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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • Ask Slashdot: Are YouTube's Subtitles 'Appallingly Bad'?
    by EditorDavid on 02/05/2026 at 10:34 pm

    Long-time Slashdot reader Anne Thwacks frequently uses YouTube's subtitles "not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good." But they say there's a new problem. "The subtitling is terrible!" Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable. And no effort whatsoever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name! If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts. If it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names! If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledygook! Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America? (However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.) They argue the subtitles are "appallingly bad" — and that "the situation seems to be getting worse," wondering why the problem isn't addressed with some basic spell-checking. ("I'm sure that the vast majority of foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary.") Have any Slashdot readers seen similar problems? A friend of mine noticed that YouTube's subtitles even bungled this innocuous song from the 1966. ANNETTE FUNICELLO: "If your love is true love, you can tell by his touch." YOUTUBE SUBTITLE: "If your love is too lava, you can tell by his touch..." Share your own experiences and thoughts in the comments. And do you think YouTube's subtitles are "appallingly bad"? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • The $19B "Nuclear AI" Energy Startup That Couldn't Sign a Single Client
    by EditorDavid on 02/05/2026 at 9:34 pm

    "Nuclear AI startup" Fermi had hoped to build power plants generating 17 gigawatts of electricity, remembers Bloomberg, "three times the amount typically consumed by New York City." Hyperscalers could install their data centers on the site itself and tap directly into that power, which would come first from natural gas turbines and later from nuclear reactors. The pitch ticked so many boxes — artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, political connections — that some investors found it irresistible. Fermi went public in October worth more than $19 billion in market value, despite reporting no revenue or signed customers. Now, the startup's board has fired its top executive, Toby Neugebauer, after months of negotiations failed to secure a single client. Chief Financial Officer Miles Everson left as well... Fermi's stock, meanwhile, has tumbled 84% from its peak. The company's more than 5,000-acre site in the Texas panhandle — dubbed Project Matador, or the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus — remains mostly unfinished. And some analysts see a cautionary tale of the market's AI enthusiasm running ahead of reality, with investors betting on companies whose grand projects may never get built... The idea of giving data centers their own, dedicated power supply not dependent on the grid may sound tempting, but former US Department of Energy official Jigar Shah said banks don't want to finance it. The grid, drawing power from many sources, is more reliable than a handful of expensive, on-site plants, he said. He considers Fermi a failure "of monumental proportions" and says similar, off-grid data center projects elsewhere deserve more skepticism than they've received... "We're allowing these types of projects to continue to be viewed as viable when they most certainly are not," said Shah, who ran the department's Loan Programs Office during the Biden administration.... "It was a piece of dirt with a dream," an investor who visited the site in February told the short sellers, Fuzzy Panda Research. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Using Drones for Cloud-Seeding Can Trigger Rain, Company Claims
    by EditorDavid on 02/05/2026 at 8:34 pm

    Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents — making them "the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations." The Deseret News reports: Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodide into clouds, then they track precipitation with advanced radar. However, Rainmaker — and every other rain-enhancement company — has been up against the notoriously difficult challenge of validation. Since there is no control set to test, and because the weather is chaotic and variable, the Government Accountability Office declares the benefits of the technology to be "unproven." To overcome this evaluation challenge, Rainmaker flies drones in unique patterns when seeding. Then operators compare distinct radar and satellite features with where their drones operated. As of April, Rainmaker found 82 unambiguous seeding signatures, which show their seeding operations directly caused precipitation. In Utah and Oregon alone, the company said its cloud-seeding efforts have added enough water to match the annual usage of about 1,750 households. However, "this figure likely represents only a small fraction of Rainmaker's total generation this season," the company said in their press release... Their drone precision, combined with their radar systems, have produced satellite images proving a direct correlation between the seeding and precipitation. Some images show cloud holes or regions of depressed cloud tops after seeding. Rainmaker's announcement promises they'll "go forward and continue our mission to refill the Great Salt Lake, end drought in the American West and deliver water abundance wherever it is needed most around the world." (Rainmaker currently operates in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California and Colorado.) The director of Utah's Natural Resources Department told the Deseret News that with cloud seeding, "cost per unit of water is so low; it really is the smartest thing we can be doing with our money," Ferry said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • What if Tech Company Layoffs Aren't All About AI?
    by EditorDavid on 02/05/2026 at 7:34 pm

    "Running a Big Tech company during Silicon Valley's AI mania may not necessarily require fewer workers or cost less," writes the Washington Post: Amazon, Google and Meta together have roughly the same number of employees now as they did during an industry-wide hiring binge in 2022, company disclosures show. Growing costs for technical workers and related expenses have often outpaced sales recently. The tech giants' big AI bet hasn't yet paid for itself. That means AI might be killing jobs not through its labor-saving wizardry but by increasing spending so much that CEOs are pressured to find savings, giving them cover to consciously uncouple from their workforces. Marc Andreessen, a prominent start-up investor and a Meta board director, put it bluntly on a recent podcast. Big company layoffs are a fix for overstaffing and changing economic conditions, he said, but AI provides a convenient scapegoat. "Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: 'Ah, it's AI,'" he said... "Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI," Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT owner OpenAI, said at a March conference when he listed explanations for AI's unpopularity in the United States. "Recent history suggests Big Tech companies might not be moving toward a future with fewer workers," the article concludes, "but recalibrating to spend the same, or more, on different people and projects." So in the end, "AI might soon reduce hiring," the article acknowledges, "But the reluctance or inability of the largest tech firms to cut too deeply so far could also show that the path to making a workforce AI-ready — whatever that means — isn't a predictable straight line charting declining headcount." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • An Amateur Just Solved a 60-Year-Old Math Problem - by Asking AI
    by EditorDavid on 02/05/2026 at 6:34 pm

    Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23-year-old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve. The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro was posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erds problems. The question Price solved — or prompted ChatGPT to solve—concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other... Price sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The duo had jump-started the AI-for-Erds craze late last year by prompting a free version of ChatGPT with open problems chosen at random from the Erds problems website. Reviewing Price's message, Barreto realized what they had was special, and experts whom he notified quickly took notice. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Costumed Crowd 'Speedruns' Scientology Building For Social Media Trend
    by EditorDavid on 02/05/2026 at 5:34 pm

    Last Saturday someone dressed as Jesus "was among the dozens of people in costumes and masks seen on a video forcing open the door of a Scientology building on Hollywood Boulevard," reports the Los Angeles Times, "after a tug-of-war with a security guard." The footage posted on TikTok and Instagram shows the group sprinting up and down stairs and clashing with black-shirted security guards, giggling and gasping to catch their breath while church members scream at them to leave. On their way out — as security guards approach armed with fire extinguishers — one of the sprinters stops and dances to celebrate their successful escape, a move reminiscent of a taunt from the video game Fortnite. For weeks, groups of people have barged into two of the church's Hollywood properties, racing through hallways and tussling with security guards, trying to see how far they can get before they are forced to leave by church staff... Church officials say the incidents are not a game and have accused the speed runners of "hate crimes." After dozens on Saturday stormed the Ivar Avenue building that houses an exhibit dedicated to the church's founder, science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, the external door handles were removed from all three of Scientology's properties on Hollywood Boulevard by Sunday morning. Guards could be seen blocking the doorway to one building on Monday afternoon... No arrests have been made. A report from the Associated Press cites a joke left on one of the videos: that if runners reach the top of the building, they'll find Tom Cruise. One commenter on a recent TikTok video of a speedrun asked why people are doing this, and another user simply replied, "because it's fun." The 18-year-old who started the trend told the Hollywood Reporter his original video has been viewed over 100 million times. "From there on out, I pretty much knew that Scientology was like a free gateway to a lot of views." Vulture notes that "there's even a Roblox re-creation of the trend, made using the 'maps; drawn from actual videos" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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