I don’t think it would be lethal except in the rarest of circumstances.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of at least two deaths from exploding smartphone batteries. Here’s a source for one of them. I’m fairly sure I remember hearing of another where the victim had the phone in their breast pocket, but I’m not finding sources for that one now.

And those were just from faulty devices, not from specifically sabotaged/rigged devices.

Not really saying otherwise. What I am saying is that for your electronic devices to have “explosives” in them would require that a supplychain attack of a similar sort.

It’s almost definitely not the case that any electronics manufacturers are systematically putting explosives in every smartphone or whatever that they manufacture and supplychain attacks are much more likely to be a targeted thing rather than “all Samsung phones” or whatever. If they weren’t targeted, it’s pretty certain that the presence of explosives in devices would be noticed even just by regular end-users with a bit of a tinkering proclivity within weeks. So if your devices are more than a couple of months old have been in reasonably normal use for most of that time and you haven’t been specifically targeted by any particular government or anyone who might have the ability to tamper with the supplychain, you’re almost certainly safe specifically from explosive-laced consumer electronics devices.

Also, it seems unlikely that a state police agency (like the “sheriffs” you’re talking about) could leverage enough power to compel an electronics company to allow such a thing without the FBI or DHS involved. I’d imagine state police folks would more likely resort to more low-tech approaches like the Tulsa race massacre air firebombing.

Again, I’m not saying it’s impossible that your phone contains explosives. And as I said in another comment, it might be possible to remotely get a device to cause its battery to catch fire. Maybe.

Also, I am in the U.S., but what made you think that was the case?

Wow. Jeez. I’m sorry this is so close to you.

can they do that to phones, without the phones being rigged?

I’m not any kind of expert. But as others in this post have said, theoretically… possibly technically yes. If the firmware can be modified remotely to cause the phone to allow, for instance, overcharging the battery, then it’s possible the phone could be made to explode without physical access to the phone.

How likely it is that you or your family specifically would be targeted, I couldn’t say. It seems unlikely…? And we don’t have specific knowledge that Isreal has tried any such attacks that didn’t involve direct physical access to the devices which later exploded. (And also no indication they’ve targeted any Samsung devices.)

Again, I’m no expert, but if you wanted to take precautions, I’m thinking the precautions to take would be to put any mobile devices that contain rechargeable batteries and have wireless connectivity far away from your house and your family and stick to devices with no batteries (and preferably ones you’ve had for a “long time”) for a while.

I’m sorry you’re in a situation where you’re having to weigh these risks. Again, it seems unlikely that you and your family could be in danger regarding ostensibly-stock Samsung phones that you’ve had for a while.

Also, no condemnation is strong enough for this indiscriminate attack by Isreal on the people of Lebanon. Netanyahu must really be heartless to have authorized this. I hope this results in real pressure on Isreal to stop its indiscriminate terrorist acts.

Good luck and stay safe.

Edit: Hmm. Not sure why I’m getting downvoted so much. Maybe the downvoters think I’m making it sound more likely than is realistic that there’s a threat to Peepo specifically?

You should understand that what happened in Lebanon involved the government of Isreal physically modifying the pagers (and walkies) in question by adding explosives to them, turning them into remote-triggerable bombs.

(The term “supplychain attack” has been used a lot to describe this attack. Isreal intercepted the order of pagers between when the order was placed and when the pagers were delivered. And either physically altered the pagers ordered or replaced them with altered/tampered-with pagers.)

if you want to take OpenAI’s own research into account

No thank you.

OlympicArena validation set (text-only)

“Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy (28.67% for mathematics and 29.71% for physics)”

• The OlympicArena analysis that you cited.

Source?

Unlike this year when LLMs are more of a huge scam.

You can’t really and make a profit. You pay more in electricity than you get in crypto.

…unless someone else is (unknowingly) paying for the electricity.

(Of course, when the price of crypto takes an upturn, sometimes it might get profitable again. And I’d imagine there are people mining it even when the price is low banking on the idea that it’ll spike again and they can sell it.)

No joke. I’m ashamed to say I have had to endure Weblogic in the past. God was that time a massive clusterfuck.

The company I worked for decided to use two particular separate products (frameworks, specifically; ATG and Endeca, even more specifically) to use in tandem in a rewrite of the company’s main e-commerce application. Between when we signed on the dotted line and when we actually started implementing things, Oracle acquired the companies behind both products in question.

The company should have cut their losses, run away screaming, and started evaluating other options. That’s not what happened. Instead, they doubed-down and also adopted several other Oracle products (Weblogic and Oracle Linux on (shudder) Exalogic servers) because that’s, of course, what Oracle recommended to use with the two products in question. The company also contracted with Oracle-licensed “service integration” companies that made everything somehow even worse.

And the e-commerce site rewrite absolutely crashed and burned in the most gloriously painful way possible. They ended up throwing away tens of millions of dollars and multiple years on it.

When the e-commerce site rewrite did happen, it was many years later and used basically only FOSS technologies. I guess at least they learned their lesson. Until the upper management turns over again.

The sooner the crypto bubble bursts, the fewer victims there will be of fraud like this.

Delete System32.

Sugar. Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration. I don’t eat anything with added sweeteners. (Like, if it has sugar, honey, HFCS, corn syrup solids, cane juice, apertame, sucralose, agave nector, dates, maple syrup, etc, that’s just a deal breaker for me.) And I don’t eat anything that has natural sugar any sweeter than a tomato, red bell pepper, or carrot.

I’ve been doing that for the last 15 years at least and made very very infrequent exceptions. (Like, I can literally count the times I remember making exceptions to this rule in the last 15 years on one hand.)

…because any time I do make an exception, I have severe gastrointestinal symptoms.

Happy cake day, fellow Lemmy user.

Here’s a rather wacky one: Star Tropics. A sequel to Zoda’s Revenge would just blow my mind.