Lifeboat Foundation

If your mother says she loves you: check it.

A couple weeks ago, I asked Vergecast.

What I was not expecting was for so many people to send me versions of a video that shows a banana getting stitches in a robotic surgery device, with the captions claiming that the surgery is being done remotely over 5G. This video has had an … More.

Continue reading “No, they did not do surgery on a banana over 5G” »

NotebookLM is a neat research tool with some big ideas. It’s still rough and new, but it feels like Google is onto something.

What if you could have a conversation with your notes? That question has consumed a corner of the internet recently.

Google’s version of this is called NotebookLM. It’s an AI-powered research tool that is meant to help you organize and interact with your own notes. (Google originally announced it earlier this year as Project Tailwind but quickly changed the name.) Right now, it’s really just a… More.

Continue reading “Google’s AI-powered note-taking app is the messy beginning of something great” »

Metasurfaces, artificially engineered surfaces that can manipulate electromagnetic signals in unique ways, have huge potential for several technological applications, including the implementation of sixth generation (6G) cellular communications. The limitations and vulnerabilities of these smart surfaces, however, are still poorly understood.

Researchers at Peking University, University of Sannio and Southeast University recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the vulnerability of metasurfaces to wireless cyber-attacks. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, outlines two types of attacks that should be considered and accounted for before metasurfaces can be deployed on a large-scale.

“This work was primarily driven by the need for enhancing security and privacy of wireless communications in the upcoming 6G era, characterized by unprecedented speeds, ultra-low latency, and vast connection nodes,” Lianlin Li, Vincenzo Galdi and Tie Jun Cui, three of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore.

The dead internet theory and the rise of bots in an AI-dominated world.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo—the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT—through its API. It allows training the model with custom data, such as company documents or project documentation. OpenAI claims that a fine-tuned model can perform as well as GPT-4 with lower cost in certain scenarios.

So basically, fine-tuning teaches GPT-3.5 Turbo about custom content, such as project documentation or any other written reference. That can come in handy if you want to build an AI assistant based on GPT-3.5 that is intimately familiar with your product or service but lacks knowledge of it in its training data (which, as a reminder, was scraped off the web before September 2021).

• Encryption and segmentation: These operate on the assumption some fraction of the network is already compromised. Restricting the reach and utility of any captured data and accessible networks will mitigate the damage even on breached systems.

• SBOM documentation: Regulatory compliance can be driven by industry organizations and the government, but it will take time to establish standards. SBOM documentation is an essential foundation for best practices.

If “democracy dies in darkness,” and that includes lies of omission in reporting, then cybersecurity suffers the same fate with backdoors. The corollary is “don’t roll your own crypto” even if well-intentioned. The arguments for weakening encryption to make law enforcement easier falls demonstrably flat, with TETRA just the latest example. Secrets rarely stay that way forever, and sensitive data is more remotely accessible than at any time in history. Privacy and global security affect us all, and the existence of these single points of failure in our cybersecurity efforts are unsustainable and will have unforeseeable consequences. We need to innovate and evolve the internet away from this model to have durable security assurances.

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, has reportedly achievedability in the first quarter of 2023, marking a significant milestone for the privately owned rocket company. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), SpaceX reported a of $55 million on $1.5 billion in revenue for the January-to-March period. This success comes after two years of narrowing losses, with the company managing to cut its 2022 losses to $559 million from the previous year’s $968 million while doubling its revenue to $4.6 billion.

The positive financial results reflect SpaceX’s growing revenue, driven in part by its Starlink internet satellite service and the development of its ambitious Starship rocket. The company’s surging revenue has enabled it to make progress towardability while pursuing its ambitious goals in space exploration and satellite communication.

The WSJ report also sheds light on SpaceX’s significant expenses, with the company recording total expenses of $5.2 billion in 2022, up from $3.3 billion in the previous year. Despite these costs, SpaceX’sability in the first quarter signals the potential for its ongoing success as it continues to innovate and expand its operations in the space industry.

SpaceX has taken a step further in its mission to enhance global internet connectivity with the unveiling of its third-generation (Gen 3) Wi-Fi for the Starlink satellite internet service. This announcement comes as a select group of customers have been invited via email to test the new at a cost of $200 USD, according to multiple individuals who received the invite.

“You’re Invited: New Starlink,” says the email, “As an early Starlink customer, you’re invited to a limited launch of our next generation WiFi We would love to hear about your experience, including setup, performance, or any other recommendations you may have, as these will be the firsts produced. […] You may order up to 3s per account. This offer applies only to your Starlink account. What’s improved? The new Gen 3 introduces WiFi 6 and tri-band radios to Starlink. With improved range, performance, and device support, the Starlink Gen 3 will extend your WiFi network throughout your home to provide a more consistent and reliable connection with faster speeds,” the company states. “The Gen 3 can replace your current, and multiple Gen 3s can be meshed together to extend the range of your WiFi network.”

A new study led by investigators from Mass General Brigham has found that ChatGPT was about 72 percent accurate in overall clinical decision making, from coming up with possible diagnoses to making final diagnoses and care management decisions. The large-language model (LLM) artificial intelligence chatbot performed equally well in both primary care and emergency settings across all medical specialties. The research team’s results are published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Our paper comprehensively assesses decision support via ChatGPT from the very beginning of working with a patient through the entire care scenario, from differential diagnosis all the way through testing, diagnosis, and management. No real benchmarks exists, but we estimate this performance to be at the level of someone who has just graduated from medical school, such as an intern or resident. This tells us that LLMs in general have the potential to be an augmenting tool for the practice of medicine and support clinical decision making with impressive accuracy.