Comment Re:Oh goody (Score 1) 72
Which means I'd have a million dollars and therefore I would in fact be a 'millionaire'. Duh.
Comment Re: Why would you give a loan...? (Score 1) 72
Everyone gets paid (if all goes well).
And (just out of curiosity) what if it doesn't?
I mean, not that it would ever happen of course (because crypto is incredibly super stable), but what if the Magical Money Fairy has a little boo-boo and falls down? Does everyone still get paid?
Comment Re:Oh goody (Score 1) 72
At this point in time it's more like White Swan event.
Comment Re:Oh goody (Score 1) 72
I too laughed at that when I read it.
"All I need to do is double my net worth every day for a month..."
Comment I can't believe it (Score 1) 72
Wow, I can't believe that some highly speculative, crypto-coin-adjacent business scheme with the word "Infinite" in the name has crashed.
Submission + - 100 years on, quantum mechanics is redefining reality—with us at the cente (science.org)
sciencehabit writes: Standing in a garden on the remote German island of Helgoland one day in June, two theoretical physicists quibble over who—or what—constructs reality. Carlo Rovelli, based at Aix-Marseille University, insists he is real with respect to a stone on the ground. He may cast a shadow on the stone, for instance, projecting his existence onto their relationship. Chris Fuchs of the University of Massachusetts Boston retorts that it’s preposterous to imagine the stone possessing any worldview, seeing as it is a stone. Although allied in their belief that reality is subjective rather than absolute, they both leave the impromptu debate unsatisfied, disagreeing about whether they agree.
Such is the state of theoretical quantum mechanics, scientists’ deepest description of the atomic world. The theory was developed 100 years ago on Helgoland, where a 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg retreated to escape a bout of hay fever—and to reimagine what an atom looks like. The leading picture at the time featured electrons hopping in discrete, or quantized, leaps of energy between fixed orbits around the nucleus. It explained the behavior of hydrogen but failed for bigger atoms. On blustery walks and cold swims in the North Sea, Heisenberg abandoned the simplistic orbital picture, instead developing a new mathematical language that would work for any atom. Later in 1925, Erwin Schrödinger conjured up a complementary lens—his eponymous wave equation—which describes the positions of electrons in probabilistic terms.
Within a few years, their calculations would reveal a disturbingly fuzzy picture of reality, one in which certain properties are inherently unknowable and others take on different values depending on how they’re measured. “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” Heisenberg wrote after winning the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics.
This year, hundreds of physicists convened on Helgoland to commemorate the birth of quantum mechanics. It has certainly earned its keep over the past century, not only by predicting experimental outcomes with immaculate precision, but also by enabling technologies such as lasers, transistors, and atomic clocks. Yet even today, scientists struggle to interpret what the theory implies about nature. Central to the confusion is how the act of measurement pins down the indeterminate behavior of atoms. The standard framing has an unsettling anthropocentric flavor, suggesting humans play some special role in shaping the universe. Now, bolstered by a string of recent experiments, theorists such as Fuchs and Rovelli are leaning into the discomfort, emphasizing how observers do indeed create the world they inhabit. What’s at stake is nothing less than reality itself.
“We don’t need to fix quantum mechanics to make it compatible with what we observe; we need to recognize that there are alternative ways of looking at the world,” says Alyssa Ney, a philosopher of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Quantum theory compels physicists to “make room for different notions of what it means to be real.”
Such is the state of theoretical quantum mechanics, scientists’ deepest description of the atomic world. The theory was developed 100 years ago on Helgoland, where a 23-year-old Werner Heisenberg retreated to escape a bout of hay fever—and to reimagine what an atom looks like. The leading picture at the time featured electrons hopping in discrete, or quantized, leaps of energy between fixed orbits around the nucleus. It explained the behavior of hydrogen but failed for bigger atoms. On blustery walks and cold swims in the North Sea, Heisenberg abandoned the simplistic orbital picture, instead developing a new mathematical language that would work for any atom. Later in 1925, Erwin Schrödinger conjured up a complementary lens—his eponymous wave equation—which describes the positions of electrons in probabilistic terms.
Within a few years, their calculations would reveal a disturbingly fuzzy picture of reality, one in which certain properties are inherently unknowable and others take on different values depending on how they’re measured. “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” Heisenberg wrote after winning the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics.
This year, hundreds of physicists convened on Helgoland to commemorate the birth of quantum mechanics. It has certainly earned its keep over the past century, not only by predicting experimental outcomes with immaculate precision, but also by enabling technologies such as lasers, transistors, and atomic clocks. Yet even today, scientists struggle to interpret what the theory implies about nature. Central to the confusion is how the act of measurement pins down the indeterminate behavior of atoms. The standard framing has an unsettling anthropocentric flavor, suggesting humans play some special role in shaping the universe. Now, bolstered by a string of recent experiments, theorists such as Fuchs and Rovelli are leaning into the discomfort, emphasizing how observers do indeed create the world they inhabit. What’s at stake is nothing less than reality itself.
“We don’t need to fix quantum mechanics to make it compatible with what we observe; we need to recognize that there are alternative ways of looking at the world,” says Alyssa Ney, a philosopher of physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Quantum theory compels physicists to “make room for different notions of what it means to be real.”
Comment Re:Environmental issues are exaggerated (Score 1) 111
Scale matters. And how serious an issue does depend on percentage, not just absolute levels. Moreover, percentage is especially important when one is considering issues of prioritization, where I explicitly compared it to golf. So far, you've doubled down on insulting people rather than making any argument involving sources. It might also occur to you that you are apparently assuming that everyone you disagree must have some dishonest agenda. But if you bothered to actually read my comment with a minimum of good faith understanding, you would not that the comment explicitly notes specific problems from AI data centers, which should suggest to you that the agenda you apparently want to impose on the comment is not accurate. Now, it would be appreciated if you could actually attempt to respond with something resembling reasoning and sources and less insults. But I do appreciate from our prior interactions that is apparently difficult for you to do, so have a good day.
Submission + - "Slop" may be seeping into the nooks and crannies of our brains. (gizmodo.com)
joshuark writes: Gizmodo reports that: Evidence That Humans Now Speak in a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger. In theory, all organically grown utterances and snippets of text are safe from that label. But our shared linguistic ecosystem may be so AI-saturated, we now all sound like AI. Worse, in some cases AI-infected speech is being spouted by (ostensibly human) elected officials.
But two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn’t just something that can be found through close analysis of data. It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now.
One can state pretty categorically, however, that the sign is written in a new style of annoying prose that has only existed since the release of ChatGPT. And at least some of that annoying new style may be embedded in all of our brains now whether we like it or not. The trend started with the infamous ELIZA.BAS BASIC program [https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc3/showpage.php?page=251] a friend programmed into their Atari 800XL home computer.
But two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn’t just something that can be found through close analysis of data. It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now.
One can state pretty categorically, however, that the sign is written in a new style of annoying prose that has only existed since the release of ChatGPT. And at least some of that annoying new style may be embedded in all of our brains now whether we like it or not. The trend started with the infamous ELIZA.BAS BASIC program [https://www.atariarchives.org/bcc3/showpage.php?page=251] a friend programmed into their Atari 800XL home computer.
Submission + - The story behind the first handheld digital camera (bbc.com)
sinij writes:
In 1975, a young engineer in the company that made Kodak film took the first picture on a handheld digital camera. Photography would never be the same again.
Comment Re:Environmentalists demand we only subsistence fa (Score 5, Insightful) 111
There appear to be two interrelated issues with your sources. (Although thank you for giving sources, which was much more than the person you were replying to did.) First, there's a substantial issue with how representative these environmentalists are from the general movement. The ability to point to specific people doesn't really say much about the movement as a whole (although I will grant there's a decent fraction of the environmental movement which really does seem stuck in a 1970s sort of "degrowth" or "antigrowth" attitude). But you seem to also confuse sources saying "Hey, this is creating a serious problem" and not wanting to have that thing at all. The Science.org article for example is about the actual fact that steel production really does contribute seriously to climate change, but then much of the article is about the effort to make steel manufacturing more environmentally friendly. So the article is not about getting rid of steel manufacturing but about making it work better. Others in your list are not about getting rid of things, but moderation. To use the very last example, large scale car use really is creating a lot of problems. But one can recognize that and favor more moderation in terms of car use without getting rid of cars as a whole.
Comment Re:Environmental issues are exaggerated (Score 0, Offtopic) 111
Narcc, why are you incapable of polite discussion with people you disagree with? Would it hurt you so much to some day, maybe try to do people the courtesy of responding to what they have with some detailed arguments or reasoning rather than insults?
Comment Environmental issues are exaggerated (Score 3, Insightful) 111
The environmental issues are exaggerated. It is true that electricity prices are going up, https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/average-electricity-cost-increase-per-year but this is barely a blip above the current (very high) inflation rates https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator/consumer-price-index-1913-. The complaints about water usage are also not highly reasonable. The vast majority of water used for data centers get reused. Current data center water usage is about a 10th of the water usage for golf courses by the most extreme plausible estimates, and US golf courses account for a bit over 1% of all water usage, so being concerned about data centers here when a more useful thing would be to not have golf courses in the middle of Arizona would be a far more reasonable concern. https://www.usga.org/content/usga/home-page/articles/2025/03/water-conservation-playbook-released-golf-industry.html. There are legitimate grid concerns; AI data centers don't just use a lot of power, but they use it in hard to predict ways, which makes load balancing the grid very difficult. So there are legitimate concerns.
But it seems like much of the left has adopted an anything involving LLM AIs is bad attitude in the US. This seems connected to the fact that the US attitude towards LLM AIs is more negative than pretty much almost every other country https://today.yougov.com/international/articles/53654-english-speaking-western-countries-more-negative-about-ai-than-western-europeans. But rather than having a serious discussion about the positives and negatives of this technology (and there are a lot in both columns), there's this tendency to just pick any possible negative and throw it on the wall. This is also particularly unfortunate right now in the US because there's major problems with the Trump administration rolling back all sorts of environmental regulations, including not just those for CO2 but for many other pollutants, and the administration is now actively stopping almost any new US wind and solar on a large scale. While there's been some legal pushback against some of that (see for example, this victory just today https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/climate/trump-offshore-wind-federal-judge.html ) this would be a far better use of these groups time and resources than going after a specific industry.
Submission + - Northern Lights may be visible in nearly 2 dozen states Monday night. (weather.com)
dresgarcia writes: Apparently NOAA is predicting a strong geomagnetic storm following a solar flare that occurred on the 6th. They are predicting that this will allow the aurora to be seen much farther south than usual.
"In a special alert issued on Sunday, a forecast from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center predicted a strong G3 geomagnetic storm through midday Tuesday, December 9.
While space weather is hard to predict, auroras could be visible from late Monday night into the wee hours of Tuesday morning and possibly again on Tuesday night.
According to NOAA, here’s where they may be visible: Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine."
"In a special alert issued on Sunday, a forecast from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center predicted a strong G3 geomagnetic storm through midday Tuesday, December 9.
While space weather is hard to predict, auroras could be visible from late Monday night into the wee hours of Tuesday morning and possibly again on Tuesday night.
According to NOAA, here’s where they may be visible: Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine."
Comment Reduction (Score 2, Insightful) 63
I'd say keep letter delivery, but cut it to once a week. Have a smaller workforce cycle through the routes. Do bulk mail once a month.
Comment Everywhere (Score 2) 105
The Kroger by us, in a fairly densely populated suburb, has over 25 positions open. The nearby Wal-Mart can't stay open 24-hours because they can't get enough people to work the night shift. Two nearby restaurants closed because they couldn't keep enough staff to stay open during lunch and dinner rushes.
Slashdot Top Deals
I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats; If it be man's work I will do it.
