Comment Re:So... (Score 3, Insightful) 25
There's no reason why Python (compiled from Rust) would be any slower than Python (compiled from C). Both languages compile to native executable code, and both have good optimizers available.
Comment If an individual did any of this hacking by hand (Score 5, Insightful) 52
He would be serving time.
Why hasn't Sam Altman been arrested yet?
Why is OpenAI allowed to continue to operate?
Clearly it's a criminal organization.
Comment Who gives a turkey? (Score 1) 19
Honestly... Since when reshuffling in a company's upper management is of any interest to anybody other than the people working for that individual at that company?
What next? They're gonna replace Bob at accounting because he didn't use AI to format his Excel sheets?
Comment Re:Sad what happened to Toyota (Score 2) 52
They hired some uninspired losers to lead their self-driving efforts. They basically were weak, looked into it and figured it's impossible.
There's nothing wrong with knowing your own limitations and acting accordingly. Had Mr. Zuckerberg had that sort of self-knowledge, he might have avoided lighting 80-billion-with-a-b dollars on fire and renaming his social media company after a technology that nobody wanted.
Comment Re:Yes, probably. And they likely can do even bett (Score 2) 241
And human drivers are NOT, "on average, really bad".
That is true, but it's a little more complicated than that.
The average driver is pretty good, 99.9% of the time. The other 0.1% of the time, they are tired, or angry, or momentarily distracted, or just looking the other direction from where they need to be looking under those particular circumstances. It's those occasional blips of inattention that cause lead to most accidents occurring.
Comment Re:what kind of bugs (Score 4, Insightful) 85
But I value even a 1 line change that clears a static analysis warning if even in practice it was impossible to trigger the issue in a real system.
Yes, I agree. The problem with thinking "this bug seems harmless, because I can't imagine how anyone could exploit it" is in the "I can't imagine" part; my imagination is limited to what is covered by my mental model of how computers work, but an attackers' ingenuity is not.
In particular, the C/C++ optimizer is a devious beast, and will exploit any opportunity to make the code more efficient, even if that means doing things that are wildly unintuitive to a naive human reader -- and it sees any instance of undefined behavior as an opportunity to exploit.
Submission + - Put Multiple Values in One Cell with Lists and Arrays in Excel 1
theodp writes: Folks in Finance and other power Excel users were no doubt all atwitter over Microsoft's Thursday announcement of support for in-cell lists and arrays in Excel, including four new functions — FLATTEN, HAS, HASANY, HASALL — to manipulate them. From the home office in Redmond:
"Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels. Many workbooks already try to pack multiple values into one cell. A project might list 'Carlos, Henrietta, Jacob' as three owners, or a Forms survey might return '2:00 PM; 2:30 PM; 3:00 PM' as one response. With lists, you can keep those values in one cell, while also keeping them separate for filtering, calculation and more."
If you haven't been keeping abreast of What's New in Excel, Microsoft has added a number of new features over the past years that enable Excel users to do things one might formerly have turned to programming languages and other computing environments to accomplish, including support for regular expressions, the LET and LAMDA functions, Python in Excel, and, of course, the obligatory AI support.
Which raises an interesting question: Is an Excel formula worth a thousand lines of AI-generated Python code? (especially if the latter is run in an overengineered infrastructure, such as an AI-generated complex CI/CD pipeline combined with cloud pipeline execution!)
"Throughout Excel's 40-year history, you've only been able to put one value per cell. In this announcement, we're excited to share how that's changing with the release of lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays, initially to Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac Beta Channels. Many workbooks already try to pack multiple values into one cell. A project might list 'Carlos, Henrietta, Jacob' as three owners, or a Forms survey might return '2:00 PM; 2:30 PM; 3:00 PM' as one response. With lists, you can keep those values in one cell, while also keeping them separate for filtering, calculation and more."
If you haven't been keeping abreast of What's New in Excel, Microsoft has added a number of new features over the past years that enable Excel users to do things one might formerly have turned to programming languages and other computing environments to accomplish, including support for regular expressions, the LET and LAMDA functions, Python in Excel, and, of course, the obligatory AI support.
Which raises an interesting question: Is an Excel formula worth a thousand lines of AI-generated Python code? (especially if the latter is run in an overengineered infrastructure, such as an AI-generated complex CI/CD pipeline combined with cloud pipeline execution!)
Comment Re:Three reasons (Score 5, Insightful) 75
(C) is the only one of those the AI companies are really concerned about -- they want to stave off model collapse for as long as possible. The problem is that AI generates so much content that the ratio of AI-generated data to human-generated data keeps rising, and sooner or later there simply won't be much human-generated data left to anything to consume. At that point they'll either have to figure out to ingest AI-generated content without causing degradation, or they'll have to accept that AIs have gotten as smart as they will ever get, and it's all downhill from there.
Submission + - The brain is actually two completely separate organs (stanford.edu)
Beeftopia writes: From Stanford Medicine:
"For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years."
The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Scientists could never create hindbrain neurons.
"Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” said researcher Rayyan Jokhai.
"The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain."
With this knowledge, researchers were able to create hindbrain neurons.
"For centuries, scientists have thought of the brain as a single, unified organ. But new research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years."
The adult brain has three main regions: the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Scientists could never create hindbrain neurons.
"Previous attempts to make hindbrain neurons likely tried to coax forebrain and midbrain progenitors into hindbrain cells, which our study shows is not possible,” said researcher Rayyan Jokhai.
"The researchers’ breakthrough came from studying the earliest moments of embryonic development, during a stage called gastrulation when the body first takes shape. Jokhai and Dundes discovered that the hindbrain follows a separate developmental path, running in parallel to — rather than branching off from — the pathway that creates the forebrain and midbrain."
With this knowledge, researchers were able to create hindbrain neurons.
Comment Re:When I read AI tech discussions ... (Score 1) 108
It's really the same problem that we see with quantum physics -- the subject matter is esoteric enough that common sense can't be used to determine whether what you're listening to is really advanced theory or utter BS (or some combination of the two); they both sound the same, and the situation isn't helped by the presence of large numbers of people who think they know what they are talking about but don't.
Comment Re:Train robots to play doom (Score 1) 51
I think the distinction they are making is between technology that kills people, and technology that entertains people. If someone fitted actual weapons to a Doom engine, they'd probably object.
Comment Re:What If The AI Doesn't Hate Us? (Score 2) 167
But here's the part I find interesting: why assume a superintelligent AI would actually want to kill us?
Let's make the hopeful assumption that the superintelligent AIs will not "go rogue" in any way, but will correctly try to carry out their tasks as assigned by the people who designed and trained them.
Pretty much every major nation has military AIs, at this point. So the Chinese AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Americans, and the American AIs are working hard on how to defeat the Russians, and so on. In the final analysis, no matter where you live, there is probably an AI that has been explicitly tasked by its operators with figuring out the most effective ways to do you in. Not because they've "gone wrong", but because they're working as intended.
Comment The "reality is just messing with us" hypothesis (Score 4, Funny) 88
The size of the universe is increasing...
but the rate at which it is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate is decreasing is increasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate is increasing is decreasing...
but the rate at which the rate of the rate of the rate is decreasing in increasing...
[... and so on, ad infinitum...]
Comment All-or-nothing fallacy detected (Score 1) 167
People commonly overestimate the possibility of "all humans dying", and simultaneously underestimate the possibility of "billions of humans dying".
People are like cockroaches that way; a disaster could wipe out 99% of us, and there would still be millions of us left to repopulate afterwards. To truly wipe out all humans would take something more severe than the asteroid that did for the dinosaurs.
Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 167
Which people? It's owners? The government?
Whoever set up its reward function, really. Could be any of the above. The technology doesn't care, it only follows its algorithm.
