Opaque recurrence, and other AI terms that you should probably know
The rise of AI has brought an avalanche of new terms and slang. Here is a glossary with definitions of some of the most important words and phrases you might encounter.
The rise of AI has brought an avalanche of new terms and slang. Here is a glossary with definitions of some of the most important words and phrases you might encounter.
Creepy crawlies Konstantin Ryabitsev discusses how bad the "background radiation" of abusive crawlers has become from the perspective of git.kernel.org, the official Git repository for the Linux kernel: TL;DR: we spend more CPU cycles rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds...
The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI. [...] We will need powerful, aligned AI for defense; to secure infrastructure, to protect against rogue agents in real time, and to invent...

Forget email surveys or long calls spent on hold. Voicebox lets people send customer feedback by recording a voice note on their phone.
My comment on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get — Lobste.rs.[In reply to a comment about burning it down to start from scratch when technical debt becomes overwhelming] In my experience it's so rare for that to work. You announce the old thing is irrecoverably drowning in tech...
The Uber founder has said that Atoms will allow him to complete "unfinished business."
Jakub Pachocki reflects on increasingly capable AI and the challenge of keeping it aligned. He calls for stronger safeguards and international coordination.
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate". On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says: It...

I was initially enamored with the beta version of Apple’s revamped smartphone assistant. As the full release approaches, I’ve forgotten Siri AI even exists.

Polls show that overwhelming majorities of Americans hate data centers. China makes a perfect scapegoat for tech leaders and their allies—the only problem is a lack of evidence.
If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance. — Zach Kehs, There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get Tags:...

Broadcom admits it put “too big a focus on VCF.”

A once-overlooked block of unicode that's invisible to humans is gaining ever wider use.
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It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes," which are essentially themed collections of musical...
Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors. As part of...
Instagram's visible AI labels are supposed to help people quickly spot synthetically generated content at a glance. Over the last few weeks, however, users have been reporting that the system has gone haywire. They say Meta has been automatically applying an "AI Content" label to images that they...

While philosophers ponder AI consciousness, the models have ideas of their own.
Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones, which are now firmly established as a critical weapon of modern warfare. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector. The data drones generate will far outlast the wars in which they are used to...
There is a torrent of unappetizing slop coming from restaurants, cafes, and brands that are increasingly turning to AI to generate images promoting their food. The resulting horror show includes donut shrimp, Reubens from the deep, wormlike noodles, and noodle-like pastries and stringy chicken....