Can you provide some evidence that it didn’t work in Australia? Given the ban hasn’t been in place that long I’d like to see your sources about it not working.
Limited success might be a better term. But if a supposedly blanket ban only stopped 30% of under-16s accounts from accessing social media, that does seem pretty failure-esque.
This is a story about non-compliance. One hopes the Aus government is going to take some sort of enforcement action. If _that_ fails, then you could claim limited success or failure.
Presumably you wouldn't call laws against murder a failure because there are murders.
Having looked at many PDFs that needed to be “translated” to Markdown, it feels like a strange choice - I know it’s primarily to make things easily accessible to AI, but if we’re going to train models anyway, why not train them on something better? Markdown is quite limited, and can’t render something like a nested table for example, and if the point of having “open knowledge” is for AI, why do we need to use a format that won’t really be read by humans?
This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.
Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average)
Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
I was about to comment something like this. Consumption from a VAT perspective doesn't increase linearly with wealth, so a more wealthy person isn't going to spend and get taxed via VAT 100x more than someone with 100x less wealth, and VAT affects the poor much more than the rich because it's a tax on consumption irrespective of wealth, so the poor pay a larger percentage of their wealth to VAT.
We should just get rid of VAT and replace the lost tax revenue with something that's more equitable, such as a proper wealth tax. It's not like wealth goes away with a UBI.
> California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems.
> The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained.
> Its definition of “developer” extends to anyone who makes a generative AI model available to Californians.
I get that this would burden up-and-coming companies that want to train new models, but in general I don't think it's a bad thing that a company needs to know where the material they train their model comes from, and know its copyright status, and if it's actually an impossible problem then maybe the whole system is unworkable. Assuming that model training isn't fundamentally considered fair use, how else can you approach this problem?
It's wild how software BoM is taking off at the same time that LLM BoM is being declared literally impossible. IMO the threat model is roughly the same: if you can't account for the provenance of all the text in your training set, how can say that it hasn't been poisoned?
The wet dream of copyright hoarders. Everyone must be responsible for everything they have ever typed, spoken, referenced, or processed over the internet, in regards to all enforceable copyright.
> The copyright holder's need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
Even if you think the information density of YouTube videos is too low (many do on HN), I can confidently say that the visuals are outstanding for (a) how GNSS/GPS works and (b) how they pinpoint'ed the satellite.
The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely. Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already. Therefore, the disruptions must either be regular tests of the capability, or just actual communication. Right?
> The theory that they broadcast communication on a band near GPS in order to discourage jamming of their early warning system sounds likely.
Is it? If it is an early warning system, could it be jammed briefly so it would fail to warn, couldn't it? It will be a global disruption of GPS, but a brief one and I'm sure people wouldn't be concerned of it due to other news.
> Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless
Do you believe that cutting sea cables is a sensible action? Or sending drones to neighbors? It is what they call "hybrid asymmetric warfare", I'm not sure how it is supposed to work, but presumably it may let them take over the world or something.
Probably they just strive to normalize deviations, to boil frog slowly. When people become used to some stupid actions they widen their repertoire, until everything short of tanks crossing the borders became just normal news noise nobody reads twice.
Presumably the missile needs GPS to hit the target so if you jam right when the missile is coming in the missile will miss so you can't really jam the warning
Also if you broadcast noise when your missile is about to hit then your own jamming signal acts as an early warning as well, although I guess it wouldn't provide location.
US weapon systems have never relied on GPS for guidance. Some will accept GPS corrections to the primary inertial guidance system but those corrections will be rejected if they deviate more than a few meters from the inertial guidance. US missiles in particular use precision terminal guidance which doesn't involve GPS at all; in these systems GPS would only be used to correct mid-course guidance.
There has been anecdotal evidence for years suggesting that the latest US inertial guidance technology is sufficiently precise and accurate that GPS correction no longer adds value.
I do not think that is correct. For example, Excalibur [1] relies on GPS and proved to be quite inefficient in Ukraine. Russia figured out how to jam them in a few months.
ICBMs don’t rely on GPS. They are typically self-guided and use a blend of their known launch location, inertial navigation using gyroscopes, celestial navigation (yes, looking at stars), and a few other techniques.
> Flexing the ability to jam GPS is pointless, since it's obvious that any state actor who has military satellites in orbit has considered this option or have the capability already.
Forget "state actors", truck drivers have taken out entire airports with GPS jammers:
The US still has a fairly robust network of VOR's / VOR with DME / VORTAC stations. Good for navigation, but there's no timing component, beyond what's inherent in how they operate.
Admittedly, that'll never be of use outside aviation as its line-of-sight only. But if the sun threw a Carrington event (or worse) at us, I think a lot of western aviation could carry on.
> The US still has a fairly robust network of VOR's / VOR with DME / VORTAC stations. Good for navigation, but there's no timing component, beyond what's inherent in how they operate. Admittedly, that'll never be of use outside aviation […]
I'm aware of the FAA's MON, Minimum Operating Network.
Exactly: that doesn't help boats. Or people in cars. Or farmers:
There is definitely value in having a demonstrated as opposed a simply supposed capability, though. And actions that are 'almost-certainly-but-not-completely-provably-us' is very much something Russia likes to do.
(One question I would have about the comms theory is whether the amount of power being used would be reasonable for that use-case. Jamming tends to be much higher power than just communicating, but also GNSS signals are very low bandwidth as comms channels go)
> One question I would have about the comms theory is whether the amount of power being used would be reasonable for that use-case. Jamming tends to be much higher power than just communicating, but also GNSS signals are very low bandwidth as comms channels go
GPS is suprisingly low power. I believe the satellites themselves transmit between 20W and 50W, and in general the signal is quieter than the background noise threshold. It's only by correlating with the PRNG stream [1] that the data signal can be detected at all [2].
[1] The PRNG stream is 1023 bits at 1.023Mbps, so repeats every 1ms, and only autocorrelates with the correct stream when they are aligned. When the streams are not aligned, the data looks like random noise, and each transmitter has a different LFSR configuration to provide a different sequence such that each stream has a low level of correlation with another.
[2] The PRNG stream bits at 1.023Mbps are exclusive-or'd with the data stream at 50bps, so when the decoder is using the correct PRNG and sequence offset, exclusive-or'ing with that produces detectable long pulses at the expected 50bps.
FWIW this is how almost every communication system works. They're all weaker than background noise (e.g. sunlight) but you extract them by correlating with some kind of carrier signal (often but not always a sine wave)
You do generally need a tuned filter before the rectification, unless you have an extremely large signal dominating the local airwaves. Which is precisely the parent poster's point: with RF you are almost always doing something to demodulate the signal. Whether you are doing it with a sine wave or something more complicated is not that fundamentally different. (and if you're looking at a spectrum analysis, that is looking at the radio signal from the point of view of that sinusoidal modulation scheme, so you will see such signals 'above' the noise floor more readily than something using a different modulation).
I'd argue that "correlation" is an accurate description of what you're doing with Gold codes - you're testing the known sequence of the output of a PRNG against the received signal, and only accepting it when the data correlates, otherwise you're adjusting the offset and trying again until you find a high correlation (strong +ve and -ve spikes) or you give up and assume there's no transmission. There's nothing in the received signal that tells you there is a real signal there at all, without correlating against every possible offset.
If you compare that to the majority of radio transmissions modulated on a sine wave carrier, there is a clear signal there and you don't need to correlate anything to tell you that, and you don't need to keep trying different offsets - you can just demodulate using a carrier of the correct frequency and the result is correct, just with a slight phase shift relative to the local carrier and which probably isn't even relevant in the frequency domain of the signal.
The key point to me is the trying repeated offsets to try to pick out a signal well below the noise floor, and choosing the offset that provides the best correlation, compared to demodulating a very strong signal that's obviously there by just adding a carrier. The latter could be done using "correlation" if you're implementing an SDR, but it doesn't have to be, and most radio hams would prefer to think of it as a simple analogue operation instead.
A strong signal 'that's obviously there' is only obviously there after you've already filtered it to some extent. If you were to look at the raw broadband RF environment on a scope you very much would not see the vast majority of signals there. And when you're demodulating you do often need to tune the phase and frequency of the carrier you're demodulating with, as well. GNSS signals are just generally quite low bandwidth and so that process takes a while.
Not to say that such codes aren't a neat trick, but it's useful to consider that these are in many ways the same thing.
By "obviously there", I meant take some old analogue receiver and twiddle the tuning knob. The vast majority of radio transmissions are many orders of magnitude louder than the noise floor. They are very obviously there.
Tune your SDR radio down to 1.023MHz, you'll see nothing there at all. The signal is about 20dB below the noise floor. The only way you can pick out anything at all is by correlating it against the PRNG with the correct offset in the sequence.
The GP post (to be fair, I should have replied to the post 2 higher up) was arguing that all signals are weaker than the noise floor and demodulating using a carrier was exactly the same thing. It is in one way, but also not in another - in that you need to keep trying different offsets in the PRNG sequence until you find a correlation. That's why I think "correlation" is a sensible term for Gold Codes, but "demodulation" is better for signals modulated by a sine wave carrier.
Even if that's for communication, repurposing it for mass jamming shouldn't be that hard. It already has this effect. Unless it's low power satellites that wouldn't be able to sustain radio signal in anything longer than short bursts.
Why these capabilities, if they exist, were not used to send Iranian drones to a wrong target? Maybe because they do not exist. Israel definitely would be happy if thousands of drones were rerouted to a neighbour country or into the sea.
There is a very good reason to do this. Suppose you had a device that would make the shoplifting detectors at stores go off. The first time you did it everyone would get hassled. And the second time and so forth. But if you kept doing it eventually the employees would stop caring. Then you just walk out the door with your stuff.
yeah, I have to admit I was commenting on possibilities here without having gone into the article yet -- having now looked for real, I agree that the disruptions don't seem very useful for actual jamming and repeatedly like this for years across satellites and bands in this specific way doesn't make sense for some mistaken targeting either.
The video did not settle on the jamming of von der Leyen plane on approach to Plovdiv, but AFAIR it was a (likely unintentional) lie.
Never acknowledged by von der Leyen nor by her press secretary because it exposed the lack of basic world knowledge around von der Leyen and her office.
TLDR: Neither von den Leyen nor her office knew about ADB-S nor about the multiple services that collect ADB-S broadcasts and republish, and there was none around who could stop them from announcing an embarrassing lie.
Probably because some missing mention of some specific thing you care deeply about doesn't imply "lack of basic world knowledge" for an entire political office, really strange thing to say and most likely why people are downvoting. It's neither kind, curious and definitively a snark/swipe that doesn't really add anything to the point you were trying to make.
If you listen to the press conference, Podesta (the press secretary) spoke about the plane circling and not being able to land. When preparing the press conference, she should have checked if this obvious lie can be obviously disproved, but she did not. This probably means that she did not know this was a lie, but then someone who ordered this to be announced knew.
My bet is that von der Leyen or her close aide told Podesta to announce the lie in these terms, and the thing that worries me as a European is that there was none to warn these war-mongering ladies that they are making a mistake. This whole situation screams for an intern that sets up the mics and has a callsign and who can stop Podesta as she walks to the pied de stal of shame and explain that the position of planes is monitored all the time and is public information.
But I bet that all their interns are servile 3rd generation eurocrats.
P.S. The whole press conference (and many others) are fascinating to listen to. The language these people use is softened by the media. What do you think von der Leyen was doing on that plane? She was going "along the frontline" to inspect our preparedness for war where "the frontline" is the Eastern EU border.
P.P.S The story made rounds in EU circles, and there was a parliamentary question offering a chance to apologize, but von der Leyen chose to ignore it.
I don't care about Ursula von der Leyen nor her plane, merely explaining that if you try to extrapolate that a group of people don't have "basic world knowledge" based on not knowing a specific technology nor how/why it's used, the community is actually doing the rest of us a favor by downvoting it.
Want to discuss her office's use of a plane and how it's related to inspecting ammunition factories or whatever tirade you're going on about? Do create a new submission where that can be discussed, hardly related to the interesting story and methods of trying to track down GNSS interference.
It's a 9 months old story, even the MEP who wrote the question got over it.
I raised it because it was mentioned in the Veritassium video, but they stopped short of calling it a lie. They wanted to stay on topic, but the beauty of HN is that we can wander slightly off-topic and discover curious facts without being punished.
Yeah, curious facts like "it exposed the lack of basic world knowledge around von der Leyen and her office". Go outside brother, and get some fresh air before that too disappears :)
Is that normal? To promote a research paper in ArXiv so heavily? I think the parent comment’s concerns still apply, saying a large, well-funded YouTube channel is specifically releasing coordinated content to promote this prompts more questions than it answers, in my mind.
Yes it is common, just not always to the scale of a Veritasium video. Usually it’s just the press office for a university putting out a press release or a summary article in Scientific American.
But in the case where the story is interesting to a larger audience, having a push behind a story across non-academic media is not unheard of. If you can get some media coverage of an academic topic, it can be very beneficial to the researchers’ careers. One goal for a researcher is to bring notoriety to their research, to their institution, and to the field in general. This is the main motivation I see.
The authors may have pushed the arxiv paper out earlier due to the timing of the release of the video.
It doesn't sound that conspiratory: someone of the millions of subscribers of Veritasium watches the video and thinks that is good content suited for HN, but instead of linking the video itself (rarely video links raise upvotes here) it links the primary source.
But even if the paper was "promoted" (i.e. a link submitted), what is bad about it? People seem to find it interesting, and unless there are upvoting bots involved, posting links is the raison d'être of this site.
I doubt it based solely on that there are multiple interviews including from one of the paper’s authors. Given that Veritasium is a very well known channel at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they were contacted instead and then roughly coordinated the timing of the paper and video release together.
I’m not going to go sleuthing into the links and beyond (the one I clicked was for the Stallman Support website which presumably is biased), but I’m somewhat aware of the controversies around Stallman. Can someone with more knowledge weigh in on what the post says?
They all appear to be links back to the blog itself or said support site. Speaking for myself I don't need a messiah figure to support elements of FOSS, and I don't need Stallman to be a decent or functional human being to have made good points in the past.
Speaking for myself the first HUGE red flag out of Stallman was his famous comment about pedophilia circa 2006, which this "Stallmansupport site" actually addresses.
The defense seems to be summed up in this line: "Whatever the reasoning that led Stallman to write those statements, the fact is that later he changed his mind."
It seemed pretty clear what he meant, and walking it back 13 years later under pressure doesn't make me think that he didn't mean it the first time.
I can't speak for Trump, but yes many of his friends are. As for Trump whether or not you believe he abused children, we know that was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting at least one person and is accused of much more.
None of which changes anything about how much a person should or shouldn't support Richard Stallman.
You can look at Trump’s comments about his own daughter to confirm that he’s at least attracted to underage girls.
He was also credibly accused of raping minors multiple times, although those accusers were too afraid (justifiably so) to let us see those accusations play out in court.
I'm not saying that he isn't, I'm saying that when we have STRONG evidence of his sexual assault of adults, and dozens of other felonies, we don't need to focus on the one for which no proof exists despite extensive attempts at finding some. It's not a denial of what he might have done, it's essentially a policy statement.
Edit To be entirely clear: I am not defending Trump, he should be in prison, not the White House.
The position of the website the blog links to and references makes a clear statement that Stallman has been framed and "cancelled"... not that he's as guilty as people like Gates.
I looked into this a year or so ago. My take away was that at some point someone published a very long piece which quotes stallman and step by step concludes "this is bad". And then people started quoting the piece conclusion. However I remember reading the originals from stallman and not finding anything wrong with them. (If someone wants to disagree please cite stallman, not someone else's conclusion about stallman.)
The post is highlighting the discord between the MIT/associated media hit pieces on Stallman (free software advocate) for having problematic views, while compelling evidence of Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft) Epstein-class behavior was pretty much ignored.
Maybe in the US, but in countries with minimum holiday time you get the minimum in your contract (or a bit more) and the employee handbook says you have unlimited. Companies can’t shirk their responsibility here legally by saying they give unlimited vacation.
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