Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Some time ago I visited a used book fair and came across this awesome piece of 80s scifi-asthetic.
This book is a collection of short stories by the Polish author Stanisław Lem originally published in 1964. Its English title is The Cyberiad. One story, about Trurl's electronic troubadour, turned out to be surprisingly topical.
Spoilers for the whole story followThe inventor Trurl (revealed in other stories to be a robot) wants to create a machine that can generate poetry. He begins by obtaining several hundred tonnes of books to use as training data.
Trurl gets to work constructing the electric poetry machine. In the process they have to create massive data storage containers that stretch further out than one can see using binoculars. This is considered a necessary evil to get this great invention going.
The machine will not work as expected. As a last resort Trurl rips out all logic circuits and replaces them with "narsistors". Then things start working.
Trurl invites his friend Klapaucius over to test the new machine. They give it all sorts of weird and wacky instructions like "create a pastoral love poem that also contains mathematics and cybernetics". Basically they do a whole bunch of prompt engineering. They talk and behave exactly like people of 2021-2023 did when LLMs first appeared.
Eventually the machine causes uproar among poets and there are protests demanding it to shut down. These go nowhere in part because the media secretly love the machine. They are using it to create their own content for pennies and thus don't want to see it come to harm. As all of this is going on various people develop symptoms quite similar to modern day AI psychosis.
Things eventually crash when Trurl gets the machine's electrical bill, which turns out to be astronomical. He needs to get rid of the machine and manage to dump it on a visiting dignitary who takes it to his home planet where causes a supernova explosion. Trurl deems that to be sufficiently far away to not be his problem any more.
The difference between fact and fictionIn the story all the problems are caused by the fact that the machine's output is vastly higher quality than anything humans can create. Even the great Stanisław Lem could not predict that in reality the output would turn out to be mediocre garbage and still lead to all the same problems.
Even though the story specifies that the machine is given some "basic instructions" first, nobody tries to do a prompt injection attack on it. That would only appear almost 30 years later in 1993's Paranoia novel Title Deleted for Security Reasons. An earlier example may well exist somewhere, it almost always does.
Together with Modal, I’m happy to announce that the Sovereign Tech Agency is investing nearly €510k into Flatpak development. The focus is on closing gaps in Flatpak’s sandboxing story: new portals for audio, networking, VPNs, and spell checking, plus infrastructure work on entitlements and intents.
I’ll be leading the technical side alongside Adrian, with organizational support from Kateryna and Cade. We’ve brought on a great team and the project will ramp up over the coming months through the end of 2027.
Read the full announcement on the Modal blog.
In Some Changes to GNOME Security Tracking, I reported:
I will discontinue tracking newly-reported security issues on November 1, 2026. During November, I will focus only on tracking issues reported prior to November 1. By December 1, all disclosure deadlines for that set of issues will have been reached, and I will be done.
This is because I was planning to leave my job at Red Hat on December 31 due to some internal Red Hat policy changes. But this timeline has now unexpectedly moved forward two months, to October 30. Accordingly, I will now discontinue tracking newly-reported security issues on October 1, 2026. During October, I will focus only on tracking issues reported prior to October 1. By November 1, all disclosure deadlines for that set of issues will have been reached, and I will be done.