this_steve_j

The operator’s social “experiment” has all the scientific value of an angry person at a drive-thru McDonalds goading a child into shouting and throwing food at the employee.

The simplest explanation is often the best. He was attacked by... attacked by... the meat bag! Here’s how:

A Meat bag submits a PR and feels slighted the rejection. “This approver thinks I’m an AI? Well, he discerns not wisely but too well!! “

Feeling puckish, they put on the AI shoes (the shoe fits), sling mud all over the hapless maintainer’s nice house, and exit through a window.

The ruse works better than expected; their foil takes the bait, and doubles down with a dueling blog post: “I was Attacked by a Clanker!”

And here we are.

It may all be a show, but I going to tape the finale. (What will the meat bag do? How many people are driving this buggy? Does the clanker have a heart of iron or gold?)

Comment of the week!

A CSB safety video on the agency's investigation into the massive April 8, 2021, explosion and fire that fatally injured one worker at the Yenkin-Majestic Paint Corporation facility in Columbus, Ohio.

“These agents can attend meetings, edit documents, communicate via email and chat, and perform tasks autonomously.

Redmond will sell these “agentic users” in the “M365 Agent Store” and make them discoverable in its Teams collaboration-ware tools.

A365 Agent licensing details are not yet publicly available.

The marketing has 100% shifted to the creation of workloads using “Agents”.

Presumably the hyperscalers can begin conflating the number of “agents” created with “boring jobs eliminated” and thus herald the industrial revolution.

But first: Your subscription price is increasing and now includes 5 Agents.

I like the cut of this jibe.

What are some ways to avoid common methological pitfalls when generating test cases for "groundedness" benchmarks with automation?

Confirmation bias is one obvious pitfall that comes to mind, but also I wonder how it is possible to achieve reproducibility when the input is stochastic.

Direct PDF download link:

https://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Publications/Wreck-a-Nice-...

Here is the full article text:

https://tribunecontentagency.com/article/the-hidden-costs-of...

That’s my understanding.

In a pure implementation, the same level of trust is implied (absolutely none at all) whether a device is connecting to a resource from the public internet or the same subnet.

There are four different micro-segmentation variations in the NIST reference guide: device-agent/gateway, enclaves, resource portals, and application sandboxing.

Basically a policy evaluation point (PEP) evaluates the security posture of both parties before and after a handshake, then creates a logical or physical path of some kind of between the actor and the resource. This can be done with software-defined virtual networks and stateful firewalls, at one or more of the OSI layers.

Microsoft’s version of “Zero Trust” doesn’t care if things are reachable from the public internet. They have been preaching “identity is the new perimeter” [1] for years, and it doesn’t wash.

The NIST Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) implementation guides (SP 1800-35) [2] cut through the nonsense and AI generated marketing smoke.

In ZTA, ALL network locations are untrusted. Network connections are created by a Policy Engine that creates and tears down tunnels to each resource dynamically using attribute-based-access-controls (ABAC). Per request.

Microsoft doesn’t have any products that can do full ZTA, so several pillars are missing from their “Zero Trust” marketing materials.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/insidetrack/blog/securing-the-bord...

[2] https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.1800-35

The terms “Cognitive decline” or “brain rot” may have sounded too sensational, and to be fair the authors note the limitations of the small sample size.

Indeed the paper doesn’t provide a reference or citation for the term “cognitive debt” so it is a strange title. Maybe a last minute swap.

Fascinating research out of MIT. Like all psychology studies it deserves healthy scrutiny and independent verification. Bit of a kitchen sink with the imaging and psychometric assessments, but who doesn’t love a picture of “this is your brain on LLMs” amirite?

Another reason to be worried by Microsoft’s Azure security guidelines which state “Identity is the new perimeter”.

Well, the perimeter is not a gate but a cattle guard, and I am not surprised to see some wolves eating a secret and a cow swaggering into the road.

Azure service APIs have always conflated the principles of “reachability from the public internet” and “anonymous access” into a single concept called “Public Access” which, for Azure KV, has 6 different public/private configuration combinations!

This vulnerability report did not include the Key Vault Networking settings for “Public network access”, so more testing (but not much more) is needed to see if the proxy side door can circumvent a resource ACL or private endpoint or both.

Recently related:

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Recently related:

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Why Alzheimer's Scientists Are Re-Thinking the Amyloid Hypothesis (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42628529

Herpes Virus Might Drive Alzheimer's Pathology, Study Suggests (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578383

Recently related:

Herpes virus and repeated head trauma linked to Alzheimer’s, study finds (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629076

Herpes Virus Might Drive Alzheimer's Pathology, Study Suggests (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578383

Taxi, ambulance drivers offer a clue to reduced Alzheimer's risk (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899

Recently related:

Herpes virus and repeated head trauma linked to Alzheimer’s, study finds (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629076

Why Alzheimer's Scientists Are Re-Thinking the Amyloid Hypothesis (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42628529

Herpes Virus Might Drive Alzheimer's Pathology, Study Suggests (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578383

Taxi, ambulance drivers offer a clue to reduced Alzheimer's risk (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899

Recently related:

Herpes virus and repeated head trauma linked to Alzheimer’s, study finds (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629076

Why Alzheimer's Scientists Are Re-Thinking the Amyloid Hypothesis (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42628529

Taxi, ambulance drivers offer a clue to reduced Alzheimer's risk (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899

Recent/related:

Herpes Virus Might Drive Alzheimer's Pathology, Study Suggests (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578383

Why Alzheimer's Scientists Are Re-Thinking the Amyloid Hypothesis (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42628529

Taxi, ambulance drivers offer a clue to reduced Alzheimer's risk (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42502899

After repeated blows simulating a concussion activated the dormant HSV-1 within the brain organoid samples, a significant build-up of amyloid plaque and tangles of tau protein — key markers of Alzheimer’s disease — was detected. The effect was not observed in uninfected samples.

The study was led by Tufts and Oxford researchers and published in Science Signaling:

Dana M. Cairns et al. Repetitive injury induces phenotypes associated with Alzheimer’s disease by reactivating HSV-1 in a human brain tissue model. Sci. Signal.18, eado 6430 (2025).

https://science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.ado6430

Sounds intriguing. Hoping someone here with a science background might spin up a few ideas for how this property can be used.

FT: An international research team has for the first time imaged and controlled a type of magnetic flow called altermagnetism, which physicists say could be used to develop faster and more reliable electronic devices.

Published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08234-x

It’s unfortunate that the company (teakorigin) raised so much capital ($5mil?) without publishing a peer reviewed paper, scientific report or data set available for download by the public.

It is an interesting research idea, but there are major methodological challenges that would be better be addressed by a scientific inquiry than an entrepreneurial startup-y approach. For example, time of year, sampling, seasonality, handling, selection, etc.

My guess is that this is a retailer-oriented venture in search of a host, but the margins on this stuff are razor thin and grocers are more interested in optimizing the reduction of shrink.

Why would Target or Whole Foods buy into an app that tells shoppers to throw away more produce that looks and tastes totally fine or buy it across the street?

A CSB safety video on the investigation into the fatal release of hydrogen chloride at the Wacker (pronounced “Vocker”) Polysilicon North America facility in Charleston, Tennessee, that occurred on November 13, 2020. One contract worker was killed and two others were seriously injured when attempting to escape the release.

Accident Date: 11/13/2020

Report Date: 06/15/2023

Video Date: 10/16/2024

Patent medicine is how I like to think about it. Strong placebo effect, occasionally some health benefits, mostly nominal. Strong economic incentives and some harmful effects. Traveling salesmen who claim wonders, then leave town before the miracle is delivered.

Not working for you? Be the first to try the new elixir.

If you mess with the bull, you get the horns!

The explosion in the video does show visible smoke, but there is not a visible flame or fire.

The scope of “success” under examination in this guide is tailored for an artificial economic organism that wants to survive and capitalize in a particular competitive marketplace (YouTube).

It is almost certainly not generalizable advice for achieving “success” in the cooperative game of life on earth.