One night, a friend of mine went out for dinner with her husband and toddler. The toddler, who sometimes had trouble swallowing, choked on his food - and threw up, repeatedly, in the restaurant. People around them were laughing while my friend and her family were in distress, adding to their embarrassment. But that wasn't the worst part, she told me. She thought someone might have been filming. What if a video of her child being sick went viral? What if the awful laughter at the restaurant never ended?

Social media has long been a game of roulette with fame at one end and public disgrace at the other. But if I am posting under my government …

Read the full story at The Verge.

More than 85 climate scientists declared the Department of Energy’s new climate report unfit for policymaking in a comprehensive review released Tuesday. The DOE’s report cherry-picked evidence, lacked peer-reviewed studies to support its questioning of the detrimental effects of climate change in the US and is “fundamentally incorrect,” the authors concluded.

Scientists have accurately modeled and predicted the volume and impact of excess CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere since the 1970s, when Exxon workers first began measuring the impacts of their product on the planet’s atmosphere. Since then, climate science has matured into a crucial tool to help humans gauge how a warming planet may affect everything from weather and crops to the economy and mental health.

“This report makes a mockery of science. It relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes, and confirmation bias,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, in a statement accompanying the review.

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Comments

We simply don’t know to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks. Any AI that is working in an adversarial environment—and by this I mean that it may encounter untrusted training data or input—is vulnerable to prompt injection. It’s an existential problem that, near as I can tell, most people developing these technologies are just pretending isn’t there.

— Bruce Schneier

Tags: prompt-injection, security, generative-ai, bruce-schneier, ai, llms, ai-agents

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

— Steve Wozniak, in a comment on Slashdot

Tags: apple, careers, slashdot

Every time I get into an online conversation about prompt injection it's inevitable that someone will argue that a mitigation which works 99% of the time is still worthwhile because there's no such thing as a security fix that is 100% guaranteed to work.

I don't think that's true.

If I use parameterized SQL queries my systems are 100% protected against SQL injection attacks.

If I make a mistake applying those and someone reports it to me I can fix that mistake and now I'm back up to 100%.

If our measures against SQL injection were only 99% effective none of our digital activities involving relational databases would be safe.

I don't think it is unreasonable to want a security fix that, when applied correctly, works 100% of the time.

(I first argued a version of this back in September 2022 in You can’t solve AI security problems with more AI.)

Tags: sql-injection, security, prompt-injection