Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Not surprising it's more toxic (Score 5, Insightful) 85

As Glyphosate is not toxic (apart from repeatedly swimming in it and guzzling it by the pints daily) to mammals.
The whole reason it's frowned on is because Lawyers got involved, and because scientists couldn't say "Without a doubt, Glyphosate does not cause cancer" it got marked as a carcinogen. There again, scientists will never say "without a doubt", as there is always room for doubt in anything but the most settled of science, after decades or centuries of analysis. The data shows Glyphosate as being safe, and it being "extremely unlikely" that there is any connection between normal exposure to Glyphosate and cancer. It's one of the safest herbicides around, if not the safest for mammals. So it's no surprise that anything that is used instead is more toxic.

Comment Re:Vibe Coding is not the same as coding with AI (Score 0) 79

Don't forget technical debt. Those excel spreadsheets and what not work fine for a while. When a version of excel makes some change, or deprecates part of the code used, or someone wants to put it in a proper system where the data isn't siloed, all hell breaks loose. And seeing as there are lots of these things around in an average enterprise, it can get to be a real headache.

Submission + - 'About as close to aliens as we'll ever get.' Can AI crack animal language? (science.org)

sciencehabit writes: Can a robot arm wave hello to a cuttlefish—and get a hello back? Could a dolphin’s whistle actually mean “Where are you?” And are monkeys quietly naming each other while we fail to notice?

These are just a few of the questions tackled by the finalists for this year’s Dolittle prize, a $100,000 award recognizing early breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered interspecies communication. The winning project—announced today—explores how dolphins use shared, learned whistles that may carry specific meanings—possibly even warning each other about danger, or just expressing confusion. The other contending teams—working with marmosets, cuttlefish, and nightingales—are also pushing the boundaries of what human-animal communication might look like.

The prize marks an important milestone in the Coller Dolittle Challenge, a 5-year competition offering up to $10 million to the first team that can achieve genuine two-way communication with animals. “Part of how this initiative was born came from my skepticism,” says Yossi Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University and one of the prize’s organizers. “But we really have much better tools now. So this is the time to revisit a lot of our previous assumptions about two-way communication within the animal’s own world.”

Science caught up with the four finalists to hear how close we really are to cracking the animal code. One amusing exerpt:

"Male [dolphins] form pairs and call each other’s [signature] whistles if they get separated. But once, we were just testing our equipment and played one of those whistles while the pair was still together. They responded with a totally different whistle—one we hadn’t documented before. We’ve since heard it in other confusing situations. We call it the 'WTF whistle,' because it really did seem like that’s what they were asking."

Comment Re: Short term gains for long term pain (Score 1) 148

Actually, after the war, most were happy to stay at home with the family. This lasted from 1945 to about mid 1980s. A lot of that was the perceived better lifestyle that could be obtained in the '80s by having two partners working. The benefits lasted until possibly the early 2000s, when the market stabilised, and house prices adjusted for having two partners working, and increased drastically to soak the extra available capital.

Comment Re:More wokeness (Score 1) 239

You do, of course, then open up the concept of what is evil. What we consider highly unethical these days and quite unthinkable to do was a matter of course a few hundred years ago.
What needs to happen is an understanding of the person in the context of their day, and a solid appraisal of the good things they did that weren't standard back then, but perhaps have been adopted more widely today.
History is a delicate and nuanced beast, though today people expect to be able to understand it as an entirely arbitrarily univariate entity, which it definitely isn't. Alas, much shouting loudly and attacking anyone that disagrees is what goes for discussion on many topics today. Which goes back to your points very valid points that much of today's discourse tends to be infantilised.

Comment Re:NO INTEGRATED GRAPHICS PLEASE (Score 1) 69

Very glad you don't run the company.
The bulk of the market these days doesn't much care about discrete graphics cards anymore. General office machines just don't need that kind of power, especially when the entire use case of the office boxes is spreadsheets, word processing and general applications.
Building a cut down GPU that can handle basic (for a modern system) acceleration of all the requirements into the base CPU and having the cost of that be fractionally higher cuts down on the overall cost of the machine being shipped by bulk vendors (dell, HP etc.). And the power consumption is lower too, so a double saving.

Now, my own use case for my home workstation doesn't fit this use case, so I have a discrete GPU. And I have a CPU that doesn't have integrated GPU (well, on my workstation; my laptop DOES have an integrated GPU, and it works just fine for the use cases I have for my laptop).

Comment Re:Watchers Don't Like Being Known (Score 1) 247

Employees have known for a long time that their traffic is passing through a gateway that allows or denies their connections (the occasional "This site has been blocked" message conveys that very well). This is different to surveillance in most cases as nobody really has time to trawl through the bulk of the logs where things just work.
What the "man in the middle" warnings do is cause lots of users to suddenly get scared and start calling the service desks, which get overloaded and put a lot of diagnostic work on the back end teams (of which there are not infinite numbers). Rather than condition people to the approach of "Oh, look, we have a serious scary notification that we've been compromised, but we'll continue because it's just a browser sending a spurious notification", they did the eminently sensible thing of "we'll just not bother utilising a tool that causes us endless work that we don't need to do if we use one of the competing products that does the job just as well, with only a fraction of the hassle".
In an enterprise environment, that's the only sane approach really.

Comment Re:DNS over HTTPS (DoH) (Score 1) 247

What you're advocating is that a team spends time to go and work out any and all issues with a product that they don't support, when there are other products that they do support that work just fine.

If all the unsupported apps were taken into account and the core groups were tasked with making sure that everything worked (core supported or not), then nothing of worth would ever get done.
This is just another "It's too much time and effort to sort out something we don't have to because we use something else that does the same job perfectly well". That's standardisation for you.

That the area seems to be working fine, seems to me to be that they already have Chrome (or some other browser they support) configured just how they want it.

Comment Re:It's the under-developed product, not the polit (Score 1) 247

Don't forget that those to the right of the spectrum also care about politics, just the viewpoint is different. Both sides are necessary (along with debate and discussion) to achieve a rational path in most cases. FF has taken a few extreme stances to the hard left on a few things, which irritated quite a few (in some cases, this was enough to push a chunk of people over the "effort to switch to a new product" threshold). However, I think you're entirely correct in your assessment that it's mainly them messing around with the API, the look and all kinds of things. Browsers are now commodity, and pretty standards based. If you're doing to push far outside an general standard, there needs to be a good reason (as a default); the pitch these days is to established companies and an open standards based environment now, not as it was 20 odd years ago when change was the driving factor and new was the biggest draw. What many others in the threads object to is the reliance on the Chromium engine, which is a Google set up entity that is similar to the Chrome browser (and this is the engine behind Microsoft's Edge, and the majority of other browsers; FF was one of the few that doesn't use that engine).

Slashdot Top Deals

The flush toilet is the basis of Western civilization. -- Alan Coult

Working...