Comment Meanwhile, at Carnegie Mellon... (Score 4, Interesting) 193
Jensen Huang to college grads: "Run. Don't walk" toward AI
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.axios.com%2F2026%2F05%2F...
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told graduates at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh yesterday that demand for AI infrastructure is creating a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to reindustrialize America and restore the nation's capacity to build."
Why it matters: With many college grads fearing AI could obliterate their career dreams, Huang pointed to boundless opportunity as a "new industry is being born. A new era of science and discovery is beginning
Nvidia, which makes AI chips, is the world's most valuable company. Huang told 5,800 recipients of undergraduate and graduate degrees that the AI buildout will require plumbers, electricians, ironworkers, and builders for chip factories, data centers and advanced manufacturing facilities.
"No generation has entered the world with more powerful tools â" or greater opportunities â" than you," he said. "We are all standing at the same starting line. This is your moment to help shape what comes next. So run. Don't walk."
"Every major technological revolution in history created fear alongside opportunity," Huang added. "When society engages technology openly, responsibly, and optimistically, we expand human potential far more than we diminish it."
Full speech: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
Comment It can't answer basic questions factually... (Score 4, Interesting) 57
...like "Tell me about Tiananmen Square" or "Tell me about Xinjiang".
Is this what you want for the future?
My thoughts back when R1 came out:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.afcea.org%2Fsignal-m...
Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213
...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:
We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.
Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.
Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)
RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1
AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.
Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.
Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.
Comment It's more than just one name: more have been found (Score 4, Interesting) 87
And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Farticle%2Fc...
Comment Re:Not laying off anyonye (Score 1) 56
Now do the percentage of moderators on reddit that use the 3rd party apps...
Comment The Web3 Fraud (Score 4, Insightful) 65
What is
Hype.
"So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only âoeutilityâ for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usenix.org%2Fpublica...
Comment Re: If Xianjing is a workers paradise (Score 3, Insightful) 156
Ah yes, the disgusting and false refuge of Chinese (and Russian) apologists and propagandists to the worst abuses of authoritarians: âoethe US does it too.â
Comment Nice job slipping pro-CCP propaganda into the summ (Score 5, Insightful) 156
These abuses are not âoeallegedâ; they are happening, and they are not based on dubious âoeresearchesâ [sic]:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.propublica.org%2Fart...
There is a genocide happening in Xinjiang; one that is erasing an entire culture, language, religion, and history of a people.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fintera...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Fintera...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com...
Comment Want to *actually* resurrect RSS? (Score 4, Informative) 16
Use https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffeedly.com%2F
When Google killed Reader, I did, and never looked back.
Comment Re:Rian Johnson (Score 1) 80
I love this obsession with whether or not something is SJW. Shit shows existed long before the SJW came along.
University of Michigan Study Advocates Ban of Facial Recognition in Schools (venturebeat.com) 18
University of Michigan researchers recently published a study showing facial recognition technology in schools has limited efficacy and presents a number of serious problems. From a report: The research was led by Shobita Parthasarathy, director of the university's Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) program, and finds the technology isn't just ill-suited to security purposes, it can actively promote racial discrimination, normalize surveillance, and erode privacy while marginalizing gender nonconforming students.
The study follows the New York legislature's passage of a moratorium on the use of facial recognition and other forms of biometric identification in schools until 2022. The bill, a response to the Lockport City School District launching a facial recognition system, was among the first in the nation to explicitly regulate or ban use of the technology in schools. That development came after companies including Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft halted or ended the sale of facial recognition products in response to the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S.
Submission + - Woz Turns 70th Birthday into Charity Event (wozbday.com)
NoMoreACs writes: Join Apple Computer inventor and co-Founder Steve Wozniak for "11 Days of Wozdom", a social media "Scavenger Hunt" featuring creative challenges that speak to the things he values most: Happiness, creativity, ingenuity and fun.
The challenges will officially begin on August 11th, but you can get a head start by going to WOZBDAY.COM for details.
The first challenge will be to help Woz spread the word about his birthday party and fundraiser on August 11th. All challenges will be due on August 21st at 11:59pm PDT. Challenge winners get special prizes!
Woz also stated:
"Iâ(TM)m lucky to be able to do this for a foundation oriented towards helping children, especially ones in need of finding themselves."
A livestream featuring a star-studded list of performers (see list at the birthday site) and other guests will begin on August 11, 2020 at 5 pm, PDT.
Come celebrate the life of one of the true pioneers in the Personal Computer Revolution. Listen to some music, hear some great stories, and maybe even help some kids in need!
The challenges will officially begin on August 11th, but you can get a head start by going to WOZBDAY.COM for details.
The first challenge will be to help Woz spread the word about his birthday party and fundraiser on August 11th. All challenges will be due on August 21st at 11:59pm PDT. Challenge winners get special prizes!
Woz also stated:
"Iâ(TM)m lucky to be able to do this for a foundation oriented towards helping children, especially ones in need of finding themselves."
A livestream featuring a star-studded list of performers (see list at the birthday site) and other guests will begin on August 11, 2020 at 5 pm, PDT.
Come celebrate the life of one of the true pioneers in the Personal Computer Revolution. Listen to some music, hear some great stories, and maybe even help some kids in need!
