Comment Re:Rapacious Assholes (Score 1) 108
I haven't had mod points in about 3 years now, ever since I flamed the mods for posting clickbait. But I would upvote this if I could.
Bookmarked for a future rainy day.
Comment Re:ST: TMP (Score 1) 23
Doesn't it go through a wormhole and get taken over by an alien intelligence?
Close. You're thinking of Voyager 6.
Comment Completely avoidable (Score 3, Insightful) 15
There's no excuse for an organization that serves young people to not have more stringent protocols in place to avoid these issues.
As to the "classist and ableist" discussion points, I'm not saying that the "get woke, go broke" mantra applies here
Comment Thank you, /. editorial overlords (Score 4, Insightful) 36
This is the kind of content I love, and miss, on Slashdot. Thank you.
Submission + - Email shows that Musk ally is moving to close office behind free tax filing prog (theguardian.com)
Alain Williams writes: An Elon Musk ally installed in the US government said in a late night email going into Saturday that the office behind a popular free online tax filing option would be shuttered – and its employees would be let go.
The 18F office within the General Services Administration (GSA) created the IRS Direct File program that allows for free online tax filings. It has been a frequent target of Musk, and one of the billionaire businessman’s close associates who holds a key position in the GSA informed staffers that the agency would close 18F in an email to staffers that arrived around 1am on Saturday morning.
The 18F office within the General Services Administration (GSA) created the IRS Direct File program that allows for free online tax filings. It has been a frequent target of Musk, and one of the billionaire businessman’s close associates who holds a key position in the GSA informed staffers that the agency would close 18F in an email to staffers that arrived around 1am on Saturday morning.
Comment Re:We finally have an answer to what consciousness (Score 1) 182
Adorable. I bet you think the Railroad is the best Fallout 4 faction, too.
Comment Awfully odd way to "preserve its legacy" (Score 1) 93
[...] while preserving the ship's legacy as a symbol of American innovation and engineering
What a wonderful new P.R. spin tactic. We're not destroying a historic icon that could be repurposed as a museum ship - we're preserving its legacy.
Translation: We know we're doing something wasteful, but we can't possibly admit that, so we're gonna pretend really hard it's a good thing!
Comment Re:Designed to fail from the get go (Score 1) 64
Only if we keep spending money to support it. Unplug the feeding tube, and the machine dies.
Submission + - AskSlashdot: What would it require for you to trust an AI? (win.tue.nl) 2
shanen writes: Do you trust AI in general? What about DeepSeek in particular? Can anyone even explain what "trust" means these days? For example, I bet most of you trust Amazon and Amazon's secret AIs more than you should...
Recently I've been dabblling with a number of the GAI websites. Of course if I was a serious scientist then I'd have my own hardware and be running local tests. Or at least I'd be rooting around arXiv to see what the serious scientists are saying... All I have (as usual) are too many questions and too few jokes. Especially funny jokes. I wouldn't recognize a funny AI joke until after the AI had pwned me to pieces...
Actually the funniest joke I can think of on this topic involves DeepSeek. One of my experimental conversations on that website involved the topic of trust. DeepSeek turned out to be extremely good at explaining why I should not trust it. Every computer security problem I ever thought of or heard about and some more besides. "So what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?"
It's like the accountant who gets asked what 2 plus 2 is. After locking the doors and shading all the windows, the accountant whispers in your ear: "What do you want it to be?" And the price of tea in China is whatever Xi wants it to be! I bet you assumed the accountant was male, right? So the next questions are whether DeepSeek can do accounting or windows?
So let me start with some questions about DeepSeek in particular:
Have you run it locally and compared the responses with the website's responses? My hypothesis is that your mileage should differ...
It's well established that DeepSeek doesn't want to talk about many "political" topics. Is that based on a distorted model of the world? Or is the censorship implemented in the query interface after the model was trained? My hypothesis is that it must have been trained with lots of data because the cost of removing all of the bad stuff would have been prohibitive. Defining "bad" doesn't matter because I bet everyone agrees the Internet is chock full of bad data these years. Unless perhaps another AI filtered the data first?
What does trust mean? What sort of responses am I hoping to see? How many people still using today's Slashdot have even heard of "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? How many of the identities on today's Slashdot are just (AI-driven?) sock puppets? (Speculations on a mutual timeline building tool to verify childhood friendships?)
In closing, if you asked an AI to analyze all of the conversations on Slashdot, what sort of changes would it show over the years? My hypothesis on this question is that the interactions based on books will trend down. Maybe that's my selective memory, but I think a "sound" analysis would should a monotonic decrease. Largely based on The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt I think the downward gradient might peak after smartphones became widely adopted circa 2010...
Recently I've been dabblling with a number of the GAI websites. Of course if I was a serious scientist then I'd have my own hardware and be running local tests. Or at least I'd be rooting around arXiv to see what the serious scientists are saying... All I have (as usual) are too many questions and too few jokes. Especially funny jokes. I wouldn't recognize a funny AI joke until after the AI had pwned me to pieces...
Actually the funniest joke I can think of on this topic involves DeepSeek. One of my experimental conversations on that website involved the topic of trust. DeepSeek turned out to be extremely good at explaining why I should not trust it. Every computer security problem I ever thought of or heard about and some more besides. "So what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?"
It's like the accountant who gets asked what 2 plus 2 is. After locking the doors and shading all the windows, the accountant whispers in your ear: "What do you want it to be?" And the price of tea in China is whatever Xi wants it to be! I bet you assumed the accountant was male, right? So the next questions are whether DeepSeek can do accounting or windows?
So let me start with some questions about DeepSeek in particular:
Have you run it locally and compared the responses with the website's responses? My hypothesis is that your mileage should differ...
It's well established that DeepSeek doesn't want to talk about many "political" topics. Is that based on a distorted model of the world? Or is the censorship implemented in the query interface after the model was trained? My hypothesis is that it must have been trained with lots of data because the cost of removing all of the bad stuff would have been prohibitive. Defining "bad" doesn't matter because I bet everyone agrees the Internet is chock full of bad data these years. Unless perhaps another AI filtered the data first?
What does trust mean? What sort of responses am I hoping to see? How many people still using today's Slashdot have even heard of "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? How many of the identities on today's Slashdot are just (AI-driven?) sock puppets? (Speculations on a mutual timeline building tool to verify childhood friendships?)
In closing, if you asked an AI to analyze all of the conversations on Slashdot, what sort of changes would it show over the years? My hypothesis on this question is that the interactions based on books will trend down. Maybe that's my selective memory, but I think a "sound" analysis would should a monotonic decrease. Largely based on The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt I think the downward gradient might peak after smartphones became widely adopted circa 2010...
Submission + - Titan Sub Implosion Audio Released For the First Time (jalopnik.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Experimental submarine the Titan sank in June 2023 while exploring the wreck of the Titanic. The controversial craft imploded while deep beneath the surface of the ocean killing five people onboard, and now a recording of the Titan’s final moments has been shared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. [...] In the clip, which is available to hear below, the static sound of the ocean is shattered by a great rumble, which sounds almost like a wave crashing against the beach.
It’s this noise that is thought to be the total failure of the Titan, as LBC adds: "It is believed that the noise is the ‘acoustic signature’ of the sub imploding on 18th June 2023. It was recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration device about 900 miles from where the sub was last seen on radar, south of Newfoundland, Canada, US Coast Guard officials announced. The five crew members who died onboard the sub were British explorer sub were Hamish Harding, 58, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet (known as 'Mr Titanic'), 77, and and co-founder of the submarines owner’s company OceanGate, Stockton Rushton, 61."
It’s this noise that is thought to be the total failure of the Titan, as LBC adds: "It is believed that the noise is the ‘acoustic signature’ of the sub imploding on 18th June 2023. It was recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration device about 900 miles from where the sub was last seen on radar, south of Newfoundland, Canada, US Coast Guard officials announced. The five crew members who died onboard the sub were British explorer sub were Hamish Harding, 58, British-Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his son Suleman, 19, French deep-sea explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet (known as 'Mr Titanic'), 77, and and co-founder of the submarines owner’s company OceanGate, Stockton Rushton, 61."
Comment Re:Does EditorDavid edit? (Score 1) 8
Let's hope my AI avatar is around to see it, and blog about it.
Comment 3035 or 2025? (Score 2) 8
To celebrate 3035's newest arrivals in the public domain
I knew Disney had lobbied for some ridiculous copyright terms, but this is ludicrous!
Submission + - Constellation Inks $1 Billion Deal To Supply US Government With Nuclear Power (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Constellation Energy has been awarded a record $1 billion in contracts to supply nuclear power to the U.S. government over the next decade, the company said on Thursday. Constellation, the country's largest operator of nuclear power plants, will deliver electricity to more than 13 federal agencies as part of the agreements with the U.S. General Services Administration. The deal is the biggest energy purchase in the history of the GSA, which constructs and manages federal buildings, and is among the first major climate-focused energy agreement by the U.S. government to include electricity generated from existing nuclear reactors.
The GSA estimated that the contracts, set to begin on April 25, will comprise over 10 million megawatt-hours over 10 years and provide electricity equivalent to powering more than 1 million homes annually. The procurement will deliver electricity to 80 federal facilities located throughout the PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission operator with service covering more than 65 million people. The U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Army Corps of Engineers are some of the facilities that will receive the power. [...] Constellation said the deal will enable it to extend the licenses of existing nuclear plants and invest in new equipment and technology that will increase output by about 135 megawatts.
The GSA estimated that the contracts, set to begin on April 25, will comprise over 10 million megawatt-hours over 10 years and provide electricity equivalent to powering more than 1 million homes annually. The procurement will deliver electricity to 80 federal facilities located throughout the PJM Interconnection, a regional transmission operator with service covering more than 65 million people. The U.S. Department of Transportation, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Army Corps of Engineers are some of the facilities that will receive the power. [...] Constellation said the deal will enable it to extend the licenses of existing nuclear plants and invest in new equipment and technology that will increase output by about 135 megawatts.
Comment Politicized language or lack of concern? (Score 1) 32
If anyone up top is reading this: What's with the recent trend of Slashdot editors using they/them pronouns for people who clearly identify with he/him or she/her? For example, in the summary here:
So to find and delete themselves from "the PimEyes searchable Rolodex of faces," they "recently handed over a selfie and a digital copy of my driver's license to a company I don't trust."
It seems like lazy writing not to respect the author's chosen pronouns, which are made clear by reading his Washington Post bio. It only takes a moment to use the correct language and not lazily use indeterminate pronouns.
Or, is this the
Submission + - The bruising debate over UK zonal energy pricing (theguardian.com)
AmiMoJo writes: This summer the windfarm dubbed the most productive in Britain stood idle in the country’s windiest area. The Viking windfarm in the Shetland islands is expected to harness the UK’s most abundant wind resources to generate enough electricity to power almost half a million homes. But in August the windfarm fell still on most days. The problem is the UK’s power market. Although wind speeds in the Shetland Islands are ideal for the spinning blades of a windfarm, they hold less appeal as a base for homes and businesses, meaning the energy demand of the local area is low.
The answer? Under the plans put forward as part of a consultation, the existing market for electricity could be replaced with seven market zones, each with their own market price. Areas in Scotland with high levels of clean electricity generation and low demand could expect lower prices, while urban areas in the south of England with high demand but limited renewable energy projects would see higher prices.
The answer? Under the plans put forward as part of a consultation, the existing market for electricity could be replaced with seven market zones, each with their own market price. Areas in Scotland with high levels of clean electricity generation and low demand could expect lower prices, while urban areas in the south of England with high demand but limited renewable energy projects would see higher prices.
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