Agreed! Many people are saying AI isn't really intelligent yet because it can't come up with genuinely new things. Maybe finding a rigorous formulation of QFT / high-energy physics would be a great test for whether they are!
> The “urine-no,” a hostile antiurination surface:
> Instead of minimising splash, it can instead be maximized by setting […], see Fig. 7a. Although not suitable as a commonly practical urinal, it showcases the design philosophy. Such a surface could be installed outdoors to deter public urination as the offender would fall prey to enhanced splash-back. This hostile surface may be dubbed as “urine-no,” as shown in Fig. 7b.
I spent this past weekend giving UTM w/ Apple Virtualization a shot and can confirm that it really does work fantastically well! The only downside seems to be that it's not possible to pass USB devices through to the VM guest yet?
> but the latter is eroding very fast and they're roughly the same.
Citation needed. Some politicians keep on pushing for data harvesting and secret backdoors and what not but most attempts have been blocked and we're still nowhere near the level like, e.g., in the US.
> Notably, Hy4 preview also contributed to its own development process, participating for the first time in the automated optimization of training methods, data strategies, evaluation frameworks, and low-level operators. The model proposed approaches, ran experiments, and iterated based on the results, with the resulting code, logs, and feedback feeding into subsequent rounds of exploration. This established an early-stage recursive self-improvement loop.
This reminds me of one of the predictions from https://ai-2027.com/ . Only that there it's "OpenBrain" doing this, not the Chinese. And the authors of that paper were also slightly wrong about "Mid 2026: China Wakes Up": China woke up already a while ago. And:
> But China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies—among the best in the world—double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain’s weights.
No need to steal anything, they have already caught up.
And then there's this prediction for February 2027:
> Officials are most interested in its cyberwarfare capabilities: Agent-2 is “only” a little worse than the best human hackers
If the distillation "attacks" created useful inputs to open weight models, ai-2027 was directionally correct that the Chinese would find ways to extract IP from western firms. (Scaled account creation and grinding outputs etc is not a dramatic story element as spies, though!)
Whether the distillation has constituted "attacks" or has or will meet the bar of "stealing" IP is not super interesting to me, though.
The idea that distillation is a significant contributor to the capabilities of the Chinese models is not true. Kimi K3 came out 2 weeks after Fable and uses a number of novel NN architecture innovations.
That may be true, though Anthropic reported 3.4 million exchanges with Moonshot months before Fable.
Why bother creating hundreds of (presumably paid) accounts and the tooling to create and consume the data if not of tangible value to their core mission?
Because the founding pillars for most of these labs are basically "more data can't hurt" and "no one died from too much data" and "you can never have enough data".
It's actually turbo boring and predictable. Capitalism has long since standardized on out and out lies to influence public perception and government action.
Don’t need a “better” hacker if you have ten thousand AIs all trying literally every single possible thing to exploit a system with. The main issue is that this will eventually bring down the exploitation cost enough to target very minor targets who weren’t worth it before.
The AI 2027 paper/website is exactly the same as random guesses from tech bros after a couple of beers telling you what they think the future will be. It has nothing to do with political theory, economic theory, game theory, or any other quasi-scientific or rigorous evaluation of real world events and predictable outcomes. It's just vibes. If they're wrong nobody will notice, if they're right people will call them geniuses.
It was removed from the whole non-folding Pixel 10 series in the US. It still has the SIM card slot elsewhere. We had to return a Pixel 10 bricked due to a firmware bug and it was the US model since we'd bought it in the US and sent it overseas with a forwarding service. Google's repair partner shop was quite confused about the lack of a SIM card slot to get the IMEI and we only had a serial number but they figured out using the serial number instead.
There's still dual SIM support either way and you can store dozens of inactive eSIMs. The main downside of eSIMs is widespread lack of transfer support by carriers.
After switching providers with a recent phone with eSIM, I would say I’d never want to go back to physical SIMs ever again.
They’re going to go away worldwide eventually, they’re just more easily removed in the US where the carriers are more bleeding edge on features and there are only 3 providers to think about in a very large homogenous market.
The difference between waiting for a SIM card to arrive in the mail or traveling to a store, fiddling with a paperclip, tray, and impossibly tiny nano-SIM versus switching providers in 10 minutes via an app is night and day.
Most SIM/dual SIM solutions also involve removing both SIM cards at once even to swap out one of two, and they tend to require device restarts.
In the past I’ve also had network problems as a result of bad/damaged SIM cards.
You seem to forget that moving an eSIM between phones isn't nearly as straightforward as moving a physical SIM, and often must be requested or approved by the carrier. If for some reason you intend to use the same SIM in various phones for one reason or another, it's a huge inconvenience.
Technically, the same thing can happen with a physical SIM. I tried that with a Nexus 5X on Verizon and that's how I learned their network has an allowlist system.
How does the carrier even know what phone you are going to use? My last SIM was bought in store at T Mobile, for cash, and I can freely move between phones. I never buy phones from carriers. My Pixel as bought directly from Google and immediately flashed with Graphene.
I had a testing phone and my regular phone, I kept swapping the same Verizon SIM between them. It worked for maybe 3 swaps, then Verizon blocked my account and sent me an email: suspicious activity detected, the SIM is blocked and cannot be restored, the contract has been terminated, you will receive the refund in mail.
Good riddance, US Mobile is so much cheaper and pleasant to use. I am scared to swap SIMs with them now though.
Can I switch out an eSIM while running an AOSP based ROM yet (ie no proprietary userspace)? Last time I checked (several years ago) it didn't seem to be possible. Did that change?
Why do they do the whole work of designing to separate variants, when they could just ship the single variant and the customers simply never use the slot, if they don't want it?
It was removed from the non-Fold devices in the US. They kept it for other countries due to only considering the US carriers to be ready for eSIM-only.
reply