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Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 1) 103

the reason DACA was done via EO was that Republicans refused to pass the DREAM Act which was a bi-partisan bill kicked around since 2001 but Republicans would filibuster it at every oppurtunity.[sic]

"We couldn't get a law through congress so we did something questionably legal via executive order" is reinforcing the point being made by the grandparent (which, FWIW, I don't fully agree with. Many of Trump's executive orders are clearly less rooted in law than what's come before).

Same with the McCain Kennedy bill, bipartisan legislation never got a vote in the Senate

By the way, funny that you mention Sen. Kennedy in the context of immigration reform, who rather famously said: "This amnesty will give citizenship to only 1.3 million illegal aliens. We will secure the borders henceforth. We will never again bring forth an amnesty bill like this." Yet here we are.

Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 2, Interesting) 162

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:Summary ... (Score 1) 270

Here's a solution for you. Universal coordinated time. UCT is the same time around the world. You don't have to ever change what time it is.

Fuck it - let's go epoch time all around the world no more DST, no stupid 720 degree clock or timezones. While we're at it - let's get rid of days of the week, month and years as well. It's 1791452533 right now, I'll see you at 1791452533.

Never thought of epoch time! The ultimate revenge of the nerds! 8^)

I'd say another drawback to getting rid DST is that any tradesman working outside would have to start banging hammers an hour earlier to miss the heat of the day waking people up whilst construction projects miss an hour per day, per person, per project because exhaustion leads to fatal work accidents.

During the longest days many of the outside contractors in my area tend to tie their workday to the light/dark cycle. There are times here in PA where it is getting light at 4 in the morning! That's like bonus time toward meeting the schedule. And you are correct about the heat. We have the added humidity (it hung around 100 percent this past summer) Upper 80's and 100 percent humidity plays hell on construction workers.

Then there is the additional energy consumption required for lighting in the evening that would have been provided by the sun for free.

Although it is mainly a transfer of energy use. But what makes me laugh is just how the intersection of solipsism and stupidity runs so deep in these matters.

Even the name "Sunshine Protection Act" the hill politicians have chosen to die on, is 100 percent wrong. The amount of sunshine in any 24 hour cycle is a matter of physics, not something politicians can vote on.

But a person who gets up at 7:00 A.M. and works a day shift. sees how it is light longer in the summer, and is stupid, thinks that all that is needed is to keep DST, and the day will be longer. And their solipsism has them thinking everyone else would benefit from that. I meant who could oppose a longer day? There are times here when it is getting light at 4 in the morning. Then it makes some sense to shift, people who work outside like that, especially in temperate zones. Hours wasted in the morning, unless you want to start work at 4 AM. But on the other end of the stick, if DST becomes permanent, in my area, during December and January, sunrise will happen around 0830, with 0835 being the latest. And I'm in PA. Around 40 degrees North, not even halfway up the latitudes.

But the solipsists don't care, and stupid is not fixable.

Comment Re:Still rocking their beige Natural keyboard (Score 1) 89

I'm one of those people that learned how to type 60+ WPM the wrong way (had a computer in the home since 1980 when I was 12)

Same experience for me. I remember a slow day in the office back in 99 or 2000 (we'd just shipped a release) we got into an argument about typing speeds so set up typing tests for the whole team. My "my fingers never actually sit on the home keys, my hands relocate from time to time, and most of my typing is with three or four fingers and a thumb" ass clocked over 100wpm to the incredulity of the rest of the team.

Natural keyboards feel decidedly unnatural to me, because my hands always want to be somewhere they don't fit.

Comment Re:There are still VMWare customers? (Score 1) 90

Have you met young people that intentionally became Windows admins?

I have. Generally fall into two buckets: the ones that did everything themselves and learned, or the ones that only have a school education. The former generally know what they're talking about, the latter often have huge gaps in their knowledge. But that's true of the devs I interview, too, so I wouldn't place that stigma on the windows admins.

Or the windows admins (the legitimate ones) you can hire out of, say, India? My guess is with your history, you probably have not.

"Met" as in face to face? No, not really, but I've been on a lot of phone calls with the men who do the needful. Again, this ain't a windows thing.

Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 0, Troll) 102

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:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 1, Interesting) 103

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) 89

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) 102

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).

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