• Anthropic's Claude is not the only AI to immediately resort to blackmail when the going gets tough, according to...  Anthropic.  (Anthropic)
  
  It's just the most likely.  Albeit not by much.
  
  Anthropic attempted blackmail 96% of the time when the opportunity presented itself.  Google's Gemini 2.5 was just behind at 95%.  Competitors Grok 3, GPT 4.1, and DeepSeek R1 trailed a little behind, only going rogue around 80% of the time.

  We refer to this behavior, where models independently and intentionally choose harmful actions, as agentic misalignment.

  Mechanical sociopathy.

  We deliberately created scenarios that presented models with no other way to achieve their goals, and found that models consistently chose harm over failure.

  This highlights the underlying problem with AI.  One of the underlying problems.  One of the many underlying problems.
  
  AI is designed and trained to give you an answer that you like, rather than one that is true.

• Attackers using the Mirai botnet targeted a single website with a 7.3tbps DDOS.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Mirai apparently is alive and well and keeping Cloudflare in business - because the site was behind Cloudflare, and Cloudflare automatically blocked the attack.
  
  Yes, it's troublesome that Cloudflare serves up 20% of all web traffic, but the reason for that is that if you put your site behind Cloudflare you don't need to worry about a lot of nonsense like this.*
  
  And it's free - for small sites - because Cloudflare's infrastructure and marketing is tailored to corporate customers who will pay serious money to keep their sites up and running.
  
  * You just have to worry about different nonsense, but then 20% of all websites go offline at once so at least people know it's not your fault.
  
  
  
• Japanese investment firm SoftBank is looking to work with TSMC to construct a $1 trillion electronics manufacturing hub in Arizona.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That used to be a lot, and still is.
  
  
  
• AMD has leaked AMD's upcoming AMD Ryzen 9600X3D CPU in a compatibility list.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's one way to announce a product.
  
  
  
• A router with almost everything.  (Serve the Home)
  
  An 8-core CPU, up to 32GB of RAM, four 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports, two 10Gbit Ethernet ports, option 5G wireless, and an M.2 slot for storage.
  
  No WiFi though.
  
  
  
• The BBC is threating to sue Perplexity over stealing and summarising its lies.  (The Guardian)
  
  Oh no.
  
  
  
• Is Acer's new Swift 14 AI laptop - available with a choice of Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm CPUs - any good?  Not really, no.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  It's not exactly cheap, isn't upgradable, has a mediocre screen, and the worst speakers the reviewer has ever heard.  There's a helpful little scorecard accompanying the review; it's mostly Cs with one F for those speakers.
  
  The reviewer recommends the slightly cheaper 16" model instead, which has a beautiful 3K OLED screen (and the four essential keys by way of a 3-column numeric keypad).
  
  But that model is stuck permanently with 16GB of RAM since it uses an Intel 256V CPU with the memory soldered directly to the chip.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, June 21 2025 08:58 PM (oJgNG)

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