James Gleick’s Chaos: The Software
This is a free release of the source, manual, and executables of a 1991 Autodesk DOS program that was called “James Gleick’s CHAOS: The Software.” The software was written by Josh Gordon, Rudy Rucker and John Walker. Rucker wrote most of the algorithms, except for the Fractal Landscapes algorithms, which are by John Walker. Josh […]
Could DOGE cut $2T? The legal and practical reality of government reform
Welcome back to Techne! Scientists and historians are converging on an answer to one of the most perplexing origin stories: Copper miners moving ore deep within the ancient mines in the Carpathian Mountains likely created the very first wheels. Taking a Swing at the Size and Cost of Government When people talk about Illinois politics, […]
Stop Making Me Memorize the Borrow Checker
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely re-architect […]
Teach Yourself to Echolocate
Daniel Kish navigates the world like a bat does—and he does so without ever leaving the ground. After losing his vision as an infant, Kish taught himself to move around with the help of echolocation. Like bats, Kish uses his mouth to produce a series of short, crisp clicking sounds, and then listens to how […]
SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks
Abstract:Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, and Claude are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks. Based on our finding that […]
Bluesky is receiving about 3k reports/hour
This is a heavily interactive web application, and JavaScript is required. Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is. Post Bluesky Safety safety.bsky.app did:plc:eon2iu7v3x2ukgxkqaf7e5np In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into […]
Logica – Declarative logic programming language for data
View project onGitHub. Logica is an open source declarative logic programming language for data manipulation. Logica extends syntax of logic programming for intuitive and efficient data manipulation. It compiles to SQL thus providing you access to the power of SQL engines with the convenience of logic programming syntax. One may say that for programming languages […]
James Webb Space Telescope finds evidence for alternate theory of gravity
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope to peer back in time into the farthest reaches of the universe have found stunning evidence for an alternate theory of gravity. Current models of galaxy formation in the early cosmos predict the presence of excess gravity caused by dark matter to pull material into slowly forming galaxies. […]
Military’s UFO-hunting aerial surveillance system detailed in report
The Pentagon provided new details today about how its deployable, readily reconfigurable suite of sensors called GREMLIN works to help set the stage for figuring out what unidentified objects in our skies are and are not, if they appear at all. In its annual report released on Thursday, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) shared […]
Statistical Rethinking (2024 Edition)
Instructor: Richard McElreath Lectures: Uploaded and pre-recorded, two per week Discussion: Online (Zoom), Fridays 3pm-4pm Central European (Berlin) Time This course teaches data analysis, but it focuses on scientific models. The unfortunate truth about data is that nothing much can be done with it, until we say what caused it. We will prioritize conceptual, causal […]