First: you are erroneously hallucinating that there is a difference between "ML" and "a boatload of maths." Machine learning is a branch of statistics. It is the biggest boatload of maths.

Second: the raw data looks like this: researchers are looking for a "crackle" pattern indicative of where ink should be. Nothing is visible to the naked eye because the black carbon ink is chemically indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath.

The picture in the article is misleadingly taken out of context: it shows the output of Farritor's model with coloured annotations manually added by linguists. No machines were involved in assigning identities to the letters, since there was so little information that needed parsing. Maybe someday an OCR algorithm will be developed for preprocessed Herculaneum scrolls, but there's no shortage of expert human labour, as most Classics departments haven't had a new manuscript to edit in a very long time.

Farritor's model was trained on manually-labelled data; he identified the "crackle" patterns in smaller sections of the available images, as Casey had before him, and enlarged the training set until it was adequate to start finding new signals on its own. This is by far the least human-effort-intensive approach to the problem, and it still took many months to surface because of the extreme barrier to entry in terms of expertise.

If there were another way, it would have been done by now.

It sounds like a great plan, but I can't help but wonder if this will create a uniform surface for attackers trying to get at deallocated memory. I imagine the WasmGC folks are going to have a hard time convincing the Rust-on-Wasm folks to remove all their free()s and just trust WasmGC to do everything for them.

The data in the paper actually show a stronger comorbidity between depression and Alzheimer's than between ADHD and Alzheimer's. Since the authors didn't provide any other correlative data that can be used to rule out an indirect link, the whole article should be pulped as a matter of course.

That's partly because the Reuters article is wrong—the Five Star Movement is a "syncretic populist" party which supports an eclectic collection of anti-authoritarian ideas. Some of those include green and progressive policy positions, which is probably why a Reuters journalist erroneously reduced them to a straight-ticket left-wing party. In reality they used to caucus with UKIP and other Eurosceptics because their main agenda was opposing The Establishment, whatever form that took. Since then they formed a minor part of a fairly aggressively right-wing coalition.

If you remember your history, WikiLeaks was lauded for taking a lot of corrupt governments to task, long before Assange redpilled himself out of existence. The M5S was forged in that time period, when basically all we heard in the English-speaking world about Italy was how flagrantly corrupt and greasy Berlusconi was—from the thousands of real estate lawsuits he's been slapped with, to his fondness for underage teenage girls, to his bromance with Putin... WikiLeaks played a role in breaking some of that news, and so the modern state of Italian politics (which is just shy of being openly fascist) owes its existence to Assange.

The man just wants to have a LAN party like it's 1998. That's as non-evil as it gets with gaming execs. It's the parasites he's replacing who should be tarred and feathered. Bobby Kotick sold toothpaste before he became Activision's CEO. Toothpaste!

Wearable electronics have always suffered from a lack of creativity on the part of the people who actually build them. Frankly, the most impressive thing about this dress is that scale mail is "in". You go, girl! Conquer Ctesiphon! Show those Sasanians you mean business!

...I believe you've just made it 2003.

The creator's hopes are actually not too far off for how large wheeled robotic systems have been used in the past. In the late 50s, the USAF sought a radiation-hardened robot for refuelling nuclear-powered bombers. The result was the GE Beetle, and though the project was ultimately scrapped, it does have something of a resemblance to the ARCHAX structurally, so that's neat. The anthropomorphism is probably wasteful, though!

Oh, no, the delay itself is good; I wouldn't want the previews (which are also useful) to get in the way instantaneously. It just sucks to have no other way to find individual windows.

The first image shows a preview pop-up—the existing behaviour that was introduced in Windows 7 and became mandatory in previous Windows 11 versions. The previews are good, but having to wait for the pop-up window to appear in order to select one window from a multi-window application is annoying. Everyone agrees on this.

The author specifically states that he wants the labels completely gone (emphasis added):

It's baffling that Microsoft can't get this feature right after three years with it being one of the most highly requested features.

A simple toggle to disable the showing of Windows titles could have been added, or Microsoft could have replicated the Windows 10 feature many of us requested.

What TFA wants isn't an option in my Windows 10 settings, either, despite what he claims; I think it might have existed in Windows 7 (and earlier 10 builds?), but it doesn't exist now. I'm guessing he's in a very small minority of people who ever used it this way.

That said, if I recall my old registry black magic correctly, the maximum taskbar button width used to be based on the size of the caption bar for iconified windows; a remnant from early builds of Windows Chicago when programs still minimized to the desktop (something similar can still be occasionally encountered in MDI applications or when Explorer crashes). The setting should be somewhere in HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics, but I don't see anything that looks like a likely candidate; must've been removed at some point. Back in the days of NT 4, I distinctly remember using taskbar buttons that were extra-wide, just for the novelty.

Actually, the author of TFA is deranged: he wants individual icons but no labels on his taskbar. That's what the article is about. (Which is sort of amazing since he gives the example of having 10 Notepad windows open at once, which are indistinguishable when they're all just iconized...)

The feature as implemented works as intended, which is to say it works the way anyone who's ever used Windows 95 or fvwm95 would expect.

Rest assured, there's prior art for everything.

Mr Garak, it is against the values of your society to favour any agenda that imperils the survival of the State. As a former high-ranking member of the Obsidian Order, you of all people would know that ignoring the fallout from a disaster, even a natural disaster, would be a direct threat to civil order. It is the State's duty to protect its people, not to simply shove its hands in its pockets and shrug in the face of Nature's capriciousness. Should it abandon this mandate, it no longer has the right to govern. Should you abandon this mandate, you would longer have the right to represent Cardassia. Do not invite us lowly Terrans to do the same.

I am not an ornithologist, but I would hesitate to expect anything to be useful that hasn't been essential for millions of years. In general, though, it is fair to assume that (flying) birds are likely to do well during drastic global changes because they're already migratory and capable of following the climate.

Doing some very quick reading, the penguins are perhaps a useful case study. Estimates range on the clade being anywhere from 70 to 100 million years old, at a time and place which would have been quite a lot warmer than today, but they seem to have favoured the coldest reaches of the planet back then, as well. Although there are tropical penguins (as far north as Galapagos, above the equator!) they only arrived much more recently, perhaps as little as 4 million years ago.

So, with that one piece of evidence, while birds may be pretty good at getting away from the heat, they probably won't be exceptional at colonizing extreme environments. When biologists talk about organisms "remembering" conditions their ancestors experienced, they're usually referring to plant epigenetics, which, in computer nerd terms, is like saving a config file full of auto-calibrated settings for the next generation. Plants that have been exposed to certain soil or weather conditions will tend to produce seeds that are more resilient to those conditions, but their genes haven't changed, just a few pieces of metadata that tip the scales toward better adaptation. It's likely that these can encode short-term weather cycles (e.g. El Nino years) but long, irregular trends (much less short, sudden, anthropogenic ones) could not possibly constitute a selective pressure to drive the evolution of a specific memory-like mechanism; at best the plants of each new generation will have to spend some effort adapting directly. (Fortunately, a single field of corn produces an absurd number of offspring. Plants are very good at exploring the problem space of evolution!)

If you see any other mention of "genetic memory," that's a misunderstood reference to Frank Herbert's Dune, and it is not real science. There are cases where the body alters its own genome for practical purposes—the immune system creates new antibodies by randomly deleting blocks of code from a master template protein sequence, and there's some evidence neurons use their own DNA as a limited form of data storage—but nothing substantial is heritable. Heritable epigenetic phenomena do exist in animals as well, but they're probably not very interesting and seem almost vestigial or dysfunctional.