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Comment Sidebar on libraries/crates (Score 1) 42

Steven Rostedt wrote -
"I played a little with [Rust] in user space, and I just absolutely hate the cargo concept... I hate having to pull down other code that I do not trust. At least with shared libraries, I can trust a third party to have done the build and all that..."

The various crate-like things are a fad. The arguably correct way of using shared libraries was reinvented independently by the Gnu libc team and by Solaris, from a first use in Multics. You remember, Unix's papa and Linux's grandpa?

Give it a few years, the hype bubble for importing static libraries will burst, and shared libraries with updaters and downdaters will be re-re-invented.

Comment That's "constructive dismissal" in Canada (Score 1) 162

From the Canadian Government page cited below:

Constructive dismissal is sometimes called "disguised dismissal" or "quitting with cause". This is because it often occurs in situations where the employer offers the employee the alternative of:
- leaving, or
- submitting to a unilateral and substantial alteration of a fundamental term or condition of their employment.

A person given a "quit or return to the office" has been fired, and can sue the pants off the employer. The lawyer involved may well offer a good price on a suit to everyone the employer fired, thus increasing the risk to the employer.

See https://www.canada.ca/en/emplo..., or google for "lawyer constructive dismissal" if you're not in Canada

Comment A philosopher would call this a "category error" (Score 3, Informative) 99

The company is testing humans for their ability to do something they are inherently bad at.
Filtering programs, such as the one at spamcop.net, do it well:
- I haven't had a false positive for about three years.
- I get a false negative about once a month.

Whenever I get an email at a customer's, I run it through the spamcop filter. That reliably identifies the phishing-test emails,

I prefer to report those on the equivalent of the IT slack channel, so others aren't caught out by them (;-))

Comment We tried and failed years ago (Score 4, Insightful) 55

More than 10 years ago, my company tried to do facial recognition in an airport in Europe, for their security service. Alas, they didn't know about the "birthday paradox", and tried to match about 1,000 criminals against several thousand passengers. They shut it down when the system identified someone's grandmother as a male member of the Baader-Meinhof gang.

The (birthday) paradox is caused by trying to match each passenger against 1,000 criminals, not just one. Even with only a 1% error rate, there will be 10 false positives and negatives per passenger. And we don't have anything like a 1% error rate.

We need a 1/infinity error rate (:-)) Otherwise innocent grandmothers will be pulled aside, while actual criminals will breeze on through.

Comment Re:Excellent news! (Score 1) 62

Alas, HR departments will wonder why they're getting fewer and fewer applications. Only if hiring manager need to sign off on ads for their positions will one have a good chance of getting a valid skills list and job description.

My company used to own a headhunter. We had to have a co-op student train them on AND and OR before we dared use them for our own job postings. Their training doesn't prepare them for hiring people with skills.

Comment Re:Why announce it at all? (Score 1) 125

Previous folks announced they had AI, talking about
- rule-based systems written in lisp and prolog
- machine-learning systems written in math and stats
- large language learning-models written in harder-to-evaluate math

All but the last was massively different from the previous.

I'll therefor be waiting to see another massive change before I believe they've made an advance toward AGI. Right now they're at MachineLearning++ running on ArrayProce$$or$++.

Comment Fork ! (Score 2) 38

Consider a few examples of successful forks:

  • - LibreOffice -formerly OpenOffice, formerly StarOffice
  • - OpenStreetMap -growing Google Maps replacement
  • - OpenTofu - fork of Terraform
  • - KeyDB - Redis alternative
  • - OpenSearch (AWS-backed) - Elasticsearch alternative

The scholarly publishing ecosystem runs largely on unpaid academic labour. Give that, I wonder if a university press or three should pick up the task of publishing academic journals, and incidentally using some of those profits to improve the journal's quality. By paying editors.

Submission + - Companies Issuing RTO Mandates 'Lose Their Best Talent': Study (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Return-to-office (RTO) mandates have caused companies to lose some of their best workers, a study tracking over 3 million workers at 54 "high-tech and financial" firms at the S&P 500 index has found. These companies also have greater challenges finding new talent, the report concluded. The paper, Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain [PDF], comes from researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Baylor University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The study, which was published in November, spotted this month by human resources (HR) publication HR Dive, and cites Ars Technica reporting, was conducted by collecting information on RTO announcements and sourcing data from LinkedIn.

The researchers said they only examined companies with data available for at least two quarters before and after they issued RTO mandates. The researchers explained: "To collect employee turnover data, we follow prior literature ... and obtain the employment history information of over 3 million employees of the 54 RTO firms from Revelio Labs, a leading data provider that extracts information from employee LinkedIn profiles. We manually identify employees who left a firm during each period, then calculate the firm’s turnover rate by dividing the number of departing employees by the total employee headcount at the beginning of the period. We also obtain information about employees’ gender, seniority, and the number of skills listed on their individual LinkedIn profiles, which serves as a proxy for employees’ skill level."

There are limits to the study, however. The researchers noted that the study "cannot draw causal inferences based on our setting." Further, smaller firms and firms outside of the high-tech and financial industries may show different results. Although not mentioned in the report, relying on data from a social media platform could also yield inaccuracies, and the number of skills listed on a LinkedIn profile may not accurately depict a worker's skill level. [...] The researchers concluded that the average turnover rates for firms increased by 14 percent after issuing return-to-office policies. "We expect the effect of RTO mandates on employee turnover to be even higher for other firms" the paper says.

Submission + - Nuclear-diamond battery could power devices for 1000s of years. (livescience.com) 1

fahrbot-bot writes: Live Science has a report about the world's first nuclear-diamond battery using carbon-14, which has a half-life of 5,700 years, to power devices.

The nuclear battery uses the reaction of a diamond placed close to a radioactive source to spontaneously produce electricity, scientists at the University of Bristol in the U.K. explained in a Dec. 4 statement. No motion — neither linear nor rotational — is required. That means no energy is needed to move a magnet through a coil or to turn an armature within a magnetic field to produce electric current, as is required in conventional power sources.

The diamond battery harvests fast-moving electrons excited by radiation, similar to how solar power uses photovoltaic cells to convert photons into electricity, the scientists said.

The researchers chose carbon-14 as the source material because it emits short-range radiation, which is quickly absorbed by any solid material — meaning there are no concerns about harm from the radiation. In addition, while carbon-14 is extremely toxic to touch or ingest, the surrounding diamond also provides maximal protection.

A single nuclear-diamond battery containing 0.04 ounce (1 gram) of carbon-14 could deliver 15 joules of electricity per day. For comparison, a standard alkaline AA battery, which weighs about 0.7 ounces (20 grams), has an energy-storage rating of 700 joules per gram. It delivers more power than the nuclear-diamond battery would in the short term, but it would be exhausted within 24 hours.

By contrast, the half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730 years, which means the battery would take that long to be depleted to 50% power. This is close to the age of the world's oldest civilization. As another point of comparison, a spacecraft powered by a carbon-14 diamond battery would reach Alpha Centauri — our nearest stellar neighbor, which is about 4.4 light-years from Earth — long before its power were significantly depleted.

The battery, which was built on a plasma deposition rig near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in the U.K. by a team from the University of Bristol and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), has no moving parts and thus requires no maintenance, nor does it have any carbon emissions.

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