ReHacked vol. 292: Can the Singularity be Avoided?, Temu faces EU investigation and more

Vernor Vinge on the Singularity #ai #futurism #superintellingence #longread

Can the Singularity be Avoided?

Well, maybe it won't happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop. There are the widely respected arguments of Penrose and Searle against the practicality of machine sapience. In August of 1992, Thinking Machines Corporation held a workshop to investigate the question "How We Will Build a Machine that Thinks". As you might guess from the workshop's title, the participants were not especially supportive of the arguments against machine intelligence. In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds. However, there was much debate about the raw hardware power that is present in organic brains. A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain. The majority of the participants agreed with Moravec's estimate that we are ten to forty years away from hardware parity. And yet there was another minority who pointed to, and conjectured that the computational competence of single neurons may be far higher than generally believed. If so, our present computer hardware might be as much as ten orders of magnitude short of the equipment we carry around in our heads. If this is true (or for that matter, if the Penrose or Searle critique is valid), we might never see a Singularity. Instead, in the early '00s we would find our hardware performance curves beginning to level off -- this because of our inability to automate the design work needed to support further hardware improvements. We'd end up with some very powerful hardware, but without the ability to push it further. Commercial digital signal processing might be awesome, giving an analog appearance even to digital operations, but nothing would ever "wake up" and there would never be the intellectual runaway which is the essence of the Singularity. It would likely be seen as a golden age ... and it would also be an end of progress. This is very like the future predicted by Gunther Stent. In fact, on page 137 of, Stent explicitly cites the development of transhuman intelligence as a sufficient condition to break his projections.

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Auth Wiki #software

Explore and find clear definitions of key glossaries related to authentication, authorization, and identity management. Work with open-standards like OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and SAML.

RCE Vulnerability in QBittorrent – Sharp Security #security

In qBittorrent, the DownloadManager class has ignored every SSL certificate validation error that has ever happened, on every platform, for 14 years and 6 months since April 6 2010 with commit 9824d86. The default behaviour changed to verifying on October 12 2024 with commit 3d9e971. The first patched release is version 5.0.1, released 2 days ago.

Temu faces EU investigation into rogue traders and illegal goods | AP News #economy

The European Commission opened its investigation five months after adding Temu to the list of “very large online platforms” needing the strictest level of scrutiny under the bloc’s Digital Services Act. It’s a wide-ranging rulebook designed to clean up online platforms and keep internet users safe, with the threat of hefty fines.

Temu started entering Western markets only in the past two years and has grown in popularity by offering cheap goods - from clothing to home products — that are shipped from sellers in China. The company, owned by Pinduoduo Inc., a popular e-commerce site in China, now has 92 million users in the EU.

'Amateurish' thieves steal 2 Warhol prints, damage 2 more in botched heist at Dutch gallery | AP News #art #crime

Thieves blew open the door of an art gallery in the southern Netherlands and stole two works from a famous series of screen prints by American pop artist Andy Warhol and left two more badly damaged in the street as they fled the scene of the botched heist, the gallery owner said Friday.

Mark Peet Visser said the thieves attempted to steal all four works from a 1985 Warhol series called “Reigning Queens,” which features portraits of the then-queens of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark and Swaziland, a small landlocked kingdom in southern Africa which is now called Eswatini.

On the influence of Japanese archaeological heritage on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Journal of Geek Studies #history #fun #longread

In the lore of Breath of the Wild, we learn how the Sheikahs, a technologically advanced culture, sought to mitigate the threat posed by Ganon: constructing gigantic “divine” creatures, powerful guardians, and meshing the territory with observation towers. The political stability of the region was thus maintained by materialistic features, but the use of these technologies slowly faded. So, when the prophecy announced that Ganon was about to come back, King Rhoam, father of Princess Zelda, seeks solution in the past, literally using archaeology to save the world against evil: “We decided to heed the prophecy and began excavating large areas of land. It wasn’t long before we discovered several ancient relics made by the hands of our distant ancestors. These relics, the Divine Beasts, were giant machines piloted by warriors” (Breath of the Wild: end of the Great Plateau cutscene). Thus, towers, shrines, and mechanical creatures had remained untouched, merely waiting for the Sheikah slate’s activation, suggesting an almost unnatural stasis.

The Invincible – Not everything everywhere is for us #fun

A game based on famous S.Lem's novel.

The Secret Electrostatic World of Insects | WIRED #nature

Because the electrostatic world is invisible to human researchers, its forces are hard to study, even before you add unpredictable creatures to the mix. “Doing research in biology can be so much harder than physics because you have to rely on live animals to do something,” England said. He wanted to test whether Lepidoptera, the order of flying insects that includes butterflies and moths, build up enough static during flight to collect pollen from the flowers they visit for nectar, as bees do. But first he had to rig up a way to measure the insects’ static charge.

Mexican TikTokers use code words to report on violence without getting banned - Rest of World #world #crime #socialnetworks

• Mexican TikTokers who report on drug-related violence have come up with code words to avoid having their content removed.
• TikTok told Rest of World that words related to narco-violence do not violate community guidelines.
• Some creators say TikTok’s moderation policies are unclear about which words can be used.

Ancient House with Erotic Frescoes Discovered at Pompeii #history

Age-old paintings of satyrs bedding nymphs and mythological figures fornicating have been newly unearthed at a small house at Pompeii.

In its announcement of the house’s excavation this week, the Pompeii Archaeological Park compared the little domicile to the “tiny house” phenomenon. The dwelling, the park said, was “extremely refined in decoration.” It is one of many like it that have been found at Pompeii recently.

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