Snippings

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For Project Sid, the company populated a Minecraft world with 1,000 autonomous AI agents to see what they would do if left to their own devices. The result is astonishing.

From: A company gave 1,000 AI agents access to Minecraft — and they built a society | Tom’s Guide.

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The agents in the simulation formed alliances, collected items in Minecraft, and even set up gems as a common currency so they could trade together. There were even crooked priests who bribed other AI townsfolk to gain an unfair advantage.

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The colossal campaign spending from the cryptocurrency industry is showing up in dominant fashion in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race, where its political action committees have devoted $40 million to support Republican Bernie Moreno’s opposition of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), the crypto-skeptical chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

From: Crypto PACs Dominate Ohio Senate Race, Spending $40M on Sherrod Brown’s Foe.

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People looking to murder their partner, relative or a boss have paid out £400,000 to fraudsters running a bogus hitman-for-hire website on the dark web.

From: Fraudsters make £400,000 from fake hitman-for-hire website that claims you can have a partner, relative or boss killed for a fee | Daily Mail Online.

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Here’s an example from Australia recently. 

Unable to withdraw the full amount, the victim – despite being questioned by her bank – took out $5000 in the hope of reversing the fake transaction.

From: Everyday sight that helped ‘hero’ cop save woman from scammers.

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Her new love claimed to be in charge of an oil rig.
Eventually, he convinced her to loan him tens of thousands of dollars to repair broken equipment.
Their romance crumbled when a video call glitched.
“While I still heard Bryan’s voice, I saw a Black man sitting in a cupboard covering his head with a blanket, so I could still see his face,” she said.

From: Romance scam: Perth woman scammed using AI deepfake technology.

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Bryan never existed. Ayres was seeing the faked face and voice of a US real estate agent whose identity has been hijacked by scammers countless times.

Live video calls were manipulated using AI software that can mimic a real person’s voice and facial expressions.

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Eventually, he convinced her to loan him tens of thousands of dollars to repair broken equipment.
Their romance crumbled when a video call glitched.
“While I still heard Bryan’s voice, I saw a Black man sitting in a cupboard covering his head with a blanket, so I could still see his face,” she said.

From: Romance scam: Perth woman scammed using AI deepfake technology.

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A new draft of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s “Digital Identity Guidelines” finally takes steps to eliminate reviled password management practices that have been shown to do more harm than good. The recommendations, which will be mandatory for US federal government entities and serve as guidelines for everyone else, ban the practice of requiring users to periodically change their account passwords, often every 90 days.

The policy of regularly changing passwords evolved out of a desire to ensure that people weren’t choosing easily guessable or reused passwords; but in practice, it causes people to choose simple or formulaic passwords so they will be easier to keep track of. The new recommendations also ban “composition rules,” like requiring a certain number or mix of capital letters, numbers, and punctuation marks in each password.

From: The US Could Finally Ban Inane Forced Password Changes | WIRED.

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Finally, we examined how intensely respondents employed generative AI on days that they reported using it. This allowed us to estimate a lower and upper bound for the share of total work hours that involve generative AI for the U.S. economy as a whole. We estimated that between 0.5% and 3.5% of all work hours in the U.S. are currently assisted by generative AI. Combining these estimates with a median increase of 25% in task productivity from the adoption of generative AI, an increase consistent with that observed in several studies,3 we estimated that generative AI could plausibly grow labor productivity by between 0.1% and 0.9% at current levels of usage.

From: The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI | St. Louis Fed.

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In our working paper on this topic, we show that generative AI use is more common among individuals who are male, younger and more educated and who work in computer, math and management occupations. However, perhaps the most important finding is that generative AI use is widespread across gender, age, education, industries and occupations.

From: The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI | St. Louis Fed.

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Leaked documents obtained by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a Washington-based think-tank, show that in 2017 a Sudanese company controlled by Prigozhin made purchases of industrial equipment from China that passed through JPMorgan Chase and HSBC.

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“We have been testing this feature in a handful of cities across the U.S.,” says Khosrowshahi, as he emphasizes that early testing shows verified riders not only receive higher ratings and tip more, but also generate fewer complaints from drivers.

From: Prove launches user verification tool | Biometric Update.

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