Comment Re:Translation (Score 1) 33
I'd like to see some comparisons between power consumption for JXL and JPEG. Constant image quality, file sizes will vary, total energy consumed by the download and decoding process.
Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1) 71
We have known about this for decades. It's called internalized sexism. Back when women where trying to get the vote, some women opposed them. They made the same arguments against it that men did.
It's understood to be largely a product of systemic sexism in our culture. It's been getting better, but it's still there. An example is how ideals of feminity were portrayed in the 1950s. The housewife, the home maker, the mother. Obedient to her husband. That's why there was so much focus on representation, so that girls didn't grow up only seeing that as the natural and proper order of things.
In the 90s there was Girl Power, and for the last 25 years we have had many, many badass action women in movies. They aren't really what we need now though. Just more competent women doing "normal" jobs, or as normal as it gets in TV shows and movies.
Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 1, Troll) 69
That's not how LLMs work. While they are trained on existing data, they are also capable of reasoning. They can produce novel solutions to problems.
Just because they don't work the same way as a the human brain doesn't mean that they are not capable of this sort of thing.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 266
Leap hours are just a legal thing to satisfy countries that require UT to be synchronized with the orbit of the Earth around the sun. There won't be one for centuries, i.e. it's so far out that it can be ignored.
Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 2, Interesting) 80
Seinfeld went to Israel and visited the IDF camps where they train people to participate in genocide. That's not a joke, that's becoming directly involved in a crime against humanity.
That's the fig leaf that is always used. "It's just a joke! I'm not hurting anyone!" Then they use the platform and money to hurt people. JK Rowling is another example. "It's just a children's book!" (never mind that she also writes shit adults novels under a male name). She funds hate groups and their lawsuits, which has recently resulted in an extremely damaging change in the law in the UK.
Speech does not happen in a vacuum.
Comment Re:poor benchmark (Score 1) 85
Do you have benchmarks for AI performance? That seems more relevant here.
Also which Apple machine are you comparing to? The M5 performance depends heavily on thermal and power limits. That website is probably using the desktop version with much better cooling and a higher power limit than any of Apple's portable offerings.
Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 1, Insightful) 69
It doesn't really matter if it makes a useful contribution to the field.
It's hard to say if it is due to AI being something novel, of it they threw similar amounts of money at humans working in the field they could get a similar result. Maybe it doesn't matter, because humans take decades to train to this level, and their built their AI in years.
Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)
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).
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:Which 400 libs? (Score 1) 24
Have you tried asking AI?
Comment Re:Sure, way up north maybe (Score 1) 266
You can avoid most of the paint by just ignoring DST. Don't change you clocks. Helps if your work is flexible about hours, but you can always move some evening stuff to the morning and vise versa.
Try it, you will find that it's no real effort to remember everyone else's clocks are off by an hour.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 266
Look at Nepal, in the UTC+05:45 timezone. They aren't even the only ones who like to break technology with their non-whole-hour timezone.
The world seems to be moving towards trying to simplify time a bit, e.g. by discontinuing leap seconds. Personally I'd start a project to build a booster large enough to correct the Earth's orbit of the sun to a nice round 256 days, but since there doesn't seem to be much support for that at least we can stop bothering with DST.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 266
You make it sound like not having DST is terrible, but most of the world doesn't bother with it.
It's basically Europe, the US, and a few random others including half of Australia for some reason. Everyone else gets by just fine without DST, and much of the world gave it up when they stopped being colonies.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
Maybe it's time to think about the hours we do things in general. For example, in Japan most shops don't open until 10 or 11 AM, and stay open until 7-8 PM. That gives people the opportunity to visit them after work or school. Schools and employers set opening times based on local conditions, because there are vast differences between northern and southern climates. It turns out that everyone doing what makes sense for them works just fine.
With things line linear TV and radio becoming less relevant, times also matter less. It's a good thing, it gives us flexibility.
Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 4, Funny) 43
Just because everyone was operating on the assumption that high energy cosmic neutrinos exist doesn't mean that it isn't worth proving that beyond all doubt. It wouldn't be the first time if the results was unexpected, or if it turned out a whole load of accepted physics were based on a faulty assumption.
Submission + - AI Male Agents paid more than their Female counterparts. (the-independent.com)
williamyf writes: If you tought the Gender Pay Gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again:
A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%
The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.
A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%
The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.
Submission + - UK vegetables 20-50% less nutritious than in the 1960s (telegraph.co.uk)
Bruce66423 writes: 'The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc since the Sixties because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.
'The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.
'Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.
'“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”
'The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.'
'The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.
'Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.
'“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”
'The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.'
