stuff
Scotland
Joined December 2009
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mike simpson retweeted
Companies: "Why do our managers over-hire?"
Their recruiters, to manager candidates: "What's the largest team you've led?"
mike simpson retweeted
"University researchers built a satellite that tracks people from low Earth orbit and dispatches a 5 kg payload to within .1 meter of their position, traveling at Mach 25 to anywhere on Earth in under 5 minutes. They suggest it could be used to deliver greeting cards."
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
mike simpson retweeted
This is how you can find hidden cameras (even the ones without lenses) with a few light flashes.
Researchers came up with a surprisingly effective method they call Eye of Sauron.
Just rapidly switch the lights in a room on and off. When the scene changes abruptly, a camera’s codec has to re-encode a lot of new data, which spikes electromagnetic emissions from its memory controller. If you sync the flashes with an EMI scanner, you can pick up this signature and locate the camera - even pinhole ones that only record to an SD card or stream over a cable.
In their experiment with 50 different camera models, every single one was detected after just four scene changes. Some were found more than 20 meters away and even through walls. Detection range reached ~30 m for plastic-cased cameras and ~11 m for metal ones (far better than typical commercial detectors that only work at 1–2 meters). The whole scan took between 4 and 32 seconds depending on room size.
The method nicely complements classic RF scanning and looking for lens reflections. They also used radio-astronomy filtering techniques to cut through the usual household noise (phones, routers, kettles, etc.).
In the good old days this would have started with the worm.
Nowadays evry1 is going to be auto-harvesting shells for reasons.
If we’re lucky then all the word guessers will be patching after shell so no long tail, just an increase in the % of perma-owned inet boxen.
mike simpson retweeted
Thames Water is borrowing £2.4bn at 10% interest so it can keep funding dividends, even though bosses know it won't be able to repay the money when the company goes tits up. This is corrupt and the government should make it clear that taxpayers won't pick up the tab.
mike simpson retweeted
“For obvious reasons” apparently means ignoring the actual numbers. Texas has 13.9 firearm deaths per 100,000 people. California has 7.0; Massachusetts 3.8. Texas has almost twice California’s rate and over 3.5 times Massachusetts’s.
mike simpson retweeted
The US has one of the highest firearm death rates in the developed world. In 2022, over 48,000 Americans died from gun injuries, more than 132 every day. Most gun deaths aren’t mass shootings: suicide accounts for over half. In 2023, the US firearm death rate was 13.2 per 100,000
mike simpson retweeted
I once sold a truck to a guy who called and agreed to pay full price as long as I brought it to the airport within the hour. It was incredibly sus, but my truck had been for sale for months, and I had grown desperate. So I went. It only got weirder.
The moment I arrive he hops in the drivers seat for a test drive, and a run to the bank to get the money to buy it. He’s a freakishly large porcine fellow, adorned head to toe in dirty work clothes. He looked like Hagrid if he were an alcoholic with a the world’s most unionized construction job.
We get to chatting on the drive. Work, life, conspiratorial ramblings, Donald Trump, Pakis. The usual, if you know this type of guy.
I come to learn he needed to buy my truck to get home. He had bought a one way plane ticket to come buy a different one, but had been ghosted by the seller when he landed. He was stranded at an airport on the other side of the country with no other plan.
So I thought, “well maybe I know the guy who ghosted him. Let me see if I can help.” I asked to see his phone to read his FB Marketplace message with the seller.
He had been talking to some guy with Broken English and a vaguely middle eastern sounding name for several days now. The guy was selling an incredibly desirable truck for 30% below market. A virtually impossible deal. The vehicular equivalent of a horny singles in your area add on a porn site.
He turned to me and said “y’know, his listing says the truck is about an hour from here, maybe I should go look for him.”
I said “bro I’m looking at his profile, he has this same truck listed in every city in North America. The plate in the photos isn’t even from our state. This truck is spammed hundreds of times across marketplace.”
To which he replied, “yeah I thought that was weird. I think it’s a glitch.”
“No it’s not a glitch… you didn’t send him money did you?” I asked, fearing the answer.
“Yeah I sent him a money, otherwise he was gonna sell it to another guy.”
I winced. “how much?”
“Five thousand bucks.”
“……okay.”
“Well let’s look him up, we have his name.” He replies confidently.
“Look him up where?” I ask.
“Facebook”
“I’m looking at his Facebook. It’s not real.”
Just then we arrive at the bank, he parks my 2500HD in the handicap spot at a 45 degree angle. I say maybe we should pick a different spot, he tells me he isn’t picky.
We set up the wire transfer, he makes a disparaging remark about brown people to the teller. She frowns, she is brown. The money luckily still gets sent. And he takes off in the truck.
Hours later he calls me from the middle of nowhere. He had decided to fuck with the aftermarket tuner while driving and bricked it. He was stranded.
I don’t think all you xitter users realize just how difficult the modern world already is for an 85IQ person to navigate.
With 53% of youtube shorts views now coming from AI content, these people are about to be thrust into a completely incomprehensible dream realm forever.
Bricklayer, 49, travels 1,200 miles for dream girl - only to discover she's AI-generated trib.al/3CcGOfk
mike simpson retweeted
10 remarks on AI and math that can be true all at once:
1. The recent progress is stunning and exciting.
2. The Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis is arguably Fields-medal level.
3. Mathematics is being transformed and there is no way back.
4. OpenAI doesn't give a fuck about the future of mathematics.
5. Half-baked unreadable preprints claiming major results can effectively stall mathematical progress.
6. Some mathematicians are responding with naive, overly defensive comments.
7. The social-media wankers framing this as "OpenAI tramples gatekeeping" have no experience of mathematical research.
8. The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.
9. Mathematics is a critical infrastructure of human cognition. The human need for understanding isn't obsolete and it can't be offloaded to machines.
10. We haven't "solved" mathematics and we won't get there before the Sun burns out.
mike simpson retweeted
At Dylan’s inquest in May 2024, ANP said it “wouldn’t be unusual” for her to assess children without reading their GP’s referral.
Ms Hayden reasoned that practitioners “shouldn’t be led directly” by a GP’s assessment
@RCollEM is this what you teach YOUR ACPs/ANPs ?
mike simpson retweeted
Who knew Ukraine's defenders could even debotify the internet?
Well, I guess we did 😌
mike simpson retweeted
This is correct:
"Attempting to outpace AI-driven exploitation with reactive defense is a losing battle. As Provos noted in follow-up work on AI threats[1], security teams should focus on using security invariants to limit attack paths rather than trying to defend at machine speed."
okta.com/newsroom/articles/n…
[1] provos.org/p/security-at-mac…
mike simpson retweeted
Welcome to the future!
An Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) armed with a M2 heavy machine gun rolling through a ruined neighborhood somewhere in Ukraine’s east targets and destroys Russian invaders.
mike simpson retweeted
Cannot WAIT for the cybersecurity conference talks
"How Our Multi-Million-Dollar DR Architecture Performed During an Unscheduled Encounter With Physics"
Forty slides with the SEV-0 postmortem using satellite imagery instead of logs
Smoking one for that poor infra engineer
mike simpson retweeted
It gets even funnier when you consider all these countries are spending billions making "sovereign AI infrastructure" only to rediscover that every "cloud" has a fucking street address
Sovereign compute!
Strategic autonomy!
AI supremacy!
Very impressive, babe. How's the roof?
mike simpson retweeted
The Autumn issue of 2600 is now out!! 2600.com/content/autumn-issu…