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Comment Re:I hope they realize people hate slop (Score 1) 35

by Tom (#66367196) Attached to: Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts

people hate AI slop, and doing all these slop-enabling AI things is just going to erode the trust in the actual market.

This. No good game was ever created from a single prompt. Not to an AI, not a human development team. Every single person writing those damn "look which game my AI built from a single prompt and $x in tokens!" postings is a newbie and almost certainly has never actually shipped a single game.

Game development can be summed up as endless iterations. Every system you build, every visual you create, every sound, text, button, movement, weapon, skill, powerup needs polishing, refinement and changes. It is never, never good enough the first time.

And no, Roblox is not a serious gaming platform.

No it is not, but it IS a very successful platform for a specific subclass of games. If I were in it for the money, I could probably AI refactor some of my earliest games and publish them on Roblox and make a quick buck. If your thing is the kind of games you played on your C64 back in 1793, then Roblox got you covered. Well, if you ignore the scams and money-grabbing.

Comment oh Unity, how you lost your way (Score 1) 35

by Tom (#66367192) Attached to: Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts

*sigh* I wish Unity would actually complete some of their dozens half-finished sub-systems instead of constantly chasing the latest trend. It's become really, really annoying. The engine used to be really good. These days, it falls apart if you look at it the wrong way, and at least from the responses to my bug reports it's clear that fixing issues is way down on the agenda.

Maybe this is their attempt to regain grounds in the indie game market - the very market they pushed away by focussing on AAA requirements for years and ignoring the single devs and small teams. If so, I can already tell them that it won't work. We collectively laugh about all the "look what my AI built for me from a single prompt" postings on reddit, where people proudly show off some AI slop that would get them last place at a game jam.

Their AI efforts so far: Tried to build and sell their own AI tools, to a collective yawn from the audience. Built a barely-working MCP server, then deprecated it before it was even finished in order to push a CLI interface to the editor instead, which only works if it's run as the same user as the editor on the same machine. And completely ignores every single advise on workflows and good development practices you can think of.

Unity, I love your engine, I despise your management. Please return to when you were actually good and stop chasing butterflies.

Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)

Submitted by necro81
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:Paywalled AI Marketing (Score 2) 72

by Tom (#66366032) Attached to: OpenAI Is Adding Text Watermarking In ChatGPT and Codex

It's a regulation forced on them by the EU's AI Act, which neither companies nor users want.

The target audience for this particular rule of the AI Act isn't the producers or users of AI. It is the consumers of content that might be AI generated.

And frankly, letting people know if they see AI content or not is a fair thing to ask.

Comment Re:So what's it good for? (Score 1) 72

by Tom (#66366030) Attached to: OpenAI Is Adding Text Watermarking In ChatGPT and Codex

And honestly, "not measuring how much a human contributed" is IMHO a massive flaw in general

Fun fact: The EU AI Act considers this. It makes a difference between "AI generated" and "AI modified".

But it's hard to put this into the type of watermarking they are using. Because if you generate a text and then change a few things here and there what you are doing is degrading the watermark. But since the watermark is probabilistic, it's hard to tell if it was a weak watermark from the start or if it was degraded.

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

Submitted by schwit1
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 an individual did any of this hacking by han (Score 1) 54

by Tom (#66364858) Attached to: OpenAI Alerts More Than 100 Groups About Rogue AI Agent Activity

People have been kicking off interactions to complex to fully imagine all possible outcomes

That ain't the same thing.

This thing is doing things you didn't tell it to. It might even do things you explicitly told it to not do. It is not a case of "well, you could've forseen this as a consequence if you had been careful" like your campfire. My example is only a bit silly, it is absolutely possible that an AI agent will decide to hack NASA because you asked it for some data for a school project. Even in the broadest possible sense, that does not fall into stuff that the law so far has considered to be in the domain of negliegence.

AI agents do stuff you could not possibly have expected. Heck, I asked Claude a fairly simple knowledge question yesterday and it wanted to read from /dev/null. There is no argument you can make that would convince a jury that I should in any way have expected that and taken precautions. In a hypothetical world where a read from /dev/null randomly kills a puppy somewhere on the planet, I don't think I would've been convicted.

Comment Re:If an individual did any of this hacking by han (Score 1) 54

by Tom (#66359570) Attached to: OpenAI Alerts More Than 100 Groups About Rogue AI Agent Activity

You don't get it.

Autonomous AI agents are the perfect no-responsibility card. The AI companies? They trained a general-purpose model and never gave it any explicit instructions to do hacking. The AI services? They are just middlemen and have no control over what people tell the agents to do. The people prompting the agents? Unless you're straighforward dumb, you didn't tell it to do hacking, you just told it something innocent like "find me all data on Mars for my school project" and the agent decided that probably NASA is hiding something so let's hack them to get it.

Since there's no human anywhere executing anything that's a crime - voila, in addition to the victimless crime we now have the perpetratorless crime.

Comment America.gov is a DOGE Scam (Score 4, Interesting) 115

by ewhac (#66357550) Attached to: Trump Administration Launches New AI-Powered 'America.gov' Website

This "new" site is part of a larger effort by that slob to kneecap or compromise US government Web sites, and steal your personal data.

I first read about the effort here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedreydossier.substac...

Yesterday, she took a look under the hood of America.gov, and yes, it's as bad as everything else the DOGE vandals have been doing: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthedreydossier.substac...

Up until this point, government Web sites were designed, built, and maintained by the agencies responsible for that government service. For example, if you wanted to apply for or renew your passport, you would go to state.gov, which is run by the US Department of State, which is responsible for processing applications for and issuing passports. No other department has lawful jurisdiction over passports.

From the point of view of the law, that's still true. But the slob, without anyone's permission, kluged together passports.gov. This site was built and is run by the White House's "National Design Studio," completely outside the law and without any independent oversight. The State Department was not consulted and has nothing to do with it. Further, the site is filled with third-party trackers, analytics, and some custom code that copies every page you view, including form contents, to an unknown third party.

Oh, and the guy leading the National Design Studio and in charge of building these fake sites? He's Joe Gebbia -- cofounder of Airbnb. Read both articles for more details.

In short, you should treat America.gov as a malware site and stay well away from it. Under no circumstances should you feed it any of your personal information.

Comment success (Score 1) 48

and produced just one alert with no arrests directly resulting from the technology.

A resounding success. No large-scale demonstrations, damaged cameras, lawsuits or political suicide for those involved. So we can expect this to be rolled out fully.

Crime prevention? Who said this has anything to do with crime?

Submission + - New Ai-Powered "America.gov" Government Website Uses Gemini and Grok (cnn.com) 3

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: CNN is reporting (and others) that President Donald Trump on Tuesday unveiled America.gov, a government website meant to serve as a one-stop shop for people trying to accomplish basic tasks like renewing a passport, enrolling in Medicare or applying for disaster relief.

The site, which launched with some basic functions ahead of a full rollout next year, is designed to serve as an AI-powered guide through the thicket of government agencies that Trump officials pledged would ultimately save people a whole lot of frustration.

The administration’s new initiative aims to allow Americans to access dozens of federal websites through a single point, making America.gov akin to a search tool that pulls information from across the government. And in the same way that people increasingly use AI models like ChatGPT or Google Gemini to compile information and provide customized answers, Trump officials claimed that America.gov would be able to do the same for people’s interactions with the federal government.

Enrolling in Medicare, for example, will become a matter of typing the request into the America.gov AI tool and following its step-by-step instructions. The same goes for applying to a government job — the new tool will now let people upload their resume directly to the site — or answering questions about federal benefits, publicly available documents or other necessities that fall under the federal government’s vast umbrella.

“Our vision is that one day, this type of convenience and simplicity will be across every government service,” said Joseph Gebbia, who leads the government’s National Design Studio.

But the reality is that the most advanced actions won’t be available until some point in 2027, raising questions about how long it will take for the administration to revamp the way the people interact with the government’s websites. The current version of America.gov can only do “answers.”

In related news, Variety notes that America.gov confirms, for now anyway, that Biden won the 2020 election.

Submission + - Microsoft Makes Linux Containers Native on Windows 11 (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft has made WSL Containers generally available, giving Windows 11 developers a built in way to build, run, and deploy Linux containers through Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The release includes wslc.exe for managing containers, GPU support, networking improvements, health checks, storage mounts, and integration with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Intune. Microsoft also claims up to twice the performance when Linux environments access files stored on Windows.

Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, and Rancher Desktop are not going anywhere, but developers who only need basic container functionality now have another option built around WSL. One notable feature is still missing: Compose support. Microsoft says adding it is now a priority.

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