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Comment It feels like this is happening already (Score 1) 34

I guess it's probably about to get an order of magnitude worse and the only way to navigate it will be crowdsourcing, but the gaming world already feels much like people are prompting their way to releasing games. Remember the days when there were only dozens or hundreds of games released per year? What seems crazy to me is that although most of them have very low-quality assets, there's so many actually playable and working games which are more or less fully realized, at least to the point that they have entire communities. I guess that's a testament to the ease of game creation with some of these engines.

The interesting AI-related question to me is whether it's going to increase or decrease average quality. TBH I think it might actually increase it, because so many of these games are so half-assed. At minimum it should make them prettier.

Comment Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican) (Score 1) 59

Ilhan has been in her seat for 4 terms, any day now she'll reveal her secret plan for Sharia? What's she been waiting for? I don't even particuarly like Omar, I think she's an omnicause slopulist but I'm not so deranged to think she's some secret Islamist.

I guarantee whatever media figures you get your news from are far more radical. How about you share your media sources and podcasts with us?

Source: thousands of years of history.

Turkey and Iran for example were once free nations.

And yet the fact you said that shows us all you actually haven't read the history of either of those places to understand why they are where they are now. Also you know who is the biggest fawning fan of Erdogan? Donald Trump and Republicans.

Meanwhile we have JD Vance campaigning with Victor Fucking Orban which is a form of authoritarianism far more likely to grab hold in the US but that's white folks so you have no worries about that do you.

Comment Re:Risk reward and perverse incentives (Score 1) 42

Close to how I want to see nuclear power re-launched in America:

Legislation for funding 10-30 new reactors, owned and operated by government (like TVA does already)
Build them on selected Federal land sites
Have the Army Corp of Engineers certify and plan on a standardized design for construction (example, work with Westinghouse on our own version of an AP1000)
Fund a Manhattan Project style research initiative into fuel reprocessing and build a site(s) to absorb waste fuel.

Comment Re: On the plus side ... (Score 1) 16

Agents don't cause attacks. People running agents do.

The people who ran the agents were negligent at best but I have an alternate theory.

If they knew the technology could go sideways and hack things then they effectively executed those hacks intentionally.

If not they are only negligently ignorant which is not generally a crime in this context.

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).

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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