fidzu : geek

At the AI safety site Foom, science journalist Mordechai Rorvig explores a paper presented at November's Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing conference: [R]esearchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Georgia Tech revisited earlier findings that showed that language models, the engines of commercial AI chatbots, show strong signal correlations with the human language network, the region of the brain responsible for processing language... The results lend clarity to the surprising picture that has been emerging from the last decade of neuroscience research: That AI programs can show strong resemblances to large-scale brain regions - performing similar functions, and doing so using highly similar signal patterns. Such resemblances have been exploited by neuroscientists to make much better models of cortical regions. Perhaps more importantly, the links between AI and cortex provide an interpretation of commercial AI technology as being profoundly brain-like, validating both its capabilities as well as the risks it might pose for society as the first synthetic braintech. "It is something we, as a community, need to think about a lot more," said Badr AlKhamissi, doctoral student in computer science at EPFL and first author of the preprint, in an interview with Foom. "These models are getting better and better every day. And their similarity to the brain [or brain regions] is also getting better - probably. We're not 100% sure about it...." There are many known limitations with seeing AI programs as models of brain regions, even those that have high signal correlations. For example, such models lack any direct implementations of biochemical signalling, which is known to be important for the functioning of nervous systems. However, if such comparisons are valid, then they would suggest, somewhat dramatically, that we are increasingly surrounded by a synthetic braintech. A technology not just as capable as the human brain, in some ways, but actually made up of similar components. Thanks to Slashdot reader Gazelle Bay for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Jan 2026 2:34am GMT

As 2026 begins, MIT Technology Review publishes "educated guesses" on emerging technologies that will define the future, advances "we think will drive progress or incite the most change - for better or worse - in the years ahead." This year's list includes next-gen nuclear, gene-editing drugs (as well as the "resurrection" of ancient genes from extinct creatures), and three AI-related developments: AI companions, AI coding tools, and "mechanistic interpretability" for revealing LLM decision-making. But also on the list is sodium-ion batteries, "a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium." Backed by major players and public investment, they're poised to power grids and affordable EVs worldwide. [Chinese battery giant CATL claims to have already started manufacturing sodium-ion batteries at scale, and BYD also plans a massive production facility for sodium-ion batteries.] The most significant impact of sodium-Âion technology may be not on our roads but on our power grids. Storing clean energy generated by solar and wind has long been a challenge. Sodium-ion batteries, with their low cost, enhanced thermal stability, and long cycle life, are an attractive alternative. Peak Energy, a startup in the US, is already deploying grid-scale sodium-ion energy storage. Sodium-ion cells' energy density is still lower than that of high-end lithium-ion ones, but it continues to improve each year - and it's already sufficient for small passenger cars and logistics vehicles. And another "breakthrough technology" on their list is commercial space stations: Vast Space from California, plans to launch its Haven-1 space station in May 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. If all goes to plan, it will initially support crews of four people staying aboard the bus-size habitat for 10 days. Paying customers will be able to experience life in microgravity and conduct research such as growing plants and testing drugs. On its heels will be Axiom Space's outpost, the Axiom Station, consisting of five modules (or rooms). It's designed to look like a boutique hotel and is expected to launch in 2028. Voyager Space aims to launch its version, called Starlab, the same year, and Blue Origin's Orbital Reef space station plans to follow in 2030. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Jan 2026 11:41pm GMT

In December 2024 the Google Threat Intelligence Group published research on the code of the commercial spyware "Predator". But there's now been new research by Jamf (the company behind a mobile device management solution) showing Predator is more dangerous and sophisticated than we realized, according to SecurityWeek. Long-time Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: The new research reveals an error taxonomy that reports exactly why deployments fail, turning black boxes into diagnostic events for threat actors. Almost exclusively marketed to and used by national governments and intelligence agencies, the spyware also detects cybersecurity tools, suppresses forensics evidence, and has built-in geographic restrictions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Jan 2026 10:41pm GMT

ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks. We can. ↫ ChaosBSD GitHub page This is an excellent approach to testing drivers that simply aren't even remotely ready to be included in FreeBSD-proper. It should be obvious that this is not, in any way, meant to be used as a production operating system, as it will contain things that are broken and incomplete on purpose. The name's also pretty great.

17 Jan 2026 10:18pm GMT

This is a book intended to teach someone the Java language, from scratch. You will find that the content makes heavy use of recently released and, for the moment, preview features. This is intentional as much of the topic ordering doesn't work without at least Java 21. ↫ Modern Java GitHub page Some light reading for the weekend. This sure is one hell of a detailed book.

17 Jan 2026 10:13pm GMT

Supernatural has had its staff cut and won't receive any more content updates.

17 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

"I've got one job, and it's the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy."

17 Jan 2026 4:45am GMT

Reseller says Rackspace plans to charge it 706 percent more.

16 Jan 2026 11:15pm GMT

Since Wayland is still quite new to a lot of people, it's often difficult to figure out which features the Wayland compositor you're using actually supports. While the Wayland Explorer is a great way to browse through the various protocols and their status in various compositors, there's now an easier way. The Wayland protocols table makes it very easy to see what your favourite compositor supports, which compositors support the protocol you really want supported before leaving X11 behind, and much more. Roughly speaking, there's a set of stable core Wayland protocols, as well as a slew of unstable core Wayland protocols that are still in development, but may already be supported by various compositors. On top of that, compositors themselves also have a ton of protocols they themselves introduced and support, but which aren't supported by anything else - yet, as they may be picked up by other compositors and eventually become part of Wayland's core protocols. Keeping tabs on specific protocols and their support status is mostly only interesting for developers and people with very specific needs, since mature compositors provide a complete set of features most users never have to worry about. Still, that doesn't mean there aren't really cool features cooking, nor does it mean that one specific accessibility-related protocol isn't incredibly important to keep track of. These websites provide an easy way to do so.

16 Jan 2026 10:08pm GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT