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2025-09-15

• 15:31 UTC Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape :: BogdanTheGeek’s Blog – Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape :: BogdanTheGeek's Blog Turns out disposable vapes contain a quite capable ARM microcontroller! So here are the specs of a microcontroller so bad, it’s basically disposable: - 24MHz Coretex M0+; - 24KiB of Flash Storage; - 3KiB of Static RAM; - a few peripherals, none of which we will use. A cool hack ensues. Tags: computers hosting hacking diy electronics arm microcontrollers kernel vapes

2025-09-11

• 16:04 UTC Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference – Thinking Machines Lab – Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference - Thinking Machines Lab Reproducibility is a bedrock of scientific progress. However, it’s remarkably difficult to get reproducible results out of large language models. For example, you might observe that asking ChatGPT the same question multiple times provides different results. This by itself is not surprising, since getting a result from a language model involves “sampling”, a process that converts the language model’s output into a probability distribution and probabilistically selects a token. What might be more surprising is that even when we adjust the temperature down to 0This means that the LLM always chooses the highest probability token, which is called greedy sampling. (thus making the sampling theoretically deterministic), LLM APIs are still not deterministic in practice (see past discussions here, here, or here). Even when running inference on your own hardware with an OSS inference library like vLLM or SGLang, sampling still isn’t deterministic (see here or here). The levels of non-deterministic variation throughout the LLM stack discussed here are massive! It's kinda crazy that this doesn't produce incorrect output more often. Tags: llms ml machine-learning ai determinism testing inference reproducibility randomness floating-point
• 15:52 UTC After ‘humiliating’ raid, Burkina Faso halts ‘gene drive’ project to fight malaria – After ‘humiliating’ raid, Burkina Faso halts ‘gene drive’ project to fight malaria Oh great. Russian psyops are now disrupting the fight against malaria: The move is “a real blow” to hopes for gene drives, says Fredros Okumu, a vector biologist at the University of Glasgow and the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania. “Target Malaria has made a huge investment in Burkina Faso” by training scientists and engaging with communities, he says. And although lab research can continue, finding sites for field tests has now become a lot harder, says Mark Benedict, a mosquito geneticist who until recently worked for Target Malaria. “Burkina Faso and Target Malaria were the most fully developed partnership, so it’s chilling.” The collapse of the project there may discourage other possible host countries. [...] Opposition to the project has grown, fueled in part by false accusations spread through social media, such as that Target Malaria was weaponizing mosquitoes to spread disease or sterilize people. The claims are part of a wider pattern of disinformation campaigns in the region often linked to Russian networks, says Mark Duerksen, a security expert at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense. “We’ve seen this kind of public health disinformation really take off in the last 12, 18 months,” he says. The campaigns aim to sow “distrust of the West as having nefarious plots in Africa,” Duerksen says—and they play into the “sovereignist narrative” of Burkina Faso’s government, led by Ibrahim Traoré, a young military officer who took power in 2022 after two coups. Traoré has emphasized national autonomy and has revoked the licenses of many foreign nongovernmental organizations. Tags: malaria russia propaganda disinformation mosquitos gene-drive

2025-09-09

• 11:54 UTC TLDs’ grace periods – TLDs' grace periods WTF! some TLDs allow anyone to buy the domain BEFORE they expire; e.g. ".pe" allowed a squatter to steal a domain 12 days prior to its expiration. How does this make sense? Tags: expiration domains cctlds tlds domain-squatting infosec
• 11:49 UTC GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work – GOP Cries Censorship Over Spam Filters That Work LOL. Republican political email campaigns (like WinRed) keep getting marked as spam, because they're using shitty lists: Tossavainen told KrebsOnSecurity that WinRed’s emails hit its spamtraps in the .com, .net, and .org space far more frequently than do fundraising emails sent by ActBlue. Koli-Lõks published a graph of the stark disparity in spamtrap activity for WinRed versus ActBlue, showing a nearly fourfold increase in spamtrap hits from WinRed emails in the final week of July 2025. Tags: spam anti-spam spamtraps winred us-politics gop republicans filtering

2025-09-08

• 15:28 UTC Where’s the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don’t Add Up – Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up One dev crunched the numbers on AI coding -- and found absolutely 0 noticeable impact: I discovered that the data isn’t statistically significant at any meaningful level. That I would need to record new datapoints for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. It’s too neck-and-neck. That lack of differentiation between the groups is really interesting though. Yes, it’s a limited sample and could be chance, but also so far AI appears to slow me down by a median of 21%, exactly in line with the METR study. I can say definitively that I’m not seeing any massive increase in speed (i.e., 2x) using AI coding tools. If I were, the results would be statistically significant and the study would be over. That’s really disappointing. Tags: productivity chatgpt github technology business culture work llms metr ai

2025-09-05

• 08:51 UTC Google quietly demotes its net zero pledge – Google quietly demotes its net zero pledge "An investigation by Canada’s National Observer has found that Google’s net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company's sustainability report." Tags: net-zero climate-change google dont-be-evil sustainability

2025-09-02

• 15:56 UTC OVHcloud legal eagle on Microsoft’s sovereignty admission – OVHcloud legal eagle on Microsoft's sovereignty admission OVHCloud are (rightfully) making plentiful hay from Microsoft's admission that data sovereignty is a joke under US law: "[Microsoft] finally told the truth!" says OVHcloud Chief Legal Officer Solange Viegas Dos Reis. "It's not a surprise," she shrugs, "we already knew that [MS could not guarantee that customer data would remain protected from US government access requests]." However, "this reply from Microsoft brought kind of a shock for customers, because they suddenly discover that what they have been taught for a while. 'Oh guys, don't worry, it will not apply to you. Don't worry.' It's false! Because, indeed, the data can be communicated." Anton Carniaux, director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France, made the admission during a hearing in the country. In answer to whether he could guarantee that data on French citizens could not be transmitted to the US government without the explicit agreement of the French authorities, Carniaux replied: "No, I can't guarantee it," but added that the scenario had "never happened before." "It's a question of trust," says Viegas Dos Reis. "And because of this question of trust, we have been receiving a lot of questions from our customers about, 'Hey, we know now how it works with US cloud providers. Tell me how it works from other providers.'" Tags: ovhcloud ovh data-protection data-privacy amazon microsoft google cloud-computing sovereignty eu politics surveillance
• 15:30 UTC Turning AI Data Centers into Grid-Interactive Assets: Results from a Field Demonstration in Phoenix, Arizona – Turning AI Data Centers into Grid-Interactive Assets: Results from a Field Demonstration in Phoenix, Arizona Demand-response actually working in the field! Artificial intelligence (AI) is fueling exponential electricity demand growth, threatening grid reliability, raising prices for communities paying for new energy infrastructure, and stunting AI innovation as data centers wait for interconnection to constrained grids. This paper presents the first field demonstration, in collaboration with major corporate partners, of a software-only approach – Emerald Conductor – that transforms AI data centers into flexible grid resources that can efficiently and immediately harness existing power systems without massive infrastructure buildout. Conducted at a 256-GPU cluster running representative AI workloads within a commercial, hyperscale cloud data center in Phoenix, Arizona, the trial achieved a 25% reduction in cluster power usage for three hours during peak grid events while maintaining AI quality of service (QoS) guarantees. By orchestrating AI workloads based on real-time grid signals without hardware modifications or energy storage, this platform reimagines data centers as grid-interactive assets that enhance grid reliability, advance affordability, and accelerate AI’s development. Tags: demand-response power ai datacenters electricity emerald-ai grid
• 15:28 UTC Toyota Prius gen2 plug and play – Toyota Prius gen2 plug and play Turns out there is an extensive hacking scene turning cars like the Toyota Prius into a full EV with homebrew hardware/firmware (via ITC Slack) Tags: via:itc homebrew hacking prius cars evs toyota hacks

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