How does this help? 99% of the population aren't technically minded enough. Most people just buy a wifi router, plug it in (maybe having read the instructions) and that's it. They have neither the skills nor the inclination to update firmware.
The real problem is: assuming that firmware can be updated, how do you run a nationwide update programme overcoming a population that doesn't really care or have the skills to do it.
Vehicle safety standards (mandated annual safety checks like the UK MoT test) is the closest analogy I can think of - in the UK you can't insure your car without a valid MoT. If you were serious, then maybe tying ISP access to updated router firmware would be the way to go.
Are there are other flavours of proton still to be discovered? Can you (theoretically) build a proton with any two quarks selected from {up, charm, top} and one selected from {down, strange, bottom}?
> Particles with † next to their names have been predicted by the Standard Model but not yet observed.
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There are some technical details, because QM rules makes everything more complicated and you can potentially have a mix of quarks. I (mis)remember something weird in barions, but I can't find what it was.
Another one: Is this newly discovered particle stable, or does it only exist for a short time before transforming in some way? I didn’t see any mention of that in the article.
Is it theoretically possible to have atoms with 4x the proton mass, starting with hydrogen at atomic weight 4? Pu-239 could theoretically have an atomic weight of 521 instead of 239… Wild!
It's not stable, and no it's not theoretically possible.
A proton is the lightest stable baryon, and thus the only only stable one. It's not a coincidence - in particle physics if a lighter elementary particle is possible the heavier one will ALWAYS decay into it. "Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory." (Combination particles like atoms are more complicated because there are other things that might force the particle to exist.)
The closest example I can remember is that you can have atoms with muons instead of electrons for a shot time ~2.2E-6 seconds, that is a pretty long time for for an unstable particle. You can do some chemistry in that "long" time. (Can you put a muon around a heavy atom like gold and get some extra time for special relativity corrections?)
If you want to replace protons, I guess you can try with "strange" particles instead of "charmed" particles. The difference of mass is small, like only a 10% more instead of a x4 increase. In particular, the sigma particle (up+up+strange) has a half life of ~2E-10 seconds that is shorter than the half life of a muon but much longer that the half life of this new particle. (I can find the number, but let me handwave a ~~~1E-22 seconds(???).)
Lovely tales. I'm a keen climber - one of these stories has just explained to me why the fantastic sea cliffs at Gwennap Head are known as Chair Ladder.
Is the LLM acting as my agent? If the LLM has been exposed to the source code then have I been exposed to the source code? So in that case is a "clean room" implementation possible?
Maybe what it needs is a testing framework - Σωκράτης (Socrates), that will demonstrate to you that everything you thought you knew about how your programme would behave (or the thought underpinning it) was at best problematic, or at worst just plain wrong!
Gloves: if you have to take them off outside, brush the snow off them first, then put them in an inside pocket. You will naturally sweat a little, so the gloves will be a little damp inside even if you don't notice it. If your gloves are in an inside pocket they stay warm. Otherwise you will find that your hands freeze when you put your gloves back on.
I was somewhat dissapointed at the perspective :-) seeing the article was from morningstar.com, I was expecting a radical left wing critique of EU and US tech policy.
[The "Morning Star" is a left wing UK paper, whose editorial stance is in line with the Communist Party of Great Britain (morningstaronline.co.uk)]
I don't know if your wrong or right about "The Morning Star" but Morningstar.com is a financial firm specialized in research and recommendations. They have a lot's of influence relative to their relatively small holdings.
It's a joke. The Morning Star is well known in the UK as being the mouthpiece of the UK Communist Party. It was originally founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker, before becoming the Morning Starin 1966. So the idea of the Morning Star offering a critique of the tech policy of the decadent capitalist running dogs is intrinsically funny from a UK perspective.
But given the downvotes maybe there has just been a massive sense of humour across the pond...
So let's just take a moment to recall how we got here: Grok had the ability to create sexualized deep fake images of people. This was shown to not distinguish sufficiently between adults and children, creating sexualized deep fake images of children.
Unsurprisingly, outrage ensued across the political spectrum - anything associated with facilitating child abuse is politically toxic.
xAI responded by making this feature only accessible to paying accounts - leading to the response that they believe that producing sexualised images of children is ok provided that you pay for it.
It is absolutely unsurprising that the UK Gov is taking action. As far as I can tell, popular opinion is that Grok has crossed a line here - abstract free speech arguments don't work that well when people see it affecting their partners and daughters.
X could be banned from the UK, under the Online Safety Act - but that is the maximum sanction. Banning Grok is more likely. The OSA was brought in by the previous government (Conservative - centre right), and has broad political support.
There is fundamentally a difference of approach between the USA and Europe (inc the UK). In the US, you tend to weight free speech more highly, and consider harms resulting from non-protected speech (like inciting riots or murder) to be legally an individual matter. Over here we take a slightly different approach, focused more on the entire system that enables the harm. Hence under some circumstances we restrict the transmission of speech that facilitates the harm.
In this case, requiring a change from Grok to comply with the OSA not offer this facility in the UK seems appropriate, with appropriate sanctions if they fail to comply.
The real problem is: assuming that firmware can be updated, how do you run a nationwide update programme overcoming a population that doesn't really care or have the skills to do it.
Vehicle safety standards (mandated annual safety checks like the UK MoT test) is the closest analogy I can think of - in the UK you can't insure your car without a valid MoT. If you were serious, then maybe tying ISP access to updated router firmware would be the way to go.
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