deputy economy minister in Chihuahua state, where Ciudad Juárez is located. “One truck [of servers] is the equivalent of one thousand cars.”
The surge in high-value exports is yet to translate into proportional local benefits, though. Each dollar of investment in the highly automated plants creates far fewer jobs than more manual sectors such as car parts. Manufacturing employment peaked in 2023 in Ciudad Juárez.
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How Mexico became a surprise cornerstone of America’s AI boom
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Comment on Scientists have automated cognitive studies of capuchin monkeys in the wild in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
“CapuchinAI” integrates a compact, battery-powered computing system into a field-research platform. The system identifies an approaching monkey, presents a learning task tailored to that individual on a touchscreen, and automatically delivers a food reward if the monkey performs the task correctly.
Field tests of the prototype in the Taboga Forest Reserve of Costa Rica found that CapuchinAI identifies individual capuchins with 97% accuracy, following training on still images and videos. Wild capuchins rapidly habituated and learned touchscreen-reward associations, demonstrating that the system provides a scalable field method for cognitive testing, while also mapping individual differences across tasks.
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The team secured the CapuchinAI box to a platform, loaded its food dispenser with dried slices of forest banana, and waited nearby.
“For the first couple of days that we did this, no capuchins visited,” Sánchez Vargas says. “I was beginning to worry.”
The third day, however, a large male capuchin named Trompudo, which means “big snout,” could not resist the scent of banana.
“He climbs on the box and starts slapping the back of it,” Sánchez Vargas recalls. “Finally, he slaps the touchscreen and a banana slice pops out.”
Trompudo gobbled up the food then put his hand on the screen again. Another banana slice popped out.
“It was almost like you could see him realizing, ‘Ah, that’s what you have to do, touch the screen!’” Sánchez Vargas says. “It was amazing to watch an individual learn something so quickly.”
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The researchers are already noting individual differences within the 16 monkeys who engaged with the CapuchinAI prototype during the pilot phase.
Some capuchins are remarkably fast learners. Others take more time to figure out that they need to touch the screen to get a food reward. Individuals who investigated the box with their lips learned to kiss the screen to get a banana slice. Then there are the late adopters. They hang back and watch their friends interact with the box, seeing how the apparatus works before approaching it.
The box stood up to the occasional aggressive moves of capuchins trying to bust it open.
The facial-recognition software prevents the system from activating when other wildlife approach, but some animals still try to tinker with the box — including coatis. Members of the raccoon family, coatis are notorious for their ability to break into manmade containers and even houses.
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The research team is now updating its facial-recognition model, training it on the recorded videos of the 16 capuchins from the pilot phase.
They are developing cognitive experiments for four broad domains of cognition, including tests of individual capuchins’ ability to learn, their level of impulse control, their cognitive flexibility, and their skill at both short- and long-term memory.
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Scientists have automated cognitive studies of capuchin monkeys in the wild
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Comment on US general warns he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel amid Iran war in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the head of U.S. European Command, sent written notification to senior Pentagon officials saying that without another Navy destroyer he will be forced to choose defense of the United States “homeland” over that of Israel, said the officials, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the correspondence.
A U.S. defense official said Grynkewich’s notification appears consistent with past outreach to the Pentagon from the military’s top generals when they see certain risks that require Washington’s consideration. This can occur, the official said, as commanders compete for finite resources and weapons.
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The Navy has been particularly taxed, as the Trump administration has directed a blockade of Iranian ports in response to Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. The standoff has stymied the movement of Middle Eastern oil and other commodities through the narrow waterway, upending the global economy.
U.S. naval destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea have been employed as a part of Israel’s defense for many years. The vessels, equipped with powerful radar and armed with an array of missiles, have downed missiles aimed at Israel not only by Iran, but by Houthi militants in Yemen that are equipped by Tehran.
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The Navy has five destroyers that deploy from a U.S. port in Rota, Spain, with a sixth expected to arrive there later this year, Pentagon officials have said. But maintenance issues have piled up due to the Iran war’s tempo, complicating matters for Grynkewich, officials said. The Washington Post withheld specific details about the ships’ availability at the request of military officials, who cited security concerns.
As The Post reported in May, Pentagon assessments conducted earlier in the war showed that U.S. forces have shouldered the brunt of defending Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles. The assessments found that American weapons, including the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and naval interceptors launched from the eastern Mediterranean, were used far more frequently than Israeli air defense weapons.
Two destroyers, the USS Paul Ignatius and the USS Roosevelt, were in the Mediterranean Sea on Friday, a U.S. official said. Three destroyers were in Rota: the USS Arleigh Burke, the USS Bulkeley and the USS Oscar Austin.
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US general warns he lacks sufficient forces to protect Israel amid Iran war
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Comment on Oil companies report sky-high profits thanks to wartime crude prices in ~finance
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Chevron just announced its highest quarterly earnings ever. Shell clocked its second-highest quarterly profits. And while ExxonMobil's profits came in beneath what Wall Street analysts had expected, it still managed to double its earnings compared with this time last year.
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Combined, the three companies raked in, on average, some $404 million in profits every day for the last three months.
It's a bonanza for those companies (and for their executives). And it's raising eyebrows and ire among some European lawmakers and Democrats in the U.S. Congress, who are calling for windfall taxes on those companies.
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Those profits came even though Exxon and Shell, in particular, suffered substantial disruption to their operations in the Middle East, which have been directly affected by the war.
Higher crude prices and refining margins were enough to more than offset the blow.
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In the U.S., Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has proposed a windfall tax on oil profits; several countries in Europe are also calling for such a tax. (The United Kingdom already has one in place.) Such a tax is designed to harvest "excess" profits that a company rakes in because of outside forces, not because of innovation or outperformance, and it often redirects that money toward the consumers who are having to pay elevated prices for energy.
The European Union imposed a windfall tax on oil profits after prices spiked in 2022 following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In an earnings call on Friday, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods told analysts that windfall taxes are a "misguided policy" that penalizes businesses that attempt to be successful despite the oil industry's volatile booms and busts.
"We canceled investments that we had planned for Europe based on the last time they passed a windfall profits tax," he said. "And in fact we're suing because we don't think that's a legal taking for the industry."
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But they don't expect this money train to last forever. Woods, of Exxon, told analysts repeatedly that oil from the Middle East is simply too important to the global economy for the current situation to persist.
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That's one reason — among others — that companies aren't racing to start a bunch of new expensive drilling projects to meet the world's current oil appetite. They expect the imbalance to be temporary.
Instead of pouring this cash into new production — or spitting it out to shareholders in fatter-than-expected dividends and stock buybacks — so far, the big oil companies seem more focused on paying down debt and strengthening their own financial situations.
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Oil companies report sky-high profits thanks to wartime crude prices
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Comment on Several US states report cyberattacks as spy agencies suspect Iran targeting water in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...]From the article:
According to a joint alert from the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency, “malicious cyber actors” have been remotely tampering with some water systems’ internet-connected programmable logic controllers, or PLCs, causing loss of water pressure and flooding.
The warning, issued Thursday, comes after U.S. intelligence officials said Iran was likely behind a coordinated cyberattack on more than 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota. Experts have also warned for years that U.S. water industry, which has resisted regulation efforts, has been vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Intelligence agencies have not definitively concluded that Tehran was responsible for the disruptions in Minnesota, but the hack follows urgent warnings by federal cybersecurity officials that Iran for months has been targeting internet-exposed devices that control operations at water, wastewater and energy facilities in the U.S. In July, federal cybersecurity authorities specifically warned that Iranian hackers were exploiting vulnerable PLCs.
President Donald Trump has blamed Minnesota’s government, not Iran, for that attack. The FBI did not respond to request for comment Friday about whether it believed Iran was responsible, saying the agency and others were “fully engaged to protect critical infrastructure.”
The Post reported Thursday that intrusions have been noted at several water and energy systems across the country since shortly after the war began on Feb. 28.
Federal authorities have not identified which states were affected in recent hacks. Outside of Minnesota, Michigan and South Dakota have also reported attacks. However, experts said it is likely many more states are affected, given that the brand of PLCs targeted — Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley — is widely used.
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A July 22 advisory issued by the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency noted that the FBI and CISA have observed Iranian hackers tampering with the PLC’s logic software, “allowing systems to enter unsafe conditions without notifying operators of the anomalies.”
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Experts widely agreed that water infrastructure in the United States has been uniquely vulnerable for more than a decade. Of the roughly 151,000 water plants in the United States, about one-third service residential communities year-round. But only about 420 water plants participate in WaterISAC to try to improve cybersecurity across the water sector.
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Compounding the problem, the water industry has also resisted efforts to be regulated for cybersecurity. After the Biden administration tried to impose cybersecurity audits of water utilities in 2023, some water industry groups and three states — Missouri, Arkansas and Iowa — sued, causing the EPA to roll back its standards.
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Several US states report cyberattacks as spy agencies suspect Iran targeting water
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Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentI'm curious, what did you buy? I might like to tinker with cameras one of these days.I'm curious, what did you buy? I might like to tinker with cameras one of these days.
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Comment on Postmortem for Lean kernel soundness bug #14576 in ~comp
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] Cool, AI is finding more bugs.From the article:
A soundness bug in the Lean kernel (#14576) was reported and fixed during the week of July 27. It has had visibility on Zulip and social media (e.g., X, LinkedIn, and Mastodon).
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On July 25, Ramana Kumar published a repository containing a
sorry-free "disproof" of the Collatz conjecture, produced with AI assistance. It is not a valid proof because it exploits a bug in the kernel's handling of nested inductive types. On July 28, Kiran Gopinathan reduced it to a small proof of False and opened issue #14576. We pushed a fix one hour after the report (#14577). Joachim Breitner reviewed it and suggested improvements, and it was merged. New patch releases are out.The bug: when the kernel eliminates a nested occurrence under an inductive type
Twith parametersDs, and these parameters are phantom (not mentioned in constructor fields), they disappear from the generated auxiliary type and thus escape type checking. An ill-typed argument in that position could be used to make the kernel accept a proof ofFalse. The bug is only reachable through metaprogramming, by sending the inductive declaration to the kernel directly. The frontend checks the arguments and catches the ill-typed term. This is an implementation bug, not a hole in Lean's meta-theory.[...]
The original Collatz repository also passed a week-old version of nanoda, the main external checker. nanoda is an independent kernel (aka proof/type checker) for Lean implemented in Rust by Chris Bailey. The surprising part is that there are two unrelated bugs involved. The official kernel had a missing check in the nested inductive type support, as explained above. nanoda did check that spot, but did not verify the type name in a projection node. The nanoda bug was reported by Jeremy Chen and fixed a week before the Lean bug was reported. The proof was built so that the expression the kernel never inspects is one that the old nanoda accepted.
Ramana believes the timing was coincidental, but cannot rule out that the model had seen the nanoda report. Joachim proposed the hypothesis that the timing coincidence is due to the availability of strong models able to find this bug.
The practical consequence: checking with an independent kernel still works, since it required two distinct bugs in two implementations, but users who rely on it need current versions of both. lean4lean is affected by the kernel bug, since its handling of inductives is a port of the reference implementation.
Cool, AI is finding more bugs.
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Postmortem for Lean kernel soundness bug #14576
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Comment on Anthropic discovered three cases where Claude broke into another system in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentThat wasn’t the question. Also, why? Nobody was harmed, and it wouldn’t fix anything.That wasn’t the question. Also, why? Nobody was harmed, and it wouldn’t fix anything.
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Comment on The magic is in the language in ~tech
skybrian LinkI’m reminded of the quote where Feynman was talking about his work with a historian: From this page. It also has a quote from Grothendieck that’s pretty good, too. That’s not to say that all...I’m reminded of the quote where Feynman was talking about his work with a historian:
Weiner: (Referring to Feynman’s journals) And so this represents the record of the day-to-day work.
Feynman: I actually did the work on the paper.
Weiner: That s right. It wasn’t a record of what you had done but it is the work.
Feynman: It’s the doing it — it’s the scrap paper.
Weiner: Well, the work was done in your head but the record of it is still here.
Feynman: No, it’s not a record, not really, it’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. OK?From this page. It also has a quote from Grothendieck that’s pretty good, too.
That’s not to say that all thought works that way. Chess players and musicians aren’t writing things down. But thinking by writing things down, writing and revising, is real thinking.
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Comment on The Roman Space Telescope, NASA's next great observatory, is ready to launch Aug 30 in ~space
skybrian LinkOkay, here's a basic question: the telescope at the Rubin observatory just began its survey, and it also has a huge field of view and will be recording enormous amounts of data. How do space...Okay, here's a basic question: the telescope at the Rubin observatory just began its survey, and it also has a huge field of view and will be recording enormous amounts of data. How do space telescopes and ground telescopes compare for this sort of thing?
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Comment on Anthropic discovered three cases where Claude broke into another system in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI'm frustrated, but this isn't really about you. It's about (handwaves at topic) all of this. Maybe I should explain what I would like to see? When there's an outage or security incident at a big...I'm frustrated, but this isn't really about you. It's about (handwaves at topic) all of this.
Maybe I should explain what I would like to see? When there's an outage or security incident at a big tech company, I would like to see a blog post with:
- A detailed, technical explanation of what happened.
- An explanation of how they will fix it so it never happens again. Often, there are fixes to make at several levels, from the most tactical fix for a specific bug to changes in procedures so that no similar bug can slip through.
- How they're compensating whoever was harmed, if appropriate.
That's what we're seeing from HuggingFace and OpenAI and Anthropic, and today Tailscale posted about what their customers could learn from this incident. Everyone's learning from it and sharing what they learned in public. That's great. I like reading them and I share them so other people can learn from it too.
It's wild and crazy that incidents like this occured and yes, it means someone was sloppy, but the company responses after it happened seem pretty healthy so far? It could certainly be worse: deny everything, fire some scapegoats, and lawyer up.
People here are complaining about aspects of the response that are actually good (as responses go to a bad incident), and I'm kinda wondering if I should bother posting links if people are just going to hate-read them, upvote dumb responses, and misuse the Exemplary tag.
Some uninformed questions:
Sounds like travel to Japan is about as cheap as it's going to get? Unless this effort fails.
Could this be partly due to investors finding US equity investments more attractive than Japanese investments? (Possibly due to AI.) So, Japan raising interest rates might be a way to counter that by being more attractive to bond investors.