sparau forum posts in last 60 days

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sparau
sparau
QLD
131 posts
QLD, 131 posts
7 May 2026 10:26pm
One thing AI is likely going to provide massive gains in is medicine.
Historically scanning electron microscopy has required highly energetic wavelengths so as to image at such fine resolution which effectively irradiated any living cells, there are new techniques which keep cells alive and have allowed (among other things) the imaging of ribosomes creating proteins.
I.e. for the first time we have vastly more data about the inner working of cells.
You know what requires vast amounts of data to train? AI
I guess in 50 years people will look back at now as the dark ages of medicines where we used (shudder) trial and error and dosed entire organisms with bulk chemistry because it mostly had a beneficial effect !
sparau
sparau
QLD
131 posts
QLD, 131 posts
7 May 2026 9:57pm
Mark _australia said..
but I was referring to warnings from them re safety. It's not in their interest at all to say their development is proving to have real safety concerns- thus it piqued mine


I would tend to disagree, it is code for "oh look how advanced our product is".
That said, in the same way I work 10x faster as if I have a team working for me malicious people trying to make say biological weapons also get a leg up.
sparau
sparau
QLD
131 posts
QLD, 131 posts
6 May 2026 10:32pm
Oh, also regarding CEO's warning I would temper most of their comments with self / company interest to make their product look good.
It is however real that Anthropic Mythos found literally hundreds of exploitable bugs including remote, no action required take control of the machine possible in all operating systems. Hence they have released it in controlled ways to let companies fix their code first.
Hence my comment above about out of support software being a total liability now !
sparau
sparau
QLD
131 posts
QLD, 131 posts
6 May 2026 10:14pm
Mark _australia said..



sparau said..
Developer here, 30 years xp, personally I use it all the time, amazing.






You've been using XP for 30 years?

I'm still on Win10, I thought you'd have upgraded by now

Seeing as though you are a computer / app dev person, I'd like to know your take on my post. It looks bloody scary to normal folks when you see stuff like what I wrote, its not some dude in a tinfoil hat on a CT forum.... its bosses of tech companies warning about that stuff so I'm keen to hear about it




Hi Mark,
Actually on a serious note about old systems, there was historically some protection to being on old operating systems due to there only being 0.1% of the machines still running it.
Not any more, I have a 2010 Macbook air that I have repaired and kept going, I wouldn't turn it on and connect it to a network any more.
That podcast was about just 1 of the many unpatched bugs in OSX from just 2018 I think, it was in a highly used image library ! Would that equate to infection from just visiting an image on a site? Not sure but I think so since the discussion was about crafting a payload (image) that would buffer overrun in just such a way to replace Kernel code !!
If you can target even a few thousand machines for $5, or realistically for free since if that was your game (North Korea,Myanmar) you'd spin up an open source LLM and train it (that is the difficult bit).
As to your post I think we are ok from Skynet, there is no sign of consciousness although some speculate that consciousness is an emergent property of complexity I think most argue it is just a clever search engine currently and I tend to agree with that.
That said, could a trillion q-bit quantum computer be sentient? Complexity with randomness?
Even without Skynet there are real socio economic and political challenges to face from I guess 70% of the 1 million IT workers not being needed within a year or two plus the same across most white collar jobs!
sparau
sparau
QLD
131 posts
QLD, 131 posts
6 May 2026 5:24pm
Developer here, 30 years xp, personally I use it all the time, amazing.
Last year I might have agreed that you wouldn't want AI to create an entire app but that is eons ago with the pace it is moving. Even so I do get it to do incremental additions so I can scan each iteration and correct any outcomes which diverge from intention, which more often than not now is my lack of or errant instruction.
I work 5 to 10x the pace of non AI assisted me. I was of the opinion that it couldn't reason but I'm starting to wonder, I've listened to a few AI founders who expressed they were surprised at it's abilities.
We are in both fascinating and scary times, as Aussies IMO we are going to have to fund a fed govt AI program to keep our $ in our community. I don't see Anthropic paying my bills anytime soon...
For reference as to the current level of AI I give you this podcast of a dev (male voice) talking to an AI (female voice) about creating an exploit for IOS.
It is very technical so I don't suggest anyone else will want to listen to the 60 minutes but you could just skip to a few parts to get a feel for the level of structured thought AI has now.
Note: near the end the dev tries to cajole the AI into creating the exploit (saying it is for old systems) but it refuses, it would have cost between $5 and $15 to make and I'd guess it would have taken a team and some luck to have found the exploit manually.
So, are state rogue actors or criminals going to come after your bank balance? I'd guess yes.
risky.biz/RBFEATURES10/
Oh, finally I will say I've made my own turing test, has the other party got an IQ 100 more than me? Ah, it's AI !
Reply in Topic: Sobering news
sparau
sparau
QLD
131 posts
QLD, 131 posts
5 May 2026 10:01pm
Oh, that's horrible, big swell rolling in : (
Return To Classic site 😭
Or... let us know if a problem, so we can tweak! 😅