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Comment Re:what do you do if the code does not work? (Score 1) 165

The exact same thing happened to me. I was looking up whether there was an easy way to do something in Apex on Salesforce. I was pretty sure the answer was no. On a whim I tried Bard and was excited to read the extremely well thought out answer.. but I did not recognize the method it provided. Yep, it was a total hallucination and I wasted the time going through its explanation too. Highly unlikely that the method just disappeared from the language too. I told it that's a hallucination and it immediately apologized, sorry you're right. Now it rolls over immediately. I'm done with it.

Comment Rather have non-transparent with camera (Score 2) 92

No, because others can see from the other side what you are typing (passwords) or viewing.
I'd rather have a non-transparent screen that replicates what would be seen if transparent by way of a camera.
Bonus points if I can choose an arbitrary web cam (e.g. baby monitor or remote meeting participant) as the background video instead.

Comment The force is not with you (Score 1) 90

"...Pray I do not raise your prices further." /heavy breathing.
I tried Prime but stopped when I found all the videos I wanted are "not available in your country". That is honestly the biggest pain in the ass. Even if you are a citizen of whatever country it is quite painful if not impossible to use the relevant app stores or cloud purchase platforms if you are overseas. You can buy DVDs from overseas but not rent, it seems. Anyway, I use Amazon a great deal for Kindle Unlimited (super value, super impulse buy, and not a problem so far regarding overseas purchases as I use the U.S. store) and once in a while for small physical purchases. And I would consider it for ordinary rent/purchase of video, like I have for some hard to find titles that I didn't see elsewhere. Not a 4K user so not impacted by this, but I think it just shows that whatever your current deal is, it will *never* get better, only get worse, when you are using cloud based services. That said I don't even think I even have a usable DVD player and never bought a Blu-Ray either. I probably would consider buying a DVD player some time in the future, just not a huge priority since it is easier to give up and pick up something else.. Netflix is not amazing but good enough for my current sporadic uses. I guess not having access to live TV news (no TV, no subscriptions) is the only issue I have currently though the web is enough for when I want to look something up. I have an unused Apple TV subscription, wonder if I can get news on that..

Comment Not fly ash, anyway (Score 2) 95

The new findings paper's conclusion: It's not fly ash (based on government standard sample).
They should maybe do a similar comparison against known meteoroid and comet compositions, but ultimately it seems quite difficult to prove anything exactly. That's fine. I was most concerned with the presence of Uranium and nanometer-size spherules while the photo shows those I assume are grad students without masks using tweezers.. not that I know anything but I hope it is a safe process.

Comment I had a child safety issue actually (Score 5, Interesting) 78

My initial reaction was that the engineer sounded like he was losing his mind, and what a nightmare for the company. I didn't read the post but it sounds more like "evil users can make evil drawings" kind of thing, which is true for pencil and paper too.

But, I also remembered an experience I had myself. At risk of a "think of the children" instance, I think it raises a valid point but not one to be legally enforced.

My niece, about 7 years old or so loves owls and I generated owl images with her using one of the AI image generation sites, Dall-e or something else which lets you type in a phrase then it displays some images. Everything was going fine until she demanded to be able to type. What could go wrong, I thought. Immediately she pounded the keyboard with a mischievous grin, making a string of maybe 50 characters looking like a long nonsense word, lots of consonants I think.

The resulting image looked like the complete opposite of anything wholesome, showing a severely cut up, damaged, bleeding corpse that caused her to shriek and duck her head. Basically nightmare fuel. It made me wonder how it was caused. Was there an underlying algorithmic design issue that resulted in abnormal images being hidden in spaces not accessible with anything but nonsense strings? Maybe a string that was disallowed as proper input ended up gathering lots of negative descriptors?

I think it would be a good idea for the possibility of such an input to cause this kind of output, and recommend that children not be allowed to use them without supervision. I don't know if this problem still exists, as it was maybe a year or two ago, but probably it has happened to other people. It still doesn't warrant pulling the code / service off the web.

Comment Optics (Score 1) 48

Wow. It does seem there are a bunch of other people working on metamaterial optics.. first time I saw the term meta-atom, and I guess this team put it all together first? I wonder in optical regime with eyetracking, could this enable a 3D display in which individual pixels are assigned to beam into individual eyes, so that goggles are no longer needed? Apparently you will not see much of anything if not in the main beamline.

Comment The Nature preprint (Score 2) 48

is interesting and shows some code. In particular the discussion is short but describes the cap and bin packing solutions.
The bin packing solution is neat. It seems to evolve an heuristic to score different bins and then chooses which to put the next package into.. but not if the fit is too tight, so that no tiny spaces get left that will never be filled. It beats currently known heuristics. This alone seems to be quite valuable in a commercial sense.

Comment A switching material is all.. (Score 4, Insightful) 51

So much PR clickbait.. TLDR but it seems they created a metamaterial that can be used for optical switching in the microwave regime. IANAP but it sounds like they describe things you would expect an optical router to have. Which is something for sure, but has nothing to do with time. They are basically altering the waveguide at such a speed that (if you are stupid) it sounds like magic. When it is more like electronic shutter of an LCD mirror.. ick. If anybody actually read the paper wherever it is and can correct me that would be nice but kinda fed up at this point. Sooo much garbage to "polish it up" for the readers. Pretty insulting and distracting AF.

Comment Would be okay if based on logical reasoner (Score 1) 41

Actually being able to have ALL law codified in a way that computers can understand and generate it would be pretty useful. Or, have a computer smart enough to figure it out, and give access to ALL the laws and regulations to it. However this is a law created by a bullshit generator. He wasn't using a logical reasoner. Just yesterday I was beating my head against a configuration thing and asked Claude.ai which gave me an incredibly useful response which unfortunately was based on the existence of a NON-EXISTENT field. When I told him it was a hallucination dammit "he" apologized. I am guessing the lawmaker read it before submitting the law. But lots of people probably trusted him and didn't read it. There could be a lot of malware-like attacks cynically built in by GPT to a liscense you ask it to write. "Not applicable to search engines or telemetry necessary to supporting services," etc.

Comment Re:Immature opinions (Score 1) 91

Yeah, I know nothing about Google except the parts I dislike, but was really surprised to see what a lot of people would consider a character attack on someone calling them out by name in the article summary. How is this acceptable in any way?

Comment Re:Fairly obvious what's going on here (Score 1) 66

I looked at Replit's website, first I heard of them. Their "Multiplayer" live collaboration function looks a lot like VS Code's Live Share, which I also haven't used but is probably free. And they have an AI copilot. How much effort do you think it would take to set up a server to support VS Code with repositories and live share? Live Share: https://code.visualstudio.com/...

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