Ryan Christoffel writing for 9to5 Mac: For example, there are four requirements the FTC is imposing on all subscriptions. They must: Clearly and accurately disclose all material facts Clearly disclose the fact that the subscription will continue until cancelled Get “express informed consent” to automatic renewal Make it as easy to cancel the subscription as it was to sign up Hopefully something like this makes its way to Canada soon.

The tested LLMs fared much worse, though, when the Apple researchers modified the GSM-Symbolic benchmark by adding “seemingly relevant but ultimately inconsequential statements” to the questions. For this “GSM-NoOp” benchmark set (short for “no operation”), a question about how many kiwis someone picks across multiple days might be modified to include the incidental detail that “five of them [the kiwis] were a bit smaller than average.” Adding in these red herrings led to what the researchers termed “catastrophic performance drops” in accuracy compared to GSM8K, ranging from 17.5 percent to a whopping 65.7 percent, depending on the model tested. These massive drops in accuracy highlight the inherent limits in using simple “pattern matching” to “convert statements to operations without truly understanding their meaning,” the researchers write.

Joan Westenberg has a good piece about how she uses Reminders, Notes and Numbers as her productivity system. I really liked this part: I have almost all my information set up in a single Tasks list, split out into Smart Lists by tags. Which means adding in any information is simple as hitting Command-N anywhere in Reminders, and including a #tag in the title of the note. That, plus the natural language processing, makes capturing information a breeze.

Josh Jersild @JoshJers@peoplemaking.games One thing that I was trying to describe to the 15-year-old is that, when I was in college, google worked *so well* to find basically exactly what you were searching for that there was a site called "Let Me Google That For You" where you could snarkily send someone their question back and they'd see it animate the process of typing their question into google, then get the search results and bam, there's the answer to their question

Emma Roth writing for The Verge: Let’s say you’re searching for ways to get a grass stain out of your pants. If you ask Google, its AI-generated response will offer some tips, along with suggestions for products to purchase that could help you remove the stain. The products will appear beneath a “sponsored” header, and Google spokesperson Craig Ewer told The Verge they’ll only show up if a question has a “commercial angle.”

From Creative Bloq: “The Copyright Office’s refusal to register Theatre D’Opera Spatial has put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work without compensation or credit.” If something about that argument rings strangely familiar, it might be due to the various groups of artists suing the developers of AI image generators for using their work as training data without permission.

Jeremy Hsu writing for New Scientist (Apple News): Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds – can occur when people least expect it. […] By recording user activity even when it’s coming from connected laptops, smart TVs might capture sensitive data, says Vekaria. For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.

Mark Wyner :vm: @markwyner@mas.to George Lucas got the idea for Princess Leia's iconic "space buns" from Mexican revolutionary women. Specifically Clara de la Rocha, a total badass. Clara's descendant recounted: "She crossed a river on horseback…and was able to take out a power station in order to allow the rebel forces to attack during night without being seen." Just like Leia, eh? More: https://markwrites.io/from-a-revolutionary-a-princess-is-born

David Ho @davidho@mastodon.world I think most people (myself included) don’t have an intuition for orders of magnitude (e.g., the difference between millionaire and billionaire). One way to appreciate this is time, since we all experience it. Here's the difference between a thousand, a million, and a billion seconds. 10:29 AM • September 18, 2024 (UTC)

James Woodford writing for New Scientist (Apple News): I tentatively begin to move my limbs and can see the movement reflected in the virtual reality environment. Andrew confirms that the robot, standing a few metres in front of me, is also following suit in the physical world. I move my head, crouch or bend over and so does Valkyrie. This sounds like something from an action/sci-fi movie.

Chris Smith writing for BGR: The CPU scores 3,409 in single-core tests and 8,492 in multi-core benchmarks. That’s an improvement of about 18% over last year’s A17 Pro chip that powers the iPhone 15 Pro models.

Matt Burgess writing at Wired: “Based on the direction of the eye movement, the hacker can determine which key the victim is now typing,” says Hanqiu Wang, one of the leading researchers involved in the work. They identified the correct letters people typed in passwords 77 percent of the time within five guesses and 92 percent of the time in messages. Impressive research.

𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not Taylor Swift" @Lana@beige.party Y'all won't fund the school budget enough to buy pencils for the classroom but you think the school nurse has the budget to perform surprise sex change operations? 😆🧐🤔 6:06 PM • September 11, 2024 (UTC)

enderman0125 @mudkip@wetdry.world 6:15 PM • September 8, 2024 (UTC)

podfeet @podfeet@chaos.social I enjoy creative restroom signage and this one might be a new favorite. #NoHate 4:26 PM • August 20, 2024 (UTC)

Zelda 👑 @sertaptap@mastodon.social *advertiser spends billions a year and spies on me through 30 different apps* "d-do you want to buy... *looks at my receipt for a GPU purchased yesterday* do you want to buy a GPU?" 2:59 PM • September 6, 2024 (UTC)

John Gruber writing over at Daring Fireball has a great write up on the whole Apple, DMA conflict. But whatever the effect of this browser choice screen on iOS browser usage in the EU, it’s hard for me to see any way that Chrome doesn’t benefit from it the most. That seems like a perverse outcome for a law intended to regulate “large gatekeepers”. Chrome, with 65 percent market share across all web browsing globally, is a bigger monopoly than iOS, Android, or Windows, and the only other browser with double-digit market share (19 percent) is Safari — the browser the EC is attempting to steer users away from.

Ryan Castellucci :nonbinary_flag: @ryanc@infosec.exchange Your SSH honeypot fakes a Linux system and logs the threat actor's commands. My SSH honeypot hijacks the threat actor's terminal to play the music video of Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" while ignoring Ctrl-C. We are not the same. 9:48 PM • September 1, 2024 (UTC)

CatSalad🐈🥗 (D.Burch) :blobcatrainbow: @catsalad@infosec.exchange I've been an adult for a while, but my vision hasn't improved. When do you get adult supervision? 7:57 PM • September 1, 2024 (UTC)

Randahl Fink @randahl@mastodon.social Trump illegally uses Foo Fighters' music, and they say no. Trump illegally uses Celine Dion's music, and she says no. Trump illegally uses Abba's music and they say no. Trump illegally uses the hit song "Seven Nation Army", and Jack White's response is clear as day. Source: Jack White's reals on Instagram. 7:51 AM • August 30, 2024 (UTC)