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Comment It feels like this is happening already (Score 1) 28

by drinkypoo (#66367118) Attached to: Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts

I guess it's probably about to get an order of magnitude worse and the only way to navigate it will be crowdsourcing, but the gaming world already feels much like people are prompting their way to releasing games. Remember the days when there were only dozens or hundreds of games released per year? What seems crazy to me is that although most of them have very low-quality assets, there's so many actually playable and working games which are more or less fully realized, at least to the point that they have entire communities. I guess that's a testament to the ease of game creation with some of these engines.

The interesting AI-related question to me is whether it's going to increase or decrease average quality. TBH I think it might actually increase it, because so many of these games are so half-assed. At minimum it should make them prettier.

Comment Re: On the plus side ... (Score 1) 16

by drinkypoo (#66366894) Attached to: South Korea Says AI Agents May Have Been Used to Hack the Country's Banks

Agents don't cause attacks. People running agents do.

The people who ran the agents were negligent at best but I have an alternate theory.

If they knew the technology could go sideways and hack things then they effectively executed those hacks intentionally.

If not they are only negligently ignorant which is not generally a crime in this context.

Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.

Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.

It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.

Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).

Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 4, Informative) 246

It's no surprise that most Slashdotters have lost their sense of wonder, as they've forgotten what it was like to be children.

Despite DST existing, I clearly remember waiting for the bus in the dark for part of the year.

DST doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and it kills people. It's weird to celebrate that.

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