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Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 41

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 5, Informative) 41

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs.

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

Submission + - The internet works thanks to a shared infrastructure that nobody owns (elpais.com) 1

alternative_right writes: In the 21st century, every government should understand that ensuring software sovereignty and security is part of its job, not only for themselves but also for businesses, society, and researchers. In the 21st century, software is the invisible infrastructure of our everyday life, like roads and bridges. Everything runs on software, and a significant portion of this is made possible by open source, which is maintained by people selflessly. If this open source breaks down, it’s as if a road or bridge collapses: everything else becomes much more complicated and dangerous.

Comment Re:Godzillomycota Chernobilli Kosmonautikus (Score 1) 47

Damn. You're right. That article doesn't say it, and I didn't find the one I originally read, which was about bacteria living deep in the earth where the radiation generated ionization states that they used. IIRC it was about bacteria living in a granite based low-level uranium source. And they were living a lot deeper than previously detected bacteria. (This was about 3-4 decades ago, so it's not surprising that I can't find that article. I think it was in Science News, but possibly it was in New Scientist. In any case, what I read was a magazine article. And it was rather explicit...though of course not detailed.)

Submission + - Be nice - Batman is watching! (sciencealert.com)

Black Parrot writes: From ScienceAlert:

A new study has found that people are more likely to act kind towards others when Batman is present â" and not for the reasons you might assume.
[...]
Psychologists from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy conducted experiments on the Milan metro to see who, if anyone, might offer their seat to a pregnant passenger.
The kicker? Sometimes Batman was there â" or at least, another experimenter dressed as him. The researchers were checking if people were more likely to give up their seat in the presence of the caped crusader.
And sure enough, there did seem to be a correlation. In 138 different experiments, somebody offered their seat to an experimenter wearing a hidden prosthetic belly 67.21 percent of the time in the presence of Batman.
That's a lot more often than times the superhero wasn't around â" in those cases, a passenger offered a seat just 37.66 percent of the time.
[...]
"Interestingly, among those who left their spot in the experimental condition, nobody directly associated their gesture with the presence of Batman, and 14 (43.75 percent) reported that they did not see Batman at all."

The article goes on to speculate about what is causing people to be more generous.

Comment Re: \o/ (Score 1) 69

But if they talk, should you believe them. People say all sorts of things. You can't really trust strangers whose motives you can only guess at. Perhaps they're about to be fired, so they want to damage the company.

For that matter, if someone said a game was NOT made with AI, I wouldn't believe them. They only know part of what was being done, so even if they're intending to be honest they can't be believed.

I think he was probably correct when he asserted "AI will be a part of the way all games are made".

Comment Re: CEO sees roadblock to more profit and says let (Score 2) 69

It's not slop everywhere else, just in many places. AIs that have been custom trained for a particular situation can often do quite well. This work particularly well in classification, but also works in several other areas.

The main criteria at the moment is "so you have an easy way to check correctness?". If you do, then AI can, when properly trained and configured, do a good job.

Submission + - 'Slop Evader' Lets You Surf the Web Like It's 2022 (404media.co)

alternative_right writes: AI slop feels inescapable — whether you’re watching TV, reading the news, or trying to find a new apartment.

That is, unless you’re using Slop Evader, a new browser tool that filters your web searches to only include results from before November 30, 2022 — the day that ChatGPT was released to the public.

The tool is available for Firefox and Chrome, and has one simple function: Showing you the web as it was before the deluge of AI-generated garbage. It uses Google search functions to index popular websites and filter results based on publication date, a scorched earth approach that virtually guarantees your searches will be slop-free.

Submission + - Ion-based cooling technique could make computer chips more powerful (phys.org)

alternative_right writes: [R]esearchers at The University of Osaka have developed a strategy to enhance cooling by driving the flow of ions through nanoscale channels. This ionothermoelectric strategy is analogous to the Peltier technique, in which passing an electric current through a material results in heating or cooling. This compelling invention is published in ACS Nano.

"We fabricated a nanosized pore in a semiconductor membrane and surrounded the nanopore with a 'gate,' in the form of a nanowire. Applying a voltage to the gate induced the flow of ions through the nanopore," explains lead author, Makusu Tsutsui. "Varying the voltage modulated the surface charge of the nanopore."

A negative applied voltage resulted in a negatively charged nanopore that was only permeable to positively charged ions, or cations. Consequently, each ion drags a certain quantity of heat along with its charge. The team created a concentration gradient in saltwater around the nanopore to drive cation transport in one direction, effectively pumping heat out of the nanopore. Reversing the applied voltage made the nanopore surface positive and permeable only to negative ions, or anions, therefore switching the system from cooling to heating.

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