A bunch of academic AI experts, along with the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and others have used the Center for AI Safety to put out a "succinct statement" to "voice concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks". The statement in its entirety is as follows: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war". Cool, thanks for that. Maybe you, as the people who make this fucking shit, could do something about it then? What the fuck do you want us to do???
Meta and TikTok have revealed in their latest biannual transparency reports that they've "complied with 3654 of 4517 requests for user data from Australian authorities relating to 5338 accounts last year". Those authorities include the AFP, eSafety Commissioner and various courts around the country. Meta had the bulk of them, but TikTok "complied with 91 of 224 requests relating to 229 users, including 179 legal requests and 277 emergency requests". Dunno what Meta and TikTok are handing over exactly, but they're certainly co-operating with the bulk of requests.
Some old news from my bookmarks that didn't make the cut when it was fresh, but seems useful enough to dig out on a slow news day:
Remember ExpressCard 3G modems and soundcards? Well the wizards of Shenzhen have made an ExpressCard/34 to PCIe NVMe SSD adapter. That's right, find yourself a 2242 size SSD (its like a 2280 SSD, but shorter - 42mm instead of 80mm), shove it in this enclosure then jam it into your laptop. According to this blog post, it "worked right out of the box" on a ThinkPad T430 running Fedora 36 and Linux kernel version 5.19.12. Performance is more or less like a SATA SSD as ExpressCard is hooked up via a PCIe 2.0 x1 link, but damn the life people are getting out of these T430 ThinkPads is insane.
JB Hi-Fi has a 10% off sale for Perks members (free to sign up), a few good deals around:
Microsoft's CEO Bill Gates, left, takes delivery of a picture from Intel's CEO Andy Grove, right, at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, May 13, 1993. Gates bought the picture last month for $25,000, which was donated to the Software Education Foundation. The picture is called "Die Plot of Pentium Processor". The two were meeting at Microsoft. (AP Photo/Barry Sweet)
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