Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 1) 19
Sounds like Newton. Long tradition, I guess
Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 4, Funny) 19
"Okay, nuclear power. Yeah. Yeah, they did give us that. That's true. "
"And industrial-scale superconducting magnets!"
"Don't forget GPS satellite relativistic corrections!"
"And radioisotope therapy!"
"Electron beam therapy?"
"World Wide Web, wasn't that created by particle physicists?"
"Yeah, they did do that."
"Capacitative touchscreens too, you know."
"All right, all right, FAIR ENOUGH! But APART from computers, telecommunications, nuclear power, PET scans, MRIs, satellite communications, superconductors, radioisotope therapy, electron beam therapy, heat-shrink tubing, cargo and baggage screening, smoke detectors, muon tomography, capacitative touchscreens, and the World Wide Web, WHAT HAS PARTICLE PHYSICS EVER DONE FOR US?!"
"Synchrotron light sources for drug discovery?"
"Oh, drug discovery?! GROW UP!"
Comment Re:Which 400 libs? (Score 1) 22
Have you tried asking AI?
Comment Re:Sure, way up north maybe (Score 1) 211
You can avoid most of the paint by just ignoring DST. Don't change you clocks. Helps if your work is flexible about hours, but you can always move some evening stuff to the morning and vise versa.
Try it, you will find that it's no real effort to remember everyone else's clocks are off by an hour.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 211
Look at Nepal, in the UTC+05:45 timezone. They aren't even the only ones who like to break technology with their non-whole-hour timezone.
The world seems to be moving towards trying to simplify time a bit, e.g. by discontinuing leap seconds. Personally I'd start a project to build a booster large enough to correct the Earth's orbit of the sun to a nice round 256 days, but since there doesn't seem to be much support for that at least we can stop bothering with DST.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 211
You make it sound like not having DST is terrible, but most of the world doesn't bother with it.
It's basically Europe, the US, and a few random others including half of Australia for some reason. Everyone else gets by just fine without DST, and much of the world gave it up when they stopped being colonies.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
Maybe it's time to think about the hours we do things in general. For example, in Japan most shops don't open until 10 or 11 AM, and stay open until 7-8 PM. That gives people the opportunity to visit them after work or school. Schools and employers set opening times based on local conditions, because there are vast differences between northern and southern climates. It turns out that everyone doing what makes sense for them works just fine.
With things line linear TV and radio becoming less relevant, times also matter less. It's a good thing, it gives us flexibility.
Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 2) 19
Just because everyone was operating on the assumption that high energy cosmic neutrinos exist doesn't mean that it isn't worth proving that beyond all doubt. It wouldn't be the first time if the results was unexpected, or if it turned out a whole load of accepted physics were based on a faulty assumption.
Submission + - AI Male Agents paid more than their Female counterparts. (the-independent.com)
williamyf writes: If you tought the Gender Pay Gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again:
A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%
The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.
A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%
The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.
Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 2) 19
Yeah, what has a better understanding of particle physics ever done for US, huh???
_
Submission + - UK vegetables 20-50% less nutritious than in the 1960s (telegraph.co.uk)
Bruce66423 writes: 'The nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50pc since the Sixties because of declining soil quality, according to a new study.
'The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.
'Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.
'“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”
'The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.'
'The study found that many crops had lost 20pc to 50pc of several key nutrients.
'Will Summers, a senior associate at the firm, said: “For 60 years we’ve measured food security in calories and tonnes per hectare.
'“On those measures we’ve done remarkably well. But we’ve been quietly hollowing out what’s inside our food.”
'The decrease in nutrient and vitamin value is thought to be down to declining soil quality and crops being selectively bred for their ability to grow quickly, rather than there being any focus on their health benefits.'
Comment Re:Very funny (Score 1) 72
if this were true it would not be possible for the system to read the watermark.
You confuse "invisible to humans" with "invisible to statistical analysis". Humans can't, for example, see the difference between metameric colours. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see minor drift at scales where Brownian motion dominates. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see the difference between background disease rates and new rising threats. Statistical analysis can. On and on. Statistical analysis is a far more powerful tool than human perceptual abilities.
this is also a lie. Identical thoughts must be expressed identically, otherwise they are, in fact, *different* thoughts.
I literally gave an example above. If you saw "picked a mango", "selected and picked a mango", "from within the tree, picked a mango", you would never think there was anything going on in the choice, and it isn't going to change the story one iota.
Comment Re:Countries that do not change clocks use ST (Score 1) 211
Even though some regions or countries stay on a shifted time offset year-round (which might look or feel like being "ahead" like daylight saving time), standard time is legally and geographically considered the baseline time zone for those areas. They simply choose not to participate in the biannual clock adjustments.
Countries & Regions That Do Not Change Clocks Most of Asia: This includes major industrialized nations like China, India, Japan, and South Korea, as well as most of Southeast and Central Asia.
Most of Africa: Almost the entire African continent stays on a single standard time year-round.
Parts of the Middle East: While countries like Iran and formerly parts of the Levant have experimented with it, places like Turkey and several neighbors maintain fixed times.
Parts of Europe: Iceland, Belarus, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan do not practice seasonal time changes. (The European Union has debated abolishing the practice entirely, but member states still currently shift together).
Much of South and Central America: Countries like Argentina, Brazil (which abandoned nationwide DST a few years ago), and most of their neighbors remain on permanent standard time.
Erm... notice a pattern there?
Most of these nations are equatorial or not that far off it. Most of them between the 26th parallels. As you get closer to the equator, there is less difference between the hours of daylight between summer and winter, as you get further you get a greater differential.
In Perth, Western Australia (36 S) there's about a 3 hour difference, in London, UK (51 N) there's an 8 hour difference and this difference does not neatly line up around 12 PM so if you had permanent GMT you'd have the sun getting up at 3 AM in the summer disrupting sleep and if you kept permanent BST you'd have darkness until 9 AM in winter causing chaos on the way to work/school.
Perth doesn't have DST (but the eastern states do so that causes problems) because the differential in daylight hours isn't much of an issue (that and Perth is incredibly backwards and resistant to change but that is another discussion entirely) however London does because there is a huge difference in daylight hours between winter and summer.
Comment Re:We already tried this (Score 1) 211
DST was made permanent in the USA in 1974, and it was so unpopular it got repealed the same year.
It sounds good until you have to live it... there are also morning people among us, and kids trying to walk to school where further darkness presents a safety issue. Not everyone benefits from potential extra sunlight to extend happy hour.
Before we had mechanical clocks, we used to adjust to the hours of daylight automatically. Daylight Savings came in because we needed to keep doing that as the hours of daylight changed with the seasons, so the solution was to change the clocks.
With most clocks being automatically updated these days, you barely have the excuse of having to change the clocks to oppose DST. You go to sleep on one time and wake up in the new one.
Comment Re:Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks (Score 2) 25
("It actually makes RAM needs worse" -> "MoEs actually make RAM needs worse")
Comment Re:Meanwhile, back at the benchmarks (Score 3, Interesting) 25
It actually makes RAM needs worse than a dense model, for a given quality.
That said, inference techniques like FreeToken are improving MoE swapping performance, so it's not as bad as it once was. Honestly, I would not be at all surprised if we start doing training in a swap-aware manner, where expert cache misses count as loss and models can queue experts to start loading before they're needed. Could even train in two tiers of loading - RAM and disk. Wouldn't that be great? Could run multi-terabyte models on consumer hardware. Training would tend to tend to concentrate key logic and reasoning on small number of very active experts, mixed reasoning/knowledge on less common experts that are usually kept in RAM, and rarer knowledge on experts that usually remain on-disk until needed.
