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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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  • Is AI Cannibalizing Human Intelligence? A Neuroscientist's Way to Stop It
    by EditorDavid on 26/04/2026 at 4:34 am

    The AI industry is largely failing to ask a key design question, argues theoretical neuroscientist/cognitive scientist Vivienne Ming. Are their AI products building human capacity or consuming it? In the Wall Street Journal Ming shares her experiment about which group performed best at predicting real-world events (compared to forecasters on prediction market Polymarket) — AI, human, or human-AI hybrid teams. The human groups performed poorly, relying on instinct or whatever information had come across their feeds that morning. The large AI models — ChatGPT and Gemini, in this case — performed considerably better, though still short of the market itself. But when we combined AI with humans, things got more interesting. Most hybrid teams used AI for the answer and submitted it as their own, performing no better than the AI alone. Others fed their own predictions into AI and asked it to come up with supporting evidence. These "validators" had stumbled into a classic confirmation bias-loop: the sycophancy that leads chatbots to tell you what you want to hear, even if it isn't true. They ended up performing worse than an AI working solo. But in roughly 5% to 10% of teams, something different emerged. The AI became a sparring partner. The teams pushed back, demanding evidence and interrogating assumptions. When the AI expressed high confidence, the humans questioned it. When the humans felt strongly about an intuition, they asked the AI to come up with a counterargument... These teams reached insightful conclusions that neither a human nor a machine could have produced on its own. They were the only group to consistently rival the prediction market's accuracy. On certain questions, they even outperformed it... We are building AI systems specifically designed to give us the answer before we feel the discomfort of not having it. What my experiment suggests is that the human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They're the uncomfortable ones: the capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; to sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it. To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, "What's missing?" rather than default to "Great, that's done." To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it. We don't build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways: the student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer; the person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation; the reader who sits with a difficult idea long enough for it to actually change one's mind. Most AI chatbots today default to easy answers, which is hurting our ability to think critically. I call this the Information-Exploration Paradox. As the cost of information approaches zero, human exploration collapses. We see it in students who perform better on AI-assisted tasks and worse on everything afterward. We see it in developers shipping more code and understanding it less. We are, in ways that feel like progress, slowly optimizing ourselves out of the loop. The author just published a book called " Robot-Proof: When Machines Have All The Answers, Build Better People." They suggest using AI to "explore uncertainty.... before you accept an AI's answer, ask it for the strongest argument against itself." And they're also urging new performance benchmarks for AI-human hybrid teams. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Trump Fires All 24 Members of America's National Science Board
    by EditorDavid on 26/04/2026 at 12:45 am

    America's National Science Board (NSB) "was established in 1950 to guide the governance of the National Science Foundation," writes the Washington Post, "in an unusual structure within the federal government that echoes the setup of a company board in the private sector. It helps guide an agency that operates Antarctic research stations, telescopes, a fleet of research vessels and supports basic science research in laboratories across the United States." (NSF research has helped evolve the technology used in MRIs, cellphones and LASIK eye surgery.) But yesterday President Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF), reports Science magazine: In addition to advising the administration and Congress on national science policy, it has statutory authority to oversee the actions of the $9-billion NSF, setting policy and approving large expenditures. Its presidentially appointed members, typically prominent academics and industry leaders, serve 6-year terms, with eight members chosen every 2 years.... Keivan Stassun, one of the dismissed board members, says the mass firing is the latest indication that the White House is ignoring the board's authority and dictating policies at NSF, which has been without a permanent director since Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned exactly one year ago. Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, thinks the board's public criticism in May 2025 of Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's current budget — which Congress ultimately ignored — antagonized the administration. "Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective," Stassun says, "is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes." The Washington Post adds that "The White House did not immediately respond to inquiries about why the members were terminated." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Australia's Teen Social Media Ban Isn't Working. Half Their Teens Still Have Access, Survey Finds
    by EditorDavid on 25/04/2026 at 11:09 pm

    After Australia banned social media for users younger than 16, teenagers "immediately worked to circumvent the restrictions," reports Fortune: 14-year-old in New South Wales, told The Washington Post in December 2025, just before the implementation of the ban, she planned to use her mother's face ID to log in to Snapchat and . In a Reddit thread on ways to bypass the ban, one user suggested using a printed mesh face mask from Temu to outsmart apps' facial recognition tools. Others still have tried VPNs that obscure their locations. A new report suggests these efforts are working. In a survey of 1,050 Australians ages 12 to 15 conducted last month, the UK-based suicide prevention organization the Molly Rose Foundation found more than 60% of teens who had social media accounts before the ban still had access to at least one of those platforms. Social media sites including TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, have retained more than half of their users under 16. About two-thirds of young users say these platforms have taken "no action" to remove or reactive accounts that existed before the restrictions. The survey comes at the heels of the Australian internet regulator calling for an investigation into the five largest social media platforms over potential breaches of the ban. The article points out that "Greece, France, Indonesia, Austria, Spain, and the UK have or are considering similar action, and eight U.S. states are weighing legislation that would put guardrails or ban social media use for minors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Colorado Adds Open-Source Exemption to Age-Verification Bill
    by EditorDavid on 25/04/2026 at 9:26 pm

    Colorado's "age-attestation" bill left the House committee with new exemptions for open-source operating systems, applications, code repositories, and containerized software distribution, reports the blog Linuxiac: [The bill] focuses on operating system providers and application stores. Its main requirement is that these providers supply an age-related signal via an interface, so applications can determine whether a user is a minor... System76 founder Carl Richell shared on Fosstodon that the updated bill now includes "a strong exemption for open source distros and apps" and has passed in the House committee. He also quoted the key part, which says Article 30 does not apply to an operating system provider or developer that distributes software under license terms that let recipients copy, redistribute, and modify the software without restrictions from the provider or developer... This wording covers Linux distributions and many open-source applications without linking the exemption to any specific project, company, or ecosystem. The amendment also excludes applications from free, public code repositories from being considered covered applications. It also excludes code repository providers and containerized software distribution from being defined as covered application stores. This is meant to prevent platforms like GitHub, GitLab, Docker, or Podman-based distributions from being treated like commercial app stores under the bill. "There are more steps but we're on our way to protecting the open source community," Richell posted on Fosstodon, "at least in Colorado." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Is the World Ready For a Car Without a Rear Window?
    by EditorDavid on 25/04/2026 at 8:19 pm

    There's a glass roof — but no rear-view window. Instead the Polestar 4 replaces the rear-view mirror with a live feed from a wide-angle camera. Its high-resolution display (1480 x 320 pixels) promises "a panoramic view of the outside," according to Polestar's web site, showing more of what's behind you. "Visibility in the dark and in rainy conditions is also vastly improved." Besides the camera feed (and side mirrors), the Polestar 4 offers four short-range cameras (for 360-degree views), and even short-range ultrasonics, the Wall Street Journal points out. (Car rear-view windows are usually five feet off the ground, "making a typical traffic cone invisible from closer than about 35 feet." ) And this new design also improves "aero efficiency," reducing drag and shearing turbulence, "critical, since the Polestar 4 is all-electric, and aero drag is the mortal enemy of range." [A]s a practical matter, the Polestar 4's innovation only acknowledges what drivers already know. In many modern cars, the rearview mirror is all but useless, anyway. In a typical full-size SUV, the glass in the rear hatch is about 10 feet away from the rearview mirror, with two sets of headrests in between... Having spent a few days in what Polestar calls an "SUV coupe" I am here to report that drivers won't miss the mirror. For one thing, the display is shaped like a conventional mirror, imbuing it with the comfort of the familiar. The imagery is convincingly mirror-like — reversed — with eye-like focal length, decent resolution and lowlight sensitivity, making it easy to trust when judging distances, with the help of graphical overlays and warning tones. It also has excellent auto-dimming algorithms.... The Polestar 4 is called that because it is the fourth model from the Swedish-Chinese premium/luxury collab, born out of Volvo Cars' performance subbrand. Describing it as an "SUV coupe" almost feels like a translation error. The design eschews signaling traditional utility in favor of a jocund modernism — call it orbital chic.... As for missing the rear window, my advice is, don't look back. "In sports cars, rearview mirrors have been essentially decorative for some time," the article points out. (The 1974 Lamborghini Countach LP400 originally envisioned "a rear-facing periscope fitted in a dorsal channel in the roof.") "The era's contempt for rearview mirrors was captured in a scene from The Gumball Rally (1976) when Raul Julia's character snaps the mirror off his Ferrari Daytona and throws it away. 'The first rule of Italian driving,' he says. 'What's behind me is not important.'" There's 11 exterior cameras, plus 12 ultrasonic sensors and a mid-range radar to watch for threats and "intervene if necessary". One feature even reads speed limit signs and shows the posted limit on the driver's display. ("If the car exceeds the limit, the driver will hear a warning sound.") Even the windshield has built-in camera sensors to provide automatically "adaptive" headlights that switch from high beam to low beam when they identify approaching vehicles or the taillights of cars ahead. "A total of seven airbags are deployed in the event of a collision." Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Open Source Developer Brings Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows ME
    by EditorDavid on 25/04/2026 at 6:34 pm

    Microsoft released the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" in 2016, adding an optional Linux environment into every operating system since Windows 10. But now an open source developer has brought Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, reports the blog It's FOSS, "with Linux kernel 6.19 running alongside the Windows 9x kernel, letting both operate on the same machine at the same time." A virtual device driver handles initialization, loads the kernel off disk and manages the event loop for page faults and syscalls. Since Win9x lacks the right interrupt table support for the standard Linux syscall interrupt, WSL9x reroutes those calls through the fault handler instead. Rounding it all out is wsl.com, a small 16-bit DOS program that pipes the terminal output from Linux back to whatever MS-DOS prompt window you ran it from. The end result is that WSL9x requires no hardware virtualization, and can run on hardware as old as the i486, the article points out. On Mastodon the developer says they "really got this one in right under the wire, before they start removing 486 support from Linux." The source code for WSL9x is released under the GPL-3 license, and was "proudly written without AI." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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