Tootfinder

Rapport från dagens stora anti-G7 och anti-Trumpprotest i Genève: ”Man ska inte förhandla med en sådan man”.
https://www.dn.se/varlden/stora-protester-mot-trump-infor-g7-motet-man-ska-inte-forhandla-med-en-sadan-man/

Stora protester mot Trump inför G7-mötet: ”Man ska inte förhandla med en sådan man som bara tänker på sig själv”
Stora protester mot Trump inför G7-mötet i Évian: ”Man ska inte förhandla med en sådan man som bara tänker på sig själv”

Lynx S10: Roboterhund erstmals autonom auf arktischen Eisschollen unterwegs
Deep Robotics hat seinen vierbeinigen Roboter Lynx S10 so modifiziert, dass er sich in der Arktis autonom auch auf Eisschollen fortbewegen kann.

Lynx S10: Roboterhund erstmals autonom auf arktischen Eisschollen unterwegs
Deep Robotics hat seinen vierbeinigen Roboter Lynx S10 so modifiziert, dass er sich in der Arktis autonom auch auf Eisschollen fortbewegen kann.

So to follow up on this, I've caught it in action. Models, when quantized a bit, just do a bit more poorly with short contexts. Even going from f32 (as trained) to bf16 (as usually run) to q8 tends to do okay for "normal" context windows. And q4 you start feeling like "this model is a little stupid and gets stuck sometimes” (it is! It's just that it's still mostly careening about in the space of "plausible" most of the time. Not good guesswork, but still in the zone). With long contexts, the probability of parameters collapsing to zero are higher, so the more context the more likelihood you are to see brokenness.
And then at Q2 (2 bits per parameter) or Q1, the model falls apart completely. Parameters collapse to zero easily. You start seeing "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy” sorts of behavior, with intense and unscrutinized repetition, followed by a hard stop when it just stops working.
And quantization is a parameter that a model vendor can turn relatively easily. (they have to regenerate the model from the base with more quantization, but it's a data transformation on the order of running a terabyte through a straightforward and fast process, not like training).
If you have 1000 customers and enough equipment to handle the requests of 700, going from bf16 to q8 is a no-brainer. Suddenly you can handle the load and have a little spare capacity. They get worse results, probably pay the same per token (or they're on a subscription that hides the cost anyway so you are even freer to make trade-offs. There's a reason that subscription products are kinda poorly described.)
It's also possible for them to vary this across a day: use models during quieter periods? Maybe you get an instance running a bf16 quantization. If you use it during a high use period? You get a Q4 model.
Or intelligent routing is possible. No idea if anyone is doing this, but if they monitor what you send a bit, and you generally shoot for an expensive model for simple requests? They could totally substitute a highly quantized version of the model to answer the question.
There are •so many tricks• that can be pulled here. Some of them very reasonable to make, some of them treading into outright misleading or fraudulent, and it's weirdly hard to draw the line between them.

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell’s abrupt exit from the race for California governor
— then his announcement he would leave Congress
— left his rivals scrambling to lock down his former supporters in a crowded contest with no clear leader,
injecting more turmoil into the campaign to lead the nation’s most populous state.
Swalwell’s decision to suspend his campaign Sunday followed allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman twice,
including when she worked for him…

Swalwell exit leaves California governor's race in disarray
Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell’s abrupt exit from the race for California governor left his rivals scrambling to lock down his former supporters in a crowded contest with no clear leader. Swalwell's withdrawal injected more turmoil into the campaign less than a month before mail ballots go out to primary election voters. The congressman's decision followed allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman twice, including when she worked for him, that were published Friday in the San Francisco Ch…

ByteDance launches its Seedance 2.0 video model to enterprise clients in 100 countries, excluding the US amid legal disputes, after a February launch in China (Juro Osawa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/bytedance-laun…

ByteDance Launches Seedance 2.0 Globally, Excluding the U.S.
ByteDance’s cloud computing unit has made the company’s Seedance 2.0 AI video generation model available globally to enterprise customers in more than 100 countries and regions around the world—but the U.S. is not among them. It is unclear whether the cloud unit, BytePlus, has any plans to offer the model in the U.S. later. The U.S. is not included in BytePlus’s list of countries and

Don't leave for the weekend until you've checked out today's Metacurity for the most critical infosec developments you should know, including
--AI bug hunters expose new weak point in Apple’s locked-down macOS,
--Shai-Hulud attack campaign hit two OpenAI employees,
--Hackers unwisely targeted Amnesty International's Security Lab chief,
--US and China to discuss AI guardrails,
--Anthropic warns of CCP AI dominance,
--DPRK's APT 37 is now…

AI bug hunters expose new weak point in Apple’s locked-down macOS
Shai-Hulud attack campaign hit two OpenAI employees, Hackers unwisely targeted Amnesty International's Security Lab chief, US and China to discuss AI guardrails, Anthropic warns of CCP AI dominance, DPRK's APT 37 is now posing as cops, MSFT warns of severe XSS flaw for Outlook web users, much more

A medical examiner has ruled the death of a Haitian asylum seeker after being released from federal custody a homicide.
An attorney representing her family said he expects her relatives to sue Immigration and Customs Enforcement in connection with her death.
Daphy Michel, 31, died March 2.
She was found at a bus shelter in Pittsburgh.
The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office found her cause of death to be hypothermia
and ruled the manner a homicide, “indica…

Officials rule Haitian asylum seeker's death a homicide
The death of a woman from Haiti seeking asylum in the U.S. who died from hypothermia days after her release from federal custody was ruled a homicide by a Pennsylvania county medical examiner's office. Daphy Michel was 31 when she died March 2. An attorney for her family said she had psychiatric issues that resulted in her being arrested last year and spending six months in jail before a magistrate said she could not be bound over for trial for threatening imaginary people. Immigrations and Cus…

Source: the White House is unlikely to extend export restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos 5 to other AI companies, citing Anthropic's refusal to fix jailbreaks (Leo Schwartz/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/u

Exclusive: U.S. Government Unlikely to Extend Anthropic Export Control to Other AI Companies
The White House is unlikely to extend export restrictions on Anthropic’s advanced models to other AI companies, an official close to the U.S. government said Saturday. The mandate stemmed from what the official said was Anthropic’s refusal to fix vulnerabilities in its recent Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. Anthropic has argued that other companies have developed models that hold similar risks,

In Abwesenheit: Spotify gewinnt vor Gericht gegen Anna's Archive
Spotify soll 300 Millionen US-Dollar von der Schattenbibliothek Anna's Archive bekommen, entschied ein Gericht. Die Betreiber erschienen nicht zur Verhandlung.

Samsung quietly increases US prices of the Galaxy S25 Edge, S25 FE, Z Flip 7, Tab S11, Tab S11 Ultra, and more; the 1TB Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra jumps by $280 (Adrian Diaconescu/PhoneArena)
https://www.phonearena.com/news/samsung-us-p…