Tootfinder

🚯 Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon
#computing

Junkyard Computing: Repurposing Discarded Smartphones to Minimize Carbon
1.5 billion smartphones are sold annually, and most are decommissioned less than two years later. Most of these unwanted smartphones are neither discarded nor recycled but languish in junk drawers and storage units. This computational stockpile represents a substantial wasted potential: modern smartphones have increasingly high-performance and energy-efficient processors, extensive networking capabilities, and a reliable built-in power supply. This project studies the ability to reuse smartphon…

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ispreview/116377243959305777
The high position of the UK in the Spamhaus C2 list represents a big failure of the UK's (now decade long) investment in cyber security, and a small win for the reliability of its networks.

When DHS, USCIS, and DOGE announced the overhaul of the SAVE program,
they explicitly linked the effort to a campaign to combat the “taint” of noncitizen voter fraud,
a long-standing claim tied to the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
By all appearances, the administration is poised to use the SAVE program to prop up these false claims,
and sympathetic local officials may deploy SAVE to concoct evidence.
This move poses serious risks to vo…

DHS, USCIS, DOGE Overhaul Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Database | Homeland Security
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, alongside USCIS and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), announced a comprehensive optimization of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to ensure a single, reliable source for verifying non-citizen status nationwide.

“In this work, we conduct a large-scale simulation of how users might delegate work to LLMs across 52 professional domains. We find that current LLMs are unreliable delegates: even frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content over long workflows, with sparse but severe errors that silently compound over time.”
Good to see the issue addressed explicitly, even though the results aren’t surprising—why would anyone expect LLMs to be reliable!?

RE: https://toot.cat/@plexus/116283016837715719
It should also be noted that beyond the ethical, political and environmental issues with this is that it doesn't work:
1. There is on average no mid to long term productivity gain with actual real-world software development that isn't just a "wow see what it can do" demo. (Multiple studies have shown that now.)
2. It won't help with 90% of the work when professionally making software, which, believe it or not, isn't coding. 90% of the work is designing and planning the software (these are things that happen both upfront and during development).
Maybe you have seen the recent Microsoft thing rolling back features in Windows they added?
E.g. Copilot in Notepad. What they did is essentially outsourcing project management to developers who then outsourced it to LLMs. But an LLMs can't plan and design software, and arguably barely can even generate code that works (as in reliable and performant). So now they have a buggy mess with features no one wants and they're rolling it back.
There's no silver bullets in software development.

PSA: that linux root exploit is significant. Nobody cares about the number of bytes of the exploit. It's about as meaningless as the also popular "this attack takes only xx seconds / xx minutes". If attackers want to become root, they really don't care if you need 700 or 7000 or 70000 bytes. Or if it takes 2 seconds or 5 minutes. Irrelevant metrics for impact.
Relevant Qs are: how reliable the exploit is, how widespread the vulnerability, etc.

“In this work, we conduct a large-scale simulation of how users might delegate work to LLMs across 52 professional domains. We find that current LLMs are unreliable delegates: even frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content over long workflows, with sparse but severe errors that silently compound over time.”
Good to see the issue addressed explicitly, even though the results aren’t surprising—why would anyone expect LLMs to be reliable!?

“In this work, we conduct a large-scale simulation of how users might delegate work to LLMs across 52 professional domains. We find that current LLMs are unreliable delegates: even frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content over long workflows, with sparse but severe errors that silently compound over time.”
Good to see the issue addressed explicitly, even though the results aren’t surprising—why would anyone expect LLMs to be reliable!?

from my link log —
What SRE is not.
https://blog.relyabilit.ie/what-sre-is-not/
saved 2021-11-29 https://dotat.at/:/T0UG8.html

What SRE is not
We used to have a difficulty in our community - thankfully less prevalent now - with rootless questions of identity. Of course, it's not wrong to ask who we are, what we're here for, and what should we be doing: every profession benefits from regular reflection. But too much of

We did a few small things to polish #LinuxBoot channel if you're interested! 🥳

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LinuxBoot is the concept of using a Linux kernel and initramfs as a bootloader. The linuxboot repository contains a build system implementing LinuxBoot primarily targeting servers and PCs, which started as NERF in January 2017 at Google. Why? Improves boot reliability by replacing lightly-tested firmware drivers with hardened Linux drivers. Improves boot time by removing unnecessary code. Typically makes boot 20 times faster. Allows customization of the initrd runtime to support site-specific…