Author: Vidya Saras

The Bank of England is under increasing pressure to cut interest rates this week as job vacancies and factory output show signs of a slowing economy. According to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), job vacancies fell by 3.2% in August, with nearly 720,000 new adverts, reflecting a sluggish job market as Britain’s factory output contracted for the first time since late 2020. Separate data from Make UK, the manufacturing industry body, revealed that manufacturers are holding back on hiring amid declining industrial output, highlighting broader economic concerns. This contraction marks the first decline in factory output in four years,…

A cyberattack that shut down two of the top casinos in Las Vegas last year quickly became one of the most riveting security stories of 2023. It was the first known case of native English-speaking hackers in the United States and Britain teaming up with ransomware gangs based in Russia. But that made-for-Hollywood narrative has eclipsed a far more hideous trend: Many of these young, Western cybercriminals are also members of fast-growing online groups that exist solely to bully, stalk, harass and extort vulnerable teens into physically harming themselves and others. Image: Shutterstock. In September 2023, a Russian ransomware group…

Microsoft has dropped heavy hints that change is coming to the way security products interact with the critical core of the Windows platform, its software kernel, spurred to action by the IT outage that disrupted millions of CrowdStrike customers in July. For security vendors, being able to load kernel (ring zero) drivers matters. If Microsoft removes that access — something Apple did for macOS in 2019 — their products will need to be heavily re-designed to implement security with lower privilege. What’s not yet clear, however, is what form any change will take and on what timescale. Hanging over this…

Ever been asked a question you only knew part of the answer to? To give a more informed response, your best move would be to phone a friend with more knowledge on the subject.This collaborative process can also help large language models (LLMs) improve their accuracy. Still, it’s been difficult to teach LLMs to recognize when they should collaborate with another model on an answer. Instead of using complex formulas or large amounts of labeled data to spell out where models should work together, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have envisioned a more organic approach.Their…

Deep learning has made significant strides in artificial intelligence, particularly in natural language processing and computer vision. However, even the most advanced systems often fail in ways that humans would not, highlighting a critical gap between artificial and human intelligence. This discrepancy has reignited debates about whether neural networks possess the essential components of human cognition. The challenge lies in developing systems that exhibit more human-like behavior, particularly regarding robustness and generalization. Unlike humans, who can adapt to environmental changes and generalize across diverse visual settings, AI models often need help with shifted data distributions between training and test sets.…

Politics / September 16, 2024 The months-long romance between Vance and an easily duped press in 2016 led directly to his sordid political rise. Edit Ad Policy Republican vice presidential nominee US Senator JD Vance (R-OH) speaks with the media at the airport before he departs on September 14, 2024, in Greenville, North Carolina.(Allison Joyce / Getty Images) When Hillbilly Elegy was published during the homestretch of the 2016 election, its author, JD Vance, became the designated empath for a region and a marginalized cultural tradition—the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, and episodically hard-working Scotch-Irish peasantry in the American heartland. So it’s entailed…

Not only is the spin incorrect; it misses the point.

Politics / September 16, 2024 Donald Trump is a world-class BS artist. His running mate is just a twitchy liar. Ad Policy JD Vance: If his lips are moving…(Photo by Dia Dipasupil / Getty Images) During a contentious interview with Dana Bash on CNN on Sunday, JD Vance seemed to admit that he is willing to “create stories” to push a political agenda. Bash had rebuked Vance for spreading “baseless” and “unsubstantiated” stories that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. The CNN host rightly noted that these claims were inciting racist violence against Haitians. Vance responded,…

The debt based monetary system has become quite extreme. On one hand, the US crossed the $35 trillion national debt milestone, placing a $104k burden on every US citizen. On the other hand, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) puts federal expenditures for 2024 at 24.2% of GDP.This divergence between profligate spending and debt ballooning puts the economy on a narrow path. It is exceedingly unlikely that USG would opt to reduce spending, most of which goes to social programs, entitlements and the military. The latter alone is the key ingredient that backs USD as world currency.Conversely, this entails another Fed…

Casa has added Ethereum support to its self-custody storage solutions, providing multisignature security for BTC and ETH. Cryptocurrency self-custody platform Casa has rolled out support for Ether (ETH) storage, touting its support for multisignature Bitcoin (BTC) and ETH self-storage as a first in the industry. Since its inception in 2016, Casa has promoted multisignature self-custody in the crypto industry. Its flagship Bitcoin vault allows users to store the cryptocurrency using up to five keys for more distributed security. Casa’s service originally catered to Bitcoin “whales” willing to spend $10,000 a year on custody before opening its service to a broader base…