Noteworthy News

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^I thought the UK's healthcare system was pretty good (or at least better than a lot of people gave it credit for) until we emigrated.

It's amazing how many countries can do things like national healthcare, parental leave, childcare, etc., while still maintaining an effective national defense. Why these countries have not collapsed into a 'Mad Max' style dystopian hellscape is a complete mystery.

Boru

[Ivan Denisovich]

^I thought the UK's healthcare system was pretty good (or at least better than a lot of people gave it credit for) until we emigrated.

Poland system ain't great or even good but that's mostly function of it being underfunded thanks to years of neoliberal propaganda which permeate brains of population and politicians both.

It's amazing how many countries can do things like national healthcare, parental leave, childcare, etc., while still maintaining an effective national defense. Why these countries have not collapsed into a 'Mad Max' style dystopian hellscape is a complete mystery.

Amazing indeed. Almost like if a basic welfare would be a good long view strategy.

[The Valkyrie]

^I thought the UK's healthcare system was pretty good (or at least better than a lot of people gave it credit for) until we emigrated.

It's amazing how many countries can do things like national healthcare, parental leave, childcare, etc., while still maintaining an effective national defense. Why these countries have not collapsed into a 'Mad Max' style dystopian hellscape is a complete mystery.

Boru

I'm working on it.

A little patience, please!

[Ivan Denisovich]

U.S. President Donald Trump promised to give economic support to Hungary if needed by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, reiterating his backing for the Hungarian leader just hours ahead of a crucial election in the country.

Is donny pressured by Moscow or he simply likes autocrats?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's probably one of his kinks. He likes the way it feels when they squeeze him, and it lets him believe he lives in a spy novel... where he'll get no doubt get one over on them all in the final chapter.

[Angrboda]

Scott Bessent calls emergency meeting with bank CEOs over AI that could crash the financial system — what is Anthropic’s Mythos and why the panic?

On April 7, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell convened an unannounced emergency meeting at Treasury headquarters in Washington with the CEOs of the country's most "systemically important" financial institutions, according to Bloomberg (1). The subject: an AI model called Mythos, built by Anthropic, and the potential for it to fundamentally transform and destabilize cybersecurity across the global financial system.

In the room were Citigroup's Jane Fraser, Morgan Stanley's Ted Pick, Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, Wells Fargo's Charlie Scharf and Goldman Sachs's David Solomon, Bloomberg reports (2). JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon was unable to attend.

All the banks represented are classified (3) as globally systemically important, meaning a breach of any one of them could send shockwaves through the international financial system.

Anthropic's Mythos and how it's different

Mythos is Anthropic's most powerful AI model to date, released April 7 to a tightly controlled group (4) of technology and finance firms rather than the general public.

While it wasn't designed specifically for hacking, its advanced coding and reasoning capabilities have given it something far more alarming: the ability (5) to find and exploit software vulnerabilities that human security researchers missed for decades.

According to Anthropic's security team (6), Mythos has already identified thousands of previously unknown, aka "zero-day," vulnerabilities across every major operating system and web browser.

Among the discoveries: a flaw in OpenBSD — widely regarded (7) as one of the most secure operating systems available — that had gone undetected for 27 years, and a bug in the video processor FFmpeg that survived five million automated security tests without being caught, per Quartz (8).

What makes Mythos especially worrying to regulators is not just that it can find these flaws, but that it can link multiple vulnerabilities together autonomously to construct working exploits (9).

"We've regularly seen it chain vulnerabilities together," Logan Graham, offensive cyber research lead at Anthropic, told NBC News (10). "The degree of its autonomy and sort of long-range-ness, the ability to put multiple things together, I think, is a particular thing about this model."

Anthropic noted (11) that none of these cyber capabilities were specifically trained into Mythos, but that they surfaced as a byproduct of advances in reasoning, coding and autonomy.

[Deesse23]

Hungary:

Orban is done. He admitted defeat.

[AFTT47]

^ Rare good news.

[Jackalope]

Hungary:

Orban is done. He admitted defeat.

Holy shit, that's huge.

[Ivan Denisovich]

Hungary's veteran nationalist leader Viktor Orban lost power to the upstart centre-right Tisza party in Sunday's national election after 16 years in office, marking a setback for his ​allies in Russia and U.S. President Donald Trump's White House.

[...]

His landslide defeat handed Tisza's Peter Magyar, 45, a comfortable majority in Hungary's 199-seat legislature, opening the door for meaningful reforms of a system critics in the European Union said subverted democratic norms.
With nearly all ballots counted, Tisza was set to win 138 seats, more than the two-thirds majority Magyar would ​need to undo Orban's constitutional overhaul and combat corruption.

Hopefully new dude will not be shy about using his power to undo crap that orban did.