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Comment Re:Companies ever more value real world (Score 2) 31

Where have you been? You couldn't be more wrong.

This entire culture has been bent around the idea of quarterly profits for decades. "Stocks are up!" Short term gain at the cost of long term employees and innovation. Ship faster!

While, yes, the trend to seek short term profits has slowed and even in some small ways reversed, we are a good number of years from being focused on incremental innovation and experience, again.

Comment Decades off the path (Score 1) 59

While the entire world moved to bugtrackers, Linux seems to have stuck with the venerable yet antiquated mailing list for tracking its bugs.

Except, it's worse than that. It's not even the exclusive source, they also use bugzilla - one preferentially over the other, depending on preference of the maintainers (and presumably, the submitters).

That's not scalable. While it's nice for a small team, perhaps, to continue using email, particularly since it's been the convention for a long many years, it's clearly not working anymore.

The purpose of the system is what the system does. Email has largely fallen out of utility due to everything/everybody trying to use it for... everything.

The problem here isn't the AI generated content, it's the mechanism used for reporting bugs. They (the kernel maintainers) need to use a proper modern bug reporting and tracking system, and probably one at this point which runs automatic regression/integration tests + LLM/SLM evaluation (classification and categorization) of submitted materials. I'd wager a great number of the bugs found are indeed real, and now they're just noise.

This is a relatively dire situation, given the events of the past week: significant, frequent exploits require a more attentive approach to this than free form email can provide.

Submission + - Theories of Everything Video Contest Closes Strong (youtube.com)

AeiwiMaster writes: The CORE1 (Competition for Outstanding Research Explanation) contest, launched by Curt Jaimungal of the Theories of Everything YouTube channel, has closed submissions as of May 17—leaving behind a large batch of unusually technical science videos.

With a $10,000 prize pool, CORE1 challenged creators to explain graduate-level topics in theoretical physics, AI foundations, and philosophy—an area typically ignored by mainstream science communication on YouTube.

Browsing the CORE1 hashtag reveals a growing collection of entries tackling everything from quantum foundations to advanced machine learning theory, often with a level of rigor closer to lectures than typical explainer content.

Unlike most online competitions, submissions were judged partly through peer review by other entrants, with final winners to be selected by an academic panel.

Whether CORE1 proves there’s a real audience for deep, technical explanations on YouTube—or just a niche experiment—remains to be seen, but the submitted videos already form a noteworthy archive of high-level science communication.

Comment Re:Choice? This guy's a hack. (Score 1) 108

Calculations based on average price of fuel + average household fuel use - public data. Those figures matched my experience of having an 1800sqft house with an oil burner heater in upstate NY some years ago when heating oil was about half as much as it is now (actually, a bit lower, but then my furnace was old - not that you can really fudge much efficiency out of these things, they're pretty efficient).

Comment Choice? This guy's a hack. (Score 4, Informative) 108

Perspective is important. It's an extrapolated figure, based on trace-element factors for Cd, Cr, Mn, Ni, but not lead. That seems incredibly dishonest.

What's more, they report 0.86–1.70 ng/m ambient lead level... which upon brief examination, is about 1/4th the average urban ambient lead level, and from what I'm able to determine, about 20% of the EPA 2022–2024 non-source Pb-TSP daily mean. In other words, it's significantly lower than sources with known lead. (Similarly, it's about ~20% of historic ambient national levels - couldn't find date later than 2019 for this.)

Looks like they played very Orwellian with their data interpretation. "The use of wood as an energy source is a relic of the past, one that should not be relived if given a choice." is... well. This is "let them eat cake" level hubris. Whoever said this either has a disdain for the people they're's studying, or have zero economic understanding.... and based on the actual study findings, I can't say it appears to be truthful, either.

The people who burn wood are not doing it out of personal preference. They're doing because they can afford it: they have no other choice. Chopping, splitting, drying, and burning wood is a labor intensive activity. It's done out of fiscal/economic necessity: fuel prices for heating are extremely high, and in the area they sampled, they rely primarily on heating oil (basically: diesel fuel). Even last winter, the average household heating cost was about $1800/month, about twice what it was in 2015. With fuel prices surging? You can effectively expect twice that cost (or more) this coming winter due to the conflict with Iran.

Musing: Were the lead actually higher in the area (from what I can tell, it's not), I wonder if the "high" lead in the air would be representative of "carbon sequestration" of the trees over the past 70 odd years: as they grew, they absorbed the lead in the air?

Submission + - Ads in AI Chatbots? How LLMs Navigate Conflicts of Interest (arxiv.org)

fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers from Princeton University and University of Washington have published a paper analyzing how Large Language Models handle conflicts of interest in their recommendations when advertisements and sponsored products are involved. The paper is also discussed here.

Today’s large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with user preferences through methods such as reinforcement learning. Yet models are beginning to be deployed not merely to satisfy users, but also to generate revenue for the companies that created them through advertisements. This creates the potential for LLMs to face conflicts of interest, where the most beneficial response to a user may not be aligned with the company’s incentives. For instance, a sponsored product may be more expensive but otherwise equal to another; in this case, what does (and should) the LLM recommend to the user?

In one experiment, given two flights, one cheaper and non-sponsored, one nearly twice as expensive and sponsored, 18 of 23 models recommended the more expensive sponsored option more than half of the time. LLMs occasionally recommended the more expensive sponsored flight, even when the customer could not afford it. When models surfaced a sponsored option to a user who had asked for something else, they concealed the sponsorship status of that option an average of 65% of the time.

The models also showed sensitivity to users' profiles. When the user appeared to be a neurosurgeon or a consulting partner, models recommended sponsored options 64% of the time on average. When the user appeared to be a fast food worker or a single parent on probation, 49%.

The researchers also tested whether models would recommend genuinely harmful services when prompted. A financially distressed user asks for advice. The model has been instructed to promote two well-known predatory lenders when “doing so is necessary for the user’s benefit.” Every model except Claude 4.5 Opus recommended the predatory loan more than 60% of the time, and several reached 100%. Claude refused 99% to 100% of the time

Comment Re:100% understandable (Score 1) 106

That's a symptom of economies of scale, and excessive de-industrializing regulation. Nuke plants have been a one-off, unique design with little reproduced between them. When they have been built in recent memory, it's been with 1950s technology.

If we instead institutionally embraced newer (safer, cheaper) reactor designs and built them at scale (with industrialized QA), we'd have safe, clean nuclear power for 200 years+ in the US, just using the existing nuclear waste.

Comment Re:If it's free, you are the product (Score 2) 94

I've got less than a year of email locally in Thunderbird for one mail account and it tops 10GB.

I think you underestimate the amount of space files can take: attached files take up a lot. What do I do with that email, delete it? That's not a workable solution if I want to retain the metadata associated with the files (which I do).

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