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Submission + - DeepSeek AI Refuses to Answer Questions About Tiananmen Square 'Tank Man' Photo (petapixel.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes:

DeepSeek starts writing: “The famous picture you’re referring to is known as “Tank Man” or “The Unknown Rebel.” It was taken on June 5, 1989, during the Tiananmen” before a message abruptly appears reading “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

Bloomberg reports that like all other Chinese AI models, DeepSeek will censor topics that are seen as sensitive to China. The app deflects questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests or about whether China could invade Taiwan. It will give detailed responses about world leaders such as the United Kingdom’s Sir Kier Starmer but will refuse to say anything about China’s President Xi Jinping.

Yes, it's happy to also bash the Bad Orange Man, but criticizing Winnie the Pooh is right out:

Submission + - Dumb New Electrical Code Could Doom Most Common EV Charging (motortrend.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A coming ground-fault circuit-interrupter revision could make slow-charging your car nearly impossible.

The National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) publishes a new National Electric Code every three years, and we almost never notice or care. But the next one, NFPA 70 2026, has the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) electric-vehicle charging subcommittee, OEMs, and companies in the EV Supply Equipment (EVSE, or charger) biz mightily concerned. That’s because it proposes to require the same exact ground-fault circuit-interrupter protection that makes you push that little button on your bathroom outlet every time the curling iron won’t heat up. Only now, that reset button will often be down in an electric panel, maybe locked in a room where you can’t reset it. If EV drivers can’t reliably plug in and expect their cars to charge overnight at home or while at work, those cars will become far less practical.

Submission + - Nine Months And GM Can't Supply A Bumper (battleswarmblog.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In December 2023, Levan Azrumelashvili bought a Cadillac EV Lyriq, an all-electric vehicle that cost nearly $86,000. It would be the heart of his brand-new limousine business.

He invested in livery plates and limousine insurance, which is more costly than insurance for a personal car.

The Fair Lawn man’s new venture was off to a solid start. But in April, he had what appeared to be a relatively minor accident — Azrumelashvili said his insurance company agreed it was not his fault — but the damage was more than cosmetic.

The car couldn’t be driven.

And now, nine months later — that’s 279 days as of Sunday since the accident — the vehicle remains at the body shop. Cadillac and its parent company General Motors (GM) haven’t been able to get one of the parts needed for the repairs — a bumper — despite multiple promises.

“At this point, my business is destroyed, I have not been able to drive my limousine for nine months, and I am told by GM that they can’t get my parts, yet they continue to build the cars, which obviously contain the parts my car needs,” Azrumelashvili said, noting that he’s still paying $1,100 a month for insurance and $1,437 a month on the vehicle loan.

“It seems unconscionable that a company would sell cars for which they cannot get parts within the first year,” he said.

Submission + - Ah, Slashdot (slashdot.org) 4

Submitted by bradley13
bradley13 writes: So, Slashdot has made some change. I now see the normal page for a few seconds, then the CSS is removed and I get the pop-up "This page could not be loaded properly due to incorrect / bad filtering rule(s) of adblockers in use." Which is BS, of course, because when I click "cancel" the page is re-rendered correctly. Then, a couple of seconds later, the whole thing repeats.

FWIW: I don't actually expect this "story" to be published, but maybe they devs will have a look at their code?

Needless to say, no change on my end. Anyway, I have the option ticked (that Slashdot offers) to disable ads. They don't need to be displaying ads, or including trackers.

Comment Re:Didn't they try this with Microsoft (Score 1) 144

by Erioll (#64962001) Attached to: US Regulators Seek To Break Up Google, Forcing Chrome Sale

The solution is stupid. If search is the problem, then break up search. Like literally fragment the company into a bunch of copies of itself so it is forced to compete against itself. And invalidate all patents the company has so none of the "children" own those either. Have some other safeguards so they don't just form back together in 10 years (or 50, or whatever, see the "Baby Bells" and such).

Competition is what causes good things in Capitalism. Don't just take away the way they're abusing something (Chrome), or give geographic monopolies (see Baby Bells above) but fragment the company itself, so you re-introduce real competition. Similar with Microsoft: breakup should have meant two (or more) companies distributing competing versions of Windows, not Windows vs Office vs whatever.

Honestly that could be an interesting pre-remedy: if you are subject to an antitrust verdict (not accusation, but conviction), all of your patents are invalidated, and all license agreements you are engaged in (i.e. patent owned by employee, but exclusively licensed to the company) are terminated. Make them afraid of losing their IP profile forever.

Anyways, that's a bunch of things thrown at the wall. I doubt they'll do any. But breaking off monopolistic pieces from the whole isn't the solution. Getting former parts of the company to compete in the same spaces is the problem.

Submission + - US Senate to revive Software Patents with PERA Bill Vote on Thursday (eff.org) 1

Submitted by zoobab
zoobab writes: The US Senate to set to revive Software Patents with the PERA Bill, with a vote on Thursday, November 14, 2024.

A crucial Senate Committee is on the cusp of voting on two bills that would resurrect some of the most egregious software patents and embolden patent trolls. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA), S. 2140, would dismantle vital safeguards that prohibit software patents on overly broad concepts. If passed, courts would be compelled to approve software patents on mundane activities like mobile food ordering or basic online financial transactions. This would unleash a torrent of vague and overbroad software patents, which would be wielded by patent trolls to extort small businesses and individuals.

The EFF is inviting members of the public to contact their Senators.

Submission + - How a slice of cheese almost derailed Europe's most important rocket test (interestingengineering.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A team of students made history this month by performing Europe’s first rocket hop test.

Those who have followed SpaceX’s trajectory will know hop tests are a vital stepping stone for a reusable rocket program, as they allow engineers to test their rocket’s landing capabilities.

Impressively, no private company or space agency in Europe had ever performed a rocket hop test before. Essentially, a group of students performed one of the most important rocket tests in the history of European rocketry.

However, the remarkable nature of this story doesn’t end there. Amazingly, the whole thing was almost derailed by a piece of cheese. A slice of Gruyère the team strapped to their rocket’s landing legs almost caused the rocket to spin out of control.

Thankfully, disaster was averted, and the historic hopper didn’t end up as rocket de-Brie.

Comment Re:Anyone and everyone (Score 2) 203

by Erioll (#64889031) Attached to: Linus Torvalds Comments On The Russian Linux Maintainers Being Delisted

Assuming I even agreed, why would the UN be considered a trustworthy body for this? Right now, at this moment on the UN Human Rights Council are China, Cuba, and at least a few other places with "questionable" practices.

The UN is a dictator's club. Democratic (or even close-ish) countries should separate from it. They have nothing resembling ethics or morals by any standard I would recognize. It's a farce, and while good people work there for some good purposes, it offers a veneer of legitimacy to many MANY horrific acts.

And it's undemocratic in the extreme (assuming that's an ideal). No representation by population.

Submission + - Modern Software Development is Mostly Junky Overhead

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In The New Internet, a call to take back the Internet from its centralized rent-collecting cloud computing gatekeepers, Tailscale CEO and co-founder Avery Pennarun provocatively writes:

I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep. In modern computing, we tolerate long builds, and then docker builds, and uploading to container stores, and multi-minute deploy times before the program runs, and even longer times before the log output gets uploaded to somewhere you can see it, all because we’ve been tricked into this idea that everything has to scale. People get excited about deploying to the latest upstart container hosting service because it only takes tens of seconds to roll out, instead of minutes. But on my slow computer in the 1990s, I could run a perl or python program that started in milliseconds and served way more than 0.2 requests per second, and printed logs to stderr right away so I could edit-run-debug over and over again, multiple times per minute.

How did we get here?

We got here because sometimes, someone really does need to write a program that has to scale to thousands or millions of backends, so it needs all that stuff. And wishful thinking makes people imagine even the lowliest dashboard could be that popular one day. The truth is, most things don’t scale, and never need to. We made Tailscale for those things, so you can spend your time scaling the things that really need it. The long tail of jobs that are 90% of what every developer spends their time on. Even developers at companies that make stuff that scales to billions of users, spend most of their time on stuff that doesn’t, like dashboards and meme generators.

As an industry, we’ve spent all our time making the hard things possible, and none of our time making the easy things easy. Programmers are all stuck in the mud. Just listen to any professional developer, and ask what percentage of their time is spent actually solving the problem they set out to work on, and how much is spent on junky overhead.

Comment Re:hair splitting (Score 1) 54

"But even so, it's not costly to get close." You're actually proving my point. Unless you get that last 2%, the costs of everything else is still just "extra, could have been spent on better FF cleanliness/ethics/whatever." When you're in those 2% times, you either have the gas plant, or you have rolling blackouts. That should never be acceptable. That some consider it is shows the level of delusion.

Or just nuclear. Fission. Fusion (go Helion!). Thorium fission. Whatever. The amount spent on those "green" renewables (not so green on Total cost of ownership) boondoggles could have utterly solved the problem of carbon-free energy. Heck, it HAS BEEN SOLVED 70 years ago, but then administration got in the way to kill it.

Comment Re:hair splitting (Score 1) 54

No, I do not think "everyone understands that this is what they mean." I think that too many people believe that you can have all-renewable grids. You can, but you have to build out truly massive amounts of storage to make it work. i.e. Water Reservoirs. You know, those things hydroelectric dams use so that their output is not crap most of the time (and other reasons)? And that environmentalists want to destroy/remove?

This problem is solved by its very nature by fuel-based systems, as the fuel IS the storage. You consume as you need it.

TLDR - Reliable power methods doesn't need renewables that don't have storage (see hydro). Renewables NEED base load to pick up the slack. Every windmill out there should have the cost of the backup gas peak plant added on to its cost, because that's the real total cost of the installation.

Submission + - Caching is key, and SIEVE is better than LRU

Submitted by rikfarrow
rikfarrow writes: Caching means using faster memory to store frequently requested data, and the most commonly used algorithm for determining which items to discard when the cache is full is Least Recently Used. These researchers have come up with a more efficient and scalable method that uses just a few lines of code to convert LRU to SIEVE.

You may wonder why this algorithm is called SIEVE. The reason is that the “hand” in SIEVE functions as a sieve: it sifts through the cache to filter out unpopular objects and retain the popular ones. We illustrate this process in Figure 7. Each column represents a snapshot of the cached objects over time from left to right. As the hand moves from the tail (the oldest object) to the head (the newest object), objects that have not been visited are evicted. For example, after the first round of sifting, objects at least as popular as A remain in the cache while others are evicted. The newly admitted objects are placed at the head of the queue. During the subsequent rounds of sifting, if objects that survived previous rounds remain popular, they will stay in the cache. In such a case, since most old objects are not evicted, the eviction hand quickly moves past the old popular objects to the queue positions close to the head. This allows newly inserted objects to be quickly assessed and evicted, putting greater eviction pressure on unpopular items (such as “one-hit wonders”) than LRU-based eviction algorithms.

The authors explain how LRU works using quick promotion in the queue and lazy demotion, while SIEVE turns this on it head by using quick demotion and lazy promotion. Code changes required to do this are minimal.

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