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Comment Longevity and specificity? (Score 2) 23

The fact that this approach is catalytic rather than requiring a binding agent seems positive in terms of longevity and not being directly depleted by repeat exposure; but I'd be curious how durable the material is under real-world conditions(clothing that gets hard wear tends to get hard washes) and also how specific it is. 'Organophosphate' means something moderately specific in the context of chemical warfare; but a lot of fairly prosaic compounds are, technically, 'organophosphates'(like DNA and RNA when held together by phosphodiester bonds); and this would be considerably less helpful in practice if it is busy chewing up the genomes of random soil bacteria; and markedly less helpful in practice if there's a "do not perturb the nanites in your clothing if you want them to not migrate into your cells and start mitigating the harmful effects of your DNA" user notice on the treated article.

Comment Good work on the easy part! (Score 5, Interesting) 31

This doesn't seem like a lie, a NIC is in a pretty good position to knock something off the network if it feels like it and the 'bluefield' devices have enough punch onboard to run some rules regarding whether or not to do that; but it seems like a wild exaggeration of how helpful it actually is.

If you actually have a set of rules that detect your bot being wicked it will presumably save you some CPU time to run them on the NIC rather than having the host CPU watching the traffic; but the hard part is the set of rules that detect your bot being wicked.

This is basically the equivalent of adding a firewall and claiming that you've solved network security. Yeah, the firewall is pretty well placed to block malicious traffic; defining 'malicious traffic' is left as an exercise for the reader.

Comment Timing? (Score 2) 65

Support for Office 2016 and 2019 ends October 14th of this year; I assume that the feature is dropping now; rather than either 20 years ago as part of ECMA-376 and eventually in a live product for either Office 2010 or 2013, or never if they didn't want to do that, in order to draw a hard line under the utility of those?

It otherwise seems like a kind of weird time to do it. In principle what a 'cell' is has never really had an obvious mandatory scale: it has essentially always been relevant that a 'cell' existed in relation to other cells, so that something like an array could be a row; but it has also long been allowed and encouraged to do things like substring operations that acknowledge that cell contents are 'larger' objects that contain smaller ones; and are not automatically spilled out for that reason alone. Not clear that the pragmatic use case for spreadsheets would ever have supported some sort of 'any data type that implies it can be decomposed into elements shall be' rule, strings getting broken up into substrings and so on; but it's also not clear that the pragmatic use case is going to be much clarified by a single cell being n levels deep of lists and arrays of lists and arrays being a fully supported thing rather than something you hack on by shoving JSON into text cells or whatever.

It definitely seems like asking for confusion when some, but only some, "excel spreadsheets" have cells that are arrays, potentially of arrays, while others have rows of cells with contents that, at least formally, are not acknowledged as arrays.

Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 74

That's the sort of curious thing about this announcement: at least in theory(I assume things are uglier in practice) the X1 parts that they shipped for windows-on-ARM/Copilot PCs already use UEFI/ACPI in line with what MS wants for booting Windows.

That obviously doesn't mean that there's a working GPU driver; or that naive power management doesn't cause the system to run at 90% of maximum power and hammer the battery flat; but the theory was that the last gen was already doing the "big kid ARM that has embraced PC standards" thing; very similar to the 'standards base' that ARM encourages ARM server part vendors to use.

Comment Re:oh good (Score 1) 74

I'm always a little curious what the thinking/strategy is with the Chinese outfits. I don't necessarily expect much from the OrangePi guys; they ship a surprising number of different SoCs, including multiple architectures and multiple vendors, for their size, so are likely to be mostly at the mercy of the SoC vendors; but is the situation for someone like Allwinner such that people who want linux to work on their stuff could be a resource for them and they are just not taking advantage of that very well; or are they actively annoyed by GPL-related claims and really just want to shove minimum-viable android out the door as cheaply as possible to win cheap tablet tenders and really do not want to hear from SBC hobbyists.

Comment Re:Why not X1? (Score 1) 74

SOP at Qualcomm. It has been literal years of hammering on them by Google and basically every Android handset OEM to even keep parts that ship with android support in support for more than a few years(I think the current timeline, at least for 'snapdragon 8 elite' flagship parts, is a princely 8 years from release; and that is with the 'project treble' stuff that attempts to reduce the number of changes that might potentially need to be supported). Especially with the, um, raging success, of Copilot+ AI PCs they are probably ready to pretend that X1 never happened and call it good. I'm not even sure how long the windows support on X1 is expected to last.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Comment correct incentives (Score 1) 151

Well, there have to be correct incentives for someone to be in software, I got into it because I liked the idea of being able to control a machine, to be able to tell a computer what to do and it would do it.

Would I have the same interest in it 40 years ago if controlling the computer meant writing in human language that is imprecise and nuanced and receiving back code that I couldn't start to comprehend? Maybe, maybe not, I am not sure actually. If there was still a way for me to do this without the AI I probably would have gone that route but how many people today would do it? I mean people are telling Agents to write their letters for them, not code, just letters. People are telling agents to do all sorts of things, all of which probably saves some time, make some errors, creates some problems while solving others, it is just that none of it is actually understood by the user.

How many AI users understand how any of it works? But that was the point, to understand how the thing works to be able to control it.

It is similar to car mechanics, people who like to tinker with cars, how interesting is it to tinker with a car where you are not allowed to understand half of it and you cannot fix most of it, if something breaks you have to order an entire replacement part because it has a built in computer interface.

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