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Comment The bigger story (Score 3, Interesting) 31

by jizmonkey (#65841679) Attached to: New FreeBSD 15 Retires 32-Bit Ports and Modernizes Builds

Big endian support is dead. Power was always great for testing code, because you could get an old Mac off e-bay for $100 and make sure stuff worked right. Now the only Power architecture supported is little endian.

I mean, if you see computer programming as just a means to an end, that's fine, but if you see it as an art form (c.f., "The Art of Computer Programming," written by some guy) it's important to write portable code.

Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by Jeremy Allison - Sam
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.

"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Submission + - Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, reveals terminal cancer diagnosis (foxnews.com)

Submitted by professorfalcon
professorfalcon writes: Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, revealed that he has prostate cancer. He said that it has spread to his bones, like the diagnosis for former President Joe Biden. President Trump reached out to him; of course it went to voicemail. Adams said that he has "no good days", already, and that he doesn't expect to survive past this Summer.

Comment can't do it (Score 4, Insightful) 245

by jizmonkey (#65396401) Attached to: US Treasury Unveils Plan To Kill the Penny

We have a non-truncatable currency system. An ideal coin system will have the following characteristics - that it is "countable" for any number, and that eliminating the smallest coin will always leave the remaining coin system countable. "Countable" means that that cashier's algorithm of pulling the largest coin less than the amount needed and then repeating with the next largest coin will produce the optimum number of coins. For example, with our current system, if you need to make 42 cents, you do a quarter (leaving 17 cents), then a dime, (leaving 7 cents), then a nickel and then two pennies. Our current system is only truncatable for the penny. If you only consider coin amounts which are multiples of 5 (since other ones become impossible after getting rid of the penny), our system minus the penny is clearly countable.

The problem is, consider getting rid of the nickel. Now try to make 30 cents. You pull a quarter, leaving 5 cents, oh shit you made a mistake. Back up, you should have done three dimes.

Submission + - 'About as close to aliens as we'll ever get.' Can AI crack animal language? (science.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Can a robot arm wave hello to a cuttlefish—and get a hello back? Could a dolphin’s whistle actually mean “Where are you?” And are monkeys quietly naming each other while we fail to notice?

These are just a few of the questions tackled by the finalists for this year’s Dolittle prize, a $100,000 award recognizing early breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interspecies communication. The winning project—announced today—explores how dolphins use shared, learned whistles that may carry specific meanings—possibly even warning each other about danger, or just expressing confusion. The other contending teams—working with marmosets, cuttlefish, and nightingales—are also pushing the boundaries of what human-animal communication might look like.

The prize marks an important milestone in the Coller Dolittle Challenge, a 5-year competition offering up to $10 million to the first team that can achieve genuine two-way communication with animals. “Part of how this initiative was born came from my skepticism,” says Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the prize’s organizers. “But we really have much better tools now. So this is the time to revisit a lot of our previous assumptions about two-way communication within the animal’s own world.”

Science caught up with the four finalists to hear how close we really are to cracking the animal code. One amusing exerpt:

"Male [dolphins] form pairs and call each other’s [signature] whistles if they get separated. But once, we were just testing our equipment and played one of those whistles while the pair was still together. They responded with a totally different whistle—one we hadn’t documented before. We’ve since heard it in other confusing situations. We call it the 'WTF whistle,' because it really did seem like that’s what they were asking."

Submission + - Among tech layoffs 120K H-1B visas approved (uscis.gov)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

FY 2026 H-1B Cap Process Update We received enough electronic registrations during the initial registration period to reach the fiscal year 2026 H-1B numerical allocations (H-1B cap), including the advanced degree exemption, also known as the masterâ(TM)s cap. We selected 118,660 unique beneficiaries, resulting in 120,141 selected registrations in the initial selection for the FY 2026 H-1B cap.

This is disappointing failure in otherwise excellent track record of Trump administration of reducing out of control immigration.

Submission + - New Pope Chose His Name Based On AI's Threats To 'Human Dignity' (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Last Thursday, white smoke emerged from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel, signaling that cardinals had elected a new pope. That's a rare event in itself, but one of the many unprecedented aspects of the election of Chicago-born Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV is one of the main reasons he chose his papal name: artificial intelligence. On Saturday, the new pope gave his first address to the College of Cardinals, explaining his name choice as a continuation of Pope Francis' concerns about technological transformation. "Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV," he said during the address. "There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution."

In his address, Leo XIV explicitly described "artificial intelligence" developments as "another industrial revolution," positioning himself to address this technological shift as his namesake had done over a century ago. As the head of an ancient religious organization that spans millennia, the pope's talk about AI creates a somewhat head-spinning juxtaposition, but Leo XIV isn't the first pope to focus on defending human dignity in the age of AI. Pope Francis, who died in April, first established AI as a Vatican priority, as we reported in August 2023 when he warned during his 2023 World Day of Peace message that AI should not allow "violence and discrimination to take root." In January of this year, Francis further elaborated on his warnings about AI with reference to a "shadow of evil" that potentially looms over the field in a document called "Antiqua et Nova" (meaning "the old and the new").

"Like any product of human creativity, AI can be directed toward positive or negative ends," Francis said in January. "When used in ways that respect human dignity and promote the well-being of individuals and communities, it can contribute positively to the human vocation. Yet, as in all areas where humans are called to make decisions, the shadow of evil also looms here. Where human freedom allows for the possibility of choosing what is wrong, the moral evaluation of this technology will need to take into account how it is directed and used." [...] Just as mechanization disrupted traditional labor in the 1890s, artificial intelligence now potentially threatens employment patterns and human dignity in ways that Pope Leo XIV believes demand similar moral leadership from the church. "In our own day," Leo XIV concluded in his formal address on Saturday, "the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor."

Submission + - Llama 2 LLM on DOS (yeokhengmeng.com) 1

Submitted by yeokm1
yeokm1 writes: Conventional wisdom states that running LLMs locally will require computers with high performance specifications especially GPUs with lots of VRAM. But is this actually true?

Thanks to an open-source llama2.c project, I ported it to work so vintage machines running DOS can actually inference Llama 2 LLM models. Of course there are severe limitations but the results will surprise you.

Submission + - Samba gets funding from the German Sovereign Tech Fund.

Submitted by Jeremy Allison - Sam
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The Samba project has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers
from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing
Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.

The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that
supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital
infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source
ecosystem.

The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX
extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB
over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a
robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT
infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is
expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.

All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba
development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running [4]
and gitlab MRs will appear soon!

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsamba.plus%2Fblog%2Fdetail...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sovereigntechfund....

Comment Re:Here we go (Score 2) 129

I was sitting in a diversity training class at Ford in the late 1990’s when the presenters aired this same statement. Our manager, who was a Brit on loan from Jaguar, offered the following statement:

“So you’re saying that if I was looking for the best and most popular four door family sedan, I should look at a picture of the design teams from the Big Three, and the one that was most diverse would be the number one car?”

He was told that was correct.

He then said that it was a bit of a trick question, since the best selling sedan in America was the Toyota Camry, and the design team for that car was the least diverse group you could possibly imagine, consisting of Japanese males between 30 and 60.

After a long silence, the presenters finished their PowerPoint and left.

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