Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Think smaller (Score 2) 66

> you apparently desire to use systems beyond their design points

Who doesn't include cost in design?

If my CPU/SoC is plenty fast for my task and the DRAM is faster than I need it to be and a CPU instruction to compress takes less power than a write out to the bus - it would just be wasteful to manufacture and purchase twice as much DRAM as the application needs.

Either the end user gets a better price (and all money is the result of expending energy, so we save again) or the manufacturer makes a larger profit (in a constrained market).

Now then - all you lunatics embedding Electron and costing me 400MB to send an 80 character text message - we need to talk about this.

CRAM seems like a great idea but it's not the solution to not caring about the Craft.

Submission + - Amid K-12 AI Pushback, OpenAI Named Lead Partner of 'Hour of AI' for Kids

theodp writes: On the heels of announced AI moratoriums by the nation's two largest K-12 school districts (NYC, LA), tech-backed nonprofit CodeAI (aka Code.org) this week named OpenAI 'Lead Partner' for the 2026 Hour of AI, which has replaced the Hour of Code (RIP, 2013-2024) as the premier event for the nation's K-12 schoolchildren during December's CS Education Week. OpenAI investor and partner Microsoft was named as one of two 'Supporters' for the event/infomercial (the other being U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman).

In August, as it launched ChatGPT for Teens, OpenAI announced a new signature partnership with Code.org to 'prepare the first AI generation', explaining that 'through the Hour of AI, OpenAI and CodeAI will introduce millions of students to the basics of using AI thoughtfully and responsibly.' OpenAI and Microsoft last year teamed up with the American Federation of Teachers to 'bring AI into the classroom', but that honeymoon is over. For more on the inside story of how Big Tech is applying the same playbook it used to scale coding lessons nationwide to now mainstream their AI tools in schools, check out Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools.

So, much like the Hour of Code that preceded it, will the Hour of AI serve as tech's 'Trojan Horse' (ChatGPT-generated parody cover) in its 'Odyssey' to push its agenda and curriculum into schools?

Comment Long Road (Score 2) 74

JPEG-XL is a good format but I just realized yesterday that Google Docs on Android doesn't support inserting a webp image a decade after Google was pushing it. I had one from a website and needed to run it through imagemagick first.

Android supports it, all the apps using android image primitives supoort it, but one of Google's flagship apps still doesn't.

We used move much faster thirty years ago. If an app supported say GIF, PNM, and TGA when JPEG came out it was supported in the next release.

Hopefully this round will be better. It's probably a management problem ... maybe they will listen to their chatbot since they don't listen to their engineers.

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).

Comment Re:Aux port - how could it even technically pause? (Score 1) 47

I don't know the protocol but old phone headsets had a 2.5 or 3.5mm jack with an extra ring that got you play/pause/hook/next/last.

Hypothetically that could have been implemented. I had a collection of Alexas that got binned as soon as they got caught spying for police so I never got that far. ESP32 is better for nerds anyway.

One thing Australia does right is a statute naming removal of features as a violation of contract requiring full refunds in these circumstances.

Submission + - Wisconsin U–Madison Prof Francis Halzen named 2026 Nobel laureate in physi (wisc.edu)

schwit1 writes: Halzen is the principal investigator of the NSF IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the world’s largest — and perhaps strangest — telescope. The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded observatory is operated by an international collaboration of scientists led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center based at UW–Madison.

Embedded in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, IceCube uses thousands of light sensors to survey the universe for neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with other matter. Neutrinos provide information about the workings of black holes, galaxies and other objects in the cosmos.

“IceCube is like no other telescope in the world,” says UW–Madison interim Chancellor Eric M. Wilcots. “And there is no other scientist quite like Francis Halzen, whose idea to create a neutrino detector under almost a mile of ice has led to a remarkable multinational and multi-institutional scientific collaboration and a fundamental shift in how we think about the universe.”

Comment Re:If they are thermally efficient enough (Score 1) 128

Stupid and malicious are different.

The offered narrative is "let us build the data center AI control grid now because it's only temporary until we can move it to space".

You and I both know that's not thermodynamically possible with known science.

So do the people saying it.

We have a real problem with Positive Projection where we are decent folks so we project that on people who are not. That is an error even though most people are decent folks. The parasites are not.

I only recent learned that Hanlon's Razor comes from a humor book about Murphy's Law from the early 80's. It's not some ancient axiom of wisdom - it is used by the Cluster B disordered to mask their nefarious deeds.

If you talk about this with most people these days you'll get the Positive Projection script executed like an autorun.

Everybody should turn off autorun whenever possible. Major risk.

Comment Re:We're probably going to find more (Score -1) 34

> Gardasil

It's sold as an "HPV vaccine" but it only targets about 4% of HPV viruses, specifically the ones most likely to cause cervical cancer in women in their 40's. It's described in the Merck literature.

Not even the HPV most likely to cause throat cancer in men (usually acquired from lady parts).

If cancer treatment advances at the current rate (AI discovery docs estimate 9 years for the supermajority) it's possible that the Gardasil fatalities will have killed more teens than prevented deaths of women.

It's like a Drake Equation for cancer - the coefficients will determine the narrative either positive or negative. This is where free choice is ethically mandated.

Unfortunately there is considerable religious fervor about such things so very few people wants to scientifically discuss nuances.

Comment Re:Constructive responses anyone? (Score 2) 70

Why isn't EU sponsoring specific features and fixes it needs?

Or assign some of their own developers to submit pull requests.

Or hire *some Europeans* who are unemployed because their war is killing industry.

Let's hear from their project manager instead of faceless wankers and the people responsible for sales.

Comment Re:Groundwork for censorship (Score 2, Insightful) 113

Who decides what's true and what's false? Who gets to hold who "accountable", and what does that look like? How does that look any different than punishing someone for speech you don't like?

Some of y'all need more than a surface understanding of the 1st amendment, with a focus on how it came about in the first place.

Slashdot Top Deals

Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn't deliver it.

Working...