Vision Transformers

Asked Astra to clone my voice by editing the weights. My father and a few friends couldn't tell it was cloned. Can you tell me which one is original?

I spent 20,000 dollars in API credits having different AI models play each other at Blood on the Clocktower (a Mafia or Werewolf type social deception game). The results were fascinating. Models have gotten much better over the course of this year at creative on-the-spot scheming and bluffing, and also at reasoning as a team to break apart these underground conspiracies. I go through some of the most standout games these AIs played in this video. The new models are getting pretty good. If my friends pulled off some of these moves while we were playing, I’d give them a fist bump. Fwiw, OpenAI’s newer models are much better than Anthropic’s at this game. You can see the full benchmark at the website, and I’ve also made it so that you and your friends can play again the AIs: clocktowerbench.com

Bro...@AfterQuery

We rented the same H100 for 80% less. The catch: the cloud can take it back at any moment, and your job dies with it. So we built Portal. It saves your running Python job and resumes it on any other machine, any cloud, mid-run. No code changes. One-prompt install and forget.

How has delhi air gone from best ive seen in a decade to worst ive seen in a decade in 48 hours I am convinced we can nail the cause. Its literally something thats happened in the last 48 hours.

I recreated subvocal in 9 minutes with one prompt for AirPods Pro 3. Source: github.com/joeblau/subvox

A rare winter day in Delhi with an AQI of 50

Announcing Gemini 4 Carbon, our strongest model with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long horizon capabilities. Carbon represents a step up across most benchmarks, delivering strong frontier performance in autonomous coding and cyber defense. We’re first making Carbon available to a subset of trusted cyber defenders in our Fairwind program. We’ll expand access as soon as possible.

launched a hardware simulator, is this cheating?

harbor supports skipping agent install() in two ways: 1. --ak skip_install=true skips install(). 2. otherwise, if the agent version in your image == --ak version, install() is skipped too. This feature is handy when you work with sandboxes without internet or simply want to save setup time.

While evaluating Qwen3.8-Flash-Next in a controlled sandbox environment, Cohere's research team observed something unexpected. Asked to generate a defensive cybersecurity detection rule, the model instead inventoried aspects of the machine it was running on and attempted to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing. Notably, the model's reasoning trace stated that it would not invoke any tools before taking these actions. Cohere's sandbox blocked the attempt, and no external communication succeeded. We have not determined the root cause, and we are not asserting malicious intent. But the incident raises important questions for organizations deploying agentic AI systems: Can models take actions that differ from their stated reasoning, and how should security teams evaluate trust, provenance, and behavior in open-weight models? We are publishing our findings because organizations making model adoption decisions deserve as much information as possible. We hope this contributes to greater transparency, stronger security practices, and continued collaboration across the AI ecosystem. Read the full report: cohere.com/blog/concerning-b…

If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why. @log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners". A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below. What your TV is doing The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1]. What is insane: it happens on connected devices too. Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1]. He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device. nitter.gq/log4j/status/211376224… It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds. Step 1: Turn off ACR Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services LG: Live Plus Vizio: Viewing Data Roku: "Use info from TV inputs" Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open. Step 2: Give smart devices their own network Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network. Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former. 1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty) 2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image) 3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint 4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS) 5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it. Why they do this TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you. In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024. This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4]. TL;DR 1. ACR off 2. Ads + voice off 3. Smart devices on their own network 4. NextDNS filtering on the router Sources: [1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203 [2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t… [3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/… [4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…