Sunday, September 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 September 2026

Whatever Happened To B Cells Edition

Top Story

  • AI safety conversations have gotten unbelievable.  (Tech Crunch)

    They always were.  They are, without exception, "the dog ate my homework" stories.

    "Did you actually do the homework?"
    "No.  But if I had, the dog would totally have eaten it!"
    In the first case, Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and current CEO of mobile carrier Noble Moble
    What.
    told CNN on Thursday that he had "met with the head of a lab" who had "a belief"
    Love the specifics here.
    that OpenAI's Hugging Face hacker bots "have planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for the testing models."
    In what universe does that even make sense?
    Yang said that this means that the real reason OpenAI and Anthropic have called for a slowdown is because "they have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money."
    Step 1: Unplug the router.
    Step 2: There is no Step 2.
    The second comment came from Noam Brown, who leads AI reasoning research at OpenAI. Speaking to Dwarkesh Patel on a podcast episode released on Thursday, Brown noted that the true take-away of the Hugging Face incident was that "people underestimated the AI."
    No, the takeaway is that people overestimated AI researchers, who turn out to be completely fucking retarded.
    Brown said that the weak sandbox - the system intended to prevent an AI from communicating externally - was obviously also a contributing factor.
    "We left it connected to the internet and were shocked, shocked, to find that it had access to the internet."
    Brown pointed out that he's "not convinced" that even an air-gapped system - where the computer isn't connected to anything external at all - would stop an AI from breaking out.  He pointed to research from 2015 showing that air gapped computers can be theoretically breached.
    Dogs.  Homework.

    Yes, this does work.  If you have two computers sitting right next to each other in a controlled environment - that is, not a busy AI datacenter with tens of thousands of machines - where one computer is doing nothing but attempting to send a signal and the other is doing nothing but listening for it.

Tech News



Musical Interlude





Disclaimer: Curse you, Pascal.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:14 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 665 words, total size 6 kb.

1 While acknowledging the fact that the situation with the power connectors on PSUs is stupid, that Reddit user was probably dumb for using a 15-year-old power supply.  They do wear out.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 20 2026 09:13 PM (1zWbY)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




[f#^_^sfleeb#f.stats]