miner
'Kill the people': How men were left to starve in a South African gold mine
How men were left to starve in a South African gold mine. This image was created by Mohamed Hussein using the artificial intelligence (AI) tool Midjourney. Ayanda Ndabeni watched the faint glow from his headlamp fight the vast darkness 1,500 metres (4,920 feet) below ground. His miner's lamp had lasted for more than a week after he was lowered down into the shaft of the gold mine. But now the batteries were dying. He gently flipped the plastic switch of his lamp, turning it off, and the trapped men around him became shadows. In the stifling heat and humidity, their anxiety pressed in from all sides. Ayanda had descended into Shaft 10 of the Buffelsfontein mine in late September 2024, lowered by a team of nearly 20 men operating ropes and a pulley above ground. That day, he'd spotted police vehicles near the mine's entrance. The 36-year-old assumed it was just routine patrols around the mine system, which is 2km (1.2 miles) deep. But then the rope pulley, via which food, water, batteries and other items arrived, stopped moving. The shouting that usually indicated the rope operators were sending down a man or supplies also fell silent. When huge rocks came crashing down the shaft, they knew it was a warning. The men whispered of their growing fears that something was very wrong on the surface. Patrick Ntsokolo was also in Shaft 10. He was a few hundred metres higher up than Ayanda and had arrived in late July. Patrick was new to the mines. Tasked by the leaders of the artisanal miners with collecting the food, water and alcohol lowered down by the rope pulley, he hauled supplies along the slippery tunnels to small shops.
- South America (0.40)
- North America > United States (0.40)
- North America > Central America (0.40)
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Supplementary Material
Tab. 13 shows the parameters and variables used in this optimization. Table 13: Parameters and variables used in credit optimization.Known Parameters Description ϱ = R Eq. 5 presents the optimization formulation, where Eq. 5a calculates the total credits gained by the The following examples illustrate the prompts used in LLM-C for each mini-game. The prompts vary slightly for different mini-games and also differ across stages within the same mini-game. Specifically, the prompt for the dynamic scenario in Social Structure is presented in Listing 1. The corresponding prompts are provided in Listing 4 and Listing 5. 27 Listing 1: Prompt example for dynamic scenario in Social Structure . Instructions: - The AdaSociety game is an open-ended multi-agent environment. The game consists ofa complex crafting tree, where the agent needs to obtain as many resources aspossible in the limited time and craft tools to mine more advanced resources tomaximize its benefit. At the same time, agents can also take other actions tohelp them increase their returns. The numbers of resources are limited.- Map: AdaSociety is a 2D grid-world game. The map size is 15*15.- Some of them can only bediscovered with some specific tools, which will be introduced next.-
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- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Learning Graphical Models > Undirected Networks > Markov Models (0.46)
Twelve miners killed by Russian strike in Ukraine, energy company says
Twelve miners have been killed by a Russian drone strike in eastern Ukraine, the country's largest private energy firm has said. DTEK said a bus carrying workers after a shift in the Dnipropetrovsk region had been targeted in Sunday's attack. At least seven people were injured. Earlier, at least two others were killed and nine injured in separate Russian attacks overnight and on Sunday. The victims included six people hurt when a drone hit a maternity hospital in Zaporizhzhia.
- Asia > Russia (1.00)
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- Government > Regional Government > Europe Government > Russia Government (0.93)
- Government > Regional Government > Asia Government > Russia Government (0.93)
The Temporal Graph of Bitcoin Transactions
Since its 2009 genesis block, the Bitcoin network has processed >1.08 billion (B) transactions representing >8.72B BTC, offering rich potential for machine learning (ML); yet, its pseudonymity and obscured flow of funds inherent in its UTxO-based design, have rendered this data largely inaccessible for ML research. Addressing this gap, we present an ML-compatible graph modeling the Bitcoin's economic topology by reconstructing the flow of funds. This temporal, heterogeneous graph encompasses complete transaction history up to block 863000, consisting of >2.4B nodes and >39.72B edges. Additionally, we provide custom sampling methods yielding node and edge feature vectors of sampled communities, tools to load and analyze the Bitcoin graph data within specialized graph databases, and ready-to-use database snapshots. This comprehensive dataset and toolkit empower the ML community to tackle Bitcoin's intricate ecosystem at scale, driving progress in applications such as anomaly detection, address classification, market analysis, and large-scale graph ML benchmarking. Dataset and code available at https://github.com/B1AAB/EBA
- Asia > Middle East > Jordan (0.04)
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- Information Technology > e-Commerce > Financial Technology (1.00)
- Information Technology > Data Science > Data Mining > Anomaly Detection (0.54)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Statistical Learning (0.48)
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Supplementary Material
Tab. 13 shows the parameters and variables used in this optimization. Table 13: Parameters and variables used in credit optimization.Known Parameters Description ϱ = R Eq. 5 presents the optimization formulation, where Eq. 5a calculates the total credits gained by the The following examples illustrate the prompts used in LLM-C for each mini-game. The prompts vary slightly for different mini-games and also differ across stages within the same mini-game. Specifically, the prompt for the dynamic scenario in Social Structure is presented in Listing 1. The corresponding prompts are provided in Listing 4 and Listing 5. 27 Listing 1: Prompt example for dynamic scenario in Social Structure . Instructions: - The AdaSociety game is an open-ended multi-agent environment. The game consists ofa complex crafting tree, where the agent needs to obtain as many resources aspossible in the limited time and craft tools to mine more advanced resources tomaximize its benefit. At the same time, agents can also take other actions tohelp them increase their returns. The numbers of resources are limited.- Map: AdaSociety is a 2D grid-world game. The map size is 15*15.- Some of them can only bediscovered with some specific tools, which will be introduced next.-
- North America > United States > Oregon > Lane County > Eugene (0.14)
- Asia > Singapore (0.04)
- North America > United States > Ohio > Lucas County > Oregon (0.04)
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Gradients: When Markets Meet Fine-tuning -- A Distributed Approach to Model Optimisation
Current AutoML platforms leave substantial performance untapped. Testing 180 fine-tuning tasks across models from 70M to 70B parameters, we found that HuggingFace AutoTrain, TogetherAI, Databricks, and Google Cloud consistently produce suboptimal configurations. Gradients, built on the Bittensor network, attacks this problem through competition. Independent miners race to find optimal hyperparameters, earning rewards proportional to their models' performance. This tournament drives exploration of configuration spaces that single-strategy methods never examine. In our experiments, Gradients achieved a 100\% win rate against TogetherAI, Databricks, and Google Cloud, and beat HuggingFace AutoTrain in 82.8\% of experiments. Mean improvements reached 42.1\% against commercial platforms. Retrieval-augmented generation tasks saw 30-40\% gains; diffusion models improved 23.4\% on person-specific generation. When miners compete for rewards, they develop optimization strategies that centralized approaches overlook. These findings demonstrate that decentralized systems with economic incentives can systematically outperform traditional AutoML, suggesting market dynamics may be key to achieving superior fine-tuning results. Code is available at https://github.com/rayonlabs/G.O.D.
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- Banking & Finance > Trading (0.34)
- Information Technology > Security & Privacy (0.34)
Substituting Proof of Work in Blockchain with Training-Verified Collaborative Model Computation
Rafid, Mohammad Ishzaz Asif, Sakib, Morsalin
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper introduces a hybrid architecture that replaces Bitcoin's traditional PoW with a centralized, cloud-based collaborative training framework. In this model, miners contribute computing resources to train segments of horizontally scaled machine learning models on preprocessed datasets, ensuring privacy and generating meaningful outputs \cite{li2017securing}. A central server evaluates contributions using two metrics: number of parameters trained and reduction in model loss during each cycle. At the end of every cycle, a weighted lottery selects the winning miner, who receives a digitally signed certificate. This certificate serves as a verifiable substitute for PoW and grants the right to append a block to the blockchain \cite{nakamoto2008bitcoin}. By integrating digital signatures and SHA-256 hashing \cite{nist2015sha}, the system preserves blockchain integrity while redirecting energy toward productive computation. The proposed approach addresses the sustainability concerns of traditional mining by converting resource expenditure into socially valuable work, aligning security incentives with real-world computational progress.
- Information Technology > Security & Privacy (1.00)
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A Formal Rebuttal of "The Blockchain Trilemma: A Formal Proof of the Inherent Trade-Offs Among Decentralization, Security, and Scalability"
This paper presents a comprehensive refutation of the so-called "blockchain trilemma," a widely cited but formally ungrounded claim asserting an inherent trade-off between decentralisation, security, and scalability in blockchain protocols. Through formal analysis, empirical evidence, and detailed critique of both methodology and terminology, we demonstrate that the trilemma rests on semantic equivocation, misuse of distributed systems theory, and a failure to define operational metrics. Particular focus is placed on the conflation of topological network analogies with protocol-level architecture, the mischaracterisation of Bitcoin's design--including the role of miners, SPV clients, and header-based verification--and the failure to ground claims in complexity-theoretic or adversarial models. By reconstructing Bitcoin as a deterministic, stateless distribution protocol governed by evidentiary trust, we show that scalability is not a trade-off but an engineering outcome. The paper concludes by identifying systemic issues in academic discourse and peer review that have allowed such fallacies to persist, and offers formal criteria for evaluating future claims in blockchain research.
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